I am very inspired by both Candace and Jeremy.
I am 15 months after my first DDay and things are still stinging and raw.
I still swing in and out of the grief anger and shock. Some days I feel good and I actually feel like I am beginning to heal. It seems almost miraculous!! What happened to all that pain?
And then suddenly another day, it hits me again like a ton of bricks.
And I spin back down into the dark void of crushing pain.
I am definitely isolating right now. I know I will eventually come out of that at the right time for me.
I know most of my husband’s different stories with the various women, though I was never yet given an official Disclosure.
I am not backing down on that!
I will never ever forgive the other women with whom my husband cheated on me.
“Affair Partners” sounds too benign to me for people who are so evil.
“Unfaithful Partner” is also a very benign term for someone who knowingly makes a decision, day after day for 7 years, to deceive you and put you at risk and use you and abuse you. My husband is definitely becoming a new man. For the first time in our 41 years together he smiles at me and makes me feel love cherished and adored. We are working on reconciliation with specialized courses and individual Root Cause Therapy with therapists who have been through this themselves. My husband is slowly beginning to do the work. He has a lot of shame and needs to work through it to become strong and resilient for me so he can hold me in my pain. Something he cannot really do so much yet. I have been learning and doing therapy almost from the beginning. Forgiving my husband I can see will take more time for me. Disclosure needs to come first. And then maybe in a few years in the future can I see rewriting the story. In the meantime we still have a lot more work to do on both our parts.

Being asked to change the perception of my story sounds like self-gaslighting to me.

I was betrayed multiple times across 23 years. He lied to me from the first day we met. When I'd discover an affair, he only admitted to what I had proof of, and swore there was nothing else. So then 4 years ago (right after the discovery of the most recent affair) I discovered he was still lying about each affair, and they were far more involved than he had ever admitted to. He lied to me, to therapists, etc. Even when he wasn't in active addiction, he was still manipulating me through lies and gaslighting. He's never admitted to anything without me finding evidence first.

I hate my story. I am embarrassed of my story. I regret that this story is my life. His actions ruined nearly everything I ever wanted from this life. There's no way to re-write that story. There are still 23 years filled with pain, there are still memories of failing to be the mom I wanted to be to my children when they were small because of the trauma he caused, and every memory of him from those years is now questionable, because how can you possibly love someone while continuously denying them their reality and informed consent in the relationship? He's the one who re-wrote our story by keeping a secret second life - the story I thought I had was a fantasy.

Even if he remains in recovery for the rest of his life, I will never be able to trust that it won't happen again, because we've been thru therapy multiple times and it always happened again. I will never be able to believe any words of love from him, because he said the same thing to each AP. I will never be able to believe that he truly puts me first in anything, or has consideration for me in all choices he makes, because addicts are selfish and focused on themselves.

I never wanted this story, and I'm ashamed that I'm stuck with it. Trying to reframe it is like adding lipstick on a pig. I don't blame myself for a single action he took, but I regret that I didn't see the red flags clearly enough early on and left before I had children with him. I will never let the feelings of love cloud my judgment ever again.

I am so happy for both of you that you were able to heal from your partner's betrayal and that you were also able to heal as couples. Yet, I feel like it is important that when there is a post like this that you give some sort of warning about the necessity of the willingness to heal of the "wayward spouse" (I actually do not like that euphemism because I think it minimizes the actions of the cheating partner). Although you slightly touched on it, I have come to realize that MANY cheating partners are not fully committed to the work. They use programs like EMS online to check the box and pretend like they are doing the work. It is very simple for a betrying partner who is used to lying as part of the daily routine to lie about his/her "story" when they disclose it to the group in EMS online. This gives the betrayed partner a false sense of security. My partner told a very minimized story in our EMS online group that revealed basically nothing that I hadn't found out on my own. But I believed him because we were in the class and I thought we were doing the work together. LIke most betrayed partners I had no idea the depths of the lies that my mate would be willing to tell because, unlike him, I am not a liar and did not live a secret double life. It took many many months after EMS Online (and HH and Hope for Healing) that I finally realized through my own investigation and not through his voluntarily disclosure that I did not know the whole story and that he was still lying, gaslighting, and minimizing. I do not know if he was still acting out. People who are willing to cheat and have a double life are often hiding much more than they let on. I feel like this video and Affair Recovery generally do not do enough to warn betrayed partners that they need to very carefully look beyond the surface level work. I am so very glad that some unfaithful partners are able to heal and I sincerely wish it for everyone. But please, betrayed partners, proceed with caution and look past the surface.