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

Cheating has nothing to do with your partner not meeting your needs. Actually, it has nothing to do with partner at all. Cheating is all about the cheater himself/herself and is rooted in low self esteem and/or personality traits. If the cheater doesn’t do a substantial, individual therapy work and doesn’t have a true desire to change, there’s no point in couples therapy.
It’s not going to work for you OP.

😄
I also suspect this is a man and that he is the cheater, for the reasons you list. I can't see a woman thinking lazing around the house while her cheated on spouse is away dealing with the children constitutes an "opportunity for rebuilding." It's possible, though unlikely.

Yes, I'm guessing the wife's thought process was "I can't think straight with him badgering me to reconcile, soothe his guilt, and "meet his needs"..... I need to get away so I can make decisions..... but looking after children is beneath him.... I know, I'll take them to my mum's for a week"

Odds are "the betrayed" has a thread on here.... that doesn't open with "infidelity was discovered...."

I hope she has good women around her.

I happen to disagree with most pp who, as par for the course, are a den of vipers trying to prove one more than the other how mean they can be. Frankly, I find them goady to op.

I also am not convinced the person posting is a man or the cheater. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a woman who has been cheated on and is desperately seeking Mumsnet approval for her reconciliation. She’s a seasoned Mumsnet user and knows how negatively reconciliation is looked upon here, and wants to get a kind of ok for taking this path.

It might also be the cheater, or a man. But the fact that the cheater is going away with the kids and it’s framed as a benefit to the cheated-upon makes me think it’s the guy who is going away with the kids, while the woman is staying home for alone time. Because if the wife was going away, the husband staying behind without the kids would hardly be a huge healing occasion.

And this brings me exactly to why I’m finding it so annoying that op refuses to share who cheated. Because gender matters! Despite the fact that commenters here love to constantly turn genders around and create equivalencies, you can’t do that. Gender creates different power dynamics and contexts. You can not discuss this attempt at reconciliation and not disclose the genders.

Reading this thread makes me want to tear my hair out. It reminds me of trans advocates who claim gender doesn’t matter and talk about everything with all gender info stripped.

yhe Best thing is for the cheater to get individual counselling, to get to the bottom of why they thought having an affair was the solution to their problems. Most affairs come from a place of dysfunction, depression and trying to escape themselves, rather than their spouse. These don’t go away just because they have been caught. If they aren’t willing to work on themselves and grow, then the marriage is doomed.

No therapy but worked it out. Depends on both parties willingness to make it work

How are you supposed to imagine the horror and terror of war until you’ve been through it? Sure, you can read accounts of it, and watch documentaries, or whatever. But you can’t being to imagine what it’s actually like until you’ve experienced it. If the most violent, chaotic thing you’ve ever experienced is like, two children fighting on the playground of an expensive, private preparatory school, can you understand what it’s like to be surrounded by explosions, people stabbing and shooting and blowing each other up, blood and limbs and dirt flying everywhere, abject terror and confusion…? Maybe you think you can imagine it. But you can’t, really, because you have no point of comparison. You might even go around thinking, yeah, war is terrible. But it’s a necessary, and every citizen should be willing to stand up and defend their country. This generation needs to stop being so soft and man up like their grandparents did (And there are people who think that.)

But, let’s say you meet a veteran who’s missing some limbs, and they suffer from severe PTSD episodes, and you see in their face all the depth of their emotions as they relive their time in combat, and you observe first-hand exactly how utterly, mentally messed up they are as a result of having experienced war… You still haven’t experienced war, but that’s a lot more real, a lot more tangible, than the media accounts of war you’ve consumed. Would you be able to send that person back to the battlefield? Would you be as swift to dispatch a generation of teenagers to that fate?

If you’ve never had a “broken heart” and you hear someone singing about how a cheater broke theirs on the radio, does that mean anything to you? If Sarah’s going around campus telling everyone who will listen that Ben’s a dirty, cheating SOB because she caught him watching porn, are you not more likely to think that someone crying their eyes out about their boyfriend “cheating” on them is being a bit dramatic? If you’re not at all concerned about your partner cheating on you, and you have no intention on cheating on them, how much attention are you even paying to media accounts of cheating?

Why is it so unfathomable to you that someone would be unable to put themselves “in another person’s shoes” when it comes to this traumatic thing with which they have no experience?

"But the fact that the cheater is going away with the kids and it’s framed as a benefit to the cheated-upon makes me think it’s the guy who is going away with the kids, while the woman is staying home for alone time."

That didn't happen though. He said the "betrayed" went away with the kids, and the "betrayer" stayed home.

Cheater gets home alone time, wife gets to look after the kids.

Occam's Razor applies here - this poster is the cheater and he's a man (indignant at not being "listened to"; makes flowcharts; currently putting extraordinary amounts of effort into mansplaining why he has no empathy for his wife and downplaying the cheating).

Oh did I misunderstand who is going away with the kids? I thought the betrayed stayed home without the kids. I can’t keep up with all these betrayed and betrayer stuff.

@TreadingTrepidatious

Can you imagine divorce and what that would be like, I think you can.

Hey OP. Question for you.

Does your wife (and your marriage counsellor) know your idea of "rebuilding" is not using your solitude to reflect on why you made shitty choices and what you might do to heal the wound you've inflicted on your wife and children, but instead composing lengthy screeds and making flowcharts to justify your shitty choices and defend your right to make them again if the "need" arises?

I know right? It's confusing. But these are his words:

"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."

People who provoke you into reacting a certain way and then pull out the “protest too much line” are bad fucking people, full stop.

Good opportunity to screw arround and cheat more likely.

Cheaters can never be trusted.

Rebuilding, rubbish
Cheaters don't build anything, they destroy.

No cheaters are bad fucking people, full stop.

why is it so hard for you people to stop telling me what I believe, and what my situation is, like you know better than I do, myself? Telling me I’m not a reliable narrator, that I’m the manipulator, and then calling it “constructive criticism?” Come on. That is textbook definition gaslighting. I’m calling you out on it. You are fucking sick.

The needs of the betrayer were not “to fuck other people.” They were to feel desired by their romantic partner and to connect with them through conversation. But apparently it’s soooo unreasonable to want your partner to even notice when you’re naked, or to want them to fucking talk to you on car rides or during meals. Why in the world would that make anyone feel lonely and undesired?!

And if you must know, the betrayed partner wanted to go on this holiday, which the betrayer was very explicit about not wanting to go on because it is stressful to do with young children, and volunteered to take the children with them. There are also other family members going with them to assist in the child minding. The betrayer is home catching up on household tasks that are difficult to stay on top of when the children are home.

....household tasks, *and justifying his shitty choices, and spitting the dummy when the women of mumsnet dare not to hugbox him for making them.

So the cheater didn’t want to go and take care of the kids and indeed didn’t end up going? So what’s the moral of the story, how’s this healing?

Silly. The betrayed doesn't "need" the children's father to play a part in looking after the children's "needs". Why is it so hard for "you people" to understand that OP's "needs" are paramount?

So the betrayed and their family didn't want the betrayer to go with them.

Has the bretrayer been ostracised ?

The betrayer has been shut out.

The betrayer said “Going to this place with the children is incredibly stressful to me. I do not want to go.”

They betrayed heard that, decided to schedule the holiday, and took the children, without the betrayer, anyway.

It’s INCREDIBLE how MNs manage to twist that around into it being the betrayer’s fault that the betrayed is having to mind the children (with the help of other family members) on this holiday, when the betrayer WARNED the betrayed that it would be stressful and advised them that the betrayer was not going. Somehow it’s the betrayer’s fault that the betrayed booked that holiday with the kids, and how dare the betrayer “enjoy” their time alone cleaning the house, doing heavy labor in the garden, and sorting out the laundry so the betrayed can come home to an orderly house!

And what I meant by “it’s a good opportunity for rebuilding” is that the betrayed is home alone, so this is a good opportunity for them to demonstrate trustworthy behavior and begin to rebuild trust.

OP: (Notice cheating isn’t on the damned chart.)

Does this not strike you as a bit of a problem with the flowchart?

You can even see it visually - there's a huge blank space on the right hand side with arrows pointing to it, but ... no outcomes, just white space.

You could almost call it Diagram Of A Blind Spot.

Deranged thread and crazy OP. Interesting reading

What are you talking about? Follow the arrows until you get to one of the coloured boxes. If you get to the orange “No,” the options are “give up,” “give them time/another chance” or “attempt to communicate your needs” (the medium purple box on the right side.)

Here is an Imgur link in case the photo is blurry when you try to zoom in. imgur.com/a/dd3mOKR

Once again, one does not need to know exactly how war feels, exactly how terrifying and horrifying, in order to understand that it is terrifying and horrifying enough that it's to be avoided. Just like cheating. You don't need to know exactly how much it hurts. So you've wasted a potentially moving soliloquy about a soldier with PTSD.

I have not mentioned "media accounts of cheating". What would those be, something like a news report on the Ashley Madison hack? Don't answer that, it's rhetorical.
I have, however, spoken of the raw emotion found in songs, poems, etcetera, that everyone has heard and anyone with sufficient empathy can understand. You insist that "the betrayer" couldn't, which of course, you'd only know if you are "the betrayer." "The betrayed" would not know the details surrounding your history of reactions to artistic expression of pain. It's not something that would normally come up in conversation. Anyway, it might be true that you couldn't understand it, which would mark you as a low empathy person, which, as I said before, means true reconcilation is probably not possible.

You've given a fatuous (and probably fictitious) example about somebody crying her eyes out over porn in order to excuse yourself for lacking empathy for people who have been cheated on. Again, this is manipulative behaviour and another example of how you make excuses for yourself, probably without even being aware you're doing it, which is why you keep insisting you don't make excuses. This, combined with the low empathy and multiple slips you've made, is ample evidence that you are the cheater, as your cheated on spouse would not be making up stories to support your rationalizations. I don't know who you think you are fooling (other than yourself of course) with this "the betrayed" and "the betrayer" dog and pony show but I've had all I can take of it. Neither of us is going to be swayed in the least and your debating style is such that you simply refuse to acknowledge points you don't have some kind of counterargument (usually involving an analogy) for, necessitating that I repeat them ad nauseum. I'm actually starting to bore myself at this point.

The answer to your final question can be found in every post I've made to you, but I'll make it clear. It's not unfathomable, it's just highly unlikely, and when combined with other things I have mentioned about the way you are communicating, it smacks of rationalization and disingenuousness. If you didn't seem so manipulative, if you'd been upfront that you were the cheater from the get go instead of engaging in defensive shadowboxing to get around telling the truth, I'd be more inclined to believe you. As it stands I'm sorry to say that I just don't believe you and there is nothing that will convince me you are being genuine other than possibly full disclosure and radical honesty from here on. You fail to see why people don't believe you, but you have been deceptive from the jump. It's not complicated. If you want people to believe you, try being open.