Help... I need to stop reacting!

[Deep]

Hey rocked. I'll just add, it'll be a surprise if you did not feel down. I mean, it's draining. That's why places like this board is so helpful - the support. What we are all going / have gone / about to go through is immensely draining and wearisome. And that's the good part if you can control the pain by cutting out the option of suffering.

You just gotta keep picking yourself up and keeping yourself up.

And umm, I'm not sure at all if it will have any relevance to your sitch, but I faced parallel decisions / milestones in mine. It certainly is not a good idea to generalize, and I'm not saying for a minute our spouses have the same dynamics in their As, but here's a few heads up in my humblest opinion:

Be very mindful of validating and / or encouraging H's mood swings towards OW. Be mindful too of your own state of mind and "DB integrity" or you can eat yourself alive, or rather the self-doubt can, not to mention dealing with the seeming insanity should the sitch go south.

W had also spoken to me at length about OM and their R. About the closeness, the connection, why it happened. There's a VERY fine line between hearing out the WAS, and helping them justify in their own minds why it happened. And this is important because I feel at some point, without being vindictive on the part of the LBS, both spouses have to come to terms with what had been going wrong in the M, and each have to OWN the responsibility for the decisions they made. You can't fully move forward without confronting this demon.

W also spoke to me of the negatives in the A. How OM was rich, but cheap. How she knew it was never going to go anywhere. When I was serving military reserve for 3 weeks a few days after discovery, she texted me regularly, including "I miss you"s. Met me for lunch one day and out of nowhere "Deep, see that grass there? It's always greener on the other side, until you step in it and it's full of sh*t" - and that's a direct quote.

Oh, but a couple of weeks later, it was the Alien again. "I have no connection with you"; "I care so much for you, I guess this is just the way Ms will go, I just am not in love with you"; "the A is over, we're just friends now. Why can't we be friends Deep? Why can't you be adult about this?; "What I did was morally, ethically wrong, in the eyes of society, but I did it for me, and it was not wrong for me".

You get the drift. It was maddening to detach, cautiously think about reconnecting, get slapped, rinse and repeat.

And yes the contact was intact in my sitch too, OM was her client. We needed the $ too (ok to be brutally honest, it could have been more of want than need), her career meant the world to her, and I was weak or understanding, depending on your point of view.

It's conventional wisdom that WAS need to mourn the loss of the A, suffer the withdrawal, come to terms with the devastation of giving up their emotional focal point. Put yourself in their shoes, and give them the benefit of having some honor and integrity in wanting to come back to the M - still, how are they going to do this while facing OP?

Difficult would be your most positive situation. How strong is your H, and what kind of person is OW? (yes, that's partly rhetorical). OM was definitely a predator and he very insidiously tugged at my W. It was a most unreal and painful experience watching my personal hellish version of "Alien Vs Predator", heck it took a LONG time before it was even "versus". And my W is simply one of the strongest, smartest persons I have ever known. The contact certainly did not help.

Exposure? I never went all the way. But once earlier in the sitch, OM texted her "by mistake" he later claimed. W replied asking him to respect her wish to be left alone. I completely lost it then, called his home, asked for OMW, and politely left a message that I needed to talk to her about an A her H was having. His reaction was classic - he called W the next day saying I had broken a boundary by calling his home and that "they had an agreement they would leave the kids and family out of it". But I think that shook his little world just a little.

Keep doing good