Rebuilding Marriage After Infidelity Community Group
A community for those who have been through the heartbreak of infidelity and decided to stay with their partner and try to re-build the relationship.
over a year and a half from dday.... been working on R
but I'm very confused today, and last evening after talking with WW'
for the last year and change, all the therapy I've gone to stressed to me, that WW affairs and choices and nothing to do with me...that they were not caused by anything i did or said or didn't do...that they were all her choice....
but after talking to her last night about her solo counseling session with our MC, I'm almost believing that her affairs were all my fault since i have not been supportive and have been prone to outbursts of anger over the lat 16 years I wasn't kidding when i said to her "i wonder why it took you 13 years to have an affair"
it seems to me, that its all on me now. I'm supposed to be expected to have emotions, yet control how i express them, and also insure that i don't suppress them.
i find that very confusing.
the take away for me after 1.5 years of therapy is
1. emotions happen. they are neither good nor bad, they just are
2. acknowledge your emotions
3. choose carefully in how you express your emotions
4. do not suppress your emotions.
and frankly, it's much easier for me to suppress it all, and bottle it up, because then i don't have to experience other emotions like fear and anxiety about what impact my expression (verbal or otherwise) will have.
it seems to me, that whatever WW does, say, think, act ....it shouldn't have a detrimental affect on me.
if i react emotionally, I'm allowed to experience the emotions, even if its anger, but i just have to express it in a way that doesn't cause her to choose a reaction that leads her to counter emotional reaction which will fuel the fire
my default is to deny my experience of emotions like anger and fear and bottle them up and suppress them because i don't want to let it out...or i don't know how to let them out in a constructive and healthy manner. all i know is yelling and getting mad and pouting and holding grudge just like i watched my mother do for all those decades.
so, it seems to me that, i have all this work to do, and past non supportive behavior and past anger issues to atone for, but am expected to just let what ever WW does, say, think, act roll off me like water.
it seems to me that she finally gets her free pass. she is absolved. she deserves compassion and empathy from me because her life was so difficult and unfulfilling ...so its all on me now..its all my problem...seems like it was always my problem.
and i don't for a minute believe that to be true.
and i am getting even more anger as i type this
but I'm very confused today, and last evening after talking with WW'
for the last year and change, all the therapy I've gone to stressed to me, that WW affairs and choices and nothing to do with me...that they were not caused by anything i did or said or didn't do...that they were all her choice....
but after talking to her last night about her solo counseling session with our MC, I'm almost believing that her affairs were all my fault since i have not been supportive and have been prone to outbursts of anger over the lat 16 years I wasn't kidding when i said to her "i wonder why it took you 13 years to have an affair"
it seems to me, that its all on me now. I'm supposed to be expected to have emotions, yet control how i express them, and also insure that i don't suppress them.
i find that very confusing.
the take away for me after 1.5 years of therapy is
1. emotions happen. they are neither good nor bad, they just are
2. acknowledge your emotions
3. choose carefully in how you express your emotions
4. do not suppress your emotions.
and frankly, it's much easier for me to suppress it all, and bottle it up, because then i don't have to experience other emotions like fear and anxiety about what impact my expression (verbal or otherwise) will have.
it seems to me, that whatever WW does, say, think, act ....it shouldn't have a detrimental affect on me.
if i react emotionally, I'm allowed to experience the emotions, even if its anger, but i just have to express it in a way that doesn't cause her to choose a reaction that leads her to counter emotional reaction which will fuel the fire
my default is to deny my experience of emotions like anger and fear and bottle them up and suppress them because i don't want to let it out...or i don't know how to let them out in a constructive and healthy manner. all i know is yelling and getting mad and pouting and holding grudge just like i watched my mother do for all those decades.
so, it seems to me that, i have all this work to do, and past non supportive behavior and past anger issues to atone for, but am expected to just let what ever WW does, say, think, act roll off me like water.
it seems to me that she finally gets her free pass. she is absolved. she deserves compassion and empathy from me because her life was so difficult and unfulfilling ...so its all on me now..its all my problem...seems like it was always my problem.
and i don't for a minute believe that to be true.
and i am getting even more anger as i type this
Stop MC, stay with IC if you feel it helps ... Feeding into your wife's justification for her behavior is not what MC is for
I'm assuming this 1.5 years of therapy you've mentioned is individual counseling, and not marital counseling. If I'm right in that assumption, I think what you are experiencing is a result of the focus of the counseling. An individual counselor will be focused on you and what you can do to improve yourself. It would be pointless to instruct you on how to improve your wife, because you can't do that. She has to do that for herself. Since you are not the one who cheated, none of what he/she can discuss is how she should be working to resolve what she has done in cheating, but in how you react to what she has done and is doing.
That focus can, at times, make it seem like he/she is suggesting "if you fix this about yourself, she won't cheat again, in fact, she wouldn't have cheated in the first place." Hopefully he/she isn't directly stating that message, but is unintentionally communicating it to you. In either case, I'd recommend discussing this perception with him/her to gain clarification. If he is intending to say that, it might be a sign to look for a different therapist.
I can't evaluate the anger management techniques you mentioned, but I can see from your perspective the difficulty in learning to express it in a way different from what you learned growing up. My son-in-law grew up in the same kind of family. My daughter didn't. She's struggled to deal with that around his family because she's not used to parents and siblings yelling at each other all the time. It is true we learn how to deal with relationships by experiencing how our parents did. It can be a struggle to unlearn bad ways of interacting with others and learn healthier actions and words.
That said, that is your issue that only you can change through determination, to make you a better person, husband, and friend. That is what you will gain from it. And no doubt, it hasn't been easy for her to live with someone prone to such anger, based on what you've said.
But as you know, or should know by now, that doesn't justify her cheating. Her cheating is her own marital problem that she is responsible for just as you are responsible for your anger issues affecting the quality of the marriage. You didn't cause her to cheat any more than she causes you to get angry. They are both destructive to healthy relationships. She chose to deal with her issues by cheating. You didn't force her to do it.
So, no, she doesn't get a pass from the *consequences* of her destructive decision to address her needs by cheating, any more than you do about getting over-angered. They feed on each other, but neither caused the other nor does it give either of you a pass on dealing with the consequences. In her case, she still has the painful task of facing up to and changing what in her allowed her to betray you, and fixing it so it doesn't happen again. That is not easy either, but required to rebuild successfully.
But I can see how the focus of your counselor on your issues could lead you to start to feel you are the problem, not her, as to why cheating happened. But that was her decision to deal with her needs destructively instead of destructively. But, in talking with you and suggesting what can be done, he can only focus on what you can do to make yourself and the marriage better. If she were in his office, hopefully he'd be doing the same thing to her, because she can't force you to make changes either, she can only focus on what she must do to address the pain she's caused you and in truth, herself as well.
We started MC in Feb 2015..we are still going
Wife started IC end of jan 2015..but goes to a different IC