PL, I think you did GREAT! I am proud of you. You made a decision to do something for your H and in the process, found out that some of what you THOUGHT was your motivation in all this (OW being going) was actually not the case...and managed to emote, and then get back to the business at hand.

I sympathize with you because I recently went through something similar when I decided to go against my strongest advice not to snoop and looked at my W's cell phone only to find out that she had indeed called OM even though she said she had not. It's not like I really believed her but my reason for snooping was NOT for the normal reason (this is my excuse anyway), I wanted to make sure that I was not doing all this JUST because I somehow believed OM was gone but because I truly had made progress in my own self esteem and independence. Does that make sense. By confirming what I already knew to be true, that in some way, OM was still around, I was able to refocus on myself and DB in a way that I had not in a couple weeks. I was not angry or hurt, just reminded of the reality of my sitch.

This is what I think happened to you. Yes, you got angry and upset. That is FINE and you should not deny that. The important part is that you realized that this changes nothing in your sitch. You KNEW your H was not really back 100% so to expect that he was away from OW 100% is unrealistic at this point. You now know that you are capable of getting emotional by a trigger (stuff from OW) that used to push you over the deep end and then pulling yourself back to center again. That is a really handy tool to have in your DB tool belt, and one that is hard to come by. It's called detachment and now that you can do it, you are even MORE free to be YOU in all this and stop being whatever emotion the situation seems to warrant.

Like I said, you did great. I would NOT bring this up to H. If he "knows" you saw the picture and stuff, and feels guilty about it, or just feels the need to talk about it, then let him talk. Listen, validate and then move on. He KNOWS what he has to do and when things get more on track, he will have to do them. At this point in the journey, you now know that it's not your place to do these things for him.

GH


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