SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hello All,

I'm in my 3rd month at my trauma center receiving intensive therapy, and I've had to confront many truths that I avoided for a long time.
I have lived with the guilt and shame and horror of my A from over a decade ago. I have felt overwhelming disgust when I relive the memory of my horrible actions.
However, there is another layer of disgust that I am having trouble coming to terms with. The beginning of my infidelity started out as sexual assault. I did not recognize this until a few weeks ago when I was describing my A step by step with my psychologists.
*Note: being sexually assaulted by my AP does not minimize my fault for the A. I made thousands of choices after the assault to continue the A.

I have lived in denial for most of my life; I refused to acknowledge the extreme abuse as a child from my alcoholic/drug addict mother, I avoided thinking about an attempted rape when I was 14, and I tried to bury my college A deep down inside for over a decade. These decisions were selfish decisions that allowed me to avoid pain, discomfort, and accountability, and caused severe harm and pain to by BS.

As I am coming clean with all of this, and working through my issues in the trauma center, I am slowly coming to terms with the assault at the beginning of my A. The AP flirted with me for a few weeks, I would set boundaries and tell him I had a BF and was not interested in him. Then one day, the AP showed up at my college dorm room, closed the door, and tried to aggressively kiss me. In my attempt to get away, we ended up on the floor with him on top of me. I managed to avoid a kiss, but then the next day he managed to hold me down forcibly and kiss me.

What is especially disgusting is that after these two assaults, I chose to continue the relationship. Every time he tried to go further sexually I would initially say no, he would push it, then I would give in.

So not only do I have to come to terms with the fact that I was someone able and willing to cheat, but I am also someone who chose to cheat with a man that assaulted me.

I am having a difficult time accepting this. I wondered if there are any other WS on this site that had any forced interactions with their AP, and their way of coming to terms with it? I am having trouble working past my disgust with myself to continue on my path of improvement and accountability. This level of disgust is easy to spiral into, but I recognize that shame spirals are continued selfish behavior and I'm doing my best to avoid them.

Not exactly the same but I do relate some this.

I was sexually abused in several different situations growing up. It gave me a dysfunctional view of male attention. As a later teen and into my early twenties I was overly sexual, at times promiscuous. I had a wall between my emotional life and my sex life and used to say I was more like a man in the way of seeing sex and love separately.

When my husband and I were dating we tried swinging. In many ways it was killing my self worth and making me so much more insecure. It took a while before I finally told him I didn’t want to do it anymore. He didn’t see to mind to stop but I knew he was a bit disappointed.

Over time I felt like I had started to heal from that and didn’t lead so much with my sexuality. And over a period of twenty years I had settled well into monogamy and more into myself.

My affair in many ways was a reversion. I went back to many of my old tendencies in the ways I was trying to present myself. There was a lot of evidence that the ap really was only interested in some quick sex on the side and that fear of abandonment made me push harder to win his approval. In retrospect, I knew I was being used, and my fear of abandonment was so deep because a lot of my life I spent self- abandoning. I had to come to terms with until I could always be firmly on my own side that I would never feel that stability that was seeking in getting men to like me.

That sounds very rudimentary and boiled down, it’s because it is. I am coming on 9 years of working on listening to my inner voice and learning my boundaries, and honoring them. The less I have abandoned myself and nurtured the younger versions of me the more I understand how I have allowed myself to be taken advantage of in order to earn relationships with other people. My relationships are actually stronger now that I have a better one with myself.

Try and tread gently. Yes, you allowed this. But think about where you are going and how you are going to get there. The past is informative but we can’t change it. We can only adjust our sails for a better course. It took a lot of struggle for me to get to a place I could align with those simple words. You will get there.know in g the issues are the path to solving them. Take good care.