Are you getting good marital advice?

[saffie]

Allen,

I don't disagree with a lot of the principles you discuss regarding exposure and dealing with an A at all. I do however take huge issue with your style and attitude. Coming from one person to another whose health was badly affected by a S's A I don't see the need for such an abrasive way of putting things to others.

At times in my sitch, my H had me thinking black was white and that I was going mad. He exercised mental cruelty on me and had me believing that our friends didn't like me and only saw us socially as a couple for 'his' sake as they felt sorry for him.He told me that our friends had told him they thought I was nasty and horrid - after the A he told me he had lied about that. Now what am I meant to believe? These are people we had gotten to know over the years through ME, but I was so confused by everything I believed him - friends we had known up to 20yrs. Even now- fully reconciled - I can't feel sure of myself with these people and I socialise little and under sufferance. I tried to take my own life as I said earlier. Yet I feel that the advice on here needs to be tempered a bit by you. Hurt and made ill you may have been, but you don't have to post in the manner you do. In fact I think part of your message is lost in your style as it turns some off reading your posts.

Exposure, although good at ending the A, can cause catastrophic fallout and I feel you don't give that part of it enough weight when you post advising people. You know, there has been at least one instance on here of someone following advice blindly, and then the outcome was so awful they tried to take there own life. That I believe caused one of the mass bannings on a previous occasion of some of the stronger posters. Those that were allowed to remain were asked to temper their posts and put them in a little more context and show that they were applying their own personal views etc.

Now to what exposure to all can do. Personally I have seen couples who expose the A to friends, family etc be outcast. People don't know what to say to them and they don't want to be seen to take sides. In my instance we were both upfront with our friends and said that we didn't want anyone to feel they were to take sides - they were both our friends and whatever the outcome in our M was, they would still be all our friends.

Exposure to family was another success. Both our families supported both of us. Probabaly because we both accepted that there were reasons on both sides why the A had happened. Having an A is wrong, but neither of us was without blame in causing the M to get to such a place where my H felt the need to have an A. My H now can't believe he had an A and can see that it solved nothing - in fact it made things much harder. Trust can still be an issue even now.

Do you think there is a chance you can temper your posts a bit Allen?