The affair before the BPD - so much sadness still - LONG

[Healing4Ever]

As I'm 3 months post-uBPD, I'm feeling so much relief about being out of the BPD r/s I can't even believe it!  The craziness gets more clear each day I step away from it, and the lies (or insincerity or... . ) behind the idolization are so obvious to me now.  Its hard for me to believe I invested 7 years of my life with him.  At least it wasn't more!  And I'm thankful every day that we did not have children together. 

However, as I examine what brought me into that r/s, I keep coming back to the affair my first husband had, and it's pretty obvious to me I'm still devastated by what he did.  I have cried so many tears about the loss of our family, and yet here I am, still crying.  It rocked my self-confidence to the absolute bottom - nothing hurt me more than knowing the person who had dedicated himself to loving me chose to violate that bond, repeatedly, and leave me for another woman.  For so long I just took it to mean that I'm an awful partner, horrible wife, and unloving person EVEN though I understand in my head that it was his own issues that caused him to deal with whatever his problems were by having an affair.  I'm also not sure why he did it.  He said things like "things always went your way" and "I was so miserable then" (when looking at a family picture of us from a few years back).  I was stunned by these things - it was news to me.  Which then led me to thinking "am I so utterly awful that I demand things go my way without considering other people?  Especially my husband?".  And again - the encompassing feeling of loss - I lost the nuclear family that meant the world to me, I lost my best friend (him - who clearly didn't see me that way - who knew?), I lost sharing my life with the one other person who cared as much about the kids as I did, I lost friends, I lost any shred of confidence I had, I lost the opportunity to grow financially with him (we were just finally getting out of debt and he had recently gotten a big promotion), and in the years to come, I lost the opportunity to live with my middle son (he moved to his Dad's after being bullied), I lost vacation time with the kids, etc. etc.  Through the r/s with my ex-uBPD, certainly it seems that all this grief and self-blame and belief that I am basicly a terrible person, even though I tried harder than ever to be loving and considerate kept me coming back for whatever shred of love he was willing to dole out.  And then the bad times were just proof of my own awfulness.

In healing enough to demand change from my ex-uBPD, and finding God, I have become a different person.  I see that I'm worthy of love, that being alone is less lonely than being in a terrible r/s, and finally, how sad I am because of my ex-husband's affair.  And now, looking at the affair from this new place of wavering self-confidence - I wonder if I'll ever heal.  Will this be a lonely pit of despair forever?  Has anyone here truly moved on after an affair?  What I find interesting is that many people I know who have been cheated on get angry - and I haven't done that.  Much of what I wrote above (sadness and self-loathing) are my main feelings.  But we've remained amicable since we separated - we text and talk and see each other regularly because of the kids and their events.  He appears to be happily together with the woman he cheated on me with (it's been over 7 years) and they travel and co-parent and work together at the same place - everything seems pretty idyllic from the outside.  But I haven't gotten angry - and I wonder if that is what I'm supposed to do in order to heal?

Also - not really knowing why he cheated - I have gone around and around in my head about how I may have contributed to his unhappiness.  I was soo focused on the kids - they were my life and I just assumed they were his. In reflection though, and seeing how he's living his life with his partner - I don't think that's the case.  He doesn't live his life with the kids at the center in the ways that I do - nurturing them, hanging out with them, helping them reach their goals.  (However - that being said, we are a big volleyball family, and he has thrown himself into coaching the kids' teams at a competitive level, spending 3-5 nights a week now doing this, so certainly they are still a focus, but in a different way. Also - he only started doing this as they got older - he didn't seem to relate well to hanging out with them when they were younger).  Also - my appetite for sex at the time was low.  Very low at times.  And it wasn't very satisfying for me - so that didn't help.  We could go weeks, and sometimes months in the early years of the kids life, without it.  I feel shame about this now - I wish I had dealt with that differently if I understood then what I know now about how important sex is for men especially - but it hurt and I didn't make it a priority to fix.  And I was controlling I guess - I just assumed that the kids were our priority so planned out our life that way - didn't leave much room for other options.  Any reluctance he might have shown I chalked up to tiredness or whatever - he didn't ever outright sit me down and let me know how he felt about any of this. 

Thank-you if you've made it this far through this post.  Any words of advice or understanding or wisdom or direction would be appreciated. 

H4E

[MaybeSo]

If I had my marriage to do over again, with my first and only husband (not BPD) I would have done it differently, too. But, you get nowhere beating yourself up about it.

Me and my ex husband were pretty codependent: meaning we were good at taking care of others but not so good at our own self care. This led to the demise of our relationship.

The lesson learned is how important our own emotional self care really is. We focused on others a lot, too... . operating under the belief system that couPle time and self care was a selfish luxury when you have kids and responsibilities to others.

Looking back, I see that if we took better care of our adult needs as a couple, that in doing so, we were in fact taking better care of our kids and our responsibilities. It serves everyone to have a happy, stable couPle... . and that takes some time and focus.

We were also too polite to say what needed to be said most of the time, and if we did speak up it was often way overdo or it got swept under the rug. If I had to do it over, my motto would be "forget being "nice" and be real... . including realistic.

Assigning yourself blame, though, is more of the codependent track. You do not have that much power that you are to blame for what another person does. Beating yourself up is a manifestation of self abandonment; we then find relationships that mirrors our own self abandonment in a variety of ways.

When we stop abandoning ourselves, things start to change in our relationships, too.

[Healing4Ever]

Thank-you MaybeSo,

Pointing out the self-abandonment in my thinking is very helpful.  I do feel myself slipping into old emotional ways of thinking/feeling wrt the grief that is coming up about the affair that aren't helpful for me, and I'm having a hard time figuring out which is healthy grieving and which is not.  I see that grieving the loss is healthy - trying to blame myself is not.  This is definitely a struggle for me when it comes to healing from the affair.  For whatever reason - I can see the BPD behavior of my ex as his own and not my fault - AND can see how I chose to stay and that WAS my fault - but the basic tendency of my ex-husband to lie (I saw it in many areas of his life - just never thought he would do it with me) - I seem to want to own.  I'm trying to translate the learning from my BPD r/s to this situation.  

I read on this site about the love of "soulmates" - and now I wonder if part of the issue with both of these men is that they were NOT truly soulmate type love (well - clearly not as they left!) - but I mean that they're the only partners I've known, so I have nothing else to compare to, but perhaps there is something much better waiting out there for me and all of this will come into stark contrast once I heal enough to be ready for love.  What a catch-22 - in order to get the ultimate final clarity about healing and r/s, I need to heal first.

I'm just starting to get glimmers of really hoping that such a reality may still be possible for me - I may yet find a special someone where it works out.  Where I'm healthy enough to choose wisely, love fully, and live with abandon.  Big sigh!  I'm looking forward to healing!