Can you unpack this a bit more and help me to get it:
“ Your best chance for reconciliation is to go as far as you can in the opposite direction. The longer that takes the more time it gives her to solidify her position with other male.
You want her to be unsure where she stands with you.”
How? When? What?
You are genetically wired to protect your wife and kids. When she's in distress, your first instinct is going to be to try to make things better. When you feel that you're making an effort to relieve her distress, it brings you a feeling of relief.
When you don't respond to her distress, it’s going to make you feel uncomfortable. You're going to get a cortisol dump and it’s going to be very tempting to act to make that bad feeling stop.
You'll tell yourself stories that you're being a bad person, or that you're "pushing her away" to justify trying to relieve your discomfort. "Making things worse" means that you grin and bear it.
You basically need to withdraw support -- emotional support and financial support to the degree possible. If she makes a mess, she needs to clean it up. You do not step in and enable her in any way.
If she gets mad at you, you shrug it off, you don't engage.
If she cries in front of you, you let her cry and you make NO effort to comfort her.
You go out and "get a life" and you don't feel any responsibility to explain or justify what you're doing, you just do it.
Very important: You are not mean, punishing, or passive aggressive. You don't make nasty comments. You don't go out of your way to inconvenience her, you simply act as if you are completely uninterested and unaffected by her.
If she wants to make love to OM in your front yard, you walk past, smile and wave. It just doesn't impact you emotionally.
When she senses that she's losing control over you, she will fight back. She will try to manipulate you to stay invested in her. The more you resist, the harder she will try. She'll scream and yell, she'll accuse, she'll break down and cry, she'll blame. The minute you engage, you lose. This will be uncomfortable, it will feel worse than giving in to her and engaging. That's what making things worse means.
Often people mistake this fighting on the part of the WAW as interest -- that they want you back and that's why they're engaging you. Don't be fooled -- you being emotionally invested in her is an insurance policy and NOTHING else. If things go horribly wrong with her affair partner and outside interests, she can always come back to her comfortable marriage.
It’s a huge comfort to know that she has you to fall back on if things go badly for her. You've already proven that you'll save her, like when you helped her find a therapist. You need to pull that safety net away entirely.
She needs to fully believe that you will not be there for her if she chooses to return after her sex trip, and that if she wants to come back she's going to have to work for it.
You can't tell her that, she'll never believe it. You have to show her that beyond a doubt with your ACTIONS.
Ever run into a crazy person on the sidewalk who points at you and yells at you? You do what you can to minimize the interaction but after that you move on. It doesn't ruin your day, it certainly doesn't hurt your self-esteem or make you feel worse about who you are.
You need to regard her with exactly the same level of detachment and disinterest. Whatever she does, your toes are still tapping.
At the same time, you have to build a life for yourself that anyone would want to be a part of, full of fun activities, outside interests, and engaging friends. If you can do both of those things -- completely emotionally uncouple from her (fake it until you make it) and build an amazing life for yourself, she'll clamor to come back and if she doesn't you won't care. That's your only winning path out of where you are, but getting there is going to be uncomfortable, and more painful than you feel today, because it will go against your white knight nature.
Rockon, I'm very sorry you're here. Everything she told you about your faults was nonsense to justify her affair. When you then respond to her complaints you validate them, so she feels even more entitled to have her affair.
You've been trying to "nice your way back" for awhile.
It's not working, it will never work.
You cannot placate her, you cannot "prove your love" through acts of giving and support.
You also cannot push her away by withdrawing support.
She has chosen her course of action, and as of right now, nothing you do will impact it.
Your shortest path back together is to go the opposite direction.
You need to make things worse before they can get better
Are you willing to do that?
If not, you can expect many more years of the same thing you have now.
I had conversations with the MC I went to. She said that people come to MC for a variety of reasons:
1) Trying to give the appearance that they "tried" when in fact they had already given up. This is public face-saving
2) Trying to help the other person come to terms with the fact that they have decided to leave
3) Trying to get a third party to validate that they are right and the other person is wrong
4) Trying to save their marriage by being willing to work on it.
They said that 95% of the time, one person is coming for reasons 1-3, and the other person is coming for reason 4. When only one person is in, MC has a 0% success rate.
She said that people usually come in about three years too late, when one party is already fully checked out.
It sounds like you're fully in this scenario where you're in group 4 and W is in some combination of groups 1-3. In that scenario, you have almost no chance of success with MC.
I would strongly recommend individual IC and telephone DB coaching as being a much more effective course of action for you.
In this situation that one person is already done there is probably a zero percent success rate for any MC. In addition, I believe that they make the situation worse because they encourage the "standing spouse" to divulge all their thoughts and feelings which comes across as pursuing behavior.
When one person wants out and one person wants to keep things together, overt pursuit is the enemy.