So it happened to me, he had an affair. He admitted it when I asked him why he was lying to me, just flat out “I am having an affair”. No knife could cut deeper. I felt so worthless, so unloveable, so unwanted, it took my breathe away. The pain over the next month while I was trying to figure out what to do was incredible - I didn’t want this, I didn’t deserve this, I was a good person.

Then I stopped to think, who would want this or deserve this? There are plenty of people who are “Good”er than me so Why not me? What would make me so much better than anyone else so that I wouldn’t have to deal with this pain and heartache? How superior of me to think this - that I shouldn’t have to deal with it. Get real, suck it up, and deal with it.

There are lots of people who will help -like this website here. I had never heard of it but it is making a huge difference to me now, so maybe this is how it is supposed to be - for me to learn and grow (although, I would have really preferred a less painful way).

I have been in a waiting period for 5 years. In therapy but recently finding out that I do not know everything. No surprise from what I now know about infidelity and deception. My husband is in recovery and wants to do whatever it takes to restore our marriage. I am not sure our marriage can be restored, but I want to be restored and I am willing to do whatever it takes for that to happen. Harboring hope would be one more support to help do that. Thank you for offering this chance.

I’d love to try harboring hope. There has to be some hope somewhere- and has to be someone somewhere who understands- haven’t had much luck finding either of those things so far

I'm tired of the re-runs; the obsession; the pain. I want to be free of the shackles. I don't want to give 'her' any more rent-free space in my brain! Because I see her with him ALL THE TIME. They both lied to me straight-faced! Of course, last to know. Our teenage son even knew! For 1-1/2 YEARS! I HATE HER! What was he thinking? I know her car. I know her plate. Always looking. Always checking. So sick of it. Triggers: all around me. Hotels. Dates. Anxiety. Panic. Shaking. Grinding teeth. Closing throat. She wanted my life! She was going to move in! No respect for me or what it was doing to our son! So he 'chose' me instead. Like which cereal for breakfast? Should I have even been a choice? I guess I should be happy. No. I'm devastated. I can forgive him (i think) but NOT her. Evil. No conscience. How can He forgive me if I can't forgive her?

We are a couple committed to restoring our marriage since his affair. However, hubby wants to bury the past and just move on forward. His reasons for having the affair were -in a nutshell- my lack of attention, especially during the period when my elderly mother was living with us. Her negativity, overbearing presence and endless neediness created an environment that was often unbearable for all of us. He says he needed to escape from the oppressive conditions at home and found a ‘friend’ who said and did all the right things at the right time. According to him, I was SOOO emotionally unavailable that he couldn’t communicate what he wanted from me(heavy sarcasm). We are seeing a marriage & family therapist who does not have any specific infidelity training (that I know of) and appears to have found my husband’s reasons as well as his method of handling the aftermath to all be perfectly acceptable. We do love each other very much and want to be together but I am worried that the monsters he’s pushing down right now will rear their ugly heads in the future. We truly need your help to upright this tipping boat! Thank you for the opportunity!

After 27 years of being with my spouse a full disclosure of addiction and betrayal was given on July 4th. His first day of truth and freedom became my first day of pain and rejection. I actually believe I suffered PTSD from the extent of the deceit and lies that were in my marriage. It took me til January to begin to process and this past number of weeks to actually feel and begin to grieve.
A snap shot of our story - During the second year of our marriage my husband was unfaithful and we separated for five months. We attended counseling, moved to a different country, worked on our marriage, worked in marriage ministry and even renewed our vows three years ago. Over the years I knew things weren't perfect and I adopted a crazy cycle of "put up, shut up and then flare up!" I was extremely lonely in my marriage and experienced abandonment and rejection frequently. On the 28th of June 2017 I received an email from a woman my husband had been in a relationship with in 2012. I will never know the true motive or the real intent behind sending this email but it did bring years of lies and deceit into the light. I have to say after the first infidelity and the destruction it caused I never dreamt he would hurt me in this way again. But he did! We separated again in July 2017 and have lived separately and are coparenting successfully. I am at a what's next place! Since the separation while I have been lonely and have missed the husband I thought I was married to, I have never felt alone. I know God is with me in my journey and I know He can heal all things. But I ask myself, do I really want this marriage to be healed? I am tired and have peace on my own right now. I am safe and content. In truth I wrestle with the feelings of my heart and thoughts in my brain. I wrestle with what the world would say I should do and what God would want me to do. I feel ashamed and don't want to be made a fool of again. One thing I do know for sure is that I have to heal in order for me to have true peace and freedom. My husband is working his recovery and I have been working on mine but feel I need to step deeper into the pain I am masking. It's time for me to be able to walk in freedom!
Noreen

Looking for help, guidance, comfort. Not sure where to begin. I am 5 month out. I keep feeling unsafe, cant seem to move forward take two steps forward to fall two steps back, I watch videos and read blogs, but I feel I would truly benefit from Harboring Hope. I want to rediscover who I am. I need help!!!!

It has been 2 years since discovery. There has been only empty promises, no healing. Continuous lies/deceit, addiction, affairs, financial ruin. But he gives me "just enough" to keep hanging on. I have distanced myself from friends/family. I am unmotivated and in a constant state of anxiety. I am taking care of all financial responsibilities myself as he says he says he will, but never does and hasn't given me money, etc in months- so insurance on verge of being cancelled, car in danger of being repossessed - the outside of home looks like a junk yard so we are being kicked out, and I can't pass a credit check because of all the debt he racked up ( in my name with my cards ) . I want to be strong enough to either heal,or move on. Feeling so hopeless.

A 40 year marriage and family has been destroyed by infidelity, and I can’t imagine ever having any joy again. My marriage and family has always been my focus, so I feel completely lost. I’ve never worked outside the home throughout our marriage and was a homeschool mom. My divorce is almost final, and I tried so hard to reconcile, but even though my husband has claimed he doesn’t want a divorce, he hasn’t been willing to do the work to reconcile, and he’s been incredibly mean to me. I’ve been reading about narcissists, empaths, codependents, trauma bonding, etc., and I see now a lot of unhealthy relationship issues I need to heal from. I’d love help from Harboring Hope!

I am sitting in bed next to my beautiful husband. I would love nothing more than to snuggle up with him, and explore his warm strong body.
But just 30 minutes ago he said he couldn't care less if i "recover" he used air quotes. So instead the joy i could have found in him i am watching tears land on my phone. He takes NO responsibility for having an affair. He blames me and says its not that big of deal. 30 years
4 sons
2 grandsons.
1 broken woman.
Damage provided by 1 selfish man....but its not that big of deal.

I dont feel as though I will ever get over my husbands affairs (and deceit) without the appropriate help. There are no therapists in our area that specialize in infidelity, the therapists we have went to were not helpful.
My friends that have been cheated on (that I am aware of) have all divorced their cheating partners so I feel very alone, helpless and ashamed.
The online AR resources have been the most valuable tool during our journey but we seem to have lost momentum at this point and we dont know how to move forward. Transparency is still a huge issue. I'm feeling very helpless right now and I dont know if (or how) I can ever get over this. We would love to participate in the course, if offered the opportunity.

Several months after having my world shatter apart, my husband is expecting a baby with his affair partner in less than 2 months. I’m in a world where I feel stuck and don’t know what to do.

Broken, shattered by way too much, for way too long... Need to find strength and healing for myself & my girls... along with a ray of hope.

My husband and I have been married for 29 years. I have had two d-days in those years. The first one was after 10 years of marriage, and that was an 8 year affair. The second one 18 years later that was only a year in length before my husband was caught at work and lost his job. Because I believe in forgiveness I was able to forgive him after the first discovery rather quickly. We did some counseling through our pastor and another Christian therapist. They had us both believe that as long as I forgave him we could just pray away the infidelity and move on with our marriage... 4 years later there was no change in our marital relationship, I then filed for a divorce. We were divorced for 3 years before I remarried him. We have now been married for an additional 12 years. In September 2018 was when the 2nd D-Day was. I was more crushed the second time then I was the first time. Believing God had restored us through our second marriage to each other, I would never have dreamed that I would have to deal with infidelity again, but here I am...
What I'm realizing now is that I am grieving the loss of my marriage from the first affair my husband had before our 10-year anniversary. We never sought out true infidelity counseling and therefore the things that led my husband to cheat the first time resurfaced 18 years later. Now it is going to be dealt with. Many are shaking their head at me wondering why I'm staying. And I tell them, I'm not staying yet but I'm not leaving either (29yrs and holding). I want to believe that there is hope yet for my relationship with my husband. He seems sincere that he wants change and desires to be a better person. He is remorseful and is starting to do the recovery work and doing those things that will make me feel safe. But honestly, only time will tell if we are successful at recovery. I would love the opportunity to go through Harboring Hope!

Two and a half months ago, I experienced the second D-Day of my 20-year marriage. My wife had a weekend fling 14 years ago, when our eldest daughter was 2, but I discovered it very shortly thereafter. In therapy together after that incident, we agreed that, because of our very different energies (I'm a cancer survivor with constant fatigue that no therapy so far has really helped), my wife should tell me right away if she ever again experienced a serious attraction, even if it crossed a line, and in exchange I promised not to blow up the relationship right away, but to really hear her out and try to bring the energy back into our relationship. (This was NOT the same as agreeing to an open relationship on her end.) But my wife now says she forgot about our earlier agreements, and after her narcissistic mother passed away a few months ago, she "broke apart" and felt she needed different energy to get her through that dark time. She happened to meet someone with boundaries as porous as her own, and embarked on a second affair.

Of course, she didn't tell me right away, as we had agreed, and this time the affair went on for 10 weeks, until my wife finally broke down and told me. It took her another 3 weeks to break things off with the affair partner, and now I'm experiencing post-traumatic symptoms, which I trace to that horrible time when I was trying to express clearly how much pain I was in, but my wife just couldn't bring herself to do what needed to be done.

I have forgiven my wife: she really is kind of broken with grief for her mother, and I can see that there were tensions in our relationship before this most recent affair. But I also feel terrible sadness most of the time - it doesn't help that I already was tired all the time even before this betrayal, and now I have to try to get through so many awful feelings on top of it all. (Luckily, I have no suicidal ideation, etc.) We have two daughters, age 7 and 16, and my wife has said from the time she told me about this most recent affair that she wants to stay with me. I'm just not sure what I want: if it weren't for the kids and our shared history of 20+ years, I would probably not be willing to trust my wife a third time. I am finally realizing that she has serious unresolved attachment and boundary issues, likely stemming from being a daughter of a narcissistic mother. While I don't blame her for these issues, and she says she's now finally ready to really work on them, it just seems almost impossible to me that she (and I!) will change in the fundamental ways that might be required before we can go from surviving to thriving.

One problem for me is that I have chosen to use most of my limited time and energy outside of work these last few years on my kids and family/household, so I don't have a lot of close friends I feel I can turn to for support. I have finally told some family members whom I didn't tell about the first affair, because this recent one was so much more serious - I didn't realize that you can lose months or years after learning about a long-term affair! But my family members, though kind, are not equipped to be the best emotional support for me. I'm also seeing a therapist but feel it's not a great fit, and she's not an expert in infidelity trauma. Therapy and medical issues already feel like a part-time job to me, and I would really like to find a community that really understands these particular issues, so I can hone in on strategies that will help me set boundaries and feel safer in this relationship moving forward without spending even more time and energy that I don't really have. Thanks for reading and for providing this forum for people like us!

I would like to attend so that both myself, the betrayed, and my husband, can experience grace. I know that it must be hard for him to fully step into his role as healer for me with all the emotions he’s feeling about himself. We both need grace. That said, I still need him to get there if we’re ever going to be able to get to the deeper, longer-standing issues. That, and I need some community to get me out of this darkness and start coping with the trauma. Affair Recovery is my saving grace every day. I need more!

On August 1st my husband and I were having our morning coffee at the kitchen table when he said "we need to talk" I said OK about what? He proceeded to tell me he wanted a divorce. Said he loved me but was not in love with me, said he wanted to be happy for the last years of his life (hi is 68?.... I was devastated. He left and called his adult children and our adult son told them he was getting a divorce. We did not talk for 2 weeks. I took a vacation with my son's family to get away for a while and when I returned he came to me apologizing and begging me to forgive him. Of course I did because I love him and did not want a divorce. Two weeks later I was looking through some tax papers and found a bank statement from a secret bank account with purchases to Victoria Secret, Jewelry stores, Spas and Hotels.... none of the purchases were for me! I called him screaming and he just said he could not talk to me about it and hung up. My son came and helped me clear out his clothes and change the locks on the doors and told his dad to not come back home and to leave me alone. Again my world was shattered. Over the next month I went through every file, box, drawer and envelope I could find looking for evidence of the affair and I found plenty. The affair was with a co-worker 26 years younger than him and had been going on for 2 years. He had spent over $60,000 on her with gifts, cash and she even had her own credit card on his secret account...He even had filed for his Social Security and had it going to that account to support his affair partner. I also found he had been cheating his company and doing unethical practices... all things that could have cost him his job and our livelihood. I just could not believe the man I had been married to for 33 years could be capable of doing all of this... I had not idea. I told my friends that if someone had bet me a million dollars that he would be cheating on me I would have taken the bet...that's how much I trusted this man with my life. After another month we started talking again and he again told me how sorry he was and how he would spend the rest of his life making it up to me and our family. He would never stop loving me or trying to earn my love back. So a month ago we started living together again.. he seemed to really be trying to make it work. He and I both went to individual counseling and started marriage counseling. Then all of a sudden things have taken a change for the worse. He is hiding things from me again, he will not let me even touch his phone. I have caught him in several lies and just this week he has moved out and now says he's not sure if we can make it... I am so confused as to why he has put me through this again. As you can tell we are seniors and should be thinking about growing old together... I need help in trying to figure all of this out. I feel like a fool and a failure.

I need to do something! Found out about my husband’s affair 7 months ago. I need Harboring Hope to do just that, bring me hope to get over the immense pain I feel day in and day out. And the many other confusing things swirling around in my head. I need a process, a guide, and “steps” to take to help me on this journey of recovery.

My husband and I have been married for 23 years and have seven kids. During that time, he had an emotional affair at year 7, right after our fourth child was born, and basically "checked out" during year 11, during which we became pregnant with our sixth child. He is not an attached father to any of them. Then, not even three months ago he went on a deployment for Hurricane Florence and had an affair, which culminated just a few weeks later in him staying in a hotel with her on our 23rd anniversary.

The last 12 years have been difficult because of how he changed after he "checked out". He went from not approving of alcohol to drinking, not approving of tattoos to getting several. Both of those things weren't an issue, just part of a measure of how much he changed. The hardest change for me to accept was he went from affectionate, and loving, to literally telling me he didnt love me anymore. He eventually came around and became a husband again, but never went back to being loving, affectionate, or telling me he loved me. In 12 years I had only heard it a handful of times.

When I found out about his affair, he immediately did a 180, telling me how much he loved me, being affectionate, remorseful. For a short time he was the man I wanted, and I let him come home. After about a week, we were right back to the same old deal. Then I found another message he sent her, so I kicked him out again. And again, he was remorseful, but it seemed more “real”, not so flowery. I thought this time was more realistic, and I felt like God was telling me to let him come home, so I invited him home again. After a couple of weeks, we were back to the same old story, and basically just coexisting.

At this point I felt like I was done living in a loveless marriage and he was obviously not willing to do the work to help repair the damage he had caused over the last decade, and the affair, so I told him I was leaving with the kids. He immediately wanted to meet with our Preacher, and since then has been checking off the list of things that Preacher said he needs to do. So it looks like he's trying, but we never talk about the affair, our marriage, his feelings, my feelings. Nothing. He has again quit being affectionate unless it involves sex, or I initiate it. He very rarely tells me he loves me. Again, I feel like we are just good friends coexisting with all our kids. I feel like it is time for me to move on. I am beginning to feel like he is incapable of truly loving anyone else anymore. However, he was able to tell her he loved her after only knowing her a few days. He was able to have sex with her after only knowing her two days. I'm not sure what is so wrong with me that he can't tell me he loves me, can't tell his kids he loves them, but he can say it to a virtual stranger.

I plan on doing HH as soon as I can afford it. I feel like I need to move on and try to heal myself. I've never been anything but a wife and mom, I don't even know who I am anymore. I've been a good wife to him, but that has been thrown back in my face. I feel like I can't be a good mom to my kids right now because this is so all-consuming, and I can't even afford to get us out of the situation. I'll admit to feeling pretty hopeless at the moment.

We are 6 months from the initial discovery and every day feels like that day. We were meeting with a Christian Counselor but he dropped us right before Christmas. I wish that everyone could win this prize as I pray for all hearts in need of healing from this agonizing trauma.

I’d love the opportunity to attend a seminar. I need some HOPE!

Registering for drawing

Hi,

I have been separated for 7 months and am not sure how long to wait for my spouse to decide if he wants to come back to our marriage.

I'll try to word this coherently. I need help. My husband had a one night stand with his best friends sister. It was 20 years ago and just one night one time. He kept it a secret for a year and a half. Betrayed isn't a strong enough word. And I'm so angry at myself that I can't get past this. I died that day. And I can't find myself. Nor do I want to since I obviously wasn't good enough. There have been other issues but this is the most pressing. I can't get over this and I'm so unbelievable stuck in the past. I've ruined my children's lives because I can't get over this. I trust no one. I've only ever told one other person aside from his best friend who I called that night and told to never speak to us again. He knew for over a year and never told me. I've lost my faith almost completely. I wasn't allowed to talk about it period. Not for almost 10 years. You can imagine everything was bottled up. I just became a Christian about 2 months before d day. The pastor told me the first day I found out I was to forgive him and forget about it. Everyone deals with this. Then I was told how it was my fault. I feel so unbearably lost. I see no future only pain and fear. At this point all I can ask for is help. Please.

I would be eternally grateful to win the free Harboring Hope registration. My husband confessed his affair and wants to save the marriage and do the work, and I do as well but I feel like my well is running dry. I’m a giver and I have given so much and gone through so much with him - he’s a recovering alcoholic - and I need a source of hope in addition to my faith to draw on. Please help me save myself and our marriage!