How do you learn to live without the truth ??

Tell him you’ll work it out if he’ll agree to full disclosure with a polygraph. Then dump him immediately after the poly.

HI freedom,
Wow, you’ve been through so much and made it this far…without us!
The truth…well there’s the truth, and there’s the facts.
You may already have the truth without the facts. The truth is that he is dangerous person in your life. Every time you turn to him for “the facts” you endanger yourself and your family. This is true whether you trick him into telling you, or whether he decides to come clean.
You can only get away from him, by getting away from him.

Do you think it might help if you were able to replace the drama of his story with working with your own story? What are your facts? How can you invest in your own story?

Thank you for letting us know how it is for you today. I hope tomorrow is better for you. I think you’ve done really well, and you’re probably worn out and worn down. That’s why he’s pushing so hard right now. You’ve vulnerable and it’s his last chance to manipulate you back into his control. Lean on us. Don’t try and solve everything right now. Sometime’s there a false urgency about that.

D.

Diane is right, as usual. And Liza.

hi freedom,

sorry for your pain! the sad thing is, even when you have the ‘truth’ you know it is ‘mostly’ the truth. or the truth for now. until the next lie, maybe or maybe not.

once you are lied to and deceived like that, there is no longer truth. just, as far as i know. and i’m pretty sure.

these guys lie to themselves. most for years. how can they tell someone else the truth? they don’t even know what that is…

i’m sorry for your pain.

the truth is in you, sister.

Diane : there is the truth and then there are the facts. Ohmigod. So true. Why the F don’t therapists just say that when the partner is beating herself up trying to figure out if its bad enough to leave and obsessing over the details? So helpful. Thank you!

It’s one thing for us to know the truth (and that’s a very important thing), but if you are dealing with courts and custody, you need facts, and you have to get them yourself.

Hi freedom, I’m so sorry you are facing all this, but you sound like you are on the right, ugly path to honesty. My h is famous for admitting something and then denying it the next day. And the next days argument would last 3 hours and he would admit it again! I had to write it down every night so he could not deny it. Mine started with an affair. 2 years later of so exhausting prying, a polygraph exposed, he is attracted to anyone who has gone through puberty. 12+. puke. The csat said that this is true with most sa’s. in their twisted heads, boobs are boobs. It’s not pedophile, it is called hebophiles. Now most of my h’s shit was with married women, the polygraph revealed this. I have 1 son and 4 daughters now 17-26. Yep – he spied on their friends when they were changing. under 18.
I am haunted by the fact that I didn’t know. I have a house/cabin where kids always crash. I didn’t have any gut feelings or radar on this. He acted like such a good dad. I pray nothing else comes from this. It’s scary.

You are right that to be happy you found out now. Protect your girls and their friends, zero tolerance for anything. No more bed with dad, modest dressing, no clingy pj tops, etc. He is a sex addict. Everything is subject to danger, especially when he has to stop what he was doing.

sorry for this plate of shit.
Hugs
Heidi

Sorry this is the whole thing. I lost the link.

Lying
by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
This is for Shlomo Elfassy
I hate being lied to. Short of violence, it is the worst thing you can do to me. Not because of God, or the Ten Commandments, or any universal moral precepts. The reason that I hate lies is because, like you, I wish to navigate carefully through life, and to do so I must be able to calculate my true position. When you lie to me, you know your position but you have given me false data which obscures mine.
Lying is theft. When you tell me something which I take to be true and as a result I invest my time, or my money, or even my care, you have stolen these things from me because you obtained them with false information.
Lying creates inequality. Since you also do not like being lied to–I have never known anyone who wanted to be deceived– you have acted as if there were two classes of humans: you, with the right to lie, and everyone else, who must be truthful to you so that you too will not lose your way.
Lying treats people as means to the end you wish to accomplish, and not as ends in themselves.
Lying is one of those rare areas in which the moral rulebook and the legal one overlap each other quite neatly. Fraud is defined as an intentional falsehood on which another relies to his detriment. A fraud is a lie writ large, often in a financial context, where the damage to me is quantifiable in money. Even those lies which the law does not define as fraud tend to fit the same definition: a knowing false utterance which the mark is intended to rely on to his harm, and does. The only differences are of degree, for example, when we cannot assess the loss in money.
Truth stands as an absolute value, the glue which binds the rulebook. “When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened,” says St. Augustine (quoted by Bok), “all things will remain doubtful.”

Lynn, those articles were incredibly helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Love,
Daisy

Freedom,
I am so sorry for what you are going through. It is so hard to get your head around the whole Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. It doesn’t sound to me like you are in denial- it sounds more to me like you are in shock.

I don’t know how they lead their double (and in my case, it become triple) lives. But just think of all the mind games he played with you to pull that off, and he continues to play when he won’t come clean. And he covered for it by playing the nice guy. How sick is that?

I understand because I have been gaslighted, too. Everyone thought my STBX was this great guy. He had me second-guessing myself like crazy. It helped me so much to have concrete proof that I could not explain away. It helped me find myself again. I spent years without proof, and he constantly minimized what he had done and made me out to be suspicious and unforgiving (while he was still messing around).

I think it’s a harder road when you don’t have the facts. But as the sisters have pointed out, you know a lot about his trustworthiness- his willingness to lie and manipulate you. These guys tend to minimize like crazy and admit only as much as they feel they need to to keep you hooked in (“Oh, he’s finally being honest with me. Maybe he really does want to get better”). Trust your instincts. You already know you aren’t getting the whole truth.

This all takes time and energy to process. Take care of yourself and give yourself whatever space you need to work through it.

Freedom,

“What are we talking, please don’t hold back. I need you to open my eyes and make sure I know what I am truly dealing with here because I am in serious denial. Thank you xx”

How do I answer that without giving everyone here a dose of what has permanently scarred my psyche in ways I truthfully never imagined? I never imagined the things that this can escalate to. I always heard porn was violent, and I thought I knew what that meant. I did not. There is violent sex, there is rape, there is gang rape, there is bukake (sp? gag!), there is bondage and S&M, and then there is the torture I saw, which is light years a beyond A Saw movie would be less graphic. There is no relation at all to the sex act anymore; the men are clothed and in groups watching, even in the pics. There’s no sexual contact at all. At least as a part of all the photos (125) I saw. I don’t know about the videos or live webcam versions, maybe there is there, and it wasn’t on the pics I saw because maybe that’s where the line of legality is crossed. But, remembering how much my STBXSAH spent on whores (over 10K in 6 mos prior to our meeting – he says, I’m still waiting on the admittance that those calls to whores resulted in appts. Yes, my ex-seminary, ex-boyscout leader STBXSAH did that, and Freedom, to this day he says of that, I was just calling my friends to stay in touch and keep them update.), he obviously has long since passed the point of caring about legality. He openly admits he considers himself too clever to get caught. He might be right, as I still dont’ have anything the attorneys accept as actual proof that he had intercourse with a woman other than me the whole time we were married, despite 140+ pages of emails and texts about his contacts to his whores asking them to call him and inviting them to our home. I still have no legal grounds for divorce.)

I think it’s part of the genre that he progressed to, that this is done in almost a clinical atmosphere of fully clothed men. Naked women being mutliated on display while they observe. In ways that as a nurse I know involved a long, long process to get to that state of … hell, I can’t even type it. I just don’t want the words out there in the world, even if the images are. It’s so twisted, anyone who treated animals that way would go to prison. And probably be killed by the other inmates for being a sicko. But having the pics on an SD card that mistakenly got put into MY phone was the stupid slipup that got him caught. And splintered my brain so bad I had to have meds to stop crying and then crashed and slept for two days straight. I will NEVER be the same. Just don’t go there. If he’s what you say, he’s scary as hell to me.

Of course you have to make your own choices, from the guidance you seek. I pray to GOD that your SAH is not as far along as mine, or maybe took a different turn somewhere. But the minimizing, the hiding, the denial, the prostitutes, the whole thing is so similar. Even the gentle nature otherwise. You never met a more gentle man than my STBXSAH. But then theres this. And it’s like a demon possession, it’s so far from humane. Mine has been progressing through this since he was 14. He’s 53 now. He’s just GONE. He swears he’s clean and wants to win me back, but the evidences are that he’s still in it. I honestly think he can’t leave. Won’t ever, and just needs me so much to believe he’s normal he would do ANYTHING to get the front back so he can feel real. But he scares the hell out of me now. I literally nearly vomit when I hear his voice. Have blocked everthing, phone, texts, email. I thought about EMDR, but honestly, I think I need to be this scared to go through with all I know I will have to do to escape. My hands are shaking so bad I’ve had to edit this three times.

Freedom, that’s the best I can do. Even at that, I feel it’s too much. And maybe sets your imagination going too far. I really honestly don’t think many counselors are even aware of how far this goes. It’s all so “Shades of Grey” and gentile in the way they describe it. This stuff I saw has never, ever been described even by the sexual trauma counselors I’ve seen. It’s beyond what mine had heard of. Yet, it’s obviously produced for mass consumption. That changed my view of the world forever. I am so, so, so, so, so sorry. Again, your SAH might not be at that point. I’d bet a very small percentage of them ever get there. God I pray that’s true.