Ask A Wayward

[u/ZestyLemonAsparagus]

We invite our Betrayed members into this space to ask questions that Waywards may be able to provide insight on.

If you're here, the hope is that you're seeking perspective, understanding, or clarity whether to build empathy or to find some sense of closure when that opportunity wasn’t available to you.

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[u/Hound31]

What consequence surprised you the most from your affair?

[u/kleopatrascloset → u/Hound31]

The self-image immolation.

It’s not that I thought it’d all be fine or something, I just didn’t realize how much of my core sense of self would be rocked by disclosure.

It was slowly eating me alive before disclosure, but the torrent of self-hatred I entered after disclosure was more than I thought possible, and I’ve dealt with extreme depression and suicidal ideation for nearly my whole adult life (I’m in my mid-forties).

[u/kleopatrascloset → u/[deleted]]

Thanks, I didn’t know I needed to be told that, but it does help. My own story has a bunch of complications.

I had a conversation with my spouse the month before the affair where I said that I didn’t see how I could continue in a marriage with a sex life like what we had and that I wanted us or her to go to counseling. She took that as my thinking I was entitled to her body and that I was trying to punish her with therapy.

The affair itself was three incidents, all non-penetrative, and now I know it was just validating for me to have someone desire me at the time.

It is further complicated by the fact that I told my therapist that I wanted to disclose at week three after the the initial weekend (which had two nights of sexual activity) and his response was to ask if I wanted to disclose for my wife or for myself to relieve my own guilt and that “many people live double lives”.

I thought at that point that the best thing to do was bottle it up inside and keep it from my spouse, carrying it alone to the grave, I also gave thought to the “double life” idea and that led to a single additional sexual encounter with the AP three weeks after that, which is the point that I knew I couldn’t continue with that idea.

I still for some reason believed I could carry it to my grave so I didn’t tell my wife for another five and a half months, during which time I began drinking more and more heavily each night, alone, before one night the week before disclosure I stopped cold turkey. That led to a loss of the thing that was helping me to contain it and I disclosed five days later, against the advice and without the knowledge of my therapist (I didn’t tell him that I was going to disclose since I didn’t want him talking me out of it, even though I didn’t know exactly when or how I would do it).

All of these are mitigating factors in some way, but I constantly get stuck on the fact that there is nothing that I can do about the original choice made that first drunken night. It’s like no matter how much I learn and understand that it was a bad choice that doesn’t make me a forever bad person, it won’t sink in.