Caught cheating a 2nd time

Hate to break it to you, but there's going to be a lot of talk of the past... For quite a while, what you did was pretty bad man... And it's going to take a long time to heal your relationship.

If you want her to heal, You're going to have to stop wanting the past to just be forgotten. Instead you're going to have to repeatedly admit what you did wrong to her. She's going to go through a roller coaster of highs and lows from your betrayal, and really the only way to address that is to focus on her, which is going to be about those past events, way more often than you'd like.

I am wondering, what happened in this span of 2020 to present. Recently you said you were caught by your wife about a prostitute... So after this instance, you've now gone back and used PMO? And are now struggling with early day urges? What happened first? PMO, or this altercation with a prostitute?

 

Make sure you are being fully honest... That's the only way things get better.

In your very first posts you say how P isn't an issue, and here you say it was first P then this prostitute. And now you've edited your first post saying that you had paid for access for some time. Gotta be honest about that stuff man, not only for your relationship, but if you truly want to change this stuff, that's the price of admission, honesty with full transparency is really the only way to lasting change.

Some of this isn't really adding up, and I'll tell you this right now, if you let this disclosure drip drip drip about what happened at ALL over time it's going to do even more irreparable damage to your relationship. Get ahead of that by being honest about it, not by trying to make it sound just a little better than it "could" have been.

A question you should ask yourself while looking in the mirror is, would you have ever told her had she not caught you?

 

Be honest with yourself about what happened. In excruciating detail don't leave out important details. Face the shame you feel around that and work through it.

 

This discovery is an “unmanageable moment.” You’ve made the best first step to admit that you have a problem and that you are powerless to control it.

Looking back onto your history is not a bad thing. In fact, our history gives us the best lessons for how we can face the future.

• Preoccupation of thoughts,
• Believing a negative thought or hard external trigger,
• Finding escapes from hard feelings,
• Isolating yourself

Will keep you trapped in the cycle. Hopefully the counselor will help walk you though the relapse cycle so that you have a tool to evaluate where you are each moment.

keep up the hard, but good, work of discovering yourself. May you find your wife to be the best support during the hard times of life.

 

The hard part of recovery is changing our beliefs. Our beliefs drive our actions. For me, I consider B movie and P occasionally acceptable because my wife doesn't object to them, but in truth, she objects to the path that those things lead to in my life. She objects to the inadequate sex we have because of my porn.

From 2020-2022, it seems like you did an excellent job staying busy and doing meaningful work that felt rewarding. That is part of the process of recovery and sustaining sobriety. But you skipped the part about changing underlying beliefs about PMO, cheating, prostitutes, and developing healthy coping strategies for when life is not going our way. This is the hard work of addiction.

To what others have said, be honest with yourself, honest with your therapist. Then work with a therapist to mediate future conversations with your wife. But full honesty with yourself and your therapist must come first, so you can be fully honest with your wife.

I'm sorry you're going through this pain. There is a better, more rewarding life on the other side if you work through it. Not an easier life, but a more rewarding and honest one.

 

You might want to talk with you therapist about this, because there's a lot of depth to this.

Your wife isn't going to believe you when you say, I want the past to be the past, because if she hadn't caught you, you would be perfectly happy continuing to keep that from her, and most likely there would have been another encounter, this has been something you've been entertaining for some time. Now that it is in the open, you want nothing more than to move past it. That comes off as very dismissive even if that's not your intent, she very well may feel that way. How could you really blame her for feeling that way?

 

And it ensures that he will do this again.

 

Exactly

 

My approach to giving up anything - PMO, cigarettes, sugar, etc. - has always been gradual reduction prior to abstinence.

For me, the cold-turkey, white-knuckle approach always seemed unnecessarily painful. Failure always feels like more of a total defeat when you're not looking at it from a perspective of progress (i.e., my streak was longer than the last streak, I'm doing x less than x months ago, etc.).

I'm probably in the minority in that view round here but then not everyone has the luxury of an environment where they can cut down and give up gradually. But for me, the expectation that you one day wake up and instantly break a habit of a lifetime or however long just seems totally unrealistic. Assume you will fuck up and set your expectations and targets accordingly.

 

True, but that is hardly a winner's mentality. There has to come a point where you say, "I'm doing this, I don't care what it takes."