Zeniff

Joshpal, Interesting advice but yet very true. One other interesting item in our therapy is that our therapist has never had a situation were we both were the addicted and the betrayed. It is a strange intertwined mess that the therapist is trying to untangle. Still good that my wife and I are positive about working things out, this helps a lot. The recovery and healing are going to take longer than I expected though. I am seeing that patience and daily spiritual effort is key.

Well here is the update to this story. My wife and i both had our disciplinary councils. I was disfellowshipped which I thought I had a probable chance to be ex'd. Nevertheless, the lord showed mercy and now i am in the healing process. I am meeting 1x per month with the Bishop & Stake President and going to marriage counseling every week. The pain of learning of the affair is still there after 3 months but I am starting to come off of the emotional roller coaster and dealing with PTSD. They say the pain is sometimes worse than losing a loved one and I agree (It's devastating and that cannot be under stated). As for my wife, she was excommunicated. I am very sad for her and us. This should never had progressed this far but yet here we are. Not sure what to expect with the next year for her and me but she will need to be re-baptized if she desires to come back. I think she does. I also think her judgement was worse because I decided to repent and she did not at first. I am very worried about her since I still care and love her. Now we need to find forgiveness for each other and start to rebuild from the ashes. I hoping our journey will make us better people and better members of the church. Time will tell.

Thanks for all the support and suggestions so far as it has been overwhelmingly positive for me. I thought I was going to be a punching bag which I deserve but I know there are good people that truly want to help.

Thanks for all the support and suggestions so far as it has been overwhelmingly positive for me. I thought I was going to be a punching bag which I deserve but I know there are good people that truly want to help.

My wife and I were good active Mormons having a great life. Eventually life took its toll. I lost 4 jobs in the space of 5 years. We moved into a ward that didn't care for our family or several high school age children. We could not meet our needs and were falling 15K into the hole every year. I am now headed for bankruptcy, and foreclosure. Our life in the bedroom was pathetic no passion no nothing. This was mostly because I had major knee surgery on both knees and it completely hampered sexual activity. All praying seamed to not help anything. On top of that both of our fathers and my wife's best friend died. All within a relatively short time. At the brink of filing for bankruptcy a recruiter called me for a job that would pay 2x what I was making and it would have basically save us from financial ruin. I had a priesthood blessing and the whole family prayed for me to get it, how could I fail. I nailed every interview and had great discussions and now it was close for the final decision. What I received devastated me with a cold email back saying sorry but we have decided to go with another candidate. Nearly immediately after the email, my current employer asked me to go overseas to work with some clients which was completely out of the blue which I had never done. I was to travel for over 1 month. Of course when i was there I was surrounded by sexual temptations as I was put in a hotel in the heart of this activity. So I went out and had a massage, nothing sexual but near erotic and they offered many other services which I said no. I called my wife and told what I had done and it didn't bother her at all!. Instead she was aroused by it and told me to go again and try those other services and find some passion. I struggled with this and eventually with her basically giving me a hall pass, I went. You can pretty much image what happened next. I committed adultery many times. With each time telling my wife the details and thinking she was living vicariously thru me. I have never done anything like this in my life but the passion and energy I could feel was unstoppable and thoroughly enjoyable. My spirit and guilt never showed up. As it turns out near the time I was to return home. My wife told me before I started to sin that she went to a bar picked a guy and had sex! She explained that it was the best sex she had in a long time. It didn't hurt me at the time because I had the same thing. Keep in mind that nothing like this ever took place in our lives before the previous month. This explains her trying to entice me to do wrong from the first call we had about this. It was almost like eve tasted the apple and now she wanted Adam to partake because of Satan's enticing's. Basically all the recent life experiences we had had up to this point broke and beat us down where we didn't care anymore. Eat, drink, and be merry right!. Oh yeah and my wife took up drinking alcohol too. When I got back I told her we need to repent of our ways and focus on fixing us regardless of how hard our life is. Well, we never repented, instead we added watching porn in the bedroom to supplement. That eventually only helped me. I enjoyed it and it restored some passion but for her not as much. This dragged on for 5 months which I got addicted to. My work then advised we need you to go back for another month. I said to myself, well here I go again, and my wife was telling me to go enjoy myself how ever I wanted, hall pass number #2. So As you can expect I had sex, well I should say paid for sex and each time telling my wife details since she liked it. I kept asking her if she was cheating on me too and she never said she was. When I got back we hugged each other, appeared to really miss each other, and I said this time we need to repent. She advised you can but I am not ready yet. So I said I can't unless we both go together so we never went. We stopped going to church to mostly not take the sacrament, but nobody in the ward really cared we were gone anyway. By this point she was going to happy hour every week. Fast forward 4 months and I am getting very suspicious of her and the way she is acting. I even told her I don't recognize you anymore. She said she had lost all feeling and didn't really care about anything. She did still say she loved me very much and would never cheat on me. On a couple of occasions I felt a burning sensation that she was cheating on me. Like the holy ghost or something was prompting me that she was cheating or too find out. I confronted her several times but she always denied it. Then one night i basically had a revelation or something that there was no doubt she was having an affair. I then confronted her and she broke down and told me that she met the same guy 2X while I was oversees and had sex. I felt relieved but not hurt since she said she broke off the affair when I came home. Well It gets worse. My promptings/intuition came back and I felt something still wasn't right. So I went to happy hour where she says she is and I wait. Sure enough as I expected, she comes out of happy hour and gets into another vehicle. The vehicle drives to a nearby empty lot and i follow. I wait 30 minutes and I can't take it anymore. So I walk up to the vehicle. The lights turn on and it peels out. Eventually the guy drops her off somewhere and she calls me to pick her up. Ugggggh!!! As you can expect I lose it and now I feel hurt, pain, betrayal. Lots of tears, a hard time sleeping, and going back to work. I thought her affair was over as mine surely was when I came home and I wanted to fix things. I love her deeply and she has committed to ending the affair after that night I caught her. In all honesty I think she really wants to this time. She has committed to stop happy hours too. I think she really loves me deep down for the 20+ years of marriage but its hard to tell exactly. She has been really nice to me and telling me shes sorry but still has no emotions and shows no remorse (IMO). She says something is biologically wrong with her and needs help from all the pain of life, finances, deaths, and lack of marital passion. I am a wreck because she was having a continued affair (10 months), she lied many times when we were together while I was being honest. Yet in the back of my mind I cheated too so why should I judge. She still doesn't hold that against me. So from here, we just started meeting with the bishop and soon the stake president and therapist. We need a lot of help. I am wondering if I should stay with her or leave. I think I should stay because I do love her but I know I would rather not be alone too. We are both messed up but the pain of her lying and the images I have catching her in the act are too great right now. I know to be Christlike I should stay and work it out but that is only if we are true and dedicated to each other from here on. Advice? be gentle....