Hello, I recently found this forum and decided that it would be good for me to post about something I am struggling with. Around March 2024, I confessed to my BW about my infidelities that started with an A of about 1.5 years and then after that ended, several other incidents with others. This spanned about 9 years of our relationship, the exact timelines are still a bit fuzzy.
We have been together since we were in high school (we are late 30s now), got married, had 3 kids. We both had our challenges growing up as neither of us came from a sturdy household but we found safety in each other early on and shared very similar values of wanting to grow past the challenges that we faced with our parents. After several years of growing guilt and shame, I finally confessed everything to her. I just couldn't bare it. I felt we were growing apart and something inside me told me I needed to get it out and maybe try to save myself and our marriage. Obviously she was devastated, felt betrayed, enraged, all the feelings. Her first reaction was to tell me she wanted to divorce, after a while we went through a few weeks of hysterical bonding and then it was the ups and downs of her trying to reconcile everything. Her biggest thing has always been the kids, and not wanting to hurt them. She has told me several times that if it wasn't for the kids she would have left. I did, and have done my best to show remorse, support her through this, try to change and work on myself, and do all the things I need to do to try to save us.
We've been trying to work through things, I have been in IC for year to try to deal with my childhood trauma (bipolar mom, workaholic dad). We started MC December 2024 and that has been helpful. Recently we had been in what I thought was a VERY good place for about 1.5 months but then we hit a wall. I started to relapse a bit with shame and guilt and sexual fantasy. I had a trip coming up with friends and I wanted to ask her about going to a SC with them and see if she was comfortable with that. But of course my shame and guilt overcame me and she felt I was trying to manipulate her for permission. That spiraled along with some re-triggering of old things from a 2024 falling out we both had with my mom and it all fell apart. She told me that she was done, that she couldn't get past things and that she wanted to move on. At first I was in shock because I was trying so hard to be mindful of her when I asked her and it blew up in my face. After talking to my IC, I pulled myself together to try to keep fighting. Since then, we agreed to do a 2 week in house mini separation for her to have some space. In hindsight, it seemed like this was under the surface the entire time I thought things had been going well and I think it was less IF and more so WHEN it was going to happen.
The mini separation has been challenging for me because I have more of an anxious attachment style. Trying to be around her in the house but knowing that there is this huge gap between us just brings these feelings of anxiety and nausea. I spoke 1 on 1 with our MC to ask for some advice in how to move forward. Part of me wants to keep fighting for this relationship but I also know that there is a lot that I still need to fix within myself. I know that if both of us cannot show up to this relationship as whole versions of ourselves, there is probably little chance that this will work long-term. After talking with our MC, what I landed on was that I need to figure out how to love myself. I've rarely felt safety within myself throughout my life. I know that stems from childhood, likely from feeling abandoned by my parents and all the other issues I dealt with from my parents disfunction (bipolar, domestic abuse, etc). The problem is that I feel stuck right now. I've thought about going back and trying EMDR to address this but I figured this would be a good point to reach out and see if any of you could offer advice. I really want to get to the point where I can feel whole within myself and love myself. Its scary though because I fear that maybe if I am my true self, maybe i'll scare my BW away, or maybe I won't want to be in the relationship anymore. What will that mean for me? For my kids? For my family and in-laws? When I think about those things my stomach turns.
Anyways, I hope that someone out there can offer some wise words. I do want to try to fix this and save us, I think there is lots of good in our relationship and I do love her.
Thank you in advance
[This message edited by jaguar280 at 9:43 PM, Wednesday, September 10th]
