It's me again (some updates)

[samantha303]

Hi, I am the girl who started the thread about me cheating on my abusive boyfriend.

We had our first counseling session three days ago and he stayed over at mine twice after the session. We are going for more as we decided to work on our relationship. He is ready to forgive me and needs time to forget about this.

However, I just constantly feel sad and guilty. I don't think I can get over the fact that I have done this to him. I jus don't feel confident that I will be able to forget I was the terrible person, even though he hit me, which was not the excuse for me to cheat. I think his friends an family won't have respect for me anymore. And I can't even tell my parents he hit me because they will never want me back with him anymore.
I'm very unsure if I can get back with him knowing that I'll never be able to forgive my mistakes

I showed his best friend the first thread I made on here

You do know that your privacy here has now been compromised? Your abusive man will be reading your words whenever he feels like it. His best friend isn't going to keep that thread a secret from his mate. This one might not take too much finding.

No worries, you'll be commanded asked by him not to post here soon enough. I wish you luck in this awful relationship. You're going to need every scrap you can gather. Your counsellor is wrong at every level. I can't bear to look back, did you say she was Relate or from church or somewhere else?

I'm really worried about the safety of the OP in this thread

Me too. :(

Would I be right that he hit you, you felt like shit and subsequently cheated to make yourself feel better?

He will use the cheating episode as a stick to beat you with forever.
at some point you may be told that cheating is worse, he only hit you cos he loves you. You wound him up and he can't cope due to the love he feels for you. He will call you horrid names because you cheated. The crime will become your action not his.

strangers on the net have no motive for you staying together or splitting up. It would be nicer if all threads mentioned their wonderful partners. These forums often help women see through the confusion their relationship has become. Please don't show your partner your threads, you may need to post in the future.

Cheating is totally legal in the eyes of British law, hitting your partner is a crime.

Thank you ladies for all your comments but I think it'd be better if someone could offer me some actual advice about how to leave him. I'm not in danger or anything at the moment. Everything is going fine with him at the moment. We still see each other a few times a week. I like to stay with him but just don;t think I can be his official girlfriend anymore and he doesn't want an open relationship

I think I'm making some very slow progress. for example, right after my cheating, I felt very upset to think I may not be able to do a masters in London and stay with him. Now I stop incorporating him into my life decision making and think doing a MSc in Uni of Warwick would be pretty awesome.

An MSc at Warwick would indeed be very fabulous !

I'm not sure what you are asking.
You don't live together or anything.
Jut tell him you don't want a relationship with him any more.
Cut all contact. Block from phone and facebook and any social media.
It really should be that simple.
If it's not then you have some very big problems.

And yes, if your dream is to study at Warwick then get it set up and put in place. That would be your perfect 'out'.

You will makes some great friends at Uni and won't need to even thing about this abusive loser again.

As others have said, no decent counselling would even consider doing joint counselling where abuse is involved.
Stop having joint counselling with him as of now. Counselling for yourself is definitely recommended.

As a PP has said. Please contact Womens Aid and definitely enrol on their Freedom Programme. You need to spot red flags far sooner and definitely need to reset your boundaries.

Please get some RL support. The more people on 'your side' that know about this abuse, the better for you and the easier to get away from him.

You need your mum and dad now and some love and support so please go to them.

I wish you well.

Why are you focussing on you cheating? The important issue is he is a violent abuser? Yet you are focussing all the blame on yourself - utter madness quite frankly, and so wrong on every level.

Call Women's Aid and tell your parents. And get rid of him. And find a proper counsellor who will work with you alone about your appalling self esteem issues. Whatever counsellor you are seeing together needs dumping too.

What hells said.

It's not difficult to leave him if you don't live together.
Cut all contact and if he persists on contacting you, tell him and report to the police for harassment.

It doesn't matter here who is to blame or not. It's not a healthy relationship and the best thing to do is to break up.

This thread is quite confusing and spins round on itself by way of purpose. Many were thinking you'd be wise to leave this relationship but your insistence was that you wanted it to continue. For example:

Sun 19-Apr-15 13:22:31

I want to work on it because I think maybe we could become better people and build q new relationship

and

he must love me and will change. And I shall give him another chance. I'm sorry I'm not stubborn I just can't convince myself to leave him

and

I was convinced I should leave him after my first post then I changed my mind

Now you seem to be considering an open relationship but would like advice on how to leave him. Fortunately you have now received plenty of this advice.

I am a counsellor and I agree with what twinklestein's friend says. I studied for 3.5 years and did a masters, and so did many other counsellors who work in private practice and are much more skilled and no more expensive than relate, so it is a shame that so many people choose a relate counsellor who has done a few weekends training and don't have a thorough background in counselling and psychotherapy. I guess it's just because they're a 'brand' people have heard of?

While it is true that the advice from abuse organisations is that couples counselling is not suitable in abusive relationships, the reality is this is not common knowledge among counsellors!

In fact I have mostly seen it said on here.

1. Get a place at Uni. Tell him absolutely nothing about it.
2. Tell him it's over.
3. Go. (Get a new mobile number or block him on all ways he has of contacting you.)

I'm not trapped physically. I'm just not able to break things off with him entirely now I start to realise things may never work out, even though he has been extremely nice to me lately. It feels like he doesn't even care about me having cheated. I know it's a waste of time to stay with him but I can't convince myself to let go.

I think you cheated in the first place because you needed there to be a reason why he treated you so badly.

Are you a fixer? Do you try to mend things all the time, make excuses, take more responsibility on yourself for things which go wrong than is really fair? Do you think things are your fault?

Does he blame you? Did he tell you that you made him hit you? Or that he wouldn't have hit you if you hadn't done such and such?

I think somewhere in there you are trying to make yourself deserve that treatment. So you cheated. Now you deserve whatever you get, and he is being nice because that guilt trips you even more and makes him appear to be the nice man who forgave his oh. He'll live happily on that for a loooong time and you will have a truly shit time.

The future is bleak.

So you see that you should leave, but you don't see it clearly enough to feel you can?

My 3-step solution above is still a good one, if it's possible, because you plan things so that it's difficult to go back. When I left my H, I thought most of the way through the move "I don't even know why I'm doing this. Is it really what I want?" But I'd rented the house, booked the van etc, so I had to go. And as soon as I was gone, I felt better about it.

Honestly, don't expect clarity about the decision until you're out and you start to think for yourself without getting under his influence.

The other thing you can do is look for ways to build your self esteem. Time with friends if you have good, supportive friends, or make friends, or spend time doing something you're good at. Anything so that you're less dependent on his approval.

being under his influence