I don't think the presence of infidelity should affect one whit our own "personal work," other than maybe a filter the betrayed spouse ought to use in deciding WHICH things to work on (specifically, they should use their own gut and other outside people they trust to give them an honest assessment of the things they need to work on, coupled with their wayward spouse's PRE-AFFAIR marital complaints). Without doing the work, even if they're successful at getting their wayward/walkaway/MLC spouse back into the marriage, they're only going to find themselves right back in the same spot if they haven't addressed their own issues. I like what Truegritter, I think it was, called it: you work on "those things that 'sting'." In other words, those marital complaints that your spouse has that hit you in your gut, because you too KNOW that they are true, as opposed to the typical affair fogspeak babble.
So I agree with you there.
I disagree on the rest of it. Whether or not your spouse is having an EA or a PA, and whether or not they tried to get thru to you before making the destructive decision to have an affair, I think the "steps," as it were, to DBing the situation are pretty much the same, and I still believe in the simultanous "hybrid" approach of working on your own real issues while laying strong boundaries and doing all you can to separate the addict from the source of their addiction.
If anything, my approach with my wife would have called for a SOFTER touch, because she had never had any prior infidelity (that I know of) and hasn't since, and ours was an otherwise pretty strong marriage.
I think Angel's challenge is that her husband KNOWS that SHE knows that she had a significant role to play in the prior marital dysfunction, and he also knows of of her fear now to "rock the boat," as it were, and so he continues his cake-eating and gives Angel just enough to keep her.
In summary, I think the post-affair, reconciliation WORK that needs to be done looks dramatically different in different situations. But learning to lay strong personal boundaries, and how one affair-busts and divorce-busts -- in my personal opinion -- looks largely the same. At least it SHOULD if you want to maximize your chances for success.
