I have only two things to add: (1)Actions speak louder than words (yours and his); (2)What are you doing to address your own baggage? You are focusing all your energy on him and what he's done. And boy has be done some weird stuff. You cannot fix him by giving him the Bible and telling him to start reading the 12 steps and writing stuff down. If he is the king of manipulation, his words, written or otherwise, should be taken with a grain of salt.
I know you had a lot of anger and frustration pent up and it all came out. Now you have to move on and take care of yourself. Do not make any threats because you will find that you probably cannot follow through. Take those feelings to your C, without H.
Please focus on you and what you need to do for yourself. He is a sick person and there is nothing you can do about that. It is all up to him now. You can only watch and see what happens. This isn't going to get better overnight. I wish you the best!
LG - I just want to say that your H sounds sincere, not manipulative. And your anger, while justifiable, IS based mostly on finding old stuff - doesn't make it hurt less, but it is OLD stuff. It would be like me finding another love letter now that my H wrote to the OW two years ago. It would hurt like stink, make me furious - but really, what relevance would it have to where we are now?
I think the good thing that has come out of this is your H's acknowledgment that he has a problem. And it is interesting that he states several times that the antidepressants lessened his need to view porn. I've learned a lot about the role of antidepressants in treating compulsive disorders through my daughter's treatment for anorexia, bulimia, and obsessive compulsive disorder. They can work for OCD, compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling, and I would imagine they would work similarly for sexual addictions. Higher doses than those used to treat depression are often required.
I'm not letting him off the hook for his dishonesty. But look - most of the stuff that recently enraged you, you knew already. The last little bit - that he was still holding on to some scraps of porn on his laptop - needed to be addressed but doesn't necessarily seem to be proof of ongoing stuff.
He seems to be genuine in his intentions - so why not cool down and give him a chance at recovery? You can always make decisions later.
And yes, I understand that fury at being "made a fool of" or "taken for a ride" - I wrestled with that one a LOT. But you know, that part was really just my ego getting in the way - it really wasn't that relevant to what was or wasn't going on in our R.
Deep breath. Be kind. Set clear expectations, but give H a chance to meet them. Like I said - big decisions can always be made later.
I am distressed to read what you have been doing? You are letting evil come in to your life again...What happened to "forgiveness?" Was it just for the moment thing???Please go back and search your heart as to what it is you want. You need to help your H...not bash him. Why worry about what your H was doing before. It is all in the past. You were OW remember? When you got involved with your H now, he was M to the first wife...So, quit throwing all that poison back at him. You have been a party to a break up of a family, his. Now God is saying he has not forgotten...So now you are experiencing ten times the pain of the A. You have to find it in your heart to be forgiving. Christ did that for us. No matter how bad we have been. Don't use the Bible to club your H with it. God wants you to love unconditionally. If you want to find dirt, you can always find them. Find the good that is with your H now. Nurture that instead. Don't bring it up anymore...Give it to God for Him to figure it out.
I have to say that I really appreciate all the posts in support of my H. It surprises me a bit, but perhaps it is the Lord using you to speak to me.
I have discovered current evidence, so H's deviant behavior is not limited to the past. It has been ongoing as we have worked on reconciliation the past year. Among other things, he has maintained open communication as recently in the past two weeks with some of his other women. The only thing that truly appears to be in the past is his relationship with BMOW.
My H left work in the middle of Thursday morning and came home to me torn and sobbing. I had never seen behavior like this from him. He asked me if we could talk and I agreed. He proceeded to tell me that he felt he had heard from God, that God had spoken to him that morning. Then he told me what happened.
While at work that morning, he logged into one of the secret email accounts he had told me recently he used as a spam trap, but instead actually contained current correspondence with other women that would incriminate him. He said he then prayed and proceeded to delete all the current evidence, plus some very hurtful emails he had written about me from the past that he felt I shouldn't ever read. He then logged out of the account and went about his work. A little later in the morning, he said he was prompted by a feeling to log back into the account, so he did. He says that when he logged back in, ALL THE FILES he had deleted that would incriminate him to current activity had been restored, but the hurtful emails about me were nowhere to be found as expected. He freaked, logged out of the account, turned the machine off and came home, fully believing that it was an act of God that had restored those incriminating files, but let the hurtful ones about me remain deleted.
He then told me that he was now a believer. That he felt he had experienced the miracle he had been waiting for, to prove to himself there was a God.
Now, to many of you, most especially the nonbelievers out there, this may sound rather hokey, or could possibly be explained away by a computer glitch. Doesn't matter to me--my H believes what happened was an act of God and I believe that he believes that. That is all that matters at this point.
My H and I have had some very extensive talks in the past few days. For the first time, I feel I am getting the truth from him. He is hungrily reading the Word, praying and confessing his sins to me. He says the Lord has spoken to him many times during his prayers in the past days. My H is definitely a changed man. I pray that he can continue in this vein. I don't think I could keep him from church tomorrow. He is even talking about what kind of ministry he can develop to save other addicts. I told him he was putting the cart before the horse there!
So. I now have a newborn Christian for a husband. He and I pray and read the Word together. We now can have a covenant marriage. God is good.
We meet with our counselor next week. Also, my H has arranged a family meeting next week at our home during spring break so that he can confess his sins to them and repent. He says God has asked him to do this, he says it's time and he is ready. His youngest brother will be the first to arrive tomorrow. The rest will trickle in during the week.
H and I have a long road ahead of us, but we are now a cord of three; H, the Lord and me.
Blessings,
LG
BTW--I never looked on his laptop computer. I took a risk that certain files were on it and called his bluff.
A blessed and happy marriage is a union of two forgivers and Him, because...a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12.
It has been an interesting few weeks. My H is doing everything he can to convince me he is truly a believer in Christ now, but as can be expected, I am having real trouble with the trust issues. I have just given it over to the Lord to deal with. I have decided to be patient and see where this all leads. I am in no hurry and I like that pace. I am keeping my expectations nil. Healing from being emotionally destroyed twice in a period of 18 months is a bit on the tough side, but very doable with the healing power of the Lord.
I am trying to develop more of a life for myself. I am not interested in working yet because it really is not necessary for me to and I am enjoying my freedom to explore my options and do volunteer things.
I am a volunteer teacher in an afterschool Bible class for 5th and 6th graders that meets once a week and I enjoy that tremendously. I spend Tuesday mornings in fellowship and Bible study with women from my church every week. I have continued to clean out unnecessary excess material things from my house and life and donate it all to charity, heading toward my goal of a simple life. The weather is getting more consistently spring-like and I look forward to planting a garden with vegetables and flowers soon and tending it through the growing season. I like being able to have the flexibility to spend a weekend at a horse show with a girlfriend that I have met on this website. (Hi SC!! See ya this afternoon!! ) As time goes on, I expect I will get involved in many more activities.
Yesterday, BMOW and I met at a coffee shop and we spent a very pleasant two hours together in forgiveness and talking, making amends. It helped me tremendously in my healing process and I really believe it helped her too. I thought it a very appropriate thing for us to do with Easter being this weekend. We didn't plan it that way, it just happened--we both had a spur of the moment free morning. She is busily working to dissolve the internet business she and my H started so that she can get on with her life with no more ties to him. She told me that when all is said and done with the business, if there are any monies left over she wants to donate the funds to my church's building fund for our new sanctuary. I thought that was very considerate of her. We will see if she follows through. Remember--no expectations.
It has been hard for me to learn that my H continued to repeatedly cheat on me throughout our reconciliation, but hopefully he has the help he needs now to overcome his problems.
I shall wish everyone a Happy Good Friday and Happy Easter and ask you to remember the reason for the season--God is good, always and forever!
Blessings, LG
A blessed and happy marriage is a union of two forgivers and Him, because...a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12.
LG, Keep up the good work! I don't think our human nature can ever overcome the jealousy and mistrust caused from such betrayal. Fortunately we don't have to depend upon our human nature, we can (and must) rely on God and His gift of His Holy Spirit to enable us to forgive.
I can tell everytime I try to manage my feelings myself, 'cause I'll lose it when I can't reach W on the phone. Something as simple as her not answering her phone....
Don't forget the DBing step of sharing your needs. It sounds like H is pretty open right now with a desire to prove himself to you. Have you shared what you need from H to be able to start building trust in H again? I'm sure it's changed 'just a little bit' based on your new knowledge of his activities.
You are so very right--if I didn't have Christ in my life I could NEVER forgive my H, in fact, I would have left the first time and NEVER come back to experience round 2 of his cheating. I have shared with H what my current needs are to begin the long road of rebuilding trust, if possible, to any extent. I am just still so very emotionally destroyed.
I have told him that NOTHING he TELLS me means ANYTHING to me at this point and that I and many, many, many others are watching his ACTIONS and behavior and will be for a VERY LONG TIME.
I now have control over his known smut email accounts--he cannot access them. I will monitor the type and number of communications that continue to come in to them for a time before I shut them down for good.
I now have the passwords to ALL his known legit email accounts to monitor the correspondence in those. I have limited him access to his work email account which I continue to monitor, and ONE other legit email account that he uses to correspond with me and his daughter on and am monitoring that. All the rest I have control over and forward any mail to his work email account that I deem is important enough to forward.
The laptop computer is now in my possession. I have turned it over to computer technicians to search and find all files hidden or otherwise stored in the cache of the hard drive and copy them to a disk for me so that I can verify the truth as to what he has told me his reconciliation cheating was limited to. The copy will then be placed in a safe deposit box in case I have no other choice but to divorce him at some point in the future.
All other legit files from the hard drive will then be copied to a separate disk and the old hard drive will be placed in a safe deposit box. A new hard drive will be installed with a new operating system and the legit files will be restored along with a keystroke logger. I will also be installing keystroke loggers on all the computers here at home and the others H has and uses at his work place in his office.
Some friends have suggested to me about putting a GPS monitoring device on H's car because when he was not having sex with women in his office at work or at our home, he would also leave in the middle of the day to meet them in motel rooms locally around town. I guess the device would tell me if he left work during the day and where he went. Supposedly he has NEVER used anything but his own vehicle to do this, but he could always start borrowing someone's car especially if he knew/found out about the device on his car. I am still simply thinking about this.
I have to decide just how closely I feel I need to monitor my H anyway. Because quite frankly, where does all the monitoring end? How long should I continue to monitor him? Should I monitor him at all? What happens if I find out that he is STILL cheating? What then? Am I to be his parent the rest of his life? What kind of marriage is that for me? Can I ever be intimate with him again on any level? Just thoughts I am having that I have no answers to yet because they overwhelm me a bit. Like I said before, I am taking all this very slowly.
I must keep telling myself that my H is a sick man. When we discuss things, I am very aware that he has some VAST communication issues.
For example, I asked him just a few days ago how many women he had brought to our house and had sex with in our bed. He said none. I knew when I asked him this that he had at least done this with BMOW repeatedly during their relationship. I asked him again and he insisted NONE! So I had to get graphic with him. I asked him how many women had he brought into our bedroom and in our bed inserted his p#$%s into their v*&^%a.
He winced when I said that and responded, "Well if you are going to put it THAT way, it has been several." I asked him WHY I was forced to put the question in those terms. He said, "Because I only brought the women I loved into the bedroom and made love to them there. It wasn't just sex. Sex was what I had everywhere else with all the others."
And THAT people is the mind I am dealing with. Communication issues, avoidance issues and denial issues abound still, even with his new found belief in Christ.
LG
A blessed and happy marriage is a union of two forgivers and Him, because...a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12.
Lost, where does the trust come in to play here? You are trying to control his every move. GPS on his car--are you kidding me? You have access to all his accounts? You are trying to have complete control over him. If you want to accept him for who he is and hope he works out his problems, that is one thing. To try to control him and make him the person you think he should be is quite another. I've read your sitch and he has done some completely awful, freaky stuff. I personally would not have been able to stay with someone like that--but I am not you. So if you want to keep your M with this man, I would recommend, getting back to DBing, which means detaching and taking care of yourself. Working on you and becoming who you want to be. You can't change him, only he can. Sounds like he wants too, but only he can do it, you cannot do it for him and all the spying, snooping, investigating, lecturing, pushing is not going to make him do anything different than what he decides to do.
Please take care of you and let him go to figure it out. Be his friend and support if you want to, but stop obsessing about his every move--that is not going to help you or him.
Hey LG, just checking in. It was terrific to see you over the weekend and catch up in person.
Molliew, I see your point, about control. But I don't think LG has any illusions about trying to control her H. I think she is working hard to discover the truth, in the only way she can-- since her H continues to lie and decieve. I think she is trying to get the information she feels she needs to assess whether she can continue in the M. Obviously this level of "control" or surveilance is not healthy over time.
Typically, "control" is an illusion anyway... we just teach people to be more clever in order to hide things when we attemnpt to control. At least that has been my (sad) experience.
) As time goes on, I expect I will get involved in many more activities. 