I would argue that your true self is the person making these decisions and the false self is the one you present to your wife. This would be why you are calling everything you know about yourself into question.

A drastic change in perspective needs to happen. If the focus of your life is to maximize your enjoyment/pleasure/good feelings at the cost of your character then it needs to be reversed.

If the focus of your marriage is getting your physical/emotional needs met then you need to adopt a self-sacrificial love for your wife where you put her needs first.

Once you desire and start to love your wife more than yourself and hold the development of your character (honesty, integrity, kindness) above pleasure and feelings, an affair won't continue.

I remember those days and your profile name kind of sums how I felt then also. The chaos the fog... self loathing.. all those things were flooding my senses. Uno, I drive down the road now and and notice things that I seemed to not even register while I was consumed with the affair. I knew it would end, I did not know how hard it would be, how exactly it would end, nor the ramifications that followed.

Your affair will end also.. they all do and there is always consequences.
How much pain and damage will come of it is in your control. You probably cannot see that now, but it is...

So... how exactly you get to the point of pulling the trigger and ending it, I can't tell you but once their, get a plan, hang around here and make some friends, journal... I don't know how I would have made it out of the dark abis if I had not...

I definitely remember feeling addicted like that. Two things got me out of it: 1.) I got caught, and it was beyond horrific and affected everyone close to us; and 2.) I started to see my AP and the affair for what it was. I felt we were using each other to fill an emptiness that I might be able to learn to fill otherwise. I realized he was an unhealthy person vacuuming my energy and that I was letting myself be destroyed. I had to go 100% no contact, but it took me 6 months after being caught to do so.

Who is your true self? Probably both/neither persona. The real trick is to integrate them and then use it to move forward toward being the person you want to be in the life you should be living.

To the folks who replied to my post, thank you so much. I do appreciate hearing your perspectives and experience. I truly need the support as I have done a masterful job of isolating myself from the people around me.

Your post could've been written by me, only with a few twists. My AP's wife found out he had not cut things off with me and promptly kicked him to the curb. Naturally, he came running to me. I had been looking forward to a month of soul searching while he "gave it one last try" with his wife but all of a sudden I got what (I thought) I wanted. It wasn't until I confessed to my ex-boyfriend (which I regret, but may have been my salvation) that the full weight of the destruction I caused finally fell on me like a ton of bricks.

I don't want to be the person that I've become. I've decimated so many lives and for what? Now I'm struggling with how to cut things off with the AP (who has become a part-time, live-in boyfriend by default) so that I can get some semblance of my life and my sense of self back. So I can look people in the eye. So I don't have to hide things from the people close to me.

The ex-boyfriend has forgiven me, but his wounds are still open and he's still in pain. I realized that if I had to choose between my ex-boyfriend's friendship or life with the AP, I would choose the former. All day every day. And now I need to do whatever I can to help heal and rebuild that friendship as well as my self-respect.

It's about figuring out what's really important to you and acting accordingly. Mira Kirshenbaum's "When Good People Have Affairs" has been extremely helpful to me, as has individual therapy and this group (gravinggirl in particular has a lot of hard-won wisdom to dispense... thank you, btw). Finally waking up to how profoundly I hurt someone who was more important to me than I knew is the thing that broke the spell and freed me from my addiction to the AP. I now see that the affair was just me trying to fill a void within myself and that the relationship with my AP would be no better than my last one because I was bringing the void with me. No one else can complete you. You have to come to the relationship a whole person or it will be incomplete because you are. And until you find what you need within yourself, you'll always be searching for it, whether inside the relationship or outside it.

Do what you need to do to get right with yourself and the people who matter most to you. At the end of the day, the only person you have to live with is yourself. Until you can do that, how can you be any good to/for anyone else?

Hope this doesn't sound preachy... I'm writing it to myself more than you. But I hope it helps us both, and I wish you all the best on your journey.

19thnervousbreakdown, my former AP did the same thing. His wife found out about our affair and kicked him out a few weeks later, so he came to me saying it was time for us to be together, it was meant to be, he left his marriage for me, etc. I struggle with codependency, so it was easy for him to make me feel responsible for his situation. When stuck between a marriage you have severely damaged with an affair and an AP who wants you to move forward with him to make it all worthwhile somehow, it is an impossible situation.

Had I left with my AP, that relationship would have been even more dysfunctional than my marriage had become. You are right that it isn't about continually replacing a partner with a new one, but about being the person you are meant to be and taking care of your people.

gravinggirl, I hear ya... I'm working through codependency, too. My therapist was very quick to assure me that I am not responsible for my AP's pending (or not) divorce. I still feel in my heart that that's not entirely true, but I'm getting better at not taking the bulk of the blame, at least. He himself has said that if it hadn't been me, it would've been someone else, so there ya go. I do think his marriage is salvageable, though, and I will urge him to make every effort to do so. As soon as I get the nerve to rip the band-aid off.

And ridingbackwards, that's usually what an affair is... a band-aid to cover up old wounds that still haven't healed. If you can afford individual therapy, I highly recommend it. If you can't afford it, you might consider whether you also have codependency issues and, if so, check out a CODA meeting in your area (find info at coda.org). And read, read, read. As I mentioned, Mira Kirshenbaum's book "When Good People Have Affairs" has been incredibly helpful to me. I think there's a thread in this group about book recommendations, so you might check that out, as well.

Well I am back at it again. We had another meet up, the AP and myself. Started with texts, then set up a date, and there you have it I am back into the cycle again. To all those before me, I need help. No contact is soooooo hard. Any practical advice?

Sadly, it takes something catastrophic (the primary partner finding out, for example) for some of us to realize what really matters to us. And of course, by then, it's often too late to save what matters. Have you tried therapy? If not, I highly recommend it. A good therapist can help you see what's triggering the addictive impulses and give you tools to manage them more constructively. Once you know what's missing in your primary relationship, you can set to work addressing it. I only wish I had started seeing my therapist when I was in the grips of the addiction to the AP... I might have avoided a lot of emotional, physical and financial trauma for all concerned.

But sometimes we just have to lay everything to ruin before we realize what we're losing.... Or better put: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"

It's an addiction, right? So you have to face it one day at a time and eventually it will loosen its grip. Today, it got the best of you. But today is over. Analyze what happened, see where your weaknesses are and get back in the ring tomorrow, stronger and wiser. Repeat as necessary.

I'm just telling you what I need to hear myself. Hopefully others who have actually gone NC will chime in...

Unfortunately I don't think the thoughts of losing his wife are enough for him to get out of the cycle. If that were the case you would never have started an affair. The belief that you won't get caught is enough to keep it going and then you get to have a wife and a girlfriend on the side.

The catastrophic event of being caught can force you into action but it doesn't necessarily mean the right direction.

One scenario you comply or pretend to comply to NC out of fear of losing your wife which won't heal the marriage.

The second scenario is that the pain and devastation that you see in your wife's face allows you to see the selfishness/self focus and starts you on a path where you are no longer capable of getting your fix at the expense of your family and begin to learn to put them first.

Once you develop a healthy level of empathy you'll see how much you are hurting your wife which is much more powerful a tool than worrying about what you will lose.

Honestly, you won't stop the affair until you actually want to get out or your AP calls it off. Or, fairly likely, you will get caught. That is worse than you think, and all it takes is one person leaving a tiny trail or one BS following up on where their partner is.

If you have kids, the worst part is that it truly affects them. When I was in an affair, it felt like my own little outlet that wasn't hurting anyone and was keeping me going. Looking back on it, I was chipping away at our entire family's safety and security. One of my kids lost so much weight after my affair came out that he was like a skeleton. We had to switch their schools because AP had kids at the old one. I can never undo that damage. I never anticipated that.

You can end it, but you don't sound ready.

All of this advice is correct. You won't end an affair until you really want to....I ended my A multiple, multiple times until he finally ended it. It was such a dysfunctional relationship that as my best friend describes: "I saw the window open and I jumped through it" . NC was HARD. That A and him truly controlled all of me. I remember being at a river one morning, so close to where he works, holding my phone in my hand, shaking, and crying my eyes out to someone on this site who talked me through NC for at least an hour until is subsided. I'll never forget that. And it wasn't the only time.

This site is fabulous....make friends, journal, write it out. My journals became my crutch. I have journals describing all the jerk off things he did or said that I would forget (he was pretty damn arrogant where his wife was concerned-ruthless)..........but when I wanted to break NC, I read them and was like, "oh yes...I remember....what an ass"
We've all been there and we all get it. Do whatever you have to.

It becomes an addiction, a drug. And just like with addictions, sometimes you need professional help...but the desire still needs to be there. I remember going to therapy and when I was in the parking lot ready to leave, xAP would text me and within hours we were in a motel. (What a waste of a copay). But when I truly, truly had a glimpse of how unhealthy this relationship was for me....it was then I sought help to continue to stay away.

Yes, I also agree with the others, it may not end until something catastrophic happens, but we are born with free will. Don't let something catastrophic happen, you have that control in your life. Do the right thing for your wife. You would want the same consideration if she was feeling about someone the way you are feeling about this AP.

I'm feeling the exact same way as you described. I have been in my A for 3 years. We got caught by everyone we know - my H, his gf, his entire family, my H's entire family, all of our friends - it was catastrophic. We went NC for an entire year. But the minute we saw each other again we are right back to where we were in the beginning. Or worse off - it was just a fling at first and now its definitely reaching new heights. But I'm constantly torn between not wanting this - and not knowing how to stop.