I'm with you on this, Julz. Over the past couple of months, I have been torn when thinking about what my W has said to justify her leaving. "I know that I shouldn't believe what she's saying given what I've read about 're-writing the marital history,'" I've thought, "but then again...what if it's true?" There may indeed be kernels of truth in what they say, especially if they are things that were acknowledged as problems before.
Two ways I have learned to deal with this:
1. From what I understand, you really can't trust anything a WAS says. Maybe it's true, and maybe it's not. It's possible that THEY don't even know their own truth. So I would take ANYTHING your H says with a healthy handful of salt. Even if what he is saying has some degree of truth, it still NEVER justifies an affair. That choice is on him, not you. There are much healthier and more selfless ways of fixing marital problems, and an affair is not one of them.
2. I guess this is the purpose of detaching from the other person. A lot of us one-downs spend so much time believing that our S's view of us must be the absolute truth that we lose a lot of ourselves and our own view in the process. In detaching, we will begin to develope our own view of both ourselves and the marital history. Maybe we've made some mistakes as partners, but we don't want to sell ourselves short when we've done a lot of great things, too. Those great things are probably being ignored by our S's as they go along their roads of shame -- thinking about the good things in the marriage might get them to realize that what they're doing is terribly wrong, and that would mess up the whole fantasy they've got going, wouldn't it?
