Reconciliation Rollercoaster (part 5)

[Oceangl]

First, don't worry about us - or most of us at least - judging you. I can give you the full list of mistakes I made, or times I let him do something because I was too scared to let go, etc. etc. Being human is hard. And it's more hard when you have been married for a while and have a family.

Anyway, yes, you are in a hard place. Of course you are feeling fragile. Your subconscious knows that you can be hurt. And how much it hurts. Our brains want to keep us safe. It took me a long time to accept that. And then choose whatever level of "lack of safety" I could accept. I am very glad you are working on much of this with an IC.

So....at the end of the day, it seems you don't have all the information yet. I think on the face of it, trying again in a marriage because you don't want to break up your family and/or you don't like S/D is not a bad place to start, necessarily. You just don't, IMO, want to end up being someone's comfort blanket. Unless you're okay with that. For example, my sister in law and her husband are together because they are happy enough and would rather not be alone. That is enough for them, and they are one the same page. It might not be for someone else.

If he is doing what he can to "find the passion," well okay then. But if he's just waiting for it to be gifted from the fairy godmother, it's going to be a long wait. And if he wants it to feel like an affair (which I think is what my stbx wants to feel), well, we can't compete with that. Nor do I want to. And it's not fair to us.

I guess, what does "committed to trying" mean to him? What does it look like? For mine it was one foot in, one foot out. And surprise surprise it didn't work.

What are your dealbreakers? Want can you live with and what can you live without? I found I could not live with my H treating me like a roommate. Being a placeholder for when his new amazing R came along. Is he learning to fill his own holes instead of having them filled by another person or the butterfly feelings of something new? I love that you wrote you want to learn to soothe yourself. This is something I did not understand for a long time. I am of course on the crash course of it now, and here I realize...I don't necessarily miss him. He wasn't all that nice to me, and I experience nightmare after nightmare with him. But i do miss companionship. I am trying to figure out how to create a future and mindset of an exciting life even if I'm alone. That way I don't begin an R because I can't do that.

It's okay if this takes some time and you don't know exactly what you want. I know more what I want now and my dealbreakers, and it's still brutally hard.

I will say the one positive about having a spouse who had an A, is that you now know you can make it through anything. Now you know how strong you are, even when it is so very hard and painful.