SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I disagree that she had no malicious intent, when it comes to OBS. She entered that woman's life. Became friendly with OBS's children. For years. All while she was having sex with the woman's husband,the children's father. There is no way to try to rewrite that, to make her sound kind,or compassionate. She did not have to do any of that. She chose to. That is malicious intent,IMO.

It's one thing to have an affair with a married man. It's a whole other thing to become friendly with his wife and kids, so you can spend more time with her AP.

I admit, I struggle with this aspect, both her cozying up to POSOM’s family and her bringing my kids into shit face’s presence. It seems so beyond the pale. She says she did it just to get my son and daughter an activity, but damned if there weren’t some other options for activities out in the world. She just so happened to pick the one that would give her time with that ass hat. And the funny thing is I think I believe her.
I have more questions about how she could befriend OBS, but I think she was uncomfortable and disdainful of her based off the negative comps that shit for brains made about her (I called her out on that hard the other day, pissed me off that that attitude was still present). But I think she honestly loved those kids and delusionally thought she was adding something to their lives. So fucked up.

His point is if you think you would have acted better than most of the people acted (badly) then, you are probably wrong. You probably would have informed on your neighbors etc… most did…. Everyone thinks they would have been the good guy. You (and I) probably would not have been). Any moral approach to life you take on needs to acknowledge that.

I think this is good stuff and a good foundation for a healthy dose of humility. I am of the opinion that I could cheat. If something around half of humanity is doing it, your philosopher friend would probably agree.

My own view is that cheaters are malicious, do see much of the harm they are likely to do, do mean it, and, sadly that is pretty common human behaviour under certain conditions. I have seen enough addiction to see this. Addicts know, so do thieves, but they do not care or choose to focus on what’s right.

I align with emergent’s take. I don’t think they have intent to harm and as such I don’t think it’s malicious. And at least for first time offenders, I don’t think they know the extreme nature of the harm.

The upside, from a place of humility, is that I am made from the same stuff. If I can find the will and reinforce habits which reliably lead me to trend in a better direction, so can my wife.

Well said, I agree.

And..yes. The OW in my situation stalked me, messaged my daughter on SM, became a member here and lied her ass off to everyone, while simultaneously poked at me,toying with me, trying to get a response,and when that didn't work, she moved on to another site, and continues to lie for sympathy. All while constantly sending self help books to my home. It's been nearly 13 years. I've had one single conversation with her. She's not worthy of time.

My sympathies. When I think about taking some kind of revenge or even about trying to establish some contact with OBS to compare notes, I think of the possibility that puss bucket could do some serious damage to me and mine with ammunition that she gave him, with sexual images being the worst of it. It’s like a WW2 bomb lying in a field and you just hope it won’t go off. Leaving it alone is my best option.

People are generally selfish, and selfishness generally benefits more than just the selfish actor, or people have the foresight to see selfish benefits in cooperation. True sacrifice to the "greater good" is rare. I'm not quite saying "greed is good", but it's not necessarily bad.

The cheater, in the moment, believes the A is benefiting them and is worth the risk they are taking. I don't think this is a true rational cost benefit analysis. More of a by the jollies sort of decision.

I remember going thru a phase during or shortly after college where I thought that duty didn’t really matter in life, that it wasn’t really a virtue. But infidelity highlights how important our promises are.

Cheaters are a lot like thieves.

Well stated, Lurking. I have nothing to add or take away from that. It makes me wonder: is infidelity the worst thing a person can do that won’t send them to jail?

I had a weird interaction with our MC today. Last week when my wife gave that answer about why she got my kids around POSOM, I said in session that I was struggling to believe her. Our MC came in and said something like "WW told the truth, and you are struggling to believe it. Where do we go from here?" That really rubbed me wrong that the MC labeled her answer as "the truth" but didn’t put my finger on it till after session was over. So I wrote MC an e-mail (did not copy my wife) and told her that given that my wife had lied to me at a massive scale that is entirely possible she is still lying and I would appreciate it if she didn’t put a stamp of "truth" on her answers. She replied that we should talk about it in session, and that was fine with me. So we talked about it today, and MC said that she needed to believe both of us for her to do her job. I replied that I can see why she would want/need to assume good intentions, but there is a strong history of lies here and she doesn’t know what is objectively true any more than I do. And it’s entirely possible that WW has lied to herself in all this and needs time to unwind her own self deception. At that point I got scolded for "telling me how to do my job". The session turned into a total shit show, not sure if my wife took cues from that or not, but it was not good. Wife and I messaged afterward, I told her she is going to show humility about this shit or I am done and she softened. But with our MC, WTF? Does this stance make sense to people?

That's because people don't like getting called out on their crap.

I didn't go back to read what your WW said, but if it contained the phrase I feel/felt, I would point out that feelings aren't facts.

Your MC doesn't need to believe you both, they need to be impartial. They evaluate what is said, apply what they learned in school and during their internships or residency.

With infidelity in the mix, the MC should know that the wayward has broken trust and may not be truthful. Unfortunately, they don't realize the extent of the lying.

ETA: I called our MC out on a few things that I had learned through SI. Notably the unmet needs stuff. Puh-leease! If we were going to talk unmet needs, I would have been the one to have an A.

[This message edited by leafields at 2:25 AM, Thursday, April 6th]

Time to consider another MC. Did this one come with any infidelity specialty? Can't fathom how someone who had wouldn't have had other clients lie in sessions. Intentionally Even. Even if your wife hasn't been, a bs has good reason to be doubtful and trying an appeal to authority line of reasoning isn't not the solution

I didn't go back to read what your WW said, but if it contained the phrase I feel/felt, I would point out that feelings aren't facts.

This wasn’t a question of feelings, it was one of motive.

Your MC doesn't need to believe you both, they need to be impartial. They evaluate what is said, apply what they learned in school and during their internships or residency.

With infidelity in the mix, the MC should know that the wayward has broken trust and may not be truthful. Unfortunately, they don't realize the extent of the lying.

Right? I was kind of dumbfounded by her seeming nonchalant attitude about this. And to the suggestion of searching for a new one, I don’t have it in me right now. I can’t expect to totally align with any counselor, but this seems like a big strike against. I’m not even asking her to be biased. I don’t need her to validate my statements as true or not true like some kind of fact checker, it’s just not in her job description.

If unmet needs comes up, that could be a walk out moment. I will not listen to that shit for a second.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 3:13 AM, Thursday, April 6th]

That's one of the reasons why we say IC to heal, then MC when you've healed enough. I don't think I was healed enough. XWH is something else and was not doing the work to be a safe partner.

This is tough, InkHulk.

Fixed a typo.

[This message edited by leafields at 4:02 AM, Thursday, April 6th]

One thing I asked was about her motive of joining the hobby I mention in my previous thread. I have maintained in my mind that she did it to spend time with POSOM. She claims that was not the primary motive but it was to give our son an activity to replace one he lost due to the pandemic. I told her in session that I have believed what she had told me since her second confession, but this is hard for me to believe.

Both of these are highly problematic. If it’s the first, then she used our kids as a cover to further the affair, and possibly even intentionally introduce them to him. If it’s the second, it speaks to a level of complete irrationality and delusion that scares me.

It kind of sounds like maybe everybody got hung up in a discussion of honesty and truth rather than dealing with the fact that either way, your WW's answers were unacceptable to you. Either way, it's an incomplete picture of her mindset at the time and of the flawed values system which fed her rationalizations. Either way, it doesn't inform your decisions going forward as to whether or not your WW can remediate her character. You were essentially asking for a peek into her decision-making process and she's not being forthcoming enough to make you feel like you've got a real answer.

It's possible that your MC wasn't wrapping her mind around the underlying issues. Maybe you caught her on an intellectually lazy day, I dunno. I do suspect though that if everyone goes back to the drawing board on this question, a little more effort toward painting a complete picture of the thought process might make the picture clearer. I think, as BS's exploring the possibility of R, we typically expect a certain amount of foggy, wayward nonsense while the WS is working through their bullshit. But we also expect that those issues are a work-in-progress, so we need to see the gears turning in order to know that there's progress being made.

No one expects Rome to be built in a day, but if we see brick wall being defended as "truth", that's not progress. You asked your WW to explain her motive. She has said some words but she needs to keep talking until you understand what she was thinking. Then if she's smart, she'll continue talking until she can verbalize why she was wrong and what's changed since then so it won't happen again.

And btw... wholeheartedly agree on the "unmet needs" thing. If that comes into play, hitting the eject button saves both time and aggravation.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 3:47 AM, Thursday, April 6th]

That's one of the reasons why we say IF to heal, then MC when you've healed enough.

We pursued MC to help manage my wife’s shame storms so we could actually get thru disclosure. That’s been mostly a disaster. I bet we’ve used 1 in 5 sessions to ask about questions. Paid a lot of money for that, not quite sure what we’ve gotten out of it so far.

I told myself early on that I wasn’t going to make any big decisions within a year. We’re at about 9 months. That conviction has held. I could imagine driving to a lawyer after that session if not in my own self imposed moratorium period. And my wife did fairly quickly back down. But man, this needs to get better at some point here.

MC only works if you have two honest dealers. On that point the MC is right.

Most cheaters aren't honest enough for MC early on. I don't know if your wife is ready yet.

Timeline and polygraph before the next mc session seems appropriate to me.

I was an absolute mess the first year. I gave myself 6 month increments to evaluate. Take the time you need so that you know your decision. Don't feel like you need to stay in a bad situation. My kids pretty much said I should have left earlier. Just think about what type of relationship you are modeling for them.

Therapy has its benefits and it’s limits.

It’s not really about truth. It’s more about gaining some insight into habitual things you do which you may not fully realize.

The therapist often accepts what a patient says, but for now, and for the purpose of the therapeutic alliance, not as the truth writ large. Then, at least on a psychodynamic approach, the focus is on the relationship or the two and fro between analyst and patient. Say a neutral topic is introduced. If the patient twists it a certain way it is pointed out and the patient is asked to notice and reflect on whether that is a pattern.

It can be useful but I don’t think it is a complete substitute for more virtue-based or community-civic based expectations.

I say this as the son of a once quite eminent psychiatrist and therapist who was also a cheat. He could be charming and fun, I loved him, but he let himself down when he lost a more basic sense of duty and virtue.

I’m a lawyer. My response is - that’s all well and good but you’re still going to gaol - at least figuratively.

There is a famous UK based human rights barrister who does war crimes prosecutions of dictators. In his biographies he says that a root his moral core boils down to not wanting to do anything his mother would be ashamed of. It’s about that complex. Education and accomplishment don’t substitute for it.

You asked if infidelity is the worst thing someone can do without going to prison. Well, relationships are about the most important things we let absolutely anyone do.

In all professions there are restrictions where if you do borderline things, you are shut out of that means of making a livelihood pretty quickly by registration and educational barriers, formal regulation, and reputation / word of mouth. You dip into the till and you are cactus.

They may not have had malicious intent, but their acts were sure malicious in nature. They know their actions are wrong and harmful, but they do it anyway. At one point, a thought might have crossed their mind that said, "this is wrong. I shouldn't include my children or APs children or ou respective spouses in our liason", then they immediately brushed it off, saying, "What they don't know will not hurt them, right?". In the case of robbers, even if their intention is not to hurt their victims, they do commit crimes, and they don't give two shits about what happens to their victims as a result of their crime. In infidelity, cheaters do fully realize the impact of their actions and realize the malicious nature of their act and yet they don't hesitate to commit them because of their fucked up logic that says, "What they don't know will not hurt them". This is one of the reasons behind trickle truth. It helps in covering their nature and way of thinking that facilitated their affair and affair related offensive acts. It's entirely possible that inkhulk's wife is not fully truthful regarding involving her children just to hide her nature that helped her to commit those acts.

If she claims she had no malicious intent behind these acts, then the follow-up question should be, "Was she unaware of the malicious nature of these acts?". If she was aware, then why didn't that prevent her from continuing those acts?. She ADMITS to having committed foul play, but she is yet to OWN it. More work for her.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 7:26 AM, Thursday, April 6th]

It makes me wonder: is infidelity the worst thing a person can do that won’t send them to jail?

May be. The reason they don't get to sent to jail is because they are family. They are loved by their victims. Many thieves rob their own homes, and in many such cases, their family would still protect them from going to jail because they are family and loved by their victims.

My question again: is the construct of he didn’t love me a result of post A deep introspection, doing the work, lots of IC? Did she really think this pre and during the A? Or, is it actually a construct she developed simply to mitigate her A, because there’s no way I could have done this if I didn’t think he didn’t love me? In essence, is it real or a convenient contrivance? How do you know?

I think this question is being asked based off WOES post (is that acronym intentional?) and would be better posted on the I Can Relate forum. It’s too deep of a dive into my wife’s time dependent motives for me to even attempt to speak meaningfully too. If WOES wants to take a shot at answering it from her experience I would welcome that.

I’m sorry InkHulk, I did not intend to t/j particularly as it does not seem to apply to your wife.

First off, the acronym turned out to just be a fitting coincidence.

To answer the question, I had feelings prior to the A that my husband did not love me. It’s complicated at how I arrived at that conclusion but those feelings were my perception and exacerbated by some of our dynamics. I didn’t dare talk to him about any of my doubts or insecurities because I was afraid of hearing "the truth". As the A progressed, I began to demonize my husband in order to justify my own actions.

Multiple things happened after DDay. We both did therapy IC and MC (we were lucky enough to find and amazing MC), I went to Al-Alon (very helpful for our situation). We also moved 6 months after DDay. There is nothing like going through every bit of memorabilia to show hard evidence of your history.

It took me a good 2 years before I had a good understanding of a lot of my issues. The point is, it’s never a simple, easy answer. How I got where I did and how I came out of it is a combination of things.

I hope that answers your question.

I’m sorry InkHulk, I did not intend to t/j particularly as it does not seem to apply to your wife.

No apologies needed, I still think it has value to this discussion. Maybe deep down she might have had that kind of doubt about my love, she at the very least had significant insecurities and immense fear of abandonment. But I need her to speak to that, I don’t have that kind of clarity right now. Thanks for giving your perspective.

First off, the acronym turned out to just be a fitting coincidence.

Sometimes things just work out, don’t they?

Feel free to not answer if you don’t want to, but was Al-Anon for alcohol abuse in your situation or was it about infidelity? My mother went to that as the spouse of an alcoholic, so that is my reference point. I am realizing I don’t really know what it is.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 1:55 PM, Thursday, April 6th]

It kind of sounds like maybe everybody got hung up in a discussion of honesty and truth rather than dealing with the fact that either way, your WW's answers were unacceptable to you. Either way, it's an incomplete picture of her mindset at the time and of the flawed values system which fed her rationalizations.

Thanks for this, CT, it did help me come back to what’s important here.