SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Has anyone come up with a way to stop the obsessive thoughts and rumination?

It's every day, every hour, for over 25 years since I found out." Intimacy" is marked by visions of him with her. My sleep is interrupted with daily nightmares—begging for honesty and transparency about what happened—reality. For the past 2+ weeks, anorgasmia for the first time in my life.

Nothing is working to stop the pain. I'm sorry for the repetitive complaining, but I'm at a loss, and I believe that unless you've experienced the pain of infidelity, you don't understand.

My reco: ask yourself what feelings lie beneath the rumination, and then feel the feeling directly.

Keeping it simple - limiting the feeling words - always helps me. I use mad, sad, scared, glad, and ashamed. YMMV.

I know for me, at least, that efforts from my WW to answer my questions helped a great deal. She may not remember everything, but her answers were sincere.

You mentioned that your wife was pursuing IC in order to help to find answers. Has that shown any benefit/promise yet?

There's an article in the Healing Library that provides some suggestions:
https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/documents/library/articles/discovery/how-to-stop-mind-movies/

For me, I started practicing meditation. Practicing cleansing breaths and doing a breathing exercise helps me to bring my thoughts back to the present.

Has anyone come up with a way to stop the obsessive thoughts and rumination?

Since you are already doing the ruminating, worth it to try "freespotting" and see what happens. I’ve found it a powerful method. Technique…

Step 1: Identify the Emotion or Memory: Start by pinpointing an emotion, memory, or belief that you find distressing or challenging. This could range from a negative self-belief like "I'm not good enough" to a traumatic event such as a car accident or the loss of a loved one.

Step 2: Amplify the Emotion (If Necessary): If the emotion isn't initially strong, try to delve deeper into the details of the experience. Recall what you saw, heard, or felt. Let yourself re-experience these emotions to a degree where they become more palpable.

Step 3: Scale Your Feelings: Assess the intensity of your emotions on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the most intense. If you find your feelings scoring above an 8, it's advisable to seek help from a professional therapist.

Step 4: Focus on a Fixed Point: Choose a spot to focus on – it could be the tip of a pen, a point on your finger, or a spot on the wall. Focus on this spot for 2-5 minutes, allowing yourself to fully feel and experience the emotions, thoughts, or memories that surface. Remember, it's important not to judge these thoughts and feelings as bad or wrong. You can tell yourself that it’s okay to feel this.

Step 5: Conclude When Ready: Continue this process until you notice a decrease in the intensity of your emotions, or when no additional memories or thoughts arise. You can perform this technique anywhere safe, where you can dedicate your focus to being more resourceful.

Nobody likes this, but here’s what worked for me.

I imagined them together, from start to finish. As bad as it could be. Every insecurity attacked.

He was bigger, better. She was enthusiastic, insatiable, multi-orgasmic.

Watching that in my mind made me nauseous.

But once I got through it, and accepted that as the reality, and decided I could live with it, I quit thinking about it.

Best wishes

Nobody likes this, but here’s what worked for me.

I imagined them together, from start to finish. As bad as it could be. Every insecurity attacked.

He was bigger, better. She was enthusiastic, insatiable, multi-orgasmic.

Watching that in my mind made me nauseous.

But once I got through it, and accepted that as the reality, and decided I could live with it, I quit thinking about it.

Best wishes

Good lord, you did say the same thing to me in my "triggers" thread when I first got here and it made me wince.

Not saying it's necessarily horrible advice or that it might not work, tho. In fact I could see how that could possibly desensitize an individual if they have the stomach for it, but oof. That's some rough stuff. I said as much in my thread at that time, too. I believe it was you who came back and followed up by suggesting maybe imagining her AP as some cartoonish fool. Something akin to imagining her with Daffy Duck with and absurdly tiny penis or something along those lines. That at least got me to chuckle softly, and I did actually do that, and it was weirdly calming.

I stopped the obsessive thoughts by realizing that it just stops my healing and robs me if my happiness. And this the cheaters win yet again.

By year 3 of R I was still very unhappy. I just didn’t feel like I was moving forward.

Until I made an active decision to put forth all of my efforts in healing me. Getting to a place of peace and contentment and happiness.

By year 4 of R I was a completely different person.

It took an active commitment on my part to stop myself from ruminating on the whole affair, the OW etc.

I am thankful for an amazing therapist who really helped me see that I was not obligated to R but it could work if I changed my mind. It was my therapist who showed me the positive steps my H was taking and maybe give it a chance.

I hope this helps you.

For me rumination is all about quickly distracting the brain and quickly, if I don’t catch it quick enough then it gets me down.

Something to remember is if it’s more or less the same thing you are replaying then you need to see if distracting works, if not then you have something that you need to sit with and address. Identify the feeling, break the rumination down and figure out why it makes you feel like you feel.

Over the past months I’ve used a variety of methods to distract.

1) pick a person, I always go for a character of a TV show or movie, and well…….do what you want with them, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

2) pick a song you like and start singing the lyrics in your head,

3) name 3 songs with car brands in them, don’t use the same answer every time.

4) tell yourself that you have seen this garbage movie a million times and it’s crap and it’s banned from the movie theatre, the movie to be played now is called ‘your best day ever’ if you could have one day where you get to do anything you want, no expenses spared, what would you do? (your wife is not invited, this is just your day) just 24 hours to do what you want, what would that look like?.

LT, you continue to struggle with and post about this, and you're pretty consistently receiving the same types of replies/advice from a large variety of members here.

I am thankful for an amazing therapist who really helped me see that I was not obligated to R but it could work if I changed my mind.

When I got done humiliating myself for a couple of weeks playing the pick me game, I realized if things kept going that way I was just going to live in misery for the rest of my life if I remained married to her. I resigned myself to the fact that divorce was my only way out. When that was put on the table things took a drastic turn and my WW snapped out of it.

I didn't do it to manipulate her. I did it because I didn't want to live the rest of my life in misery, and if that meant it was without her, then so be it. As it turned out, our marriage meant more to her than her AP or her need to keep secrets, and I not only got the whole story (or at least enough to satisfy me that another building wasn't going to drop out of the sky on me), she really rolled her sleeves up and started giving her 100% effort and brought her A game into salvaging and rebuilding our marriage. We're now 7 months out from d day, we're still together, and things are going as well as one could hope for, for recovery. Putting divorce on the table didn't mean I HAD to get a divorce.

As far as the mental images and mind movies go, I'm still dealing with them, but they're less frequent now, and not as intense. I suspect making up my mind to get out of that horrible position helped with it in that it gave me back some sense of agency over the situation.

Nobody likes this, but here’s what worked for me.

I imagined them together, from start to finish. As bad as it could be. Every insecurity attacked.

If one were to do this, it would be worth combining it with the freespotting technique. Focus in on a point on the wall slightly above your typical plane of viewing, and keep that focus on that point while retrieving all these bad thoughts and feeling what you feel. Just do it for five minutes. Every time your attention starts to get sucked away from that point on the wall, return it. That weird, constant back-and-forth between the thinking, and the focusing on the point just has an effect on the emotions, winding them down and separating them from the memory.

I had a lot of rumination at first about my husband’s affairs. They began to subside once he started to talk about the truth of things and stop lying.

But my experience with rumination goes way back to my childhood. I was the victim of repeated sexual assault as a child. I lived in fear, and ruminated over the trauma from age of six until I was about 30.

I began working for a bunch of psychologists around that time. I asked each of them what the best way was to stop this. Interestingly, I worked for a Freudian, a Skinner follower, a Jungian, and a couple of research psychologists as well.

They all kind of told me the same thing, but in different ways. The easiest one to understand was the Skinner doc. He said "every time that rumination begins, you mentally yell (inside your head) STOP! NO! STOP!" And don’t stop yelling until the rumination stops.

You have to begin that right when the thought first happens. Your brain is essentially in a loop, and you have to consciously and forcefully stop that loop. I can imagine after 25 years, this feels very hard. But the ruminations actually did stop for me using this approach.

Identify the feeling, break the rumination down and figure out why it makes you feel like you feel.

I can usually identify the feeling, I think I understand breaking the rumination down, but, and this isn't the first time I've seen this, when it comes to figuring out why it makes me feel like I feel I kind of hit a wall. On one hand why it makes me feel the way I feel is pretty obvious. Let's say I'm ruminating about my WW with her AP in a hotel room together while I sat at home thinking she was spending time with her girlfriend whose husband was in the hospital... I mean, it's obvious the feelings are jealousy, anger, grief, and betrayal, right? Why do I feel that way? Because another man was with my wife (jealousy), that would piss anyone off (anger), it would make anyone sad and grieve the loss of the exclusivity they thought they shared with their spouse (grief), and I was betrayed (betrayal).

Okay, now what? I sit here with those feelings? I identified them and to me, OF COURSE I know why I'm feeling them. They don't just go away tho. I get stuck in these loops sometimes and it's torture.

Another one, Asterisk, involves the shaving of a certain area as well. That one eats me up, too. My WW did the same thing, tho she has done it for me before in the past. Still tho, just the thought of her doing it for someone else, and that person "enjoying" something that should only have been meant for me just kills me sometimes.

We've actually made some great progress, and my wife has gone through a real transformation in the last 7 months. I'm convinced she loves me, and never really loved her AP. Tho she thought she did while it was going on. She hates him now, and hates herself for doing what she did. She's really changed her attitude in general and approaches things much differently than she used to. No more rug sweeping, full on honesty and transparency, and she no longer avoids hard or uncomfortable conversations anymore. That's actually a pretty big deal because she's been rug-sweepy, avoidant, and has had issues with transparency and honesty for the entire 27 year run of our marriage. She's all in on changing and becoming a better person, and I'm here for it.

I'm just struggling dealing with my own hurt feelings and ruminations. I have plenty of good days, but once or twice a week I get stuck. It can wreck a whole day for me sometimes. Nothing seems to work. I don't know if I'm just stubborn, doing it wrong, or the suggested techniques and exercises just don't work for me. I've always been an obsessive overthinker and ruminator. I've been that way since I was a kid.

*ETA: I referenced Asterisk because I thought I was posting in a different (his) thread about breathing... Oops, lol.

[This message edited by Pogre at 8:11 PM, Monday, November 10th]

I have deliberately not read your history because I have a simple question. Why don’t you divorce? Your 25 years of pain sound like pure hell. It must feel like your ws has an unlimited supply of pins which are constantly being used to prick your skin all day every day. What kind of life have you chosen for yourself? Well, stop it! Just stop! Leave and go find some peace of mind.