Took Him Back, Now He’s Cheating with His Boss

At this point, you don’t think Tuesday will ever come, but it does eventually. Just keep on keeping on and things will eventually look better.

Definitely read “Why Does He Do That?” It is eye opening, explains the abuse dynamic very well, even covert abuse which is hard to piece together and explain.

I’m sorry to say this, but your grandmother and mother should be ashamed of themselves. They sent you and your children (and their grandchildren) back into an abusive home. Just because their generation turned a blind eye, doesn’t mean you should.

Good luck to you and know you have Chump Nation behind you!

I had a similar timeline, though I didn’t meet FW till I was 28 (SHOULD have known better!!). After the first Dday I had an infant and had quit my low-paying job to stay home and care for him. I threw FW out of the house and called a lawyer and found out I would not get any alimony and child support with my lousy job was not enough to survive on. I had lost too much weight and my breastmilk dried up (but I didn’t realize it- fortunately my son was on solids by then). NOT ONE PERSON TOLD ME TO LEAVE- I told anyone and everyone (it was an “emotional affair”- it wasn’t). I had already cut my mother out of my life so everyone I told was a peer. My own brother saw how emaciated I was but still treated the FW like he was his buddy. Our marriage counselor said we were equally at fault. And the thought of having to split weekends and NOT wake up to my beautiful, happy, baby every morning was too much for me. Little did I know that he would NEVER have the kids spend even ONE night at his (current AP’s) house. So I stayed. For 15 more years. It got worse (physical), but at least I got another son out of it. I’d probably STILL be with the FW if HE hadn’t told me he wanted a divorce (I suspect it was the AP’s idea because FW is incapable of original thought). Thank goodness I got out. I got the house, I’m working on a career that will cover the bills. My kids are with ME 100% of the time- I get to wake up and see their teenager scowls EVERY MORNING!! And FW is not even allowed in my driveway anymore (when he drives by for a quick 20-minute visit on his allotted days). If I could have seen this future back then on that first Dday, I would have pulled the plug and gotten divorced right away. I’m 52; my divorce will be final in a few weeks; I’m starting a new career and getting my kids ready to go off to college (as I finish college myself)- We are ALL graduating to new happy lives! Leave a cheater GAIN A LIFE and you will never regret it.

CL is spot on.

Here’s my short story about learning of cheating after being married for years:

D-Day for me happened after 35 years of marriage. Ten years before, so after 25 years of marriage, x told me that he’d had sex with another women when we were first married. It happened when was abroad for a sporting event (club team). After a day of getting sweaty on the pitch, he apparently got sweaty in bed with another woman.

Anyway, when (after 25 years of marriage) I told my therapist that he’d cheated on me when we were first married, she advised me that this was probably a youthful indiscretion by someone who’d drunk too much. Did I want to throw away a marriage based on one event? I decided I didn’t. And I didn’t tell anyone else.

Fast forward to the 35-year mark (so ten years after learning of that “youthful indiscretion” from which I probably got genital warts, by the way). We were sitting at the dinner table, and he decided to bring up the time he slept with that woman in another country. What I remember about that conversation is that he seemed to be gloating. He explained to me that the guys on his team singled him out the next day for “bad behavior.” He loved this public spanking for being a “bad boy.” Here was his opportunity as a super shy guy to “elevate” himself in his friends’ eyes, or so he thought. He told me that the captain of the team made him give a (faux) apology to the group. They then agreed that “what goes on tour stays on tour.” He loved the attention and, no doubt, the secrecy.

Here was a covert narc who couldn’t get a date in college, a guy who was too shy to join a frat. He’d had a one-night stand and all the guys knew about it. He “got the girl.” A tsunami of kibbles in one night.

No doubt he had other women throughout the marriage, getting the little “atta boys” from his friends.

Little did I know that his telling me that story was a fitting prelude to his eventual confession a few months later about the multiyear affair he was having.

Makes me sick. But also makes me realize what a small, insecure man he is.

As for my therapist who told me to forgive and forget, I’m not sure. If his timeline is to be believed (and I don’t believe anything he says), it was during the 25-year marriage mark that he started to feel he that he wasn’t happily married AND DIDN’T TELL ME. Maybe he was testing me to see if I would accept infidelity. I don’t know. What I DO know is that he got my name tattooed on his nether regions that year. Who does that when they are SO unhappy? Unless he did it to make me think I was secure in our relationship, to, in effect, make me never suspect that he would cheat.

Clever ruse. I did feel secure. Dammit.

I agree with others here that chumps/victims of domestic abuse (call it what it is) can’t assess themselves for “attachment styles” while in the midst of ongoing trauma. Furthermore, if a therapist’s first encounter with a victim happens while the victim is currently being abused or very recently abused, neither could a therapist know what a victim’s attachment style is nor automatically assess any other “preexisting” or “baseline” psychological trait the victim had prior to the abuse. Though the shitty ones always try.

And here’s the thing with that: I don’t think it’s often discussed that, to someone emerging from recent trauma, even witnessing the *mere attempt* of bystanders or so-called helping professionals to find fault or partial fault (aka “your responsibility in this”) with victims (which happens to echo precisely the abusers’ typical views the victims– ugh) causes a kind of “moral terror” because it tells the emerging survivor that “nowhere is safe,” that trying to escape is really a frying-pan-to-fire exercise so what’s the point? It’s disheartening. The experience also seems to hint that, no matter what happens to you, no matter how bad it is and even in circumstances that are much worse and more life-threatening, even *then* the social context might not help or rescue or protect. The latter point sounds a bit “out there” and is hard to explain but I think it’s important so here goes:

I thanked God for my past training in advocacy for domestic violence survivors because when I stumbled into the RIC trap and also interviewed several individual therapists after D-Day, I understood that the therapists who tried to diagnose me right off the bat were, a) committing veiled, knee-jerk victim-blaming; and, b) blatantly violating ethics. I blew off the attempts, refused to return to these therapists and eventually found one who understood intimate partner abuse, the phenomenon of negative bystander reactions and therapeutic victim blaming. Of course the latter therapist refused to act as a couple’s counselor because it went against her ethics to try to reconcile a victim with an abuser. Just the fact alone that this therapist understood all the above represented hope for me that the entire world didn’t necessarily reflect the perspective of abusers.

I really needed that reminder. Abuse, if anything, is a kind of “perspecticide” that destroys victims previous world view and forces victims to take on the world view and perspective of abusers (which is universally that victims “did something” to cause or deserve it and that the victim has no where to go that will be better than the abuse situation) so we need reminders that good, wise people even exist in order to move forward and rebuild our own perspectives. It was depressing and discouraging to have to go through scores of crap therapists in order to find a good one but knowledge of the therapeutic victim blaming phenomenon helped me muster through until I finally found the pony in the giant pile of horse shit. I also knew my experience was typical. Most of what we did as DV survivors advocates was help survivors “detox” from crappy therapeutic and bystander experiences, a trauma which seemed to cling longer than even the initial abuse experience. When “my turn” came to seek help, I knew what I needed and what I didn’t need. I knew that battered women are frequently falsely diagnosed with all sorts of stuff– typically things like borderline personality disorder or various attachment disorders– based on an old, debunked theory that DV victims all suffer from preexisting “psychological deficiency” that “draws” abuse to them on Voodoo tractor beams. In reality, there’s no statistical common denominator– not by background nor psychology– predicting which individuals might end up entrapped by abuse which suggests that the answer to the mystery for why abuse happens lies solely within the psychology and tactics of abusers, not victims. But what makes the false assumption easier for bad therapists to make is that, typically, a first encounter with victims happens while the victims are in a fraught state, basically like a cat that just had a near miss with a coyote. So the therapist will make the dim-witted, knee-jerk assumption that the victim must have “always been like this” rather than considering the possibility that the abuse might have been terrible enough to turn a sane and healthy person into a wild-eyed or near-catatonic mess.

That’s not to say that people with mental health issues can’t be abused but, since victims are no more likely than the general population to suffer from preexisting mental health disorders, this can’t be an automatic assumption of bystanders and therapists. I know that goes against common therapeutic claims. I’m also aware that a victims’ previous traumas can sometimes complicate or delay escape (if just because the victims’ dysfunctional families of origin tend not to be helpful). But most who make assumptions about victims’ baseline “issues” based on victims’ delayed escape from abuse aren’t considering that people who had been victimized in childhood prior to being victimized as adults might not solely suffer from “low self esteem” but *low esteem for the world* because this wasn’t their first rodeo in encountering social blaming or callous social inaction. They were likely already morally terrorized by bystander reactions and often understand too well how the context may fail them if they try to escape. And furthermore, someone with previous abuse experiences will know that they are now set apart from most other people by virtue of being saddled with a story that most don’t want to hear, that they’ve been turned into potential social pariahs merely for what was done *to* them. Escaping abuse won’t avoid that pitfall. In fact, the moment of escape is the moment the pariah status may begin. Frying pan, fire.

The bystander blame reaction– even if veiled in “I’m just trying to help you”– is part of the circular maze and trap of abuse. In DV research, the knee-jerk assumption that victims had something wrong with them to begin with is called “misapplication of contingency” and typically leads to what is called “the second injury of domestic violence”– when therapists and bystanders subject victims to blame (even partial blame) for the abuse and/or minimize the abuse and effects of abuse. Psychotraumatologists have identified the negative bystander reaction as a key factor in deepening the damaging effects of trauma. The best explanation for this I’ve read is in the chapter on DV in founding psychotraumatologist Frank M. Ochberg’s “Post-traumatic Therapy and the Victims of Violence.”

Basically, the reactions of people around you when you first reach out for help can affect how long it takes to recover or if you recover at all. The same has happened following political atrocity even when masses of people report the same experience so it suggests that knee-jerk bystander denial and victim blaming are primitive flaws in human social psychology. I think that’s where moral terror comes into play. I think anyone surviving anything human-wrought and traumatic– whether interpersonal or political– is shattered by negative bystander reactions because– on some lizard-brain, communal consciousness level– survivors develop a sneaking suspicion that bystander blame knows no bottom and begin to fear that it isn’t just their limited context that is unsafe but the world itself.

Sadly that sneaking suspicion has been illustrated over and over and is probably somewhat correct. Victim blaming knows no limits. For instance, survivors of the Argentine “Dirty War,” in which the former military dictatorship tortured and slaughtered an estimated 30,000 people in the space of 7 years in the 1970s and early 80s, reported the same bystander phenomenon. The term “Algo habrán hecho” or “They must have done something [wrong]” became the tagline to describe typical negative bystander reactions to survivors who escaped the military torture centers and tried to warn others. Bystanders at first refused to believe that the government would imprison, torture and kill completely innocent people and so invented crimes that these victims must have committed to “deserve it.” As a result, many who emerged from the atrocity sank into severe depression and, to this day, report extreme traumatic flooding when exposed to reminders of their experience (https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11036214/while-world-watched-world-cup-brings-back-memories-argentina-dirty-war). Even if the country and the international community eventually did believe survivors and prosecuted the engineers of the Dirty War, it wasn’t soon enough for many to stop the trauma from taking root in their souls. You could say the “second injury” of their traumatic experience was too acute to fully recover.

Trauma experts who write about the “second injury” have also sometimes referred to the plights of Holocaust survivors who, when they first escaped the death camps, often weren’t believed by others and were even scoffed at or cast as crazy. It represented a worst fear of camp survivors, one that many anticipated even before escape which suggests that this fear of bystander callousness is something that everyone can feel, even if subconsciously and even before they experience trauma. Holocaust survivor and historian Primo Levi described a common serial nightmare of death camp inmates: in the dreams, the prisoner had somehow escaped the camp and returned to their family and friends but when they tried to tell their loved ones what they had experienced, their loved ones wouldn’t believe them and would turn coldly away. One survivor who testified at Nuremberg referenced a story from Jewish lore in which a man of faith could withstand 81 blows from an enemy before dying. The survivor went on to say that his experience of not being believed when he first escaped Auschwitz represented the “82nd blow”– one that he could not survive. The title of the documentary “The 82nd Blow” was inspired by this survivor’s testimony and is about this phenomenon– how bystanders and even entire nations at first refused to believe what Holocaust survivors were reporting.

It’s risky to compare interpersonal abuse to political atrocity. It’s not intended to minimize the horror of death squads, etc., but to point out that negative bystander reactions are common, that those reactions have no limits in a historical sense, are an essential part of traumatic experience, are– on their own– universally traumatic to survivors of anything and represent a kind of existential crisis that many survivors end up wrangling with as if the initial trauma itself weren’t enough.

It might seem pretty excessive to argue that a bystander or therapist who throws around references to “codependency” may be awakening subconscious moral terror in survivors emerging from intimate partner abuse. But I think it’s worth consideration because the blaming view, if seen in a wider context, has always been a historical plague of the species. I think we all pick up on that particular pitfall in the social context and fear it even if the impression isn’t fully conscious. I would recommend getting far, far away from that mindset in escaping from abuse lest the view become part of the psychological trap. If, a while after escape and recovery, a survivor wants to delve in “preexisting issues” in order to polish up their lives, maybe that can be helpful but I don’t think it’s helpful as crisis triage or in coaching survivors in the midst of freeing themselves and can be counterproductive.

You get past the guilt, which is not yours to own, by getting righteously angry, and you let your rage propel you into action.
Your anger should also include the relatives who ganged up on you to get you to stay with this jerk. It’s clear you’ve been brought up to assume too much responsibility for the state of your marriage and family. Most women have been, but we don’t have to take it. To people who try this line of guilt-inducing crap on me, I like to quote a character from a film (played by Wesley Snipes); “Wrong century, motherfucker.”

You get past the hurt with time, by leaving him and limiting contact, and with therapy, which you are already doing. There’s probably going to be some residual pain for the rest of your life. But it will be bearable. It will ease, but only if you get away from the FW.

Ignore the ADHD thing. It has no relationship to his cheating. Let him flounder if he won’t help himself. He fired you from the job of holding up a weakling who can’t stand on his own two feet.

Someone probably already mentioned this, but I’ll say it anyway “I’m also working on my own issues of co-dependency and anxious attachment style. My husband has refused couples counseling.” … this sort of counselling can make you feel even worse. When you are married, “codependency” is what happens when you put others first, and this is what loving people do. As for “anxious attachment style” this is what happens when you are married to a FW. You are anxious and confused just about all of the time. One of the best books I read besides CL’s book is https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53023667-cheating-in-a-nutshell. It describes and helps you to process the physical and emotional effects of living with a cheater. I hope you will recover quickly and will be gentle with yourself. This guy has harmed you.

Hey there, Original Poster here! I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to read my story and comment on it. I have read every single one of them. The support here is amazing! Chump Lady, thank you for your response! There have been several other responses that I’ve read a few times, because they really hit home with what I need to hear.

I’m finding the holiday season to be especially difficult, and I’m sure this is a common issue for those dealing with things like this. You feel pressure to be strong for your children, but there are really just days that I want to crawl in bed and stay there all day, maybe all week. I look back on the years I’ve lost living in all of his lies and deceit, and I know that I should have gotten out a long time ago. But what matters now is that he is GONE (since Oct. 1st) and NOT COMING BACK! Because I am not going to let him. I’m not wasting any more of my life living like this! It’s time to finally show my children that this type of behavior doesn’t have to be tolerated, and that I know I am worth more. It’s going to take a long time for me to learn to trust myself and my perception of things. Decades of gaslighting really took a toll on pretty much every relationship in my life. But I know I will get there in time.

I know there will be good and bad days ahead, and hopefully the good will eventually outnumber the bad ones. I’m going to come back here often and reread this thread any time that I start to doubt myself and my choices (and that can be quite often). The validation and support here has helped me so much and will continue to as I navigate the road ahead. I’m just getting started, and I can’t wait to see what is on the other side!

Dear heart. I was a sputtering hot mess taking blame, never enough, it’s partially ME..I drove him to it…whaaaa crying and gasping. How will he live, WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF HIM LIKE I DID?? This is after D day 8 months ago! Then I went No Contact and moved out. The hopium haze, the thick fog of…but HE LOVES ME, cleared and I trusted that he sucked. I could not see that or feel that until I lawyered up either. It took white knuckling not to reply to his word salads ( he had absolutely no sorrow for me but plenty for his own sad sausage mixture.) I am Telling YOU that heroin would have been easier to kick!!! But I am now free. FREE I TELL YOU!!
I think too much emphasis is placed on another man or woman to stand in the gap and be the hero. I am counting on being my own hero until and IF someone else Is WORTHY OF ME..Ahhh.did I say that? Ms me sitting in snot & tears up to my eyelids. Yes it was me!