What was the thing that tipped the scale when you started to check in more with your BS?
There was a point where I understood that the truth was critical to my wellbeing, and I began to cling to it. It was fundamentally a selfish decision born of desperation - I am not a suicidal or depressive person in general, but I didn't want to continue in the life I had. I didn't want to wake up in the morning, the days dragged on, and I had no hope nor even desire for anything, and I couldn't find another way out. A friend on SI wrote about truth in a way that gave me hope. At first, I was focused on myself - the truth of how to came to be in the place in life where I found myself - and then it expanded to truths of all sorts, including the truth of my husband's experience and what he needed. I started checking in very frequently, of course with pauses to process and regroup. There were times that I wanted to talk about it more than he did. The times I did not want to talk to him about it were because I thought he was stuck on a wrong path, and then I got a marriage counselor to help us, not because I didn't want to talk, but because the talking was not helping.
Do you have some memory or measure of what was happening inside you when you moved from avoidance and shame for your betrayal, into actually coming around and initiating "those talks" with your partner without them being the ones who have to bring it up first?
I have a specific memory. A few months after I came completely clean, I found my husband's wedding ring on a desk where he left it while he was working out (there was nothing intended symbolically about him taking it off, he did it to avoid hurting his fingers while working out with weights). The cat looked like he was going to bat the ring off of the desk, so I took it and put it on the wristband of my watch, which is what I do with my rings when I take them off to work out, and then I forgot about it. A few hours later, my husband approached me, full of negative emotion, and asked if I did something with his ring. I reflexively said, "the cat knocked it off the desk so I was looking after it." Then I felt like shit for several hours. If I couldn't be truthful about something so small, so insignificant as to whether the cat looked like he was going to bat it off the desk or did bat it off the desk, how could I be trusted with important things? I knew (thought I knew) that he was at the end of his rope, that one more mistake and I was doomed (this was, in part, from the voracious SI reading I was doing at the time). I confessed, expecting the worst. He was incredibly kind and compassionate. He said that he knew the emotional environment I grew up in (we have known each other since we were very young) and which still exists in my FOO, that lying was a reflex to protect myself, and that it would take a while to undo those patterns. The reversal of how I expected him to respond, to how he actually responded, was incredibly strengthening. I felt very safe with him.
How did it feel? Was it timidly at first and gradually easier? Was it forced and unnatural? What did you feel after? What was the impact on your BS? Does it get easier or is something that makes you want to get off your chest and escape from asap?
There were so many different kinds of conversations, ones where he realized something he needed to change, where I realized something was so much worse than I had thought. I often felt both terrible and hopeful. What became easier was the belief (based on an ever increasing accumulation of evidence) that the other side was good, not always comfortable, not always easy, often gut wrenching, but always better. Sometimes the better took a while to arrive but I learned to tolerate the discomfort and be patient.
