I asked all the questions at disclosure. I said put me to sit down and start at the beginning to where we are now. After 37 yrs of marriage I think you owe me that much. I was told by my wayward spouse that he didn't owe me anything. 3yrs everything I know I learned from others. Silence to exploritor questions. Where do you go from here? He's no longer at home and refusing everyone's calls. The children didn't see him for almost 18 months before he turned up at a gathering on New Year's day.

I think the puzzle analogy is a great way to help explain just how complicated and convoluted the healing process is in its entirety. The only thing I have to question is what to do when you’ll never get the answers?

I’m the betrayed spouse, an my ex decided to obliterate the marriage and move on once the affair was discovered.

From D Day forward she never once felt obligated to even explain or discuss her feelings or actions… it was as if once discovered she simply went cold and planned in advance to grab as many resources as she could. It was “we’re done” and that was that.

Naturally that leaves the absolute chaos of navigating betrayal trauma to me and me alone. Over the years I’ve continued to do what I can, however it would have been helpful if I even had a “puzzle” to try to assemble.

The closest reference I could help illustrate in this analogy would be to turn around on D Day to what is a smoking crater in the midsts of an open field… the smell of cordite and churned earth assault your nostrils as you walk to the edge of this violent abyss and stare down into the slowly smoking 20 foot cavern that once was your home and your former life. There’s no table to try to assemble this puzzle, there’s not even a floor to place a table on… it’s all wreckage and ashes with puzzle pieces that are scattered about and lost to the blowing wind falling like a fermented hail that just feels so absolutely destructive…

And from the pieces you do see as they cascade around this Smokey vortex? They’re half formed images and glimpses of shapes mixed into the grass and covered in the hearty clay that was turned up my the explosion. Any pieces you could find are burned and twisted beyond their initial configurations that you wouldn’t know if it was a puzzle piece or some sort of floorboard. As you glance about you may occasionally find what looks like a malformed puzzle piece with an interlinking pattern or the curvature of its original design… but is this piece you found really that of this original puzzle? Or when you brushed the ashes off of it, did the mind make it so, because it seems like it “should” fit…

But fit into what? I honestly don’t know.

I do know that this kind of puzzle is one that you’ll never be able to solve or even comprehend its full magnitude as to what it was… 5,000 pieces? 10,000 pieces? 20 jumbo sized simple tiles? I don’t know.

And the sad thing is that I’ll never know as it was purposefully made to obscure everything in such a mess that it’s impossible for me to see it. I am to simply walk away from this smoking hole in the ground and never look at it again at all, all by design and purposeful obfuscation.

And this decision to leave me in the dark is the hardest part of radical acceptance 5 years after D-Day. To have 13 years of a life whisked away and taken apart in a flash, all to be simply be dismissed and gaslit… no answers of any sort, nor any apology. Just deafening silence that accompanies the blowing wind that dissipates the remnants of smoke.

So I guess I’ll never know. So be it.

Hopefully others won’t have to deal with this same type of of puzzle situation… because even if they hurt, I’d rather have answers or even an idea of what this puzzle was supposed to even be rather than be left behind to the chaos of my reality as well as the hidden unknowns that may or may not be true.

Such is life… what can you do other than move on and try not to dwell on things you’ll never be able to change.

Some answers are better than no answers at all I guess.

Hi all,
I am a wayward husband. I tried to disclose everything since we were on Affair Recover pages almost since the D day. We followed recommendations. My wife tended to need details and the more details I supplied the more tinier and subtle pieces were required. This is the game of betrayed spouse's brain even if she does not want it by the her will. After details were disclosed, her brain comes up with asking more details. Sometimes she realized and commented that my information brought unnecessary trauma. Traumatic thoughts cannot be forgotten easily, unfortunately. So it really matters what and how wayward spouse discloses.
The other problem I see here is "emotional translation" of disclosed details. For example, I said the "other woman said X and I responded Y. I also added a comment which I consider very important piece of information on "what I meant by X, what I understood form Y and what it meant altogether emotionally for me AT THAT TIME when that event happened. I feel that my explanation and understanding of past events is very important, not only the events alone as such and how they were understood by my wife initially. That part is who I really am. Sometimes it is difficult to explain exactly. Going back to the puzzle analogy, I see that my wife would need an upgrade from 500 puzzle set to 2000 puzzle set. But I do not have it. I feel she is pushing me into giving my affair a bigger scope than it actually had.
Now, I want to highlight another problem. There is a difference in what some events in question meant for me AT THAT time and what IT MEANS NOW after 12 months of hard work with 4 therapists in total and hundreds of hours of discussions between me and my spouse. We have made progress. We found better who we are and who we were before D day. We both discovered important unhealed scars of our youths in original families. It is obvious now that I made some progress at least and changed my emotions including disabling my attachment to the third person. So my current feelings are settled in a corrected shape and, hopefully, firm. However, if I am again asked to tell again some details about for a past event I am usually forced to make a deep dive into my memory and emotions I must tell truth what I felt AT THAT TIME. And this is painful for my wife because she thinks I am back in problem. But it is different. I only must say truth about what feeling I had. If I deep dive into past I still remember my mistaken feelings and I cannot say otherwise because I would be lost by overwriting the history with the risk of overwriting everything and become lost in lies. However, truth is that my wife's brain wants my emotions wiped out completely.
(sorry I am a Czech person and my English may not be as natural)