SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I get why my answer feels unsatisfying. From the outside, it looks like someone must have been getting something meaningful out of the lie, otherwise why do it? And yes, there were moments that felt good in the moment. The ego strokes, the validation, the intensity. But those weren’t signs of happiness. They were hits, not fulfillment. They were reactions, not connection.

Survival from what?

The threat wasn’t external. It wasn’t my partner. It wasn’t consequences. It was my own internal world. I didn’t have the skills to regulate shame, fear, conflict, or discomfort. I didn’t have the ability to sit with myself honestly. So the "survival" was from facing who I actually was. The mask wasn’t protecting me from my partner. It was protecting me from myself.

That’s why compartmentalization feels so alien from the outside. You’re imagining someone consciously turning off their brain to enjoy the lie. But the truth is simpler and more disturbing, you don’t think about it because you don’t have the internal architecture to tolerate thinking about it. It’s not a calculated detachment. It’s an underdeveloped one.

It’s not a calculated detachment. It’s an underdeveloped one.

Yes!

And yes on not ever letting yourself be seen and therefore all the love landing on the mask.

I just needed to chime in because I have a hard time articulating things this boiled down. I can describe it with a lot of works but you get to the heart of it.

I don’t think my issue was completely not letting myself be vulnerable, some of mine was not knowing who I am or what I want and therefore hiding and trying to be more interesting. I realize that’s vulnerability but I do think if I felt more developed or secure in who I was vulnerability would not have been so hard.

Great posts.

AnxiousAvoidant

I wasn’t having exactly an exit affair, but before and during the A, I wasn’t much invested (emotionally) in the M anymore (and not because of the AP). When I married, I thought it would be forever, but in that period I wasn’t sure anymore and I felt "done putting any effort".

Like your WS, I also thought my BS wouldn’t care much if I had something going on - when I asked him to open the relationship, I was shocked that he was so adverse to it. I thought he’d be fine with it, or at worse it would be just a "no", but no drama / emotions.

Anyway, despite all of this, I always, always, thought my husband was the best as a man. It’s just I didn’t feel him invested in me / I felt very lonely, hence I sort of "checked-out".

So it was never about him being the "second best". I always said he was a great person, dad, intelligent etc.. when I detached from him, it was more about how I was feeling in M and around him, than him as a person.

I don’t know if this helps!

[This message edited by LonelyGuilty at 10:40 AM, Thursday, July 2nd]

100% agree with foreverlabeled. Thank you for writing that out, it is so incredibly helpful, even years later, to find the words to describe my experience. FL, I know what brought you back here was unpleasant and uncomfortable and I hope you are feeling more settled and resolved - but there are wonderful things happening from your participation!

GotTheMorbs

Thanks for taking the time to share. Insightful for me.

[This message edited by Flatlined at 8:51 PM, Friday, July 3rd]

FL, I know what brought you back here was unpleasant and uncomfortable and I hope you are feeling more settled and resolved - but there are wonderful things happening from your participation!

hiya Pip! Thank you for your kind words. Much improved and getting better.

Truly grateful to be helpful 🙏🏻

I'm glad it was useful! anytime.

WS only, or BS with question(s) for WSes.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:23 PM, Thursday, July 9th]

What was the thing that tipped the scale when you started to check in more with your BS?

Do you have some memory or measure of what was happening inside you when you moved from avoidance and shame for your betrayal, into actually coming around and initiating "those talks" with your partner without them being the ones who have to bring it up first?

How did it feel? Was it timidly at first and gradually easier? Was it forced and unnatural?

What did you feel after? What was the impact on your BS?
Does it get easier or is something that makes you want to get off your chest and escape from asap?

[This message edited by BackfromtheStorm at 9:58 AM, Thursday, July 16th]

Hi BtfS,

For me it was literally this community.
I read somewhere here the importance of "checking in" or raising the matter first, so that it wasn’t always on the BS.

I wanted (and want) to fix things and reconcile so I started doing the same (and I tried to do everything I was reading on here that was helpful for recovering)

It didn’t come natural at all (I could spend many words on why, also in relation to upbringing, not just shame). I was "forcing" myself at first, like following a script. It became more natural as I kept doing it.

I guess it felt like going out from a "comfort zone" into a "war zone".

Other things were more difficult though (this to say that even if I get something right, there would be something else where I am / was failing - e.g. I kept trickle truthing)

Unfortunately, I can’t talk for my BS.

It was terrifying and completely unnatural in the beginning. The idea of bringing it up myself felt wrong. I kept thinking that mentioning it would only make things worse or drag him back into pain he was wrestling with. But I quickly learned he was already thinking about it constantly. Day and night. My silence wasn't going to protect him.

There was a moment that tipped things for me. Full disclosure. Once everything was out in the open, I found a kind of courage I didn’t have before. Facing it head on felt less awful and also freeing. I remember thinking nothing could be worse than hiding, so I might as well step out of the shadows.

How I felt afterward depended on the conversation. I never regretted checking in, but sometimes he got angry or sad, and seeing the pain I caused was incredibly hard. Those moments were heavy. Other times, it brought us closer or gave him a little relief. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t tidy.

Over time, it did get easier. Not because the topic became comfortable, but because avoiding it felt worse. Checking in became something I did because it mattered to him, and because it was part of showing up instead of disappearing.

Unfortunately, there came a time where he didn't want to talk about it anymore, and rugsweeping became easier and easier for him. I then learned not talking doesn’t make it disappear. It just changes the shape of the damage.

What was the thing that tipped the scale when you started to check in more with your BS?

There was a point where I understood that the truth was critical to my wellbeing, and I began to cling to it. It was fundamentally a selfish decision born of desperation - I am not a suicidal or depressive person in general, but I didn't want to continue in the life I had. I didn't want to wake up in the morning, the days dragged on, and I had no hope nor even desire for anything, and I couldn't find another way out. A friend on SI wrote about truth in a way that gave me hope. At first, I was focused on myself - the truth of how to came to be in the place in life where I found myself - and then it expanded to truths of all sorts, including the truth of my husband's experience and what he needed. I started checking in very frequently, of course with pauses to process and regroup. There were times that I wanted to talk about it more than he did. The times I did not want to talk to him about it were because I thought he was stuck on a wrong path, and then I got a marriage counselor to help us, not because I didn't want to talk, but because the talking was not helping.

Do you have some memory or measure of what was happening inside you when you moved from avoidance and shame for your betrayal, into actually coming around and initiating "those talks" with your partner without them being the ones who have to bring it up first?

I have a specific memory. A few months after I came completely clean, I found my husband's wedding ring on a desk where he left it while he was working out (there was nothing intended symbolically about him taking it off, he did it to avoid hurting his fingers while working out with weights). The cat looked like he was going to bat the ring off of the desk, so I took it and put it on the wristband of my watch, which is what I do with my rings when I take them off to work out, and then I forgot about it. A few hours later, my husband approached me, full of negative emotion, and asked if I did something with his ring. I reflexively said, "the cat knocked it off the desk so I was looking after it." Then I felt like shit for several hours. If I couldn't be truthful about something so small, so insignificant as to whether the cat looked like he was going to bat it off the desk or did bat it off the desk, how could I be trusted with important things? I knew (thought I knew) that he was at the end of his rope, that one more mistake and I was doomed (this was, in part, from the voracious SI reading I was doing at the time). I confessed, expecting the worst. He was incredibly kind and compassionate. He said that he knew the emotional environment I grew up in (we have known each other since we were very young) and which still exists in my FOO, that lying was a reflex to protect myself, and that it would take a while to undo those patterns. The reversal of how I expected him to respond, to how he actually responded, was incredibly strengthening. I felt very safe with him.

How did it feel? Was it timidly at first and gradually easier? Was it forced and unnatural? What did you feel after? What was the impact on your BS? Does it get easier or is something that makes you want to get off your chest and escape from asap?

There were so many different kinds of conversations, ones where he realized something he needed to change, where I realized something was so much worse than I had thought. I often felt both terrible and hopeful. What became easier was the belief (based on an ever increasing accumulation of evidence) that the other side was good, not always comfortable, not always easy, often gut wrenching, but always better. Sometimes the better took a while to arrive but I learned to tolerate the discomfort and be patient.

On SI, people often talk about how WS broke their wedding vows.

My WH actually proposed to me just a few months after his affair started. Completely of his own accord. I never pressured him or anything. In fact, the proposal came as a total surprise to me. We got married later that same year, all while the affair was still going on behind the scenes.

So he stood there at the altar, made vows to me, and those vows were a lie from the very beginning. The sheer enormity of that still haunts me, even more than a year after D-Day.

He explains it by saying it was compartmentalization.

Is there any WS here who did something similar? What was going through your mind? What were your reasons?

Oh gosh. I just realized I was trying to conceive during a couple of my instances of infidelity

I think during that time, I was just obsessed with trying to get pregnant and wanting to have a baby, whether my husband and I were in a good place with our relationship and family or not. My hormones were going crazy with the baby fever, and I was frustrated by a lengthy battle with infertility in my early 20s. I felt robbed of my womanhood...I didn't know how important it was to have everything stable and sorted out before bringing an infant into the mix, as I had never gotten too far into a pregnancy or had a baby before. Naively, I thought everything would be fine, that we could just sort things out as we went, most of it in the 40 weeks I was expecting (though I carried to 42, and while it felt like FOREVER, that definitely wasn't enough time to fix our whole life!) I thought I knew everything then... So stupid.

One of my whys is abandonment issues. A common theme for my instances of infidelity was that they often happened when I felt far away and disconnected from my husband and our relationship, and I worried we were on the verge of breaking up. Instead of dealing with the problems or confronting that fear, I skipped to trying to convince myself that I would be okay even if that happened, that I could just move on without even needing to process the heartache of losing my LT partner and my chance at motherhood with the person I wanted to father my child(ren.) At the same time, the baby fever persisted, and I didn't want to lose any time just in case our relationship did survive the rough patch. And some part of me thought that if I did ever conceive, then I would re-commit to fidelity... partly because it's supposed to be a sacred time where you're sharing your body with your developing child and literally building a family, and partly... because who wants to fuck a woman who's pregnant with someone else's baby outside of intentional and mutually agreed upon surrogacy? (Weirdos and sickos, that's who.)

At one point after Covid hit and the surgery I had scheduled to fix my infertility got cancelled, my H and I decided to temporarily stop TTC, as the world seemed just as unstable as our relationship. Three months afterwards, I conceived naturally without the surgery. From about a month prior to that first positive test to about 5 years afterwards was the longest period of fidelity I had in our relationship. We got married when I was about 4-5 months along.

Certainly compartmentalization was part of it. An expectation that things would be better going forward and the assumption that I would be more faithful to the relationship after such a serious commitment were other parts of it.

This might be a little off the mark because it is a place for Marriage related infidelity so I am not sure it's even something anyone is familiar with. But few exchanges made me wonder.

Do you see a difference if the infidelity happened before the Marriage and the Wayward still got to marry the betrayed partner later on?

Does it feel somewhat excusable or less important if there were not marital vows yet in place when the partner was betrayed?

SI is for people wanting to survive and thrive after infidelity. Marriage is not a requirement.

7m46s:

WH here. My wife has spent an extensive amount of time in therapy and in discussions with me (and chatgpt) trying to understand compartmentalization as it is so foreign to how she thinks and operates. I was able to live a separate life and can honestly say that in real time my brain would keep those worlds such that they never overlapped. I would never think about the consequences or impact of my choices when I was with the AP and honestly never really thought about the AP when I was not with her. In my IC I have come to believe that the guilt and shame from what I was doing would have triggered a mental break had my brain not kept everything in their own compartment. I say that knowing how difficult trying to process this years after the fact as I have been close to a complete breakdown a few times and the affair was 20 years ago.

My wife better understands how I learned to compartmentalize due to FOO / childhood trauma and how that wiring was reinforced throughout our marriage (including during the affair). For the first five years after the affair ended I honestly did not think about it at all. Gradually the guilt and shame started to break down the walls and I would periodically spiral. My wife knew I was in a dark place when I would spiral, but actually worried she was the root cause, which is just another layer of the hurt I caused. After a spiral I would compartmentalize again until the next episode. Eventually the walls in my brain completely crumbled and I had to disclose to start working through the mess I had created.

Long way to answer that unless compartmentalizing is part of your DNA you will likely have difficulty understanding how those of us who have used it for years can operate as normal in situations that would trigger a massive issue in a "normal" brain.