The C spent most of the time talking about guilt as it was pretty clear that was the driving force behind all of my issues. He had lots of good statements and analogies. He said there was good guilt and bad guilt. The good guilt keeps us from doing wrong, or at least from doing wrong again. The bad guilt is as he statedd "worse than useless." It can defeat any chance of progress, and can actually work against the good guilt. In attempting to assuage the extreme pain of the bad guilt, people often get stuck in the bad behavior (that is nonetheless temporarily rewarding and easy because it involves a "tried and true" process). He also used the following example. A child is disciplined in school for some bad behavior. That is like the good guilt, it disciplines us and helps prevent us from a recurrance of bad behavior. Bad guilt would be if the child was disciplined every day for a year, even if he did no other wrong. Bad guilt can be counterproductive because if you live with it constantly, you don't get good guilt clues, and if you start to become accustomed to the guilt, you can lose your sense of morality (i.e. everything hurts so who cares). He reasoned that guilt has probably been a major part of my life, and probably contributed to the EA. He was right on. I can remember having conversations in which I convinced myself that things were so bad anyway, who cares if people find out about the EA.
Thanks for your perspective and how it can shed light on how my W may feel. I did think that you and she are probably similar in your feelings of resentment, even though you react to things in VERY different ways. Don't get me wrong, I am not going to pressure her to forgive and forget. I am just going to drop the issue on my end and expect that she is working to drop it on her end if her goal is a happy marriage. I'm not setting any time limits right now either. I figure we will get it all out on the table with the MC in our next appointment and maybe can create a plan of action on how to deal with it.
I do have friends, some IRL and some here. The one thing I don't have is someone to give me a nice warm friendly hug everyday. I know that would go a long way toward giving me the strength to carry on.
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
