Infidelity Stories
The following reflections were written by a few of our betrayed clients. We share them in the hope that they resonate with where you are at, help you feel "normal", and give you hope for the future you want.
"Let Me Off This Rollercoaster!"
Waking up at 4am after 2 hours of sleep.
Opening my eyes and for a split second feeling nothing until that awful twisted gut wrenching feeling in the pit of my stomach hits.
So begins yet another day of unbelievable pain, heartache, disbelief, anger, sadness and numbness.
He sleeps beside me like a baby without a care in the world. How can he sleep? He doesn’t feel anything for me or about what he’s done.
My gut wrenching feeling begins to change to raw anger and hatred. I get out of bed in the cold and dark. Another day begins feeling so angry, hateful and completely lost.
Sitting in the kitchen alone, yet again, wondering - What have I done to deserve this? I did everything to make his life good, to be a good wife, raise the family, go out to work. I did all that for us and this is how he repays me. Over and over again the thoughts go through my head. It’s like chewing gum in my head - how could he??!! I would never do that to him, I know I wouldn’t because I love him. He clearly hates me.
Then the comparisons begin. She’s slimmer than me, younger, more exciting. Well she’s welcome to him. I hope they’re happy together. I’m not putting up with this. I’m off.
He wonders into the kitchen hours later and just grunts at me keeping a safe physical distance from me. Makes himself a drink, no offer to me and wonders out again.
I burst into tears and think again - what have I done?why does he hate me so much? What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped and scared.
Then panic sets in. What happens if people find out. What will they think? What will I say? They’ll judge me for staying and him for having an affair.
What am I going to do if he says it’s over, he wants to stay with his affair partner? The pain is just too much and overwhelm hits. The tears really flow and the sick feeling in my stomach begins. My head is throbbing and my heart is thumping. I’m literally crawling around the kitchen hanging onto the work surface in so much pain and panic.
It passes eventually and I begin to wonder around the house aimlessly, sadness and anger fighting for space in my breaking heart. I literally don’t know what to do. I have no interest in anything.
I feel nothing but hatred for my husband but I can’t do anything without him. I seem to be totally reliant on him craving his attention. He’s locked himself away in his office and I hang around outside, waiting and hoping he’ll come out and throw me a morsel of attention, love, affection, just show me it’s not over and that he cares.
He doesn’t come out and anger takes over and I storm in to confront him. I’ve boiled over and now I’m screaming at him. Saying things I know will hurt. He’s hurt me why shouldn’t I hurt him. Saying things I know will get a reaction. They do and it’s not the reaction I want.
He walks out of the house and is gone for hours. Now my mind is running riot. Is he in contact with her. I hate him, how could he. I’m done, I’m telling him to leave when he gets back.
When he comes back I ask him why he did it. What was so good about her compared to me. He says he doesn’t know but it didn’t mean anything and I needed to move on.
Weeks of this ritual passed as we drove each other further into the ground. Communication got less and less and more and more vitriolic.
I wanted to get back to what we had. To make it all stop. To make him forget her. I starting over compensating, doing things I knew he liked. If he’d liked her so much I’d emulate her. I did and nothing changed. Even more hurt and upset for me. What did I have to do?
Eventually I decided to Google ‘how to get over an affair’ and found Pete & Nikki.
Thank heavens I did!
Carla S. (Anonymity preserved)
"I imagined how excited he must have felt touching her!"
The distance between us started about a year after my daughter ( not his daughter) and her 2 kids moved back with us due to the end of her marriage due to infidelity.
At first he was caring and sympathetic toward her but as the months passed he grew more and more distant.
At the same time he was collaborating with a woman on a book. It was long distance as she lived 2000 miles away.
The unfolding of the situation came in small doses. Soon he started to be extremely argumentative, picking fights, withdrawing and spending more and more time “ writing” with her behind a door that now stayed closed.
One day he said he was leaving to give us some time apart. I actually thought it was a good idea as the tension in the house was tangible. He moved out. We barely spoke, there were many cruel texts on both sides and in three weeks he told me he was moving to Colorado to finish the book with her. She was half his age, the same age as both our daughters and I never suspected anything of an intimate relationship.
There were so many lies and I completely fell for them all. It wasn’t for another month that all the truth was out. I felt such a fool to be so naive.
I was journaling during that time and my pain is there is black and white to reflect on.
My first response was anger and I threw my tea mug across the room. My second response was to immediately vomit. My third response was the one that lasted for months, like I had been sucker punched and couldn’t breathe… I was completely immobilized with despair. I was consumed with images i fabricated of him touching her body that was half my age. I looked at my face in the mirror and only saw the wrinkles compared to her flawless skin, her perky breasts and buttocks compared to mine that were sagging. I imagined how excited he must have felt touching her.
I wrote that my heart had been laid wide open and my life’s blood had spilled out onto the floor. I was looking at myself as someone separate from me… I saw that person who was once so full of life was dying.
I couldn’t sleep. I had a constant knot in my stomach and tears were always there waiting to spill over. I still had his pillow on my bed and I would lie there at night smelling him. I felt completely alone, listless and broken, reduced to a shell of who I once had been.
Eventually we talked and he agreed to seek help. I see it now as Divine Intervention that the first thing we discovered was this website. The journey we have been on since has been incredible and I'm actually glad the infidelity happened because of what we now have together.
Belinda R. ( Anonymity preserved)
"I remember the anger and ego inside of me just raging!"
I remember the feeling of disbelief, that immediately turned into anger.
I remember everything she was saying just felt like lies, on top of lies.
I remember the anger and ego inside of me just raging. I wanted to destroy the house we just finished, because I knew she loved it.
I wanted my kids to know what a piece of crap she was, since she always portrayed me as the bad parent and her the never do anything wrong parent. Our kids are older, if they were younger, I know I would have protected them from this. However, telling my kids ultimately turned out to be monumental in where we are today, but that’s for a different story.
My anger and ego then focused on the AP. The confrontation in front of his house, with his wife trying to help him all felt so good at the time. In the long run, that turned out to be a huge regret for so many reasons.
So many nights of drinking and not sleeping just made things worse.
I just resolved myself to the fact, that everything in my life was ruined and it was all her fault.
My true feelings of still loving her and wanting to stay, didn’t happen until my search for a lawyer started.
I just started replaying her saying, from day one, that she made a huge mistake and wanted us to work it out. That she never wanted a divorce.
Wow…I have made huge progress! Not even a glimpse of a trigger reliving this. Actually feeling proud and really good about what we accomplished. Thanks so much Pete. This work has been life changing for both of us.😊
Mark B. (Anonymity protected)
"To say that I was shocked would be an understatement!"
In August, 2 years ago, I picked up my wife's cellphone and saw an whatsapp between a family friend and her which made it very clear that they were having an affair which had started some 3 months before.
To say that I was shocked would not be an understatement. I was hurt, damaged, emotionally shattered and broken. Completely.
I did not feel anger, which I saw in subsequent posts was common, but, as I discovered in ongoing research, no two people react in the same way. So there is no right or wrong way to react - it is YOU!
I challenged her, and all was admitted. We discussed options all day - she told me she loved him, but also me, and did not know what to do.
At midnight she went to sleep, I lay in bed with mind in a turmoil and internal pain (emotional), getting up and sitting alone downstairs trying to work out what to do next. Was a 36 year marriage over?
Eventually went up to bed, slept 1.5 hours...
Later that morning she told me she decided to stay with me and try to restore our marriage. A lot of pain lifted....
Discussed how to go from there. She was afraid I would not be able to forgive her, but I promised I would do my best.
I started to research affair recovery on Google, and found SO MANY articles. This just confused, as so many conflicting views appeared.
The major conflict was that of contact with the AP. All articles stressed the necessity of totally breaking ALL contract with the other party. She wanted to stay in contact with him "as a friend"! She seemed oblivious to the threat and pain this caused to me, but in the end she reluctantly agreed to break off contact, and agreed I could block him on all e-contacts. This eased matters somewhat.
I spent 6 weeks with emotions switching between pain and anguish to hope and uplifting feelings.
Searched so many sites and articles on recovery, passed them on to her, but all seemed to offer so many conflicting views, became more confused than anything else.
Then, in the search, I came across Pete Uglow's website. It really grabbed me, talked to me... My wife agreed, and we made contact, and had the one hour clarity call.
And, for the first time, there seemed to be a realistic lifeline offered. We agreed that his programme offered that "something" missing in all others we hadfound. While not cheap, it offered realistic chance of recovery, and that is a lot less costly than a divorce, splitting assets and the like. So we started the programme.
The programme made an indescribable difference! It clarifies issues that are difficult to understand when you are in emotional turmoil.
Is it an immediate placebo? No. Of course not! But, bit by bit pieces come together and one can understand why / what happened, and put bits down.
Over the months our relationship strengthened slowly and steadily, with triggers and setbacks. One major issue was contact with the other man - despite unconditional promises and undertakings to break all contact, over 3 months from DDay she tried to contact him at least 6 times, and was in contact with him actually when I found out again.
This was incredible setback. Emotions and doubts reared up again, sleepless nights, fears, pain, but I've learned this is quite common and not something that needs to derail all progress.
The programme is huge help! Strangely, when I was really down and in pain, the next lesson somehow addressed it, eased the pain/ doubts, and the triggers slowly affected me less and less.
Now I have finished the program once, start to finish, I am slowly working through it again. I keep learning new stuff as as I grow.
As I said at the start - no 2 people react or feel the same. But, as I progressed in the programme, it gradually became clearer how to handle the gamut of feelings. You learn forgiveness, which is critical as you poison yourself without it. Trust was the next major issue for me. How can you trust someone who cheats on you? And then keeps on breaking promise after promise not to contact him, knowing how it will hurt you?
The lesson on truth was an eye opener. Peter says you dont NEED to try and find things out. They will come out. So true. Every time that more comes to light it undoes so much rebuilding. Rather know the worst, so that you can accept it and come to terms with it. But every time a lie or cover up comes up you wonder what is next?
But... This programme did deliver what it promised. We are, definitely, in a much.much better place now than before discovering it, with a future together I could never have envisaged.
Phil C. (Anonymity Protected)
"It was such an emotionally dark time!"
Fear. So much fear. It was restricting my breath. For endless days, weeks.... I was afraid to let him stay. I was afraid to let him go. I was afraid to go to work. I was terrified of him leaving the house. I had fear when he picked up his phone. I had fear when he was out in the shop alone that he'd be on his phone, making plans, apologizing, sharing love that should be for me. I was so freaking afraid all the time.
I was lost, confused. "What do I do? Am I just pathetic for letting him stay? Is it because I'm too weak to be alone or do I really see hope?" I felt the most "not good enough" I had ever felt. I don't trust easy and I trusted him completely. Even after his first betrayal 15 years before. So I felt like a giant fool.
I felt so broken. So "not good enough". So "not chosen". So completely, totally, utterly unloved. Discovery day came after almost two years of feeling invisible, pushed away, unimportant. Two years of pushing suspicions out of my mind and choosing to continue to trust. Foolish. Like an idiot.
Those were my biggest feelings: like a foolish idiot, utterly unloved, and completely not good enough. So much pain in those feelings. So much despair in betrayal.
The day I confronted my husband about what was discovered, I told him not to come home. He didn't. He came home the next day. And that is when he came clean about everything, including the timeline and the second woman.
I've always been very empathic and part of my MO is to make excuses for people and their mistreating behaviors. It was a survival tool of mine - survival of my sanity, I think. (Long before I learned about "reasons" for people's actions, I made excuses for them.) It served my husband well throughout my marriage. But it also sacrificed myself, my worth, my own perception of my value.
However, on that day, I didn't yet realize I was looking at the hurting little boy in my husband, but I could see the pain on his face, the shame emanating from his very being. He was hurting so badly having to look at my tearful face and say the things he had to share. My heart broke for my husband. I hurt more for him than I did for me on that day. I hugged him so tight as he cried and apologized. I couldn't tell him it was Ok, or it was going to be OK, I couldn't say a word because I didn't know what that night would look like, much less any of our tomorrows. But I comforted him the best I could.
So, that was a big part of my confusion. I wanted so desperately to make him feel better. Which made me feel more foolish, more pathetic. And I wanted him to fix things for me, to take my pain away, to give me my security back, but I knew I couldn't ask for the impossible.
Because I hurt for him, empathized with him, from the very beginning, there wasn't room for anger to be a primary emotion. Devastation, humiliation, so much else, but anger never got to set in.
For that I am thankful because it would have been very easy for the anger to take over and become my bulletproof vest as I furthered the destruction of us. When the anger tightened my chest and started rising up, I remembered his face and his body wracked with sobs of guilt and shame. And I shared his pain. And it abated the rage every time.
So, a large part of my feelings included the pain I felt for my husband when he told the truth. And it fueled my desire to want to make him feel better, to "fix" us. Which, I've come to realize, is an old, old behavior and belief. My purpose in life is to make everyone in dysfunction as comfortable as possible, never considering my own feelings and needs, and almost feeling guilty if I recognize my own pain.
I so desperately wanted this to be a "me" problem, that the reason he strayed was because of me. That's the only way I could fix it.
When I learned (and accepted) it was not my fault, nor was it about me, I didn't feel relief. I felt sheer panic. If I didn't cause it, I can't fix it. (If I can't control the situation, I have failed.) I would rather it be all blamed on me so I could have an end goal to work towards, like a task. (Give me a task and I'll complete beyond your expectations! 🙄) Now, in the face of the new realization, it was completely and totally out of my hands - I had zero control over the outcome or the route to getting there. I was wholly at the mercy of someone else. I felt so vulnerable and insignificant.
It was such an emotionally dark time. I felt defeated. I felt weak. And you could probably smell the fear on me at any given time.
I'm just so relieved it's now all just a faded memory with no emotion attached in the present. This has been an amazing journey and I am so grateful to have found Pete & Nikki, just when I had given up hope that anyone could help us.
Sally P. (Anonymity preserved)
"I was trawling through the internet trying to find out if other people responded in the same way as me!"
I discovered my husband had been having an affair, since before I knew him, with someone who had become a close friend, along with her husband, who was also involved in the sexual activity at times.
I was thrown into despair, with a triple betrayal and feeling that my marriage was a lie - they were witnesses and hosted our beautiful day, and that I had lost my closest friends. I was lonely and confused. The pain was worse than anything I could ever describe and I felt as though I would never recover. I told my husband that I didn't think we would be able to stay together because I recognised I would constantly throw his affair back in his face.
After about a horrible month, I was trawling through the internet trying to find out if other people responded in the same way as me, why people were unfaithful and how to feel better, when I came across Pete's video. My husband had also been pretty desperate, he said he didn't know why he had done it and wanted to be with me. I showed him Pete's video, saying it was almost as though Pete had been in the room with us, what he was describing was exactly what we were going through. My husband watched it and offered to book a call with Pete. This was really surprising as my husband is very reluctant to use the phone normally and hardly ever follows up on things like this. But he booked a call.
Pete spoke to both of us and my husband agreed to sign up. I wasn't sure it would help, or if Pete was genuine, but once we were signed up I became very interested in the module content and the daily messages of support were really helpful. We listened eagerly to the coaching calls.
I am not saying any of this was easy. I had regular melt downs at the beginning, long sessions of crying and berating my husband for what he had done, and not knowing where to turn as I was missing my closest friends as well. Even in my distress, I could see how helpless and hopeless he was feeling.
Gradually the modules and coaching started to make sense, I worked hard at this and the pain started to ease. The facebook group was such an incredibly supportive source too.
After a while, I was able to meet up with the affair partner and let her know that I had been able to understand some of what may have led them to the betrayal, and that I was able to forgive her. I found myself able to forgive my husband, and we started using what we had learned to live a different life, changed for the better by the coaching and able to see how judgements about other people and their behaviours block our ability to love. The coaching has enhanced my interaction with everyone in my life, made me experience life from a perspective of gratitude, and brought me a greater peace than I have ever known. My husband and I know how to communicate and accept each other better than ever before. I rarely think about the affair, and when I do it is a memory of an event that was a catalyst for change, there is no pain associated with it now.
The affair partner's husband became unexpectedly terminally ill, I was able to offer genuine help and support to them both as his illness progressed, there was no emotional "cost" to me, it felt like the right thing to do. I almost don't recognise the person I was 2 years ago. I wish this coaching about unconditional love was taught at school, the world would be a better place if we could all live with love not fear.
Cassie S. (Anonymity preserved)
What I Want Betrayed Spouses To Know...
"When we started this program I honestly didn't understand what unconditional love really was but I now know it is the most powerful healing force on earth!
I was a betrayed spouse and I know that there are many of us betrayed who struggle with the feeling that our partners are not working as hard or diligently as we are.
As you know, my partner stopped working the program at the beginning of week 3. This felt like betrayal all over again as I was depending on this program to help us, that if he quit we would never find our way back to each other and this filled me with fear and resentment. I thought why should I have to do this work by myself? He's the one that did this to me, to us. He should be the one to fix us, and that meant working this program.
I had many calls with Pete and decided to put my trust in him and the lessons in the program when he said "if one person brings unconditional love to the relationship it can change the relationship enormously."
I kept on with the program. I started at the very first recorded call and listened to every one. At the same time I stopped trying to coerce, beg, plead, control or shame my partner into restarting the program. I started thinking back to our relationship and all the times I had not made him my priority and all the times I had been unloving to him. The first truly reconnecting moment came when I told the truth to him about my unloving behaviors that partly led to the breakdown of our relationship. I attended every group call and very often raised my hand to share my struggles. I posted on the Facebook group often by telling the truth about my unloving behaviors but also my triumphs. I felt the support, the acceptance, the compassion, and the love from the group that gave me strength and courage and hope.
One very important concept for me was accepting that I had to leave the affair in the past. As long as I kept bringing it up I was keeping it in our present. I grasped onto the concept of acceptance being coming to terms with something, the affair, that could not be changed. What happened could not be rewritten but I could move beyond it by concentrating on some of the things that led to my partner to seek consolation from another, and that was his childhood wound, his childhood pain and emptiness that was created long before we ever met. The affair happened not because I was lacking in any way or that I wasn't enough. It was the emptiness caused by his childhood wounds. Accepting this concept enabled me to change my judgment of the why of the affair and opened my heart to feel compassion for him.
As I continue to evolve I focus on the lessons in the program that I have written on my heart, "practicing the pause, asking if what I am about to say is kind, loving or necessary?"I have set a bar for myself that is to consciously choose the loving path with my spouse. This goal that I have set is for myself only and does not carry any expectation of how he should act. I do remember the excruciating pain I felt when I first learned of his affair and would never diminish that pain felt by anyone else. I feel nothing but loveand happiness now.
I realized that in order to bring loving connection to our relationship I had to shift my focus from my pain and hurt to the real reason I was doing this work. On the first call with Pete, he asked "what do you want?" I wanted our relationship back. I wanted our love back, I wanted to be happy again. Like Pete always says, before we can be loving, we have to stop being unloving. I had to set my focus on us. Did it always seem fair that I was doing all this? I decided to not let this way of thinking enter my mind. It was not a contest between us. The goal of joining this program was us. The goal of restoring love to our relationship was my focus. This isn't easy, it is often hard, especially to be loving when my partner isn't, but at those times he feels my acceptance and it has changed him. It reminds me of the relief I saw on the face of my granddaughter when she spilled nail polish on the couch and I didn't get upset. It is the visable sign of how unconditional love can affect anyone, a child or adult. It is the emotion that he experiences when he feels loved no matter what.... and the paradoxical thing.... I feel incredibly loved and whole myself by practising all this.
When we started this program I honestly didn't understand what unconditional love really was but I now know it is the most powerful healing force on earth!
Barbara. (Anonymity preserved)
