SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

In the eight months since D-Day, I have dived deep into affair recovery materials. Books, YouTube videos, Reddit, and other affair support websites. I spent eight to ten hours a day immersed in it. As my mind sometimes does, one day I idly reviewed my family's history through the lens of this new information, and it set off a nuclear bomb in my head.

For whatever reason, blind trust in adults, my autism, who knows, I believed them when they told me that my father was a philanderer and was kicked out of the family, that my mother was an innocent victim of his infidelity, that when my drunk father phoned the house that day 50 years ago and thought I was my older brother and said I was no son of his after identifying myself, I dismissed his ravings as drunk words rather than truth. I had learned to gaslight myself. I was naive and believed all of that bullshit well into late adulthood, as in until a little over a month ago, but there were problems with the narrative.

When he left, my mother scrambled to get his next paycheck before he did. Somehow, she managed to get it. She took me with her (I was six years old) to pick up his check and to cash it at the bank. She didn't even know how to drive a car, but managed to do it that day without incident. Mom had to scramble to get a license to drive. She scrambled to find a job. We had to sell our house because we had no money for the mortgage. I was to believe that, with no plan at all, my mother kicked him out of the house without a fight and put the entire family in danger of homelessness. That seemed odd to me.

He moved to an apartment about three miles from where we lived and had almost no contact with me until the drunk phone call when I was about 15. There were three instances of contact with him after he moved out. The first was when the younger of my two older brothers and I visited him on a Saturday. He got drunk and verbally abusive toward me, but not my brother, and with no provocation. We left and walked home at that point. The next was a fishing trip he wanted to take my brother on. My mom insisted I go along as well. My father was verbally abusive toward me the whole day. After that there were no more visits and no more contact until his drunk phone call.

I wondered why my oldest brother was not named after our father, but his next son was, and I reasoned that if he knew she was sleeping with other men, he wouldn't want to give his name to her "love child". I know I wouldn't. That was in 1951. In 1958, she got pregnant with me, and all seemed normal for a few years. I have a picture taken in 1961 of him holding me and smiling at me while on a family vacation, clearly unaware that I wasn't his. That all changed by 1965, a year after buying a new house in a new neighborhood. By then I was no son of his, either because he found evidence of it or because she confessed. I will never know, as everyone who could confirm any of this is either dead, or because we no longer have a relationship.

My relationship with my mother was always strained. She didn't show me affection. When she said "I love you" to me, it always felt forced. She lived the rest of her life in unexplained shame. She never felt like she deserved happiness or success. Mom ran her own business and never celebrated that as a success, but rather treated it like penance. The rest of the family cut me out of their lives one by one, quietly ghosting me after I became an adult. I had to chase my relationships with them with no reciprocation on their end, until I had had enough of the one-sided nature of those relationships. Letters that were never answered. Emails that were ignored. Not being told when siblings flew into town for family visits. Being asked for my phone number repeatedly when it hadn't changed, and never receiving any phone calls from them anyway.

The identity I carried my whole life was a fabrication. I wasn't who I thought I was, and this is added to the false image I had of the woman who cheated on me, who I called my wife. My marriage is a sham, as is my life as a whole. I'm tired. I've been trying to hold the debris of my marriage together. It looks more and more like it will fail, as she has little interest in working on anything other than her job.

Before her affair(s), I carried a lot of resentment and anger over the trajectory of my life and the relationships that turned out to be fictitious. Strangely, when I looked at all of it from this new perspective, my rage and anger disappeared. I'm alone in all of this, and it sucks, but at least I feel like now I have something real to hold on to.

May you emerge from all of this stronger and wiser and hopefully happier.

You've had a rough upbringing. The good thing is that you seem to have identified how it has colored your relationships with other people. It wasn't until years after my divorce that I understood that I was choosing men to try and fill what I had never received growing up. When I did I realized my ex and I were a bad match on many levels, and we never would have lasted, even without his affair.

Good for you for getting there, way sooner than I did. The good news is that once you accept that the rejection of you by your family all this time was wrong and unfair, you can train yourself to find relationships that are worthy of you.

I understand why you use 'nuclear'. Concluding your family is not what you thought it was is a nasty shock. Have you confirmed your suspicion with DNA tests?

The only way you'd have known is for your family to have come clean. They didn't. My reco is to forget the phrase 'should have known', to celebrate figuring out what you have, and to remind yourself that you are not designed to read other people's minds.

You are not a sham. You are real. You have done what you've done, thought what you've thought, felt what you've felt. You've done the best you could with the information you had. Yes, you've found out that your elders have probably lied to you, but the best choice you had was to believe them. IOW, you've done pretty well with what was given to you.

One of the major impacts of being betrayed is having illusions shattered. That is excruciating, but the fewer illusions one lives with, the better, but man! it takes work to rebuild one's understanding of oneself. You've made a good start.

So I'm happy to read your post - and I'm very sorry you didn't receive the love every kid is worthy of.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 6:01 PM, Sunday, October 19th]

leftdejected, what a difficult journey you've had, and one that was terribly unfair to you in multiple ways from early on. I'm glad the truth has finally set you free, though, and I hope that the years to come will allow you to finally cherish yourself. It's never to late to make a change. If your marriage isn't satisfying, why not spend your remaining years being independent and (hopefully) happier?

LeftDejected, I am a social worker. Your story plays out so often it breaks my heart for children growing up in toxic families. If you have not reached out to begin IC please do so. You need a neutral place to unload anger, helplessness, and to gain a healthy sense of self worth. Start with EMDR, a fairly short intense way of finding all those bad hidden messages you received as a child. Then talk therapy to help you refocus on how you feel about yourself.
Here is my recipe for a happy childhood. A dependable adult, a safe environment and the freedom to be yourself. In toxic families children spend all their time trying to make sense of nonsense. Instead of growing mentally, physically and emotionally they are often stunted in all three. As an adult they are still stuck in the fears and anger from it. You need help escaping. It’s time to "run away" with a therapist to help.
As a person whose job it is to try to help families I often see generational poor coping skills. It’s as if a child learns one language and then as an adult tries to speak in a different one, only to have that inner child interpreting everything in the first language. The one their conscious brain has no idea the subconscious one is running the actions, reactions and emotions. When someone says "Why don’t you grow up?" it is insulting but it is probably close to the truth. You can’t grow up if no one has taught you the skills to do so.
This long response is to encourage you to find help so that your default emotion is happiness.

leftdejected, that is a lot of sad baggage that you don't need to keep claiming! I believe you can heal from it in the present, although there is nothing that can change the past. I am so sorry. I grew up in a home with an alcoholic father and a pre-occupied mother; all four of us kids, while we knew our parents were our parents, carried the scars of benign neglect and being considered a drag on their fun, right into our adulthoods. All of us also ended up in premature and bad marriages. All of us ended up divorced. I do not think those facts are coincidental. Cooley2here said a lot about that, too, although I don't believe she meant to refer to you specifically with failure to grow up. The big picture she described though is accurate: that we have gotten mired in that history and we need to do a hard drive update, as it were. Keep posting!

I need to respond to Super. I would never tell a poster to "grow up". It is a nasty thing to say to someone. My point is a wretched childhood does often prevent emotional growth because trying to survive in childhood leaves no room for anything else.

I’m going to give a really interesting example because I think it might help people who’ve lived in chaotic families understand. If you’re driving a car on a major highway and everyone’s going 70 you might, without meaning to, get too close to the car in front of you. If they slam on their brakes you have one thing to do. You have to get yourself and any passengers to safety and that usually means slamming on your brakes, going off into a ditch, but you concentrate on that one thing. Nothing else gets in, nothing. If the passenger does not see what’s going on and makes a comment you don’t hear it and even if you did, you would never absorb it. Your one focus is staying alive. Imagine being in a family that is going 70 miles an hour all the time with the screaming and the yelling and the drinking and the drugging. What is that child doing…emotionally ducking. It can’t concentrate on anything else and that’s where the maturity is often lacking. It does not mean that the child is becoming a bad person it means the child is trying to save its own life. There’s nothing more terrifying to a child than the chaos in the family until they become numb to it.

[This message edited by Cooley2here at 12:26 AM, Tuesday, October 21st]