SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi everyone. I am almost 3 months post D-Day. Before the affair happened, and while it was happening, we were already in couples therapy. My husband really bottled up a LOT of feelings and resentment for years, so when it came out all of a sudden it has been wave after wave of pain and surprise for me, on top of the affair.

Needless to say I am not doing great. I just started on antidepressants this week, so I am hoping that helps. But right now, I feel so overwhelmed. I cry all the time. This is all I can think about. We are doing couples therapy once a week, and I am doing individual therapy every other week, and group every other week. Lots of therapy! Even with that, I feel an almost obsessive need to think and analyze my feelings. I have read probably 15 books in the past three months about betrayal, relationships, and trauma. And still it feels like not enough. I recently have started talking with AI (Claude), just to have someone to talk with, and it helps but also makes me feel like I am developing AI psychosis haha.

Any other betrayed folks go through this? How did you get through it?

You are describing a lot of what I went through in those first months.

I am about ten months out now, and at three months I was still very much living inside the blast zone. I could function, work, parent, have conversations, but underneath all of it my brain was constantly running. What happened? Why did it happen? What did I miss? What else don't I know? What was real? What does this mean about our marriage? Can this be fixed? Do I even want it fixed?

I read books. I read forums. I analyzed conversations to death. I asked questions over and over from slightly different angles.

For me, a big realization was that I was trying to think my way out of something that couldn't be solved entirely by thinking. Listen to the people here that have been here for a while.

There is absolutely value in understanding the affair, understanding yourself, understanding the marriage, and understanding what was happening inside your husband. But there came a point where I realized I was subconsciously searching for the one missing piece of information that would suddenly make all of this make sense and stop hurting.

I never found that magic piece.

What I did slowly find was perspective.

Three months is so incredibly early. I know that probably isn't comforting when every day feels about six weeks long, but you do not need to have your marriage figured out right now. You don't need to know whether you are going to reconcile forever. You don't need to know exactly how much of his resentment was legitimate, how much was distorted, or what every revelation means for your future.

You can just deal with today.

Also, please be careful not to let his bottled up resentment become an explanation that somehow turns into responsibility being placed on you for his affair. There may have been real problems in your marriage. There may be things you eventually look back on and wish you had done differently. I certainly found things in myself and in my marriage that I needed to examine. But marital problems are shared problems. An affair is a decision made by the person who has it. Both things can be true at the same time.

One of the hardest things I have had to learn is that healing is not linear at all. I have had days where I thought, "okay, I am finally getting somewhere," followed almost immediately by days where something tiny knocked me flat again. Then gradually the terrible days became terrible hours. Sometimes now they are terrible days followed by better days.

That is progress, even when it doesn't feel like it.

And all of the reading, therapy and introspection can be valuable, but give yourself permission to occasionally stop studying your own trauma. You don't have to spend every available hour becoming the world's foremost expert on betrayal. Watch something stupid, go outside, have coffee with somebody. Do something with your hands, give your brain an hour where its only job is to exist.

You are not failing because you are still crying at three months. You are not supposed to have metabolized something this enormous already.

Take what you can from therapy, books, forums, AI and people who have walked this road before you, but don't feel like you have to discover the entire answer immediately.

Sometimes the most honest answer really is:

I don't know yet.

I have become much more comfortable with that answer than I was in the beginning.

Take it a day at a time. Sometimes an hour at a time if that is all you've got. Eventually you will look back and realize that somewhere along the way you stopped drowning and started swimming, even if you cannot identify the exact day it happened.

I first described the pain to my wife as if someone had carved my chest open, dropped in a grenade that shredded my heart into a million pieces, but I somehow, I was still breathing.

That was a decade ago.

I got up to 31-books on relationships and infidelity and while they tend to talk about what works, they rarely discuss how long it takes to heal from the trauma of infidelity.

Members here told me 2-5 years!

I sure hated to hear that, but it was frighteningly accurate.

So, give yourself time and space and kindness.

I didn’t do AI or antidepressants, but therapy was helpful (to an extent). All the best advice in therapy doesn’t speed things up.

Feel all the feels, process it all — just don’t bury it.

Buried feelings become resentments and that’s no way to heal.

After processing it all, I started to feel what I felt, but eventually learned I can focus on more positive things as I processed pain.

For now, take all the time you need to get your feet back underneath you!

Both of these last two posts nailed it.
When I was in the thick of it, feeling like I was going crazy, I found that taking long walks helped tremendously. It helped take my mind off everything that was going on. It made me concentrate on my feet and my surroundings, etc. something so simple, was like the biggest thing to help my brain stop and relax some.

The first year was brutal. The second year was miserable. The third year was tolerable. This year (fourth) is pretty good.

The only through it is by taking one day at a time, doing what you can to stay healthy, and being patient with yourself. That last one is hard. The emotional rollercoaster is exhausting! You want to get off, but you can't.

The aftermath of infidelity (dis)colored everything in my life, as if I was living under a constant shadow. As others have said, 3 months is still very early in the journey. There's no quick or easy fix, I'm sorry to say. Keep doing what you're doing. Find healthy outlets for your emotions - journaling, exercise, therapy, rage rooms, punching bags - whatever works best for you. You are going through an immense amount of grief (over an ambiguous loss), and grief is not convenient or predictable. Give yourself endless amounts of grace.

At some point, you might start to feel numb. This is also normal. We get so tired of all the strong feelings that our bodies give up on feeling anything. It's a necessary break. Don't worry - something will reignite you when you least expect it.

Hang in there - one day at a time!

At 3 months I'm pretty sure that I was still afraid that I might do/say something that might upset my wife because I was afraid she would just go running off with her AP.

It probably took close to a year before I felt like my feet were planted on Solid Ground and my head was clear enough that I could make good decisions. Decisions based on facts and not emotions or feelings

From what I've read it takes around 2 years just to get over the shock and Trauma of discovering an affair and years beyond that trying to rebuild trust.

About two years out from D-Day the repressed anger started making an appearance. I reached the point that some people refer to as the plain of lethal flatness wherein I really didn't care one way or another about the relationship. Some call it ambivalence

In my opinion at 3 months you are pretty normal and typical with your feelings but I will say it does get better slowly with time. The discovery of an affair throws your entire brain into chaos and it takes a very long time to process through it

You are doing IC and group therapy so that's great. Just give yourself time. Eventually you will get to a happier place

It's been 16 months for me. I've been on these forums almost every day for the last 15 if that tells you anything.

I'm still having AI conversations too...

Sorry to hear about what you're going through, I wish you the best.

One thing I've learned is the more I accept the pain and let myself feel it, the quicker it passes. Acceptance is usually the last piece of the puzzle, and the hardest one to reach, at least for myself.

Thank you all for the replies. One of the only thing that helps right now is hearing that I’m not crazy or being dramatic.

Gemmy- you hit the nail on the head with this one:

I was subconsciously searching for the one missing piece of information that would suddenly make all of this make sense and stop hurting.

That is exactly how I feel. I want something, anything, that will make this less painful, or at least provide some clarity about why this happened. A part of me knows that’s not logical, but I can’t stop myself from continue to frantically search for relief.

It really helps to hear from those of you who are further along in recovery. I have to believe that things will improve, but the future is so unknown and scary. We are trying to reconcile, and it is just so fucking hard. I am concurrently heartbroken and shattered, and yet expected to be reflective on how my actions contributed to the affair. I want to be better, and I want our relationship to be better, but it feels like I don’t have the capacity to do anything besides cry right now.

This sucks, y’all. It really really sucks, and I hate that he put me here.

expected to be reflective on how my actions contributed to the affair

Who is expecting this of you? Your actions didn't contribute to the affair - they couldn't, because you're not party to the affair. Your actions can only affect your WH and the marriage. He and his AP are the only ones who contributed to the affair (barring accomplices like coworkers or friends who covered for them).

Do NOT let anyone blame you in any way for the affair. It doesn't matter how unhappy your WH was or how much he bottled up. The choice to cheat as a response to all that was entirely his. He could've divorced you and done less damage.

I'm curious about your WS's resentments.

Are they really about you, or are they about his inaccurate view of you? Or about something else?

It's common for BSes to think they contributed to the A. Nope. Even if your WS has a legitimate beef, he could have discussed it with you before cheating. And if he discussed it, he could have D'ed before cheating.

As are all about the WS's issues, not about the WS's issues with BS or M.

You know, you are both right! No one is literally saying "how did you cause the affair?", but there has been implicit and explicit discussion of how my actions harmed our marriage, and how the state of our marriage contributed to the affair. I have been shortening that in my mind to "what I did to cause this", which is not fair to myself.

You are also right that, no matter what I did or didn’t do, my spouse had other options. We were already in marriage counseling, presumably to work on these issues! But instead of communicating with me, he chose to seek comfort with someone else. That is not okay!

For months, I have been drowning in sadness and guilt and confusion about what I did that was so horrible to elicit this level of response. I have hardly felt angry at all, because I keep getting stuck on "my part" in this. But tonight, I finally feel angry. I did NOT deserve this.

And for context/background- WP’s main concern is that he feels lonely in our marriage, primarily because I am too busy. I understand his perspective and how my actions made him feel that way, and in response over the past few years I have scaled way, way back on professional opportunities, social gatherings, and hobbies. However, IMO, I think a lot of his feelings are actually resentment that we do not have kids. I think a subconscious part of him blames my "busy-ness" as a cause for my infertility, but that would be a horrible thing to say, so instead it comes out as I am too busy and ambitious.

Now I'm angry too! Cheating while you were in counseling is bad enough, but you being busy or not having children yet is his excuse? I hope he gets his head on straight at some point soon and realizes that there is never an external reason to have an affair. If he was that unhappy, he should've left you and found someone less busy, not lied to you (and your MC!) and snuck around behind your back. The truth is his AP was convenient, and it was easier for him to cheat than to work up the courage to divorce you.

I'm glad you've found your anger at last, Shrug. Many of us go through the same emotional process - during the initial devastation, we think there must be something we did wrong and, therefore, something we can change to prevent our WS from cheating again. Then we come to realize that the WS's behavior isn't in our control, not even indirectly. We can't "make them" be faithful and anymore than we can "make them" cheat.

On the wayward side, many will claim (especially at first) that the BS made them feel a certain way (and/or the AP made them feel a certain way), and that's why they cheated. While certain situations can elicit certain feelings, ultimately we each are in control of how we react. Plenty of people are in lonely marriages, dead bedrooms, etc., for years without the thought of cheating ever crossing their minds. Both times that my WX cheated, he claimed it was because we weren't intimate often enough or because I spent some nights in another bedroom (his snoring went through walls!). During his affair, he stopped touching me for nearly TWO YEARS. Never once did I consider cheating (though the thought of divorce did cross my mind).

You didn't deserve to be cheated on. Nobody deserves it. Nothing justifies it.

I relate to your post so much.

It has been almost two months since my D-Day. Unlike you, we didn't go to couples therapy, but I committed to healing from trauma from day one. Initially, I also turned to AI for guidance. It helped comfort me, but it also felt like I was playing psychological games—like using coldness and distance to try to gain control or pull him back.

Later, I stopped relying on AI and started downloading classic books on relationships, affairs, and sexuality (like The State of Affairs, Mating in Captivity, Intimate Relationships, and Nonviolent Communication).

I haven't finished them all, and honestly, I'm not in a rush to. I realized the ultimate answers might not be in AI or books, but within myself—my own perspectives, tolerance, life, and choices.

Because what truly shifted my thinking was prioritizing my physical well-being: getting back to regular gym workouts, sticking to a strict sleep schedule, eating healthy, and taking time to recover from a recent surgery.

Although triggers still occasionally bring back memories of betrayal like an intense emotional rollercoaster, and the pain is still real, the amount of time it occupies my mind each day has significantly decreased. I am no longer trying to fix the affair. Instead, I am focusing on building a full, loving, and grounded life for myself.

[This message edited by Alicia2026 at 6:21 AM, Sunday, August 23rd]