Expose the Affair?

[hoosiermama]

One of the great traumas in many affairs for the hurt spouse is the sense that moral/ethical "gravity" has been suspended and that the obvious injustice of the whole thing is being supported by people you thought were friends. Not only does your world fall apart, but it begins to lose meaning, as people you love betray you. A great term for this is de-narration -- a feeling that we have lost our story, that everything we live for and love has been swept out from under us. It's a very lonely feeling. I, for one, have felt that the last 15 years of my life have been wasted.

Wow, theo, is this ever true, and what an articulate way of stating it. In many ways I feel I have "lost my story." I had a simultaneous but unrelated betrayal in my previous ministry position, and I probably feel it there more than in my marriage. All that I had built my life around, that gave it meaning, that felt most solid suddenly shifted like sand under my feet. And with the loss of my job and my marriage, I also lost almost my whole family and my faith community and many friends. It is, indeed, a very lonely feeling.

And to add to it a "blame the victim" mentality is infuriating. If I hear "an affair is a symptom of a bad marriage, not the cause of its end" one more time, I'm just gonna have to throttle someone. Yeah, it was a bad marriage, and I would have loved to have worked on it; but before the affair he shut me out, and when the OW came along there was no hope of healing it. But he has "moved on" and is "happy" and while it's sad, I'd "better learn to move on too." Well, yeah, I'm trying, but when his financial greed results in virtual poverty for D13 and I, and his profound narcissism results in D13 being forced to make friends with the woman who broke up her family--it's not quite so easy, is it? But who's the one with the supportive friends and family? Even those to whom I've exposed the affair have hardly batted an eye about it and seem more concerned that I read H's email to find out the truth, than that what was in those emails was the deconstruction of my marriage.

It just seems another way of "gas-lighting" us, making us think we're the crazy ones.

Exposure did nothing for me. However, I would never say it's the wrong thing to do because each person's situation is different (in spite of so many commonalities).