Letting go, finally

[JGuy]

Time for a recap of my sitch. For those of you don't remember these details from my first thread, I want to reiterate them now since they are relevant to how I am choosing to handle things moving forward.

My W's pattern was that from the beginning of our R, she was always positive, hiding anything negative, including her waning attraction to me and her doubts about the M from the beginning. She even hid the fact that she never wanted the pregnancy of our S who is now 7! She even talked to the midwife about it, and the midwife never told me. By hiding all of this, she never gave me a chance to show her that I would have been empathetic, would have genuinely cared and would have wanted to respect her feelings and work through things before moving forward. Her decision to hide all of that caused a huge wedge that doomed our M from the beginning and caused it to be built on faulty ground, without me even knowing it. She is quite the actress and hid it very effectively for all these years. I had no idea, other than noticing her fading attraction to me starting 4 years ago, which I asked her about many, many times, insisting that if there was anything wrong, we should really try to work through it together. I told her that I wanted to be supportive. She just avoided it, insisted everything was fine, and could never bring herself to tell me all that she had been hiding for years. In my naivety, I concluded that she must just have deep intimacy issues which she was in denial about and couldn't even see in herself. What she did always communicate to me is that she felt deeply unworthy of love, and could never imagine loving herself. This worried me, and I was always her cheerleader and encouraged her to get help changing that belief, but she just never believed that she could and so she never even tried. Out of love for her, I always chose to be patient, kept loving her and accepting the lack of emotional intimacy that resulted from what I perceived to be some very difficult childhood issues. I trusted that one way or another, life would find a way of leading her to a place where she could finally heal. I just focused on being a good H.

During these last 3 months when my W finally came out with the truth about the PA that started 2 years ago and the more recent EA, she has repeatedly said that I am a wonderful man, great father and provider, and she insists that her lack of attraction to me has everything to do with her and nothing to do with me. She sees herself as fundamentally flawed, unlovable, unworthy of a man as good as me. She describes the OM as nowhere near as good for her as I am. He is a womanizer with more than one OW in the wings, including an ex that he hasn't detached from. He is financially a mess, almost bankrupt. But something about his flaws, how similar he is to how she feels about herself is what draws her to him. So unlike some of the other WW's that my fellow DBers have had to deal with, mine has very little negative things to say about me. There is none of the nasty hate or blaming me for the failure of the M. She entirely blames herself and is ready to jump off the plank. She has a seriously tragic story in her mind about herself that she cannot shake off, and even though she is poised to take down our M and our family with her, she is basically walking the plank and ready to jump off. Where she's at right now is that she is hesitating, not wanting to do it, wishing that she could find some other way, but is deeply skeptical that she could ever have what it takes to deal with all the daunting self-work that it would take to heal the roots of her self-hatred.

At this juncture, I continue to fluctuate between A) holding on with patience and love, hoping that this very experience of betraying me is exactly what will push her into finally facing her issues and working on herself, and B) wondering if I extended myself way too much for all this time and should have realized much sooner that she is a very messed up person which I should focus on protecting myself and my son from.

I think that sums it up. End recap.