SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’m just having a lot of healing revelations this week. I’m still taking responsibility for the affair while my husband was the one that actually had the physical affair but I’m getting more comfortable with myself despite feeling like nobody can relate. That’s ok. We had a wonderful day yesterday. My husband is the sweetest person in the world. He loves me like no other person ever could and that is real. I watched Brene Brown’s TED talk about vulnerability and that really resonated with me. Because I grew up with a raging alcoholic father and an intensely critical mother, I just have been recovering from that for most of my life and certainly all of our marriage. I never trusted men or even my husband and I have been insanely critical of him, always fantasizing about someone else or feeling angry that I threw my life away with this dope, making him feel inadequate and unloved. It’s ok. I know I did that. I also always knew that my fears of commitment, anxiety, control issues, trust issues, etc. We’re 99% about me. I feel shame around being so intensely insecure that I can barely work because my social anxiety is so terrible. Despite being relatively intelligent and a very hard worker, I refused to work outside the home for two decades. There was a tremendous amount of pressure on my husband to support me and our children and live according to my very strict rules. Absolutely no alcohol, constant self-help books and psycho babbling non-stop for 20 years. I drive myself crazy yet somehow he still loves me unconditionally. I always told myself it was because I worked so hard and took care of everything and he was basically just using me for housework and sex. Honestly that is a complete lie I tell myself to deny the possibility that I might actually be lovable. I’m so much more comfortable being used and unappreciated. Something my husband refuses to do for me. We are in this bind together. We both take 100% responsibility for ourselves and we both refuse to blame the other. I think that is a beautiful thing honestly. I’m optimistic today. I’m still struggling with work and feeling judged all the time and feeling frustrated that I do not express myself effectively. I seem to believe that if I could express myself with more vulnerable honesty, people would understand and stop judging me. So I overshare a lot at work in response to feeling judged. I share about every other struggle I’ve ever faced and overcome because people seem to judge me like I’ve never met a hardship. I think I cover up well but maybe I really don’t. Maybe they judge me because they see right through me. Idk but I’m really tired of being misunderstood. I know I was in love with an old boyfriend for the entirety of our marriage. That’s horrible. I also knew it wasn’t actually love it was this escapist behavior that I tried to stifle. It wasn’t an emotional affair. I never talked to him. It was like a weapon that I kept in my heart to protect myself from really being in love with my husband. I used it to protect myself from trusting him or being vulnerable. It didn’t protect me at all. It caused this terrible marriage that I was never all in. Where I used my husband to protect myself from the world. I also hate vulnerability. There is no reason to be vulnerable here. People cannot ever really understand another person or know the millions of experiences that have shaped their life. They cannot understand me. Only I can understand myself, trust myself, and know my truth. I know that my husband and I both failed miserably. I failed to trust him long before he ever had an affair. That was my childhood. All he ever wanted was for me to love him. My ability to love someone is pretty limited honestly. Or my ability to express it certainly is. Vulnerability sucks.

Most feelings of judgment, like your other revelation about things being 99% about you, are coming from within.

You are judging yourself for maybe not living up to your ideal self.

Most people don't have the mental bandwidth to really judge others or get emotionally invested in other people's lives.

It's sort of like the "asshole" saying. If you run into an asshole every once in a while, they are the asshole. If you are always running into assholes, you're the asshole. If you get judged every once in a while, you ran into a judgy person. If everyone is judging you, you are just judging yourself.

I think it sounds like you are putting a lot of the blame for his affair on yourself.

" I’m so much more comfortable being used and unappreciated. Something my husband refuses to do for me. "

It maybe true that you have difficulty accepting that you are lovable. But he didn’t refuse to "use and not appreciate you" his PA was absolutely an insult to you, at any rate that’s exactly how I felt when my H had an EA, used and taken for granted.

You speak as if it was some sort of self fulfilling prophecy, that he would cheat on you because you never let him love you???

I get it, I did it too. I still struggle with the idea that if I was good enough he would not have done this to me, If our love was strong enough, real enough he would not have been able to do this to me. But that’s just carrying the shame of his actions.

I think it’s so painful and even life threatening to know you can be discarded by the person you rely on for your survival, that we turn the blame on ourselves because it gives us the illusion of control. I realized in therapy that I blamed myself because I was afraid I didn’t exist without my relationship.

You are rewriting your story now, you have to because your reality has shifted, maybe even been destroyed. But you get to write this story, be choosy about what you put in it. "this was all my fault and he really is the amazing caring man I thought he was" may feel comforting right now, but it’s way less than you deserve.

Peace and happy soul hunting.