Q&A How Do We Balance My Need to Verbally Process and Their Need to Take Breaks & Practice Normal?
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Question
My husband of 16 years had a 6 month affair with disclosure happening 2 months ago. We are both engaged in EMS Online and initially had hope of restoring and rebuilding our marriage. However, recovery fatigue is starting to set in and causing conflict and hopelessness that we cannot escape our old failure cycle patterns. My husband is getting increasingly frustrated, angry, and impatient when I talk about the affair, I ask questions, I experience triggers, or get stuck in deep feelings of betrayal and how to overcome this severe moral injury. His frustrations prevent me from feeling safe or that he truly loves me. He has also started reflecting back my own moral failures and mistakes in our marriage when I am communicating how much this affair pains me or when I am flooding. He says he is starting to feel like what is the point in all this if I am constantly wanting to throw away everything. For example, I have been refusing to go to all the places he took her to, throw away my wedding dress, etc while he wants to reclaim everything which I don’t feel like I need to when I can just avoid them. How can we balance my need to constantly want to talk about things, both about the betrayal trauma and working on healing, and allowing him a break to not think about it? I have such high moral standards about faithfulness and cannot reconcile how a man I believed to be faithful could do something so evil and wicked and then now claim he is the faithful man I initially thought he was? He is so reactive and gets easily offended when I tell him how much he hurt me.
What type of affair was it?
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