I couldn't breathe, I felt lightheaded, I think that my heart actually stopped for a moment. This is what I was feeling as I read the email. It described in excruciating detail, my wife's real life encounter with one of her cyberlovers, Patrick. He talked about the passion he had never felt before and about the true love they pledged to each other. Patrick and I shared something else too...

Continued Below

Continued from above...

We both had no idea that Vivian was planning to leave in a few days, without so much as a note or email, for yet another cyber lover.

Weeks passed before the police informed me that my now ex-wife had left the country voluntarily. Patrick had finally gotten the nerve up to call and ask me if he could talk to Vivian. Before that, he had just kept calling and hanging up. I had the perverse pleasure of "shocking" him back, when I told him that she had left him too... for another stranger that she had met online. He was as stunned as I was.

What could make a person leave their spouse, their children AND their lover? Mid-life crisis? Maybe. But I place full blame on the cybering, which is why I started this web site. I could certainly understand my ex leaving me after 23 years of marriage. I was not a perfect husband. But it was the fact that she left her two girls just as coldly, that persuaded me to look for other causes. Our children were 16 and 18 at the time, but their relationship with their mother was as special and loving as one would expect between a mother and her daughters.

It has been over 4 years since that day and I have never heard a single word from her. That's okay, I'm over it. She just recently started contacting our daughters, but only occasionally. This is fortunate, because every time she calls them, they have to relive the experience over again and try to make sense of it. That their mother CHOSE to leave them for a man she had never even met. To go to a place so far away, that being there for them when they need her is not an option. They are the true victims in this instance of internet infidelity.

If you have a cyber cheater and they try and convince you it is just a harmless fantasy, please consider the potentially devastating results. Put a stop to it... immediately!

John
webmaster@chatcheaters.com

Traumatic events such as natural disasters and criminal attacks shatter our assumptions about our sense of safety in the world. In a similar way, the discovery of infidelity is devastating because it shatters basic assumptions about the security we expect in committed relationships.

 

Healing from adultery first requires that the betrayed spouse recover from the trauma.
Greg Swenson, Ph.D.

Discovering the betrayal and anticipating the potential loss of the person most important in your life causes great distress. Unlike the trauma of death, which has an end and can be compensated for by positive elements in the relationship, infidelity undermines all that is good in the relationship and the pain seems to have no natural end point.

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When an extramarital affair is discovered, often the couple will undergo a crisis. This may not sound surprising. However, this crisis can be the most difficult part of the issue. The "injured" spouse may feel emotionally abandoned by the other spouse. She or he may feel a loss of her/his image of marriage, of her/his marriage...

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The Impact of Discovery
American Association for
Marriage and Family Therapy

It is common for both spouses to experience depression (including suicidal thoughts), anxiety, and/or a profound sense of loss following the initial disclosure. The reactions of the betrayed spouse resemble the post-traumatic stress symptoms of the victims of catastrophic events.

Common reactions to the loss of innocence and shattered assumptions include obsessively pondering details of the affair; continuously watching for further signs of betrayal; and physiological hyperarousal, flashbacks and intrusive images.

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Life after infidelity
Nation Newspapers

Five years ago, Amanda*, aged 36 years, found out, to her dismay, that her husband of ten years was having an affair with a younger woman. The fact that her husband and his mistress had been going on overseas travels together and gone on several holidays nearly crushed her, and were it not for psychiatric help and counseling, Amanda believes she would have gone mad.

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