SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I know I don’t need to tell anyone here that when a spouse’s infidelity comes to light, whether by disclosure or discovery, it is an earthquake to a betrayed person’s mental and physical wellbeing. Everything is shaken to the core. The marriage structure, once seen as built upon a solid, unadulterated foundation, now lay shattered on its fractured footing.

I don’t know about all betrayed spouses, but for me, not one corner of my life was left standing whole. The 10.0 tremor of D-day weakened and fractured everything I thought I knew and believed.

Each trickle truth, an after-shock creating new fissures. Each unwanted recall, a PTSD remembrance, intensified by my runaway imagination. Each anniversary of the marriage is accompanied with one divisive question, "Who really is this stranger I chose to wed?". Each anniversary of D-day an annual shattering of the already broken pieces.

There are endless aspects of infidelity that rupture a betrayed person’s understanding of the world he or she thought they lived in. However, there is one that I hadn’t considered until reading so many other, fellow betrayed spouses’ accounts. I’m beginning to wonder maybe it is not the individual, sordid details of the affair but the fragmentation of oneself due to the adultery that causes the deepest, widest rift to one’s reality and the hardest to repair in preparation for reconstruction.

I would agree. It makes you doubt a lot. I think for me, the biggest part is the part of me that thinks what if everything was a lie the entire time. It probably wasn’t , but it’s hard. It makes you start doubting your self worth and start peering into yourself with more attention than you would have in the past. Every little detail about your self.

Stuff your spouse, friends and strangers probably never looked at. But now you’re looking at it cause you doubt your worth. At least that’s how I’ve experienced it.

Vankrant1993,

But now you’re looking at it cause you doubt your worth.

You said in one line what it took me four paragraphs to explain. The doubt in oneself often is greater than the doubt a betrayed now has in their wayward partner. It is far too easy to absorb the blame.

I agree that self-doubt is probably a universal response, except for narcissists and the like.

A lot of good can come from that self-doubt, though. I realized on d-day that I was a top-notch H, especially for my W. During recovery, I got answers to questions I never really had answered before. What do I want? What do I like? What do I like to avoid? What do I want in my M that is measurable? How do I maximize joy in my life?

Those questions were empowering and freeing. The answers may not have maximized my joy, but I enjoy life a lot more than I ever did before. (Of course, retirement helps - but that also means getting older and less capable.)

As I approach my first dday anniversary, I’m reminded of how far I’ve come back already.

I’m sleeping over 7 hours a night. My health app says I have the biological age of a 28 year old man (chronologically I’m 52), and mentally I feel like I’m on the right track (moving slowly towards a divorce).

But the self doubt is still strong, and unlikely to improve much in the near future.

Who is this person I married? I thought I knew.

And who am I? I thought I knew that too. In fact, I was sure that the reason my wife would never cheat was because of who we both were. I was obviously wrong.

I now wonder if I will ever trust anyone the way I did my WW. It doesn’t feel like I will.

And I guess for me, that’s the fractured part. The person I thought I was, versus the person I think I am now. So much change, but also so much confusion, as it’s impossible to know what was real.

[This message edited by 4characters at 5:52 PM, Tuesday, October 7th]