Happy Wednesday!
We’re going to stay on the holiday theme since this can be such a tough time for anyone working at affair recovery.
We actually asked this same question at this time last year and wanted to go ahead and ask it again.
Since this is the holiday season and is often said to be a time for miracles…
When you go to sleep tonight and you knew that one miracle would occur by the time you woke up, what would you want that miracle to be?
Please respond to each other in the comment section.
Have a great day!
Linda & Doug
29 replies to "Discussion: What is Your Holiday Miracle for Affair Recovery?"
The one miracle would be that all this mess had NEVER happened. That my H, when he was having all his problems, would have come to me and discussed those problems without looking to escape with someone else. It would get all those pictures and conversations (fantasy on my part, maybe) out of my head and I would be a normal person again. I would be a trusting person again who didn’t look for the bad in everyone else (I do now). I wouldn’t be sad all the time and I would be able to actually spend a day without some other woman in my head. And, I would be happy like I used to be.
Its now july 2017, are you happier now? How did your story turn out? I still hope to wake up and it all be a dream!
That the affairs never happened and I once again felt secure and content.
My miracle would have to be that my best path forward would be revealed and made crystal clear as to which direction I need to go.
Can’t change H – That really would be a miracle! 30 years with him has made that clear. So if I get a miracle – only one, I don’t think I want to use it on him…he’s basically a good guy, but with a couple major issues. He’ll have to ask for his own Christmas miracle. 🙂 I know, seems selfish. And I guess I am – but maybe that’s a good thing. Trying to give up this crazy co-dependency!
H may or may not ever be able to give up this new desire to seek external validation from other women (there’ve been 2 in the last 5 years…besides me – one on-line and the other a co-worker. Both of them were EAs…well, there was kissing with the co-worker. I guess it’s still technically NOT a PA).
Anyway, he said it just felt so good to have someone else in love with him, in addition to me.
Can’t change the past – probably just as well cuz it’s all those experiences that have made me who I am today.
But I can change me – I only have control over myself and how I react to everything.
So if I were to get to have a miracle, I’d just like to know (like, right now!) what the best choice is for me, rather than just leave it up for me to guess and end up a few years down the road and have everything mucked up again.
That my H would figure out once and for all what he really wants and that he would single-mindedly work to get there, i.e, if he wants to remain married to me, he should commit to that goal with his whole heart and soul and work to repair our relationship. If, on the other hand, he does not want, with his whole heart and soul, to remain married to me, then he should leave. The miracle that I want is for him to figure out what he wants and act on it.
My first response was that it never happened, but knowing I can’t change that now. My miracle would be that I would wake up and be able to put this behind me and fully allow myself to focus on rebuilding without dredging up the pain and feeling of betrayal.
Csb, it may seem like a miracle, and I too thought it was going to have to be one since I did not feel even close to being there, but it happened for me and the pain and feelings of disgust at what my wife did to our family have diminished so much more quickly as time and family and relationship events have transpired such that I’m as happy as I ever was to be married to my wife, which is only possible because I have foregiven her and know that she is truly remorseful for what happened and is not equiped to not let an EA happen again and she and I have a real understanding as to what is appropriate for us with respect to other persons. We have also addressed (could not do this during EA) issues that were making us unhappy in our marriage and these have not only been successfully taken care of, but we have also run across a few new ones that we quickly addressed (didn’t happen pre-EA) and put to bed. It’s not easy, of course, but when I sometimes think about the “bad” things that my wife did that were so out of character during the EA, I don’t get the strong “bad” feelings that I used to and it has made my life SO MUCH MORE BETTER!
Good luck with your efforts to heal and perhaps think of something that helped me. I control how I continue to react to things, but not necessarily how I initially react to things. So when I would experience a “trigger”, I recognized that how I initially reacted was what is was, but that how I let it impact how I felt and acted the rest of the day was much more within my control, and I chose to not let it impact me in a negative way. Have I let them impact me in negative ways? Of course I have, especially closer to D-day. But when you gain the ability to not let them impact you negatively other than for a brief time (now I hardly react to many things that I reacted to over and over closer to D-day), you find yourself, I believe, in a better place to put the pain of the EA or PA behind you and live a life that, while impacted, of course, by the infidelity, is still one that you can enjoy and flourish in.
Good night, Mark.
Healing Mark – thank you so much for your response. I especially found your comment on controlling your reaction to triggers, etc. very insightful! Like your wife, this was extremely out of character for my H (we’ve been together 32 years), it makes sense that I should at least take that into consideration.
I’m almost 3 months since DDay, may I ask how long it’s been for you? I notice you say your as “happy as ever to be married to your wife”….I’ve heard others say things like that, or even “it’s better now”, and I guess I just can’t understand that at this point.
csb, for me, it’s been one year, one month and three days since D-day. I don’t think I will ever forget that day, and fortunately nothing transpired then and thereafter that prevented my wife and I from regaining the marriage we so very much loved but had lost for a brief amount of time shortly before the EA began and all the time that the EA continued.
At three months I was still significantly altered due to finding out about my wife’s EA (work performance declined materially, triggers causing a rush of different emotions depending on… well, I could never figure out what emotion I was going to experience at any given time: anger, sadness, shame, and others). I would have posted very similarly to you in terms of my thoughts/expectations regarding my marriage ever getting back to even close to a happy one, much less one that was stronger than before the EA occurred. And my wife’s EA was apparently much more tame than some other affairs described here, and I can’t imagine how I could have dealt with a PA that was both ongoing and an EA as opposed to a one-night stand! Still, at three months, while my wife and I were taking what now appear to have been ones that successfully allowed us to get over the EA and strengthen our marriage (and as a result, not surprising, to become much happier people and much better parents than we were before), we were NOWHERE near where we are today. Those who have described the recovery process as a “roller coaster” really hit the mark on my mine and my wife’s experiences.
So hang in there! I will say that while my wife was pretty good about doing and not doing things that helped me get to a point of genuine forgiveness, she didn’t do everything just “right” and was often “guilty” of doing or saying things that didn’t help me much at the time (classic was saying “I really wish you would just get over it!” which in the beginning made me crazy but which I later viewed, correctly per my wife, as a poor attempt to communicate a reasonable request which was something along the lines of “I really want to be happily married to you, but I can’t live a happy life if I am continuously reminded of my transgressions and not genuinely forgiven by my partner, so either we are going to put this behind us and interact as husband and wife like we did when we were happily married, or we are going to acknowledge that we tried our best to overcome my mistakes but were unable to do so and thus it is time for us to move on in life following a divorce.”). And as you might guess I was often guilty of letting my emotions overcome me and cause me to act less than lovingly (heck, sometimes just downright jerky) toward my wife. But time did help us tremendously. Not sure why, but I guess the longer things are slowly getting better the easier it is for them to get better so, for my wife and me, it was kind of like a snowball effect where as our snowball got bigger, our happiness together became much more the norm and the fact that an EA occurred became less hurtful and damaging. I guess like a lot of mistakes, if the person making a given mistakes accepts responsiblity for it, is genuinly sorry for making it, and is clearly taking actions/inactions that are designed to prevent the same mistake from being made again, it’s not that difficult for another person impacted by the mistake to be able to genuinely forgive the other person and to get over (not totally, but enough to remain happily married) the mistake. Damn it that the time for the foregoing to occur, if it occurs at all, is so much longer than either partner would like for it to be!
God bless you csb and all others who have unfortunately had to join the “affairs club”.
Healing Mark,
I like the idea of the snowball effect of recovery. The positives slowly adding up over time. With time, the truth of the EA (from the past) makes less and less of an impact on your life in the present. I’m clinging to that! I do have an H that is remorseful and has stopped all inappropriate actions with promises to never do those things again. We do have hopes of a stronger, closer marriage in the future together. I can see the roller coaster emotions being less high and low. Thank you for your perspective from up ahead in the process. That really gives me hope for the upcoming year.
Merry Christmas, Mark! You do add good words to think on, I’m glad you stopped in.
for my husband to just talk honestly with me and to be honest with himself and for me to come away from that clearer on the path forward, or failing that the same as CLEAREYES, well said!
I wouldnt wish any if this away either because every heartache and experience i have had has become a part of me. To wish this all away would mean to lose a part of who I am and I gave lost enough already.
My miracle would be for my husband to be capable of feeling that deep connection with me that I believe can exist between two people in love. He doesn’t have to be perfect. He just has to be able to take full responsibility for his mistakes and have compassion with me for mine.
Does a man like that exist or am I a naive fool who watches sappy movies and believes that that kind of love is obtainable? I know not everyday can be sappy and gooey because there is reality. But can’t that connection be felt once a month?
20 years with someone and I feel even though we can have occasional meaningful conversations, there has become something between us that he is reserved with me. He’s holding back. The deepest connection I felt with him was in the weeks after Dday when he showed his raw anger and emotions. Since then he has once again become mr distant and proper.
My miracle would be to wake up feeling happy and in love with my husband. Totally in love. No resentment. No pain. No hurt. Total trust. I want to feel total forgiveness. I want to be over and done with this recovery and never have to look back. To feel good and not worry when the bottom is going to drop out and I am back in the pit with a trigger, memory, hurt or pain. I would love to not have this invisible wedge in between us in so much of our interactions.
And I am so hopeful this “miracle” will really come about. Not overnight, but I really do hope we make it to the other side eventually.
That I would be the person I was at this time last year….happy, trusting, and thinking my H and I had each others back and that NO ONE could ever come between us…and I want the great marriage that all my friends think I have now…
Holding On – I could have written your post, it is dead on with my feelings! How long since DDay for you? That invisible wedge can be so suffocating, can’t it? My CS is trying very hard to save our marriage, but I sometimes feel like I am almost sabotaging the rebuilding effort by not being able to let go of these terrible feelings.
IFSD – I find it interesting that you said something about the marriage your friends think you have. It’s the same with us, all they see is 32 years together and how we “made it”….if they only knew! It’s exhausting having to paste that smile on your face and behave like the happy couple when all you really want to do is run from the room screaming and crying.
csb…I once stated on here that I should go to Hollywood….I’d be in the running for an Oscar for sure!!
My H and I are very private people, in fact, we sort of have a “family motto” that “what happens in this house, stays in this house”…for example, if we have financial trouble, we don’t go around telling everyone our troubles, we just work together to sort it out…so I think that’s one of the hurdles I’m having trouble getting over, that he went to not just ONE person, the OW, but his two family members also!!
And I was left outside the loop, not knowing about “the trouble” in my own marriage!
I have had friends tell me just recently that they hope to be as “happy” as we are, when they’ve been married this long…BLEH!!! I think to myself, oh boy, if you ONLY knew, but they don’t because I have chosen to not advertise my troubles!
PS….just for the record…we WERE NOT having trouble in our marriage, yes, we had grown apart…A LITTLE… but as far as I can remember, it was us dealing with the curves life throws at you, refinancing of the house, enrolling our son in college, etc…not a major disconnect, and IF he would have come to me, it would have been so easy to correect…instead, he chose to take this path, and I’m having a very hard time forgiving him because after he finally confessed, HE felt his burden lift, and when it was placed on MY shoulders, he did nothing to help me heal…he felt better, I felt like crap, and his excuse for NOT helping me, he was “scared and didn’t know if I was going to leave him”! So yea, he proceeded to do NOTHING! Yep, that’s the way to win me back, DO NOTHING!! Sheesh!!!!
And as you can probably tell, I still have a fair amount of anger in me towards him…counseling is in my future, and I’m angry about THAT too!! LOL!! The time and money…what a waste!! Just so he could feel good about himself for a few months!!
But I put on my “smiley” face for all the world to see….and march on, one foot in front of the other…as I cry inside at being such a fake!
csb,
I am almost 6 months out from D-Day. Yes, the invisible wedge is difficult. Even when things are “good” it isn’t a total good. Things are going smoothly, but usually my mind is still fighting those triggers and thoughts. I do see it getting better. My good days are pretty good, and the bad days are slightly less bad or at least they don’t hang around quite as long. Just chugging along and trying to accept the process of this. I can see that my mind/heart emotions are stabilizing more and more.
Like all of you my wish would be to wake up to realize it was just a bad dream. That I could have back that feeling (I guess stupidity) that I felt in truely believing that my hubby would never do this to me.
Hello all,
I don’t relish being the nay-sayer but if I care about your well-being then I feel obligated to point out to all of you that this topic isn’t beneficial to you. Wishing the past were different will not change how you feel about today. The past is over. You cannot change it no matter how much you wish otherwise. I’m not trying to be uncaring or harsh. I’m trying to get you to understand that you are at the cause of a lot of your pain and it starts with where you let your thoughts take you. I realize this isn’t easy to acknowledge but it is easy to prove. When you have good thoughts, you feel good and when you have bad thoughts, you feel bad. It is just that simple. Our feelings start with our thoughts. Most people believe it’s the other way around. This leaves them at the mercy of life. Helpless. Powerless.
My one miracle would be that you would all recognize your God-given abilities. You each have the ability to overcome this situation that you feel was thrust upon you. It’s a lot like golf. You cannot change the last shot you took. This one right here before you right now is the only one that matters. This one…is your opportunity to excel.
blueskyabove
4+ years post DDay
Rebuilding
Really? This is a pretend thread….please dont feel “obligated” to point out to me that wishing the past was different will not change today. Is this Marie ie…all of the other names she has for herself? There is nothing wrong with letting people hope and think about what could be or should have been. All are beneficial and we all have to go through ALL of it. Perhaps the memories of dday and the time after has dwindled for you and many here are still experiencing that raw pain and aren’t at the stage of being able to see their worth. I think we all know the past is over but hey thanks for pointing it out.
I agree with you Broken…some of us aren’t as far along in the healing process as we want to be….but we are all unique and different, some feel pain and betrayal more deeply than others, so it might take awhile longer, plus we all having different coping mechanisms….I know for myself, just shy of a year, I’m a lot farther along than I thought I’d be on Dday…back then I wanted to take my kids and RUN!!
But I’m also not over the feelings of anger and betrayal…I’m doing this at MY pace, at what I feel I can handle!
Amen Broken. If we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it. I think wishing it never happened is a natural response to not wanting to deal with the pain. But deal with it we must. We WISH it never happened – that is just being honest.
I agree w Broken.
And no one can tell you how much pain you can have, or how deeply you are allowed to grieve, or how quickly you must heal. Each situation is different, and impacts different personalities in differing ways.
Ignoring the pain, and just refusing to acknowledge it doesnt heal it. It must be worked through. Happy for BlueSkies, and where she is after 4 yrs, but it is not everyones story.
Here, here blueskyabove!!! For a time, put down the affair books and read Ekhart Toiles (sp?) book “The Power of Now”. It focuses on the recognition that you can’t live in the past (unchangeable) or the future (just pinning your hopes on some day, while you miss out on all that today has to offer?), or you can live for the NOW!
Happy Holidays to all! And please try to live this Christmas with your loved ones in the NOW.
“Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed”
We are all at different points in the healing/recovery process, but one thing that is true for all of us is that we are all here for the same reason..for support and recovery. This groups is such a blessing to me…I take a bit from every post. I myself used to run a support group and never imagined in a million years I’d be needing one!
I understand what blue sky is saying…healing can’t take place till we confront the problem. I am not quite 3 months since day, so l am still trying to catch my breath, gain my sanity, and see a ight at the end of the tunnel. This is not the life we chose, but it’s what we’ve been dealt…we all have something to share and I am so greatful for all of you!
Everyone is at different points in our healing. I had to go to a counselor to help me work through my feelings. Feelings and thoughts can control you. I am not saying you should just forget because Lord knows I haven’t. My therapist referred to “stinkin thinkin”, which is what you can get yourself wrapped up into your thoughts. Pretty soon your thoughts turn into negative feelings and you are constantly reliving what you were feeling on D-Day… Keep in mind, you will do that to an extent…Read this.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-top-10-types-of-stinkin-thinkin/
I consciously try to avoid thinking about the EA and what went on. But you know, I still wish I didn’t have to do that. Every time I start to think about the mess, I get up and make myself do something to get my mind off of it. I do agree that you can’t keep obsessing over it – the whole thing will drive you insane. You are right about the stinkin” thinkin’.
You just have to separate your feelings from reality. It is hard and when my counselor first said that, I thought she was crazy. I am still going through therapy 9 + months out and I am taking anti-anxiety medication. I am not out of the woods, but I am out the thickness of the woods.
Hi
i’ve been reading this website from 3 months now and i wanted to comment on it, i loved my ex wife for 6 years and i was giving her everything and i have to admit she loved me too, out of sudden in march 2011, i felt she is cheating on me EA involved with som1 else all time talking about him even i asked her to stop our physicall relation was going down, we had fights about it she said this is not wrong its only friendship, than i was getting away from her without feeling maybe i was spending time on laptop all time, then she started asking for divorce i checked the reasons she said you aren’t taking care of me even i used to get her into bed daily to sleep for 2.5 years of marriage, and week end all day together even i never left her alone at home all day with her, we used to fight a bit about tv so i choosed that i will spend my time on laptop but after all we got divorced and she ran to the other man, i wish i beleived that she was involved in this and i searched about it and knew how to deal with it, i still love her but my mind pushing me away