Emotional Affair fallout -yes I am the cheater

I recommend to you the books and talks by Esther Perel. Mating in captivity. She says that people cheat because they look into another to find themself. It is not so much about the lover, but something missing in you.

mezzer If your wife is still there, she loves you and wants your marriage to work. But you have made yourself feel very unsafe, through the affair and also the confession. Its likely why you still crave this other person. You've also made your wife feel unsafe.

Its going to take some time to repair this. Try asking her, what she needs to feel safe again and work towards that. And try to figure out what you need to feel safe again in the relationship. Did anything happen in your marriage to make you feel unsafe, or is this coming from internal insecurity do you think?

mezzer, does your wife have an avoidant attachment style? Sounds likely, based on the little information you provided.

While you've handled your issues in a bad way (though better than physically cheating too), you should probably look into typical anxious/avoidant dance dynamics to see how this pattern plays out. The more mature and secure thing to do is, of course, communicate with your partner before things get so bad that you're seeking romantic connection and validation elsewhere (the latter of which should come from yourself, not your partner, but that's part of the AP). But since you already are where you are, then what's going to be helpful for you is to recognize that both of you make that relationship work. And past having lesser coping skills than would be ideal to handle the original source of conflict here, of which emotional cheating is a symptom not the cause, both you and your wife contributed to the pre-affair problems in the marriage.

That also means you both need to fix them. She may or may not want to after you broke her trust, but you also didn't feel comfortable talking to her about her distancing. If she's avoidant, then your discomfort is for a legitimate reason, and you'll both have to be committed to not just working on the relationship together but also working equally as hard on yourselves. Motivated by each of you wanting to do so, not motivated by one person wanting the other to do something for them.

If she's available and willing to do that, you can work through this. If she's not, then yes, you blew up your relationship and need to take responsibility for that either way, but you probably blew it up on some level because you were so desperate for change in a situation that was at a stalemate. Which is often where long-term anxious/avoidant pairings go.

You're right in observing your feelings for the other woman are about attachment, validation, and reflecting how you feel about yourself, and not so intense out of passionate love for her. In fact, I'd stay away from her. You're feeling physical withdrawal symptoms right now which will fade with some time, but she isn't going to be a better or healthier choice for you if she's willing to pursue a married man. You need to take the time to sort through your AP and figure out how to move forward with your wife (whether that means working through this or mutually separating).

Claire81 thank you for reaching out to me, it feels good to know that I’m not the only one, if you have have found your way here I’m guessing you are feeling things are not right in your situation and you are trying to understand how you ended up in this mess. I will read your post with interest and try to offer support if I can, what really hurts is that you don’t realise you’re hooked on the emotional connection, you feel in control until your affair partner shifts and then the desperate behaviour starts. It’s not pretty in my case and I hope you don’t go through what I am.

Additionally, this is one of the keys to your AP issues. AP have a lot of difficulty with emotional self-regulation and look externally for others to do this for them (based on this happening in your childhood upbringing, likely either inconsistent adult caretakers or you having to parent a parent). That's what's happening to you in this description. It is a nervous system overwhelm that puts you in very dysfunctional and unhealthy reactive patterns that repeat over and over, even with different partners, until you work on building your trust in yourself and you learn how to self-regulate your emotions.

mezzer, nothing wrong with bringing this up to your therapist as an area you want to work on, if you haven't already. You can help yourself, but you've been running on auto-pilot in the past. Now you're aware of it, and you can choose to look at things differently and break your destructive patterns that haven't gotten you what you need no matter how many times you've repeated your same behavior. It takes effort to do this, but once you start practicing different responses, especially if you see better results (even if you don't get a response you want, you'll often feel better anyway because you're expressing yourself more honestly instead of being manipulative so will process your feelings more effectively), it gets easier.

I would guess that she does, she refuses to engage with me when I bring up problems, often just refusing to talk. On the few occasions she has spoken to me about my feelings of abandonment and lack of emotional connection, she has pointed to rare instances when she has acted in a way that I would describe as being good examples of what I would like. This is fine but rather than acknowledge that I want more she is defensive as if to say look this should be enough for you. Right now given my behaviour I don’t feel like I can address this with her, I love her and know I have hurt her even if she doesn’t express it how I would. (She has only cried 4 times in 17 years and once was during child birth.) Right now, I’m not prepared to add to her pain by suggesting she is in any way even partly responsible for my infidelity.