This is really difficult. I haven’t read your story yet, but I’m assuming that if you’re the one who had the A, you felt justified at the time. I know I did. In fact, when I went back to W, I really still felt justified in what I had done. If you’ve read this thread and maybe the start of it (which you can find [url= http://www.divorcebusting.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=SEX&Number=950654&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1]here[/url]), then you know that I went back to W because I felt that it was the right thing to do. It’s kind of hard to explain, but even though I knew that what I had done was wrong, I still felt somewhat justified. In fourteen years of M, I had been all but completely denied sex. So I went somewhere else. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t have, but come on – fourteen years of no sex… What do you expect?
So, for me, the guilt went through three distinct phases. I started off with a fairly mild form of guilt. It was only an intellectual guilt: I knew that I had done something wrong and knew that I should be sorry, but I really wasn’t. I was more focused on the mitigating circumstances than on the “crime” itself. It was only after we had been back together for a little while that real guilt began to set in. I think we had been back together for somewhere around a year when I finally confessed to the A and asked for forgiveness. I mean we both knew about the A, but it was one of those elephants in the room that nobody talks about.
That was phase two. I really felt that I had been wrong and I really felt guilty. I was finally facing up to the enormity of what I had done. I can’t say exactly when it started or how long it took, but the change from phase two to phase three was a gradual process. It was a gradual change from feeling guilty for the A itself, to feeling guilty for causing so much pain and so much damage to my M. Concurrent with that change, I also gradually accepted W’s forgiveness and gradually forgave myself. I know what I did was wrong, but it’s long past and we’ve both moved on. We’ve both accepted that we both had a part in the A and we’ve forgiven each other and ourselves.
In fact, I think that the acceptance and the forgiveness are integral to the change in guilt. The A is over. It’s done. It’s history. But some of the after-effects remain. W and I have both forgiven me for the A, but that can’t change the fact that I caused a lot of pain. It doesn’t change the fact that the idealism and the innocence we had pre-A is forever gone. It doesn’t change the fact that W will probably never have the total, complete, 100% trust in me that she had before. The truth is that I learned something and I’m more trustworthy post-A than I ever was before, but who could blame W for somewhere in the back of her mind, entertaining the thought that, “He did it before; he could do it again”.
So the end result is that I no longer feel guilty for the A. The guilt I feel now is for the damage I did to my M. My decision to get involved with OW caused changes in our M that can never be undone. That’s what I still feel guilty about. Like I said, I know it’s a fine line. But it is different.
