I posted earlier closer to D-Day which was months ago now. Husband had multi-year affair with ex from long ago, which rekindled through work trips. Totally hid it from me. Compelling evidence it's been emotional for a while, and physical maybe at least the last year. Oh and we have kids so some of the extra travel took him away from spending time with them. He sucks totally. The whole time since I've pieced things together I've gotten deflection, blame-shifting (so it's about how I've broken trust with my detective work, which is mainly just smart use of google and social media observing), anger, threats, etc. whenever I've asked him to outright admit what happened, to talk about what this affair meant to him, what he was going through so we can figure out what our relationship needs, to recognize the pain it's caused me, etc.

Initially I asked him for a separation. He generated a heartfelt series of apologies for all the ways he's been a crappy husband and dad, bought us both a relationship book and read it first to diagnose his own role in this, offered to do couples counseling. The problem is he has kept deferring talking about the affair at all as a thing, and only wants to work on underlying marriage problems. We are like 2 months into couples counseling and I did bring up the affair only to have him refuse to come to the next session, and then our therapist who maybe sucks backed off and let us go back to talking about general relationship stuff (let's be clear, I let the therapist do this, so I suck too). 

At this point I just can't take it anymore risking re-connecting to my husband without dealing with this. I can't trust him fully until we address it. I feel like he is manipulating me by dictating the terms of our therapy (which is part of how he could have done this to begin with, right? manipulating me and discounting me). So I'm back to square one : about to ask him for a separation. He's been a much, much better husband consistently these last few months and a more present dad,  but nothing in the dad category that is super stellar so it may not be as shocking/traumtic for the kids to go back to me acting mostly like a single mom which I did for like years.

I just can't live without the truth discussed even briefly.

I'm doing the right thing, right, in separating? What does one do with a spouse who does make an effort but continually defers taking  responsibility for the elephant in the room? I can't tell if it's shame preventing him from being able to talk about it, entitlement and lack of empathy since he just wants to "move on" from it, fear that I actually will leave him, or what. It's not my job though, right, in guessing what's driving him. This is clearly part of the longer pattern of him being emotionally immature, and not being able to express his feelings, that has gotten us into this mess in the first place.