Has anyone successfully recovered from infidelity with couple’s therapy?

[TreadingTrepidatious]

Infidelity was discovered within my marriage last night, and we have an appointment with a marriage counselor on the 24th (which feels like forever away!). Just wondering if it’s helped anyone to get their marriage back to a good place, and if you’d be willing to talk about the process. Thanks in advance

What a load of waffle.

I’m also out. @TreadingTrepidatious i have tears of successful reconciliation under my belt! I talk from experience and a deep belief that reconciliation can work.

It won’t work for you. At some point your betrayed will realise they have been manipulated and the selfish entitled thinking that led to the affair is STILL there leading the narrative in the reconciliation.

I understand entirely what you are saying but I can’t be loud enough about this… You. Are. Wrong.

This is like being in a parallel universe. OP surely just have a serious personality disorder. This thread just needs to end.

I made a flow chart

Others: “It’s not the betrayed’s fault that the betrayer cheated, and it’s not the betrayed’s responsibility to prevent cheating.”

Me: “Yes, that is true”

Others: “You’re wrong and reconciliation is never going to work!”

🤦🏻‍♀️

OP you have over 100 people (most with experience) here saying you are wrong. Take the hint - you are wrong. You are a very arrogant person who thinks they are right all the time & will not listen to others views because you must be right all the time. Your poor partner. You’ve managed to wear down so many helpful mums here god knows what it must be like living with you

May I direct you to this comment:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/relationships/5375044-has-anyone-successfully-recovered-from-infidelity-with-couples-therapy?reply=146510486&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

This analogy completely fails. Everybody, at some point in our lives, has felt betrayed. Maybe it was a friend who talked badly about us behind our back or who just stopped being a friend with no explanation. Maybe it was a parent who wasn't there for us when needed. Betrayal is a universal human experience and everybody knows it hurts. A betrayal in a romantic relationship hurts particularly badly and everybody knows that as well, since there are a zillion songs, poems, books and films about the agony of it. It's so ubiquitous there is no way to miss it unless you have lived in a cave most of your life.
So I'm going with this is a self-serving lie, possibly to yourself as well as to your other half.

It would be hell. This person is clearly highly manipulative and is using therapy to manipulate his/her spouse further. The therapist has probably been fooled by the faux contrition as well. Note s/he got angry and all caps shouted in one post because s/he was not believed. These repetitive, defensive posts come across as desperate, but that's not about convincing us, this person is desperate to convince him/herself. IMO s/he is using this thread to try to do that. S/he is in effect posting this nonsense to her/himself.

Don’t bother directing me anywhere - Haha you just proved my point !

I don't think they're not saying you're wrong, they're saying you're lying and don't really believe the affair wasn't justified. You keep adding "but" type statements, (as in, "It wasn't justified, but there were reasons") which any intelligent person can see right through.
You wouldn't be going on about your "reasons" for any other motive but an attempt to justify it, because you can't possibly believe anybody here cares to hear about your "unmet needs."

Here is something which helps clear up the fallacy that people cheat because of "unmet needs."
https://www.chumplady.com/fallacy-unmet-needs-affairs/

The crazy flow chart would seem to confirm your theory.

I wasn't sure if this thread could get any more bonkers than it is but I come back to it and there is a flow chart. A fucking flow chart!

I know, I think at this point op is just having a laugh at us unintellectual plebs, cerebral narcissist anyone ?

If this is in anyway possibly real, you've got to be sorry for anyone living with this.

I should imagine dealing with the affair could be the least of their problems.

This is the most bonkers thing I've seen on mumsnet 😂

I don't know why but this reminds me a bit of a thread ages ago where the op posted that their lawyer husband wanted to give her (a SAHM) feedback and targets on her domestic tasks. Apparently all his lawyer friends did it.

People generally experience betrayal, but not everyone gets cheated on by a much beloved and trusted partner. Lots of people might catch like their teenaged boyfriend/girlfriend liking other people’s Instagram photos or snap chatting someone else, or even have a partner for a few years who has sex with someone else, but fewer people have been together for a decade and then experienced infidelity… The betrayer here never experienced any of that at all, and hasn’t even ever experienced jealousy within a relationship. They have had very relationships before ours (most of them short term,) and none of them, as far as they know, featured any sort of cheating.

That’s where the tattoo analogy comes in: the betrayer might have felt something like getting a vaccination or a minor laceration (being lied to or backstabbed by a friend, for instance), but never got a tattoo (cheated on by a spouse). They have a high pain tolerance themselves (not much concern about cheating nor do they imagine it as a big deal if it happened to them), so they struggle to imagine it hurting as badly as it does for someone else. Obviously a tattoo that’s big and has got a lot of shading and is on a bony part of the body (like emotional/sexual infidelity in a long-standing marriage) is going to hurt worse than a small, outline-only tattoo on a fleshier body part (like a partner in a newer relationship texting someone else), but all of these are still tattoos (infidelity), and people will describe the pain of getting one (being cheated on) differently based on their tolerance and the nature/location of their tattoo(s.) So the betrayer heard “tattoos hurt,” but couldn’t imagine or accurately predict the amount of pain the infidelity would cause.

Somehow the betrayer missed all those millions of songs, poems, books and films which feature the devastation of being cheated on? Does the betrayer not bother with reading or entertainment?
Surely not being sure how much it would hurt would be a disincentive to cheat anyway. After all, for all the betrayer knew it would devastate the betrayed enough to become suicidal.

You seem to be suggesting the betrayer imagines everyone is as unemotional as the betrayer is purporting him/herself to be, and if so, doesn't that mean the betrayer has difficulty with empathy, which would make the betrayer unsuitable for an intimate relationship to begin with, meaning true reconcilation is unlikely to be successful?

They are quite literally saying “you are wrong.”

I do not think I’ve said “The affair wasn’t justified but there are reasons.” (I’m going to go back and double check, but I’m pretty sure that’s everyone else putting words in my mouth.) I have explained the reasons themselves when directly asked about them, and the difference between reasons and justifications in general. I’ve talked about why the betrayed is putting in effort to meet the betrayer’s needs since we wish to remain in and improve our marriage, and why the needs of the betrayer are legitimate needs in response to others saying that the betrayed shouldn’t be putting in that effort and that they aren’t needs.

But somehow that all gets twisted into ‘look at this awful person going on and on about the betrayer’s “needs” like a narcissist! Stop justifying it!’ again and again. As if it was my fault they were even brought up in the first place.

Nowhere have I said, nor do I believe, “If the betrayed would have just met these needs in the first place, the betrayer wouldn’t have cheated! It’s obviously the betrayed’s fault and they need to fix it lest the betrayer cheats again!” I have stated the exact opposite many times, at this point. And yet you continue to insist otherwise, and that I’m the one being manipulative. I do not get it at all. It’s absolutely bizarre.

I was really hoping this would help people understand what I think is the morally correct way to pursue getting one’s needs met and/or the response when your partner fails to meet those needs, since people keep insisting that I think cheating is justified if needs are not met. I don’t know how to get through to you here. I can’t help but believe you are either all intellectually impaired, so egotistical that you can’t admit to misunderstanding an anonymous stranger on the internet, or you’re attempting to twist my words and gaslight me on purpose. I’m trying to produce something that can’t be twisted like that to force you to acknowledge what it is I am actually saying. (Notice cheating isn’t on the damned chart.)

DC in private schools: so yes, they have money.

How is a person who’s never even experienced jealousy, let alone being cheated on, who’s observing the same reaction in people who have caught their short term partners liking someone else’s social media posts as people who have caught their spouse of decades sleeping with someone else, tell whether the “agony” of being cheated on described in media is an exaggeration or not? When there are individuals who get cheated on repeatedly for years on end and simply turn the other cheek? Like the betrayer knew it would “hurt” and that it was wrong to do. They didn’t know it would pretty much cause PTSD, give the betrayed self esteem issues, and massively damage the relationship.

To give you another analogy, it’s like someone telling you, “the stove is hot, so don’t touch it,” when the reality is that the stove is on invisible fire and if you go anywhere near it, you will get severely burned. But you don’t know that until you’re burned. (Obviously not a perfect analogy because the betrayed is the one suffering the damage here, but hopefully you get the point in trying to make about the misunderstood severity.)

Anyway, the point is that now that it’s happened, the betrayer understands the severity and doesn’t wish to inflict that upon the betrayed ever again, regardless of whether there are unmet needs. If you recall why this was brought up in the first place.

I have not insisted anything or stated anything as fact. I know what you've said and it's subject to interpretation just like with anyone else. I interpret your tone deaf, passive-voiced, repetitive posts as a lot of excuse making and disingenuous use of therapy jargon. The very fact that you won't say if you are the cheater or the cheated on, yet somehow think you can get people on your side without making such an essential disclosure, is manipulative behaviour IMO.

I'm not saying you have ever stated that you think the cheating was justifiable. I'm saying it's what I think you believe. I assume you know what is said about he who doth protest too much. You protest way too much and with a lot of vehemence and unnecessary word salad nonsense about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and love languages (the latter is debunked drivel btw.) I've seen it before and it almost always means there's dishonesty. Whether it's just being dishonest with yourself or with others as well is something I'm not sure of, because I don't know for a fact that you are the cheater. You could be the cheated on spouse who desperately wants to believe a liar.

The debunking I made reference to;

https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/study-refutes-concept-of-love-languages/#:~:text=Clinical%20relevance:%20A%20group%20of,concept%20of%20%E2%80%9Clove%20languages.%E2%80%9D

Hopefully that explains my POV well enough that we need not go into it again. I know you don't understand. Countless people have tried to explain these things to you and you still don't understand. It's pretty much hopeless. You cannot be objective about this in the least, which is understandable since it seems you desperately want to hold onto the relationship.

Mental, but mesmerising, thread!

This poster claims to be the wife, but nothing (especially not a fucking flowchart 🙄) can convince me he's not a bloke who cheated.

He just gets so upset that these females won't Listen To His Words! Why do you keep questioning him when he has patiently explained things to you using an outdated pop-psychology framework and a flowchart? What do you want - for him to accept constructive feedback? He can't do that! He's a man! Who has needs! That must be met, or he'll have to fuck other women!

Also this:

"The betrayed is going on holiday with our children and leaving the betrayer home for several days, which I think is a good opportunity for rebuilding."

Translation: the cheat gets to stay at home resting and using Mumsnet to practice his Chinese Water Torture debating style so he can continue grinding down the wife when she returns, rejuvenated, exhausted from a "holiday" with children lol.

How is a person who’s never even experienced jealousy, let alone being cheated on

Let me stop you right there. I'll take empathy for 400 Alex. It's how we imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people, despite them not being like ourselves, and care about them. You might as well ask how one is supposed to imagine the horror and terror of war unless one has been through it.

Riiiiiggghhht. All those millions of songs, poems, books and films could all be part of a conspiracy to make cheating seem more devastating than it is. Sure, that must be what the cheater thought.🙄

Only children don't understand that the stove being hot means pain if you touch it. Adults have already learned all that sort of thing if they have any intelligence or awareness of the world around them. It is not necessary to be burned to know that a burn is painful, nor is it necessary to know exactly how painful it is in order to take care to avoid touching a hot stove. The same applies to cheating. You don't need to know exactly how much the person you cheat on will be hurt in order to take care to avoid causing hurt. In fact, as I've said before, if you don't know, then for all you know it will destroy the person, which argues that not knowing should prevent cheating rather than allow it.

If you could only hear yourself. But I know you can't. You obviously think your arguments are great, because you don't understand why we're not all convinced.