SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hello to all :)

I am a year out from Dday and I have become a serious sleuth. I never knew how good of a sleuth I could be, lol. Unfortunately,as a result,I have found hotel receipts and emails that prove there were more affairs throughout our 26 years of marriage. In addition, lies about tax filings. So many old emails I found, when he was out of town, I was asking when are you coming back no replies no phone calls. Lied about being in one city but he was at a hotel in a different one.

I feel bad for going through his computer, I never thought of looking prior to the affair. I trusted him with my life, never questioned anything. I guess I was naive, I realize now the signs have been there all along.

At what point is it not okay? We are trying to reconcile but every bit of new evidence I find makes me want to follow through with a divorce. I am torturing myself and I have been tortured enough. I was taking care of his mother at the time, she lived with us for four years while he was going to see his AP. Our daughter has some special needs so I felt like I was drowning between the two of them to begin with! What he did over the last year was awful and I still do not feel like he is truly remorseful.He is changing and I see his actions but he really thought we could just start over and ignore.

We see a counselor but it is not consistent and I do not feel the counselor really gets infedility. So my next question is,should I get individual first? We cannot afford both. I blame myself so much for past spending, poor parenting, etc ...when really I was trying to be the best wife and mother I could be. So much venting I need to do but I am sure I am driving friends and family insane. They have all been so supportive but I think I over shared with my family and wish I had not. Uggh, I am a serious mess, trying to find a job after 18 years too.This has been the most difficult thing I have ever dealt with in my 55 years of life.

I appreciate any input or even just listening. I am so
happy and relieved to have found this site.

It is definitely not wrong when someone has given you every reason to need to sleuth. You NEED all the information in order to make an informed decision about your path forward whichever path that might be.

Except for finding out about an affair it sounds like there has never been a full disclosure. My understanding is there are steps to take before reconciliation for YOURwell being and full accountability , a full therapeutic disclosure , empathy and understanding betrayal trauma are just part of it. Your sleuthing because your brain is trying to create safety and you do t know what is real.

Just realized this is your first post

So let me say I’m so sorry you find yourself here. . Please go to "just found out " and read the pinned posts about what how navigate. Take good care of yourself.

Thank you both for reaching out, I needed to hear those exact words. Life has been moving along so fast, in the process of finding out we had to be out of a rental because the lease was up. My daughter and I had no place to go because he had sort of just let his business go. He was supposed to take his mom with him and take care of her.However a hurricane slammed into the West Coast during that time, and he had decided instead of helping us move, he would go help AP prep her house for the hurricane. Well it wiped out her house And his car flooded out. I have felt the only reason he came back was because I had a car to drive and a hotel room along with our daughter and his mom. Otherwise, if that storm had not hit,I honestly think he would have bailed out on us to go live with her.
He said he just thought the grass was greener on the other side. He stopped seeing her and blocked all of her calls as far as I know. Apparently he has thought the grass is greener many other times... Yes, I need full disclosure

Thank you again! SatYaMom, I'll check out the other posts too :)

I am sorry...should I be posting on the just found out thread? Maybe I should copy and paste, this is like a novel now!

This sounds like a rough situation.

I would absolutely insist on full disclosure backed up by a lie detector test. You need to know the full truth - or as much of it as you can get, and you need to know it's accurate.

Then once you have the full picture you can make an informed decision on if you want to try and reconcile or divorce.

Posting here is fine and doesn't violate a guideline. I will refer you to some of the posts that are pinned to the top of the JFO (Just Found Out) forum because they are very helpful. The JFO forum also has some posts that aren't pinned but are helpful, and you can find those by looking for the bull's eye icon. The Healing Library is at the top of the site and has a lot of great information.

If you can, IC (individual counseling) with a betrayal trauma specialist may be helpful. You have trauma upon trauma, so you have some serious issues to work through. Not only do you have the infidelity, but you have the abusive lies that provided you with an alternative reality that you had to live through.

Have you consulted an attorney or 2 or 3 to see what your options are if you D (divorced)?

If your WH (wayward husband) isn't able to do the hard work to change into a safe partner, do you really want to continue to have to sleuth your way through life? If you live to be 75-85, is this how you want to live the next 20-30 years, if not more?

Sleuthing isn't wrong when it impacts your life so much. Maybe you should become a PI or forensic accountant? LOL. There are some professions where digging for dirt is an asset. Don't sell yourself short. You are worthy of love and respect.

I am so sorry for you.

And I don’t think you have done anything wrong especially in light of what you have recently learned about ALL the lies (including financial infidelity that affects you).

Please put yourself first. Get the counseling you need.

Continue to post here so we can support you.

We truly understand your pain.

Youve been put in a tiny box. Your world was manufactured around you to make you controllable, smaller, and to protect someone else from the natural consequences of their behavior. A remarkably unfair and broken situation has been foisted on you.

Looking outside of the box for yourself isnt wrong. Being made to feel bad for taking an honest look at your actual reality is a slave shackle, throw that shit off. Empower yourself to whatever extent your heart needs answers. But the answers you find are going to hurt you. You have to determine which side of the scale is heavier. Have faith in your innards and listen to them. Every time I thought something wasnt right, it wasnt. It wasnt always as bad as I thought, and sometimes it was way way worse. But I was lead in the correct direction by those needling feelings everytime, even when it seemed insane. Eventually, I understood, and the urge faded.

Be honest with yourself about it turning into obsession. It can break your brain, make you sick, and eat up your life and energy. Then your life becomes about your spouses dirty deeds, their lies, their cruelty. Thats about the worst possible outcome, losing yourself as a person to someone elses proclivities and lies. Its your one wild, beautiful life. You cant be a happy person if your life’s purpose becomes you finding out how you were betrayed.
But dont let someone else determine what you get to know either. That also cannot lead to happiness.

Thank you all, each of you write so well and touched on all of my concerns. I am very grateful,to have found people that want to reach out and help.❤️

I actually filed for D in September and it is still open. We are currently living together getting counseling off and on. He had no money to cover two places,and his mom was put into a nursing home.( His profession can bring money in, he just stopped) He stopped paying my car insurance and never told me until I figured it out, four months driving without. I have been too scared to pull the trigger. I learned (on my own) that I have an anxious attachment style, I fear being alone even if I am miserable. I am in constant fight or flight mode as it is. My family has questioned the very thought Leafields mentioned which is what will life be like with him 20 years from now. If he is going down do I really want to go down with him? And do I want my daughter to have this kind of role model?

He is an alcoholic, still won't admit it. He was so verbally abusive to my daughter and I over the last year, that alone was grounds for divorce and I was actually defending him trying to have my 18yr old daughter see him in a different light, too scared he would get angry if I took her side. She does not know about his affair. However,he hasn't had a drink for six months now, I am very happy for him. I thought it would make everything better, if anything it has put a halt to all the verbal garbage. I can't let go of the feeling that I caused this but we both wanted a nice lifestyle. He knew everything I spent, he paid all of our bills. Is spending too much considered financial infedility or is it only when spending is kept a secret? Not filing taxes and not telling me would be, correct? We file jointly.

I do believe I have become obsessive about sleuthing. After Dday I thought maybe I could overlook what he did and thought I could probably work through one affair because I knew the areas our marriage needed work on. However, a few months later his AP texted me to tell me how sorry she was and how she was not at all okay with what had happened. They had been friends for a while, I had never met her. She went on to say they met through a mutual friend of hers who he had been with many years ago. She said there were others as well and she felt like it wasn't fair for me to not know.I was so tempted to call but decided not to give her the satisfaction.

So, if I could find the proof of more then in my mind the marriage is based on lies and unrepairable. What is worse is my father was gifting us and then loaning money for his business. He was going to him and asking, they were friends. I was able to correlate the emails he wrote to my father while he was at a hotel with another woman long before this past AP!! Here he was spending 1k maybe more on a hotel room for a few days every month and then he is asking my family for money. How much more disrespectful can one be?

Okay, I am feeling nauseous..writing that out just kills me. I believe I need to follow through with D. I am so scared of the process and I doubt myself and think maybe all of this is excused because of the amount of stress we had. What is wrong with me?? I could still go on about more so what is my problem?

I promise my next response will not be this long!!
Thanks to everyone again.

I do believe I have become obsessive about sleuthing.

You are not alone. Many of us do it. We are just searching so hard to make sense out of what was going on, what was going on right under our noses without us knowing it.

For some of us, it's like we need to find all of these facts to help us not feel so crazy.

For some of us, I think we think that if we can just find "enough" proof, we'll know what to do even though we don't want to do it. If I find just one more thing, I'll be able to file for divorce or leave or whatever.

We just have to know what the draw was that took him right out from under us. It's like we just can't believe it until we find all of that info.

For some of us, it's busy work. It's like if we can find the facts, then we can deal with our feelings. Our feelings are all over the place when we've just found out or even still months later when we're still coming to grips with finding out. The sleuthing just seems to be something we can focus on when we can't focus on anything else.

At first, it was probably a trauma response by your brain. You're in the fight, flight or freeze mode and your brain is trying to determine if you're still in danger. Unfortunately, our brains don't know the difference between betrayal trauma's danger and being chased down to be eaten by a cheetah.

What can happen is that the excessive searching can create a neural pathway in your brain, and your brain just naturally picks that path. There are some games that can help you get your brain re-wired. The searching games where you find the hidden objects, or the matching ones like Candy Crush have been shown to help.

Only being a year out from dday is still fairly early, and any time you found out something new, it resets the clock.

You do IC first to heal you and he does IC to heal him. Then, MC may help you to work on your relationship. There are a lot of MCs out there that don't handle infidelity well and actually end up shifting some of the blame to you.

I’m glad you found this site despite the terrible situation that brought you here.

Lots of great advice from the other posters, and one additional suggestion. If I’m reading your story correctly, you file taxes jointly with your husband, and he has been underreporting income or misstating something in your filings. If you signed those tax returns, which you would have for a joint filing, then you’ll want to inform your divorce attorney if you haven’t already. There are situations where the IRS provides ‘innocent spouse’ treatment and separation of liability for divorced spouses.

As you navigate your next steps, you’ll want to avoid getting dragged into your husband’s tax situation in the middle of everything else, and your attorney can advise you. Good luck!

Thank you all ♥️ Arnold- it will be a slap in the face if I finally get a job after 18 years and then have my wages garnished. I hope there are some negotiations to be had...thank you for reaching out!

I promise my next response will not be this long!!

Don't you even worry about that! I've found typing things out to be very therapeutic. You have a group of people here who will read everything you have to say, and give you a sympathetic ear along with some valuable feedback. These situations, while most tend to follow a general pattern, are often complex and take more than a paragraph or 2 to explain. So... type away! Get it all out. It'll help you to really take a closer examination of your situation.

I'm not one for giving much in the way of advice here, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I've read your husband doesn't sound like he's feeling any remorse for what he's put you through and may be flirting with abusive behavior even minus the affair(s). I don't think you can continue this way and be happy at the same time. Maybe he can change, but you can't make him change. He has to want to, and at this point it doesn't sound like he's willing to put the necessary effort into it.

I'm so sorry you've found yourself here. This is one club that no one wants to be a part of, but if you find yourself here there are some really good folks who can help you through this.