As a betrayed spouse I totally had the urges to cheat but I realized I would never give that ammo to my unfaithful husband. I think it is totally normal to consider it.
Same for me! The first thought is to "hurt" them like they hurt you!!! But, all it does is cause a further fracturing of the relationship and DOESN'T help your pain, after your "revenge affair" happens, your pain about being Betrayed is STILL THERE!!! You just add feelings of shame to the mix!!!!
Believe me as the betrayed husband myself.I completely understand why you feel this way I have had to fight myself my flesh because I feel like since oneness and Faithfulness left my marriage I am like what the hell who cares but then again like you said it's like giving them ammo against us for cheating just like they did against their marriages .So yeah I get the pain you are dealing with because of her cruelly cheating and throwing away my trust it hurts like I never believed it would or I could be hurt this much.
It's exactly what Samuel said. It's not the ammo thing. It's the self-hate. In my journaling, I've read back over the last few years, and the amount of self-hate, "i'm a piece of crap" is overhwhelming. And I will always be an adulterer (emotional, but just as horrible, I don't care what anyone says). I told my wife, for your sake, for the kids' sake, I highly recommend you don't do that to yourself. I told her that it's up to her, and that I wouldn't judge her; but I love her enough to never want her to feel the way I do because of my stupidity.
I haven't yet, because I think more of myself than that. But I can understand how someone would. Because the cheating spouse didn't love them, thought they were ugly and degraded them. But I don't plan on cheating myself. But I don't blame anyone who does. Their heart was ripped out.
I set out to have a revenge affair and when it happened it didnt ease the pain. But i realized that it was more than revenge. As a man, tobe betrayed is emasculating. To not only feel like you werent man enough but others who know thinking that you werent man enough. At the time i felt like it would stop my pain by getting on her level. But the biggest reason was to try and feel like i could be wanted by a woman. I remember her saying that it wouldnt help if i went out and found someone. That infuriated me because i felt it was a do as i say not as i do thing. I also waa filled with resentment when i would hear someone say how an affair saved their marriage, why do i have to suffer and and she gets a healed marriage by having an affair. This is why i believe that it is a total crock when someone says it had notbing to do with the betrayed spouse. Its like saying "i had to sleep with him to get your attention". I regret having an affair for revenge and the other reasons mainly because i became what i hated and lost the moral high ground. By losing that high ground it would have been easier for us to heal. 16 years after the d day and i think about it everyday. I sometimes regret staying together. But i didnt have to worry about our daughter living in a house with a strange man.
I agree. As a man your pride and ego runs us. So getting revenge helps to restore that. Somebody was bangin your girls sweet walls and you banged someone else's gives you that feeling that ur dick game is still strong.. new experiences help to know u still have value.
Thanks for sharing! Good word. One other thing why the betrayed spouse might cheat is judging. "Dont judge less you be judged." When betrayed they can say, "how could you do this i would never do such a horrible thing!!! But we are all human and capable of the worse sins. I think even though the betrayed is crushed they need to guard their heart from judging their partner too strictly, and not falling into the sin of pride that they could ever sin like that.
3-plus since I discovered my wife's 2-year emotional affair and I am sti trying to recover on my own as we are still married but she remains disconnected. We moved cross country a few months ago and I now find myself in a neighborhood where we purchased a house, but there are several nice looking ladies including some single moms who are friendly. Having to pray constantly to keep my defenses up while I am still bitter and resentful that my wife lacks empathy in the pain she has caused and the open wounds that still remain because of the distance and lack of emotional, spiritual and physical connection. Feel like we are just roommates sharing the same air. I truly want to remain faithful and honor my marriage covenant I made to God and my wife, but it is so discouraging to work on this by myself. Just asking for prayers from the enemy's attacks to protect my heart from committing sin that would totally destroy my marriage.
Thank you I have thought about doing this to my husband so he knows how it feels Iam fight this right now I have been taking to someone else who makes me feel better iam so confused
What if your betrayed spouse demands a 6 month separation with no questions asked where she can freely date others? How would we ever move forward with that gaping hole there forever on top of an existing chasm I created
My husband has been pushing me for years to have an affair and I hate it. It's confusing and heartbreaking...hes says he won't react like I did because I'm making it bigger than what it is. He also says it'll make it easier for us to get past this. I wouldn't wish this pain on him.
I being thinking about getting revenge to my unfaithful spouse, because it hurt me so much what he did to me that sometimes I want him to have the same pain I’m feeling
I struggled with this and still do sometimes 11 months out. The feelings of worthlessness, and 1 kind word from a girl at work made my heart soar. That's when I realized that I was in a bad state of mind. I was able to work that out at counseling and with my wife. I know she fears a revenge affair. I try to continue finding my worthiness in God and to love myself, and her. Thank you for speaking about this Samuel. Hope your new year is going great.
I am soooooo in your shoes brother. Im being dog watch every time I leave the house. Only since my wife came to her senses on the reality of it all . Sharing me is nothing no more she considers. Its crazy how she would state... I screwed up now you get a pass and do what you want .. That didnt last very long Lol Lol . She really believes im seeing someone... Thats so far fromt he truth . I know the pain is everything and more stated in all the Videos. Its something I tell myself time and time again. How could I possibly wanna return this pain and just make matters worst. Ive come to terms that if I screwed 50 ladies that it couldnt compare to the betrayal of My High school sweetheart of 15 years, Because she was just that special to me. Nothing couldnt erase that life changing event . It simply wouldnt make me feel better knowing I had to share her with another. Im just working on me . Its bad when in all actuality.. It doesnt matter what she do from this day forward . Parts of me saying I checked out into a grey area, But overall Im happy and confident in all other aspects of my life going forward. I Love her . I just dont respect her the same
@@84legit I know for us, the love and respect is returning over time. Lots of work, lots of counseling. I hope you both can find a new life in your relationship. It friggin sucks a lot, but it is worth it. Take care, man !!
Needed this today. Often I get a nasty angry little voice in my head telling me to get revenge, but I know deep down that’s not who I am or what I believe in. But my trauma will justify it in my mind. Luckily as time goes by that internal thought does go away and I can see clearly that it would not make me feel better.
I feel like this would make me feel better. The unfaithful may have remorse for hurting their partner but, they do not hold remorse for the affair itself. I probably won't do it but, I am thinking about it.
I was thinking one day "why aren't there more support groups out there for people like me?" I realized this is probably why. Can you imagine putting a bunch of betrayed spouses in a room together? That's just asking for trouble. I was grateful to find these videos but it would have been great to have someone to talk to. If you haven't been through it, you just don't understand.
What do you do if now the betrayed spouse “desire” an affair just to see what it feels like to be someone else? Just curiosity of those feelings that the unfaithful had with their AP.
God bless you Sam, for touching on this situation when both spouses have had an affair. There is so LITTLE information and advice on this particular situation. It is a horrible experience to go through and compounds all issues involved in infidelity recovery. At least it has for us but we are still committed to working through this. Thank you for your direct and living approach in all your video blogs. You are a blessing in so many ways... We would so appreciate any others on this topic “when I am both the betrayed and the unfaithful spouse.” It is a very difficult place to understand, recover from and to forgive. Any suggestions on where else we could go on this particular topic would be much appreciated. There is not much available from my research. God bless you.
I find that being honest with God, My husband, and my counselor helped. Being cheated on can bring out a sense of insecurity of demonic proportions. Even knowing the pain it brings that outlive the pleasure, isn’t enough to stop it. It’s active self care that’s been helping me. It’s not easy to admit that someone noticing me is titllating, but it just shows how much pain and rejection I felt.
I found this out the hard way. My husband of 29 yrs. was betrayed by his 1st wife. He was raised to be faithful. Infidelity wasn’t an accepted practice in his family. He would drop friends who were unfaithful to their wives or girlfriends & have nothing more to do with them. I was naive enough to think he would never betray me because of this, until he did! I was also naive enough to believe that because he worked from home, he couldn’t be having an affair & that his business dinners or out of town business trips were purely business. I didn’t realize he could carry on an emotional affair on line, texting & of course, phone calls. I trusted him completely. Since his AP was a business colleague, that had shared clients, a business dinner wasn’t unusual. He worked from home so how could he be doing anything? I didn’t realize how much communication was going on through texting until my 25 year old daughter looked through his phone & saw the messages he was starting to delete & saw all the sex memes! This last year has been an eye opening meat grinder for me! We’ve been trying to do a form of repair recovery on our own with several counselors, books Affair Recovery videos etc. I asked him how someone who was betrayed before, who’s wife produced a child that wasn’t his, lost his marriage & custody of his own son could turn around & cheat on me who’d been faithful to him, loved him & emotionally supported him for 29 years? I asked him how he felt when she cheated on him with his best friend? That’s when I discovered, to my shock, he never processed the pain. He divorced her & kept busy & was never in touch with his own feelings! My husband of all these years doesn’t know who he is or what he feels or why he went against all his moral codes & cheated! This last year has been an eye opener for both of us! Through another marriage group we discovered “How We Love” by Marlin & Kay Yerkovich, online since we didn’t have the money for The EMS weekend or other counseling programs. “How We Love” has an online test you can take that reveals dysfunctional behaviors we develop as children interacting with our family’s dysfunctional forms of love that effect our grownup love behaviors & miscommunications. Now that my husband knows he’s an “Avoider”, he now sees he needs to feel his feelings, communicate them to me & listen to my feelings if he ever wants to repair our relationship & save our marriage. One of the most eye opening messages he found (on his own) was Samuel’s 2 part segment with MJ Denis on Infidelity Trauma. What a Godsend! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Samuel for her! She methodically builds brick by brick a comprehensive description of the trauma caused to the betrayed by infidelity & how the amygdala part of the brain reacts to it & why the betrayed feels so crazy & overwhelmed by their emotional flooding! Even though I tried to get my husband to “get it” on how much his infidelity hurt me & destroyed our relationship, he didn’t really get it until he watched those 2 videos! Now, finally, he “gets it”! Gone is the defensiveness, the poor shameful me guy, the unwillingness to hear me guy! He’s now looking forward to repairing what he broke. He’s beginning to see that maybe we can build a new relationship & that he can now begin to be aware of his own feelings & mine & not just avoid them. So many of Samuel’s videos have helped us but those 2 were the best! We’ve had a breakthrough! I’m writing all of this to share my year’s journey of discoveries that may help others to open their eyes to wrong assumptions about the safety of their relationships. Hopefully, my journey & discoveries will help & to thank Affair Recovery for all their great work! I’m finally beginning to have hope of recovery & healing. We still have a lot of work to do but we’ve found a lot of tools to help us.
wow, i've shared your comment with the whole team and with MJ. i'm so glad we could help and stand with you my friend. i'm so sorry for your pain but so glad to hear there is forward movement and breakthrough. it encourages us so much to hear stories like this.
Terry Wade Milan and Kay are great 👍 Met them at a New Life Weekend. How we love is very good to work with your spouse or alone. There’s a version for parents, too.
I also didn’t see it coming. My husband’s own mother betrayed her husband and abandoned her family for the AP. My husband was raised by his dad. His father died with the fear that his kids would be betrayed like he was. Lo and behold it ended up being his son that became the betrayer. Sometimes I feel compassion and lobe for him. Other times I hate him. Plus the way he went about his affair was WEIRD! He told me every step of the way. I didn’t find an affair that had already happened. No, he told me when he had “feelings” for the little whore, then when he kissed her, and finally when he slept with her. Though apparently after sleeping with her he finally realized he still felt empty. Lol but I thought he wanted a break from me because he wasn’t happy and he was convinced happiness was with this slut. He even told me at one point that he said to AP “with or without you I don’t know if I want to go back to my wife” So while I’m happy for you and your story, it also makes me angry. I can’t quite explain why. I don’t believe in marriage anymore. It wasn’t something I believed in in the first place but was sucked into it for religious reasons. Yet I always had that fear in the back of my mind that this would happen. And lo and behold it has. Love is a scam and marriage is too.
A revenge affair would only be worth it if it were actually fun and I could do it so I knew it was happening but not flaunt it in front of my cheater's face. I wouldn't do it to start fights. And I wouldn't do it with just anybody. I'd do it so I would have that little corner of my mind that wasn't reserved for my cheater anymore. I hate it that I focused on him for so many years while he screwed around every now and then. I feel so lied to and like our history together is fake now. I would like to really feel something for someone else. I don't ever want my cheater to have all my heart again. Sometimes I can't imagine that I would ever be lucky enough to find someone else equally fun and interesting. But I wish I could. I would think of it as insulating my heart from future pain at the hands of the cheater. Self defense in a way. My cheating boyfriend actually told me to go out and mess around with a few guys so he wouldn't have to feel so guilty. I told him that me doing that would not equal him running around lying to me for a decade....and risking giving me VD. Cheaters really are out of touch with reality....and decency. I have not cheated on him and it has been a little over a year since discovery day. Every day I love him and resent him. Every day I know that he has undermined our relationship. Every day I wonder when he will do that again. Every day I wonder if there is someone else out there in the world for me who actually respects an exclusive relationship. Every day I feel less special to him than I once thought I was. Every day I try to wrangle my brain to love him less so he has less power over me. Every day a part of me just wishes God would kill me so I wouldn't have to care about any of it anymore. But then, I go on. He should have just been honest years ago and told me he couldn't focus on one person. He should have found someone he could have an open relationship with. He should have let me know the truth so I could choose to leave or choose to stay and adapt....when I was significantly younger. He took my choice away from me. He stole my time. He killed my dreams. And he mutilated reality. Now I don't know what was real and what wasn't. He says it was all mostly real. But which parts? Before I looked at hm as a special man and my hero. Now I look at him as a f-cked up little selfish boy-man. And nothing I do from now on will change what already happened.
On my journey through this I never even considered this as a betrayed. My first thought was no woman would want me or look at me due to being a failure and my disability. I do think my wife (the betrayer) thought I was looking at or having an affair for the past ten years. With my disability and emergency surgery I could not perform, sexually, as I once did. To be honest I never lost my love and passion for her at all, even now. We as a team lost that flame, connection, closeness, passion love that once bound us as a team. Over the past five years I kept telling myself that she would come back when she was ready. She would reach for me again to reconnect. She refuses to get help with me and still gets angry with me checking things but to me life goes on with or with out her. These videos help me and I even catch myself re watching certain ones. I have told my spouse we can not recover or repair the old 30+ years together … but we can make a new life if she can be open to it. As a betrayed I will never forget and will stay gun shy because the first shots hurt to bad not to keep my head on a swivel.
it starts the clock over unfortunately as it's new information and forces you to start over in many ways. how big was the info and what sort of info did you find out? that may make a difference in how you approach it.
I just found out seven years later that my husband's emotional affair was a full blown sexual affair with a teenager. He told me this after I recently left him and then returned. He wants me to hurry up and leave the past in the past but isn't really getting it that it's new information I have to process. And that he would have never told me if I hadn't left him an then he got right with God because of it. That's the only reason he told me. That scares me.
You have helped me immensely, I could never figure out how to leave a comment..finally I figured it out. Anyways you have been vital to my healing and dealing with very similar betrayal, although my husband had an affair with my pastors wife and my tenant within a 5 year span. And it’s been HARSH. I’ve had to find healing on my own, and your videos have been my go to daily medicine. And also Jesus. Wow
My wife is doing it now and left I don’t know what to do because she lashed out at me like it’s been yesterday but been over year ago but I found out her recent that she cheated after I did that too but never said nothing it’s like I’m lashing out now and she never wants to listen or talk.
My angle as a betrayed was that I wanted to experience the thrill/excitement that drove my Christian wife of 33 years to be entranced by an ugly sleazy guy (common knowledge not my bias) for a 10 year affair. D Day was a year ago.Due to this vlog I will continue to fight against these thoughts with God’s help. We are on a positive pathThanks to AR bootcamp
I’m not convinced I will hate myself. I’m still on the fence, but not ruling out a side relationship if I find the opportunity. The sanctity of my marriage was already diminished by the actions of my cheater. I don’t want a ONS or a fling, but a years long, loving relationship (like he had). Sorry, not sorry.
Do all AP's try to get you to leave your spouse and kids? Do they convince you that you are in a horrible marriage? Do they get you to hate everything and everyone in your life. Do you move in with the AP in 5 weeks of meeting them? Is all this normal for an affair? Or is the AP a narc or psychopath?
it's not a normal occurrence in my experience at all. it appears to be very strange, controlling and in need of an intervention. i'm so sorry for what you're going through.
Sam. You know the reason you're doing these videos. Well your friends who convinced you too, were spot on. You do have a gift and yes you were born to do this work because you just succeeded. Thank you kindly sir, very much appreciated. You can't appreciate the depth of my gratitude. Keep up the good work Sam, God Bless!
This happened to me. I was unfaithful, we didn’t get the help we needed. She “forgave” me and we tried to move on. She ended up having an emotional then physical affair with a co-worker/friend. I’m living in hell right now. God help me.
Found out in March this year that my wife was/is cheating on me with a fellow teacher. She promised me that she broke it up with her AP when I saw her Whatsapp messages. I feel sad and have thought of a affair of my own.
I asked my husband if I will do of what he did to me he said " go on" simply as that. Now i still have pain in my heart after his emotional affair that i want to open with him but he start get mad or say move on. I met a guy which I feel he needed me, he listens to me , i know this is wrong but evrytime i talk to him secretly i get my revenge to my husband which i feel he is changed man after he wdraw his affair that i feel unloved
I was the unfaithful. She broke up with me after 11 years...and 3 mos later, is seeing someone else. I get it. I realized that I really want to heal so much that I stopped with my rebound...she was a good friend but Im not healed and I don't want to hurt her either
Being a betrayed I've given it some thought, bc the appeal is so he would understand exactly how much it hurts and can finally understand the depths of my pain and anguish.
I’m so confused on how I can react to this situation that’s happened in my life, it was between my ap’s wife and my guy, I’ve really created a disaster, and it’s just getting worse and worse
I don’t know how to begin to thank you for all of these informative videos. My husband was in a two year long affair and we have yet to seek counseling because he is reluctant. God bless you.
After infidelity, our relationship became more chaotic. No peace and respect. We fight everynight. I cant sleep and even if we are right next to each other, im not at peace. Does space and distancing yourself helps for your healing? He decided to end our marriage he said he cannot deal with my depression and anxiety anymore.
sometimes it's necessary my friend. sometimes a separation needs to be put in place to create safety for both spouses or just one. i'm sorry that he's handling it that way.
Hi Sam, thanks for this video it really helped me to analyze my spouse's affair. She was once the betrayed and now I am truly feeling what she went through. Your videos have all been a blessing and I am currently trying to rebuild our relationship which I know is going to take a long time since I have had an affair and she is currently in one but we are still talking about our relationship and where we currently stand and the possibility of recovery.
It is tempting to pursue an affair as a betrayed spouse but I think I’d be too disgusted with myself to take any action whatsoever to do that anytime soon. I can understand the temptation. We are only human, after all.