Feel out of control

[woundedheart]

I'm 46 and have been married for 28 years. I knew we had been having problems for the last 8 years. I was having sexual issues due to flash backs from childhood molestation and he wasn't getting what he wanted. Yet he wouldn't go to counseling with me and instead said it was my problem not ours. Twice he had been having phone sex with women he met on line. However, he had recently been diagnosed with depression and given meds which made him more likable and less negative. I had started to like him again an thought that things were heading in the right direction.

Then, I started noticing that he was taking his cell phone to bed with him. If I went near it he came undone. He kept saying he was using it for an alarm which is the stupidest excuse because I always have had to wake him up. He works nights and would sleep with the stupid thing in his hand.

I finally managed to go online and look up his cell phone calls. There were over 700 text and calls to the same number in ONE WEEK. They were happening when he was working and all day when he was suppose to be sleeping. He told me it was a friend of his and that is what the ID on the phone said. I used *67 and called it. It wasn't his friend, it was his friend's WIFE. I confronted him and then called her with his cell phone and told her she had 2 hours to tell her husband because I was going to. Turns out they have been "married in name only" for years, he knew, he helped hide it from me, and he didn't care.

My husband said he wanted to fix things but a week later, the day after Christmas he said he wanted a divorce. I was suppose to go visit my brother but stayed home instead. He went on a hunting trip he had planned to go on while I was gone. After he came back he said he had changed his mind but the calls and text kept coming, not as often but enough. He got really sick and had to have surgery. I was taking care of him while he was still talking to her.

I talked him into going to see our pastor. That night when I got home from church his cell was ringing off the hook. He was in our room on his knees sobbing. That's when I learned that I had been right and that she had loaned him the money to get me out of town and had flown to where we live and that his hunting trip was really time spent in a hotel having sex with her.

When she couldn't get him to answer his cell she dared to call my house. We had it out and in the process I learned he had told her all about my hangups and got to hear how she proved she doesn't have any. I got to hear how he resented me not having a job when he was the one who always said he didn't want me to work. He had told her he loved her and was going to be with her. He had lied to both of us. She just wanted out of her own marriage and was wanting my husband, my house, and everything else I've spent a life time earning.

He hasn't had anything to do with her for two months now. He seems really sorry and ashamed. He takes full responsibility and doesn't try to blame me at all. Problems is that I'm so messed up that I feel like I'm going crazy. At first all I wanted to do is drive to the state she is in and stomp a mud hole in her. Then it turned inward and I have picked up a few issues.

I got a job and work a lot now just to prove I'm not a freeloader who sits on my fat butt and does nothing like she said. I can't stand to look in a mirror and fight back tears each time I have to put on my makeup. I can't make myself let him see me without my hair and makeup done. I even get up early on the three days I have off every two or three weeks to put it on before he wakes up.

I can't stop exercising and trying to lose weight. I walk everyday as long as it isn't raining. EVERY DAY! I make myself do things I'm uncomfortable with just to make sure he is satisfied sexually.

Truth is I know the woman he had an affair with. She is only a year younger but she is prettier and thinner than I am. She also made sure to let me know that she did anything and everything he wanted.

I can't stop looking at his phone and emails even though I know that he had a prepaid he used after he got caught and that emails are easy to get.

How am I ever going to get past this?

Edited March 29, 2011 by woundedheart

[seren]

Hello Woundedheart, I so very sorry that your experiences mean you have arrived at LS, but know that there is a lot of help and support from people here and you are not alone in how you are feeling. It is still very early on from D Day and it sounds like you are in the 'looking for answers and blaming yourself' phase. We have all done it, no amount of assurance or reassurance will stop that happening, just know that it isn't you going mad, nor is it just you doing this. Thing is it was never you, never your fault, you see so called beautiful people each and every day experience their partner's having A's. The A was a fault with him, blame yourself for the problems in your marriage, if you must, but not the A. See how different that is?

 

I too have history of SA, the A sent my trust issues screaming looking for a safe place, all the old blame stuff resurfaced and it was a bitch. Tackle this one separately if you can, get to a support centre, phone a crisis line anonomously while you have triggers. Feel free to PM me if you want to. I get the everything out of control feelings and everything in your life that caused this will resurface. They are separate things to be dealt with.xx To you for this.

 

You will get past this, you will at some point shift the feeling out of control, took me a while, but it will happen. I didn't go the counselling route and we have reconciled and are in a very good place. But it didn't happen overnight. It is not a competition between you and the OW, it is however a battle with yourself - the crazy feelings, the love them/hate what they did thing is confusing. The wanting to believe but remembering the gaslighting drives you bonkers. get all the truth from your H, everything you want answering, write it down and tick it off when you feel you have asked enough and your questions answered.

 

Decide what you want to happen, what you can forgive, if you can forgive, realise that no matter what you look like, no matter what you could or couldn't do sexually, it would have made no difference. Your H needs to look at and understand why he did what he did, and own it. Try not to do the all he asks for thing, especially sexually and especially given your history, I understand why, but you are responsible for what makes you feel safe, please don't do anything that sets you back or makes you uncomfortable - H should understand all this, if he doesn't then he isn't worth it, truly.

 

I hope you keep posting, even to vent, you are not going crazy, you are not mad or bad, you are hurt. It does lessen.

Seren xx

Edited March 29, 2011 by seren
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[woundedheart]

I really don't know who I am right not. I'm usually quite independent (20 year military wife) and not violent. I feel very lost and angry. My sister wants to know why I'm not as angry at him as I am her. Well, I am angry but I love him and have been with him most of my life. We have three children together. I barely know her and don't give a rat's butt about her. I had visions of going to her house, knocking on the door and braking her jaw and all of her fingers so that she couldn't text or have sexual conversations with anybody else. I needn't explain where I wanted to put my foot so that she couldn't spread her legs for someone else. He says he only thinks of her when I mention it. Are guys really that different from us? I mean, he did all of that planning, worked up to it for months, talked about it for hours on end, then went and did it and he never thinks about it? He doesn't miss talking to her all of the time? He doesn't remember what it was like to have sex with someone else for the first time in 30 years? He doesn't think about how much better it was to have her body to touch and to look at than it is with me? REALLY? I can't think of anything else. When I wake up I think about it (I need to go do my makeup before he sees me, I don't want to remind him how much prettier she is), every time I think about not exercising I think about how much thinner she is than I am, same thing for every time I eat something. I think about it when I go to work and then have to go home to all of the work I've always done. I think about it every time he says he loves me (He said he loved her too). I think about it when his phone rings, he is on the computer, or has to work overtime. I have nightmares about it. I usually don't wish bad things on anyone, no matter how they have treated me but... right now I hope that she is stuck with her husband and that he reminds her everyday that my husband had 2 days of sex with her and still choose to come back to me. I hope she cries everyday like I do. I hope it makes her sick like it does me. That's not something I'm proud of, I'd like to be a bigger person than that but I'm not.