Now Separated, Am I doing the right things?

[Accuray]

Acc, do you mind me asking how you handled W’s affair? Denver said time makes things easier which gives me a slight sense of comfort, hopefully that will be the case. Did the passing of time make the sting a bit easier on you as well?

Rough, my W's affair(s) didn't go beyond kissing, but two of them were intensely emotional and would have gone physical if the OM's didn't put the brakes on. She was effectively looking to hook up outside the marriage from 2009 - 2011 (being coached by one of her friends) and had a few false starts before she got a couple longer term things going. I didn't learn about any of it until it was all over, so my situation is different -- I didn't have to watch it while it was going on, and I'm very thankful for that. I also got to a point where she said she wanted our marriage to succeed after only a couple months, and that also made things easier for me.

That being said, I suffered intensely, and for a long time. I was tortured by it. I had limited bits of information and my brain would fill in the worst possible interpretation of everything I knew, and would replay it again and again all day long. Then over time, I'd fill in what really happened by learning more. Sometimes that made it better, sometimes that made it worse.

Initially I was on a quest to know *everything*. I wanted a minute-by-minute accounting of everything that happened. What I eventually found is that you can't know everything. My W didn't even remember everything, and of course her memory was selective. For a long time I would suffer bouts of deep depression when I felt I just couldn't keep going.

I felt profoundly rejected, I felt replaced. I felt like I wasn't "good enough" and had failed in some very personal, very fundamental way, and I felt like she would never having feelings for me like she had for these OM's -- unfortunately that is true.

What my IC told me was that those bouts of anxiety and depression would over time become less frequent, wouldn't last as long when they happened, but that the last thing to go would be the intensity.

So how did I "handle it"? I survived, that was all I could do. I took it a week at a time. I rode literally hundreds of miles on my road bike. I spent a lot of time talking to good friends on the phone about how I was feeling and what was going on.

Eventually there were three things that probably helped the most:

1) Develop a support network you can call on 24x7 when you need it. IC is great but you can't call them at 11:00 at night when you need to talk.

2) Make a plan for yourself that expresses and reflects who YOU want to be. For me, it was losing weight and getting in better shape.

3) GAL -- people toss that around, but it is really so very critical to get out and meet new people, because you realize more and more there is good life to be had outside of your marriage and that other people will value what you bring to the table, even if your W cannot right now.

Eventually, over time, you "get your Mojo back". I started to feel better at about the 10 month mark, and a lot better after a year. At that point, I had no anxiety or depression episodes, I rarely thought about it, and I had a lot to keep me going outside of my relationship with W.

I still get sad from time to time, I still feel haunted to some degree and I probably always will. I think that if W 100% committed to the marriage and working with me on getting both our needs met, I could probably recover to 95%. Without that, I'll probably get to 85% inside the marriage and would probably reach 90% outside of it.

I don't know if that helps you or scares you, it's a long road, and it's a heavy weight to carry.

Accuray