She is healing......

Life can be funny. Not in a laughing way but how strange things work. It was only five months ago, yet five months felt like a lifetime. One can’t follow a guide line for what you go through or how things will be or work out. We all go down similar paths yet they can be so different. I read that it could take months, sometimes years or even a lifetime to get over your spouses infidelity. This shocked me to the point of never feeling right again. I was scared to think it would hurt so much for so long. How would I survive months, years of this pain and hard ache? I was not dealing well after just a few months.

So it’s funny that he would make a gesture to renew our vows a few weeks ago and I was thrilled beyond words. He could have been just trying to make good, but he was so moved when we stood there receipting our vows, the look on his face, the tears in his eyes and the way he was so moved by what he was saying to me. I believed him totally. I smiled uncontrollable I could feel his words through my whole body. I believe he meant every thing he said and that he will do right by me the rest of his life or mine. Every thing was so right last week and every thing since we arrived home.

One has to find the point of it being done, over and put things away in the past where it belongs. I will never forget what has happened after all it brought us so much closer. It was also a wake up call for the both of us. I will continue to work on me and in time I believe he will find answers to why this has happened to him and us. I no longer blame myself for what happened or think that it was done just to me. I can be loved and deserve to be loved. Things happen, life goes on and once you forgive someone they need to know you mean it. I do and I won’t punish him or myself any longer for something I can’t change. All I can really do is take care of me and be the best I can be. I am healing, I hope any one who reads this can find their way to a forgiving place and be happy any way they can. If two people are meant to be together it will work out.

Two steps forward, one step back.

I’ve been up since 3:30 AM. Sleep is a luxury I don’t have. A few weeks ago I had to see the psychiatrist at counseling and I was given an antidepressant. It has helped but it doesn’t take away the painful thoughts of his infidelity. I really did not want to take them but I am much calmer, not crying with every painful thought but the need to know things are still haunting me. I hate to go, I hate the place I have to go to and I hate that I have to take antidepressants because of what has happened but I will continue to go for me. I need this for me. I can only do what I need to for me anymore. That means take the med's, go to counseling and open up when I am there.

I have opened up a little about what I am going through without the words "he cheated". The counselor talked about relationships what makes them work and what makes them fail. I feel like she was trying to get me personally to open up. It worked. I have talked about trust, honesty and loyalty. I saw myself on the board under what makes a relationship work with two areas I need to work on. I saw him mostly on the side of fail with a few areas that did not fit him. There were some areas on the work side that did fit him as well. That gives me some hope for us.

One can not explain what it is like to any degree of full understanding, when your spouse cheats. Each and every one of us will react in similar ways but also very different. The only common thread is we were betrayed by infidelity.

I wouldn’t be in this place of mass confusion if he hadn’t cheated and that makes me even more upset. My lack of sleep, my crying, depression, low self worth are all multiplied by his actions. My obsession with what he has done over runs my mind. He dishonest ways has caused me to question every thing. I search for clarity in my mind and him any where I can.

I feel like I am trying to hard to get past this. My struggle these days is with myself. The steps I take, the set backs I face. I guess as long as I always move forward more than back I will get there. But where is there? I am not sure of this at this time but I will keep trying to learn from what I do. I have hope and have not given up on my life yet or my marriage. Some how it will all work out for the best for me.

Opening up on a higher level

I am stepping put on that limb today and adding this page from my personal journal to She Writes To Heal. Why? Because I have written about things after they have happened and my thoughts are clearer then, today it is raw, writing as I think, you can’t get any closer than this to my thoughts.

Today is our anniversary. I am lost and I feel the need today more than ever to know why this happened. I search internet journals, knowing I won’t find his lost journal but hope to understand him more. He said he had a journal he was writing online and someone responded to him, they had a connection because they were both unhappy. He said they emailed each other and talked on the phone.

Why had he not come to me when he was in such a bad place in him life? I want to know what he was going through to cause him to cheat. He must have been in a lot of pain but was he? Was he just selfish? He could have made so many other choices so why this one? I don’t see him suffering by this, why does he not open up to me. Has he not truly gone to the place of acceptance of what he has done.

Am I that unapproachable. Have I shown him in the past that I would be so judgmental to him that he won’t open up? Or is he just going through life alone, giving only as little as necessary. I wish I could shut off my mind for the day and enjoy him. But I can’t help thinking he can’t, won’t or doesn’t know how to be in a personal relationship. What is he afraid of?

I feel he needs to go to counseling more than I. I know right from wrong when it come to marriage and commitment to one person. I have shared more of myself to him than he has to me. Are guys really not deep, feeling human beings. I know he has feelings, I have seen them in him for other people. His tender side, his compassion to strangers is more obvious than his feeling towards me. I need him to show me his inner most personal self.

In counseling yesterday we talked about talking to other the way we want to be talked to and treating others the way we want to be treated. I have always treated him with love and I once told him if I treated him the way he treated me, he wouldn't like me. If I stop sharing myself with him and thought only of myself, how far would we drift apart? I can't beg him to share himself with me and I can't keep trying to repair the damage alone. I feel I must let go of things and see what happens.

It is never easy

This is by far the hardest thing to deal with in my life. I feel like I lost a huge part of myself along the way. I struggle with the thoughts of his infidelity and what it has done to my sense of self worth, security and all over well being. How do you do this to someone your in love with! I spin out of control this week and have gotten to the point of seeking out personal counseling.

I have been obsessed with what he has done and maybe still doing. It’s hard not to be, when you look at what I do know and what I don’t know. It is also even harder to face that this, went on for as long as it did and I didn’t see it. I feel like the last several years have been a lie, they were and it is harder to now know what is the truth.

In counseling, I am hoping to find the woman I once was and hoping to be better than this woman I lost so long ago. I feel pretty good about the decisions I have made for myself today. I focus on myself and hold on to hope that he will make the necessary changes for himself. At some point one needs to make the decision to let go and heal oneself. I will try harder to heal myself and move forward with my life no matter what the out come is.

He has shown some good changes in the past weeks. I have had to open myself up to see these and to be more aware of them. I can't drift thru life lost in my thoughts of the past. I would miss out on so much more than I have already missed. He is doing so much more than he has in years, I have seen this and for the first time in months I believe he is trying to change. I can not change the past for it is gone but I can change my future by what I choose to do.

I choose to live my life not his. I refuse to worry about him and what he is doing with his life. If he changes his charter and becomes the man I fell in love with and the man I still love, we will make it. If he does not change his charter, this will come out in time just as his affairs have.

None of this is easy and it is one thing to say it or write it, but to actually do it is going to be the hardest part. All I can do is keep trying and believe that some where it will become more natural to do it this way than the way I have been doing things. Change takes time and effort. Good habits come from repetitive behavior.

How much can one do alone

I feel like I have read more on cheating and self awareness than any thing else in my life. It just becomes too much. I sort through these things to fit into my life but sometimes it becomes too much. There is not enough time in my day to read all the stuff I have found. My problems is I want to get past this so much that I started to copy every thing to my computer. I would save it to read later but later hasn't come by yet. I have become over whelmed.

I am at the point now that I know I can't do it alone any more. I am going to go for counseling for myself. I would love for him to go with but I need to help myself first. My whole life has been a struggle. I started worked back through my life as far as I can remember in a timeline fashion. Writing in my journal daily about my life from my youngest years forward. When I would remember something else from my past, I would add it in the timeline where it fit. I now see myself with more problems than I started with before. I can't sort it out any more alone.

I have tried to put every thing I have ever learned from past counseling in this present situation but it just isn't working here and now. Of all the things that could have happened in my life this is not one I thought I would ever have to deal with, with him. I did not believe he was capable of doing this to me or us. I have come to realize that he has also done this to himself. He made the choice to cheat.

I believe he is hurting deep inside himself and as I write this I wonder if he is not be aware of his deep pain and if he has a low self worth that he could do this to himself. They say that some times when someone is hurting they hurt themselves and do not realize who else may get hurt. I don't believe he was thinking of anyone at this time in his life.

I will always be a caring person no matter what happens to me. I can see that he has thing to deal with that are not connected to me. I know he was deeply hurt when his father died and that was the straw than broke him. He withdrew from life and everyone around him. I just didn't see it then. I am only now aware of things that have happened because I have been looking back. Today I start looking forward.

Things slowed down

When he finally opened up, he talked very little about his infidelity. That was the only time we really talked about it. Some small things from time to time but not much more. What he shared was more than I would have imagined. I process things so slow, that in time I had more questions and even less courage to talk about it.

We have been spending so much more time with each other in a more personal way than we ever have. We have also become more aware of what we say to each other and how we say things. Communication is way more complicated than one would think. It doesn't take much to hit a nerve with one word and turn something in the wrong direction.

I am afraid of rocking the boat we are on, it has been so much better than it has ever been. Bringing the subject up seems to be harder with time. I have read things about not asking, wait for him to open up in his time, giving him a safe place for him to talk. I have also read - ask every thing you need to know but think about it, do you really want to know this and how much will it help or hurt you to know.

I wonder where is my safe place? It's gone. Then there is this one - remain calm and listen. Your heart is ripped out, world turned upside down and you remain calm. How does that happen? Do they know what you are going thru? Do they research how to understand you and how to open up and how you will fall apart and allow you to?

They panic when you show emotions, so how do you get thru this with out emotions. My best advice, the best you can. I have done so many of the wrong things and some right things. But I remain me by being and doing the best I can under the circumstances. You have to decide what you can and can't deal with. Weather you can go on with what you know and how much your marriage is worth to you.

I remain on the fence on several issues but I am not giving up yet. I can't, we are all only human and make mistakes. With that said. Time is the only way I will ever know where I stand. There are to many unanswered questions to make a life long decision now.

They say time heals all wounds, so lets see.

Trust takes time to get, seconds to lose

I trusted him with my life, he lost this and it won't come back over night. I would do almost any thing for him before he broke my trust. I hate knowing that he had been unhappy for four years and I wasn't aware of it. I look back at the last four years thinking how could I ever feel the same again about the place we lived and the things we did together. I thought we were happy. Now it is all gone. I can't see these events in any other way but tainted. One loses so much more than trust.

It has not affected anyone else in our family, I won't allow this to get out. I know it won't help our marriage by keeping this to myself but it would hurt so many others. Its just one of the things I do, try not to hurt anyone needlessly. I am not protecting him from the shame of this getting out but from the rest of the family seeing him in the different way that I now do. It hurts deeper than any physical cut ever could.

The trust is gone the feelings of be safe and secure as well. I feel like I lost my best friend, my comfort zone is shatter. I question every thing. Nothing is safe, feels safe. I second guess every thing I do. How can you spend almost twenty years with some one and then just feel so empty, so lost and so alone. Broken trust takes away so much more than any one would ever know until they themselves go thought it. I don't recommend this to any one. But if you find yourself in this story seek help any where you can, for yourself. Keep going until you find peace. I am still going, still searching it is not easy but I have to find my peace at any cost.

The days got longer and longer

I wasn’t sleeping much so the days were very long and when I did sleep, it didn’t last long. I would stay awake thinking, not being able to stop the thoughts running thru my head. I would wake from a dead sleep with thoughts that I could not escape. With little sleep the thoughts became a tangled mess in my mind. I would get up and write all my thoughts in my journal. Keeping track of what I was thinking gave me clarity and the chance to give each one more attention rather than just mindlessly spinning out of control.

I became more aware of what to search for, for help and what needed the most work. I would find some interesting articles and read each one, then I would save them on my computer labeled for the content like working on me, working on us, or what ever I felt it might fit in to my life. I needed to be able to reread them as needed. I have now read some of them more than three times. I found so much information that I could not read it all in a day and I could not process them all in a day either. Any more than I could process the things we talked about. I needed to ask the same questions of him over and over again. Some things sunk in some did not. I had to now write the questions out and when he answered them I wrote that as well. I still asked them over and over again because I was trying to deal with so much.

It amazed me how much I found on the Internet. I felt like it was just what I was thinking. How could anyone know what I felt or thought? Because the emotions that come from being cheated on are the same for everyone. It’s how you as an individual deal with this that is different. I realized that my whole life has contributed to the way I was dealing with this. I went back to my journal and started to write every event in my life I could remember that caused me pain. To focus on my life and how I dealt with it or didn’t deal with it, made me realize how much I needed to work on me just as much as I needed to work on us.

I wanted to work on me but who was I anyway? I have been a mom and a wife longer than anything. Some where along the way I put myself on the back burner and forgot I was there. I tried to focus on me and me alone but it lasted a very short time. I have always put myself last and changing this is not going to be easy either. My children are older and moved on with families of their own. But my role as a wife to me means I still have a husband to care for and a house that needs my touch. I now need to learn how to care for me and he needs to learn to put me first once and a while. Its a balance of the two of us rather than just one of us. I put him first and so did he.

He is helping around the house more and he is helping me see that I am just as important as he is, he is also working on being more aware of my needed and that they are met as well. I am trying to be patient with him and show him, he is safe here with me, that I will try to understand him in his way. We are working on talking to each other as well as listening to each other.

The signs were there, so Why?

He told me it started over two years ago. Why had I not seen this? I can only guess that with my own health problems I was blind to the rest of my life. I also don't think I was strong enough to deal with it then. We had been to counseling in the past, years ago but it was because we both had been married before and brought that crap into our marriage. So with what I had learned there, I started to apply some of this to this new mountain I face.

For the first three weeks I only knew of the one email. I thought he needed some form of dirty talk and that we were not communicating to each other on the same level. It seemed like every day there was something on the television about cheating. I could not escape this in any way. I had to face the beast head on. He was not going to give me any insight without me asking first.

I saw on one of the morning news programs a guy who had been a cheater and now was happily married. Not to the same wife mind you but he started researching cheating and offers help now to anyone who wants it. I went to his site and read every thing I could. I even searched other sites. This was all before I knew just how much bigger this was and what it was that I was faced with. I studied sites about my personal issues as well as how to get him to open up to me without pushing him away. I was not very good at it but it was better than doing nothing and feeling like crap in the process.

With writing in my journal every day it gave me the insight to myself. The more I wrote the more I learned about myself. I came to realize that I also had problems that lead to his infidelity. I won't take responsibility for his actions just my role in myself. He made the choice to do this rather than come to me with his needs. That hurts just as much as the act itself. I had asked him for years how could I please him. He gave me no answers. That, rests on him. He knew with my limited mobility that sex was hard to do and painful. This has also caused me personal hurt from him, to know he did this when I couldn't please him or myself. I may never understand how anyone could do this to someone they are married to. I don't have this charter defect.

He started to work on himself and I did the same for me. We also tried to work on our marriage as well. We talked when we could and wrote when we could not. It took weeks for him to open up to me. This is not going to be easy for either of us. The ups and downs that come with this situation, one can not prepare for. All I could do was deal with things one at a time.

It got harder to face the day

I had spent three days reading thousands of his emails, each one that I found was worst than the last. I felt I had no idea who I was married to anymore. Had my whole life been a lie? I broke down crying uncontrollability. I could not cope or process any of this. He had no idea why I was so upset. After all, he only knew about the email I saw three weeks earlier.

I asked questions of him with out being specific. I was hoping he would some how open up to me and tell me before I told him what I knew. I even asked him if it was better to tell someone what they knew or be found out first. He said it would be better to tell rather than be found out. That did not get him to open up to me.

He was once a bill collector and always said to find a debtor you need to think like one of them. So I started to think like him, not myself. I hacked several email accounts using things he would say in his own ways. I learned to look for things in places I had no idea excised, and I learned how to find things in more than one place. I researched lots of things along the way on cheating, communicating, you name it its out there. You just need to keep in mind all this information comes from someone’s point of view. So consider the source and use what feels right for you.

On day four after hacking his email, I couldn't go on with what I knew, that he didn't know I knew.... I sat face to face with him and told him everything I found in his emails. I was trembling with fear of the worst, he would now tell me it was over, he and I. This set him in a spin. He secrets where out and now he knew it. Over the next few days he was tested for STD’s, his own doing, this was a big step for him. I told him that I have always stood behind him on every thing over the years but today I will be by his side and when I couldn't be beside him I would still have his back.

I was going thru my own personal struggle for the last three years. I have had health problems that left my day to day living very hard to cope with. The person I was, was gone and what was in her place was a shell of this woman.

He now knew, what I knew. He needed time to process what I had told him. The days were long and the tears were there for both of us. He started a blog for he and I to reach out to each other. That blog is called - We Write To Heal, this is a private blog for the two of us. He started this and included me right from the start. We would post to each other when we felt we could not speak out loud. It help heal the gap and allowed us to open up to each other more than we have ever done.

My world had ended

It was just eight weeks ago, seems like a life time and yet just the other day sometimes. I was shocked that he could do this to me, us. How? Why? When? Was all I could think of. It started with a statement from him one night that he was going to get up early to do something for someone long before he needed to leave. I couldn't help but think this was odd.

When I heard him in the shower that morning I got up. I saw his I pod just sitting there. My gut made me look, without knowing what I was doing I stumbled thru it. I hit the right button and there in front of me an email sent out on Valentines day to her!

Oh my god, I ran to his bathroom and demanded he get out to talk to me. Finally he did and I told him, he was cheating on me and what I saw. I wish I had read the emails before I gave it back but my mind was not present at the time so all I saw was the subject of that email. It was enough to start something I thought I would never get over.

I started a journal that day and have written in it ever since. I spent three and a half weeks upset over just that email. When one day my gut got me to checking his email account online. I typed password after password until I got in. What I found over the next three days was far worst than just an email to a person thousands of miles away.

I won't go in to all the details of what was found but I will do my best to put what I have been thru here, in hopes of helping someone else like me. I had joined a chat line hoping for help but all I got was judged for staying in this marriage.

You won't be judged by me that is not my place. We all need a place to feel safe, I have my Personal Journal and you have me. What happened over the last eight weeks and how I am healing each week will come in bits and pieces. Help should not come with a price tag.