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Sometimes just when I think things are going well I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t let some question go. Last night it was how could he not hate the OW after the cheating was over. He did not seem to actively like her just didn’t actively dislike her. I kept thinking it was unnatural and he was missing some fundamentally human gene where you should automatically hate someone who wants to do harm to your children. Why wouldn’t he feel that. He says he was mostly scared of her. Scared the truth would come out (which he kept secret for the next 8 years) so he was just afraid something might happen to trigger her to disclose. I thought he should be capable of both fearing her and hating her. More recently he claims to hate her quite a bit. But this man has a temper. When he hates someone it is like he’s on fire looking for ways to exact revenge. He writes the ten page letter to the CEO of the company that sold him a faulty flashlight. So I’m not really buying that he hates her. He probably still has fear. Cause even though he "came clean" I’m sure her version of events is less favorable than the version he gave me.

Anyway, I was pissed it kept me up all night. So I made him go through the discussion on a walk to the beach today. Hoping that will help drain out the pus of these thoughts a bit.

Does anyone else get stuck in these pointless thought loops?

Once in a while, I will still have some thought loops roll around, even though I'm several years past the last dday and subsequent D.

After we split, I started seeing a betrayal trauma specialist and did mindfulness exercises. Combining those with learning meditation has helped me to stop the looping thoughts. Sometimes they'll come back a little later, and I do some more work there.

I also think that being D and not seeing XWH helps because I don't have his presence triggering my thought loops. For the most part, I've reached the "meh" phase. It's taken a good 4-5 years to get there.

I do still get caught in these thoughts loops - mainly late at night or when PMDD strikes. My WH did the same in that he stayed in contact with the AP through fear and she would send an irregular text (like once a year) which he said he hated but he felt that as long as things were going well in her marriage the secret was safe. That was until it wasn't and she had another affair and decided to text me out of the blue 12 years after her and my WH affair as she felt it was unfair that only she was paying the consequences and blamed her BH for not 'getting over' the affair and 'not having the balls to confront my husband'and my husband for 'taking advantage of a situation'. So despite the fact she had at least 6 affairs I know of now, she takes no responsibility.
My husband hates her now and is disgusted with himself but I think what stops real hatred for my WH and yours, is that both know they were just as broken and 'sick' to have the affair in the first place so they are probably afraid of being hypocritical.

After D day. My wife could not get why she didn’t hate AP. She just kept saying it was her fault and he could do no wrong. She was still in the fog. But I wanted her to hate him. I needed her to hate him. She went to therapy for months and then one day had an aha session and came back hating him. But it wasn’t an over night thing. The BS sees the AP as a threat and a morally sick individual. Instantly despising them post D day. The WS is still bonded to them. Via sexually or emotionally or both. When the WS is not instantly in hate mode we have a demented love triangle and the BS can’t comprehend why the WS can’t see the AP for what they are. Now this causes even more strife for the BS. The WS is like an addict and can’t see the harm the AP is doing. Until that bond is broken the WS will not be able to reconcile with BS. It took my wife months to get there. It hampered my recovery greatly. Bring him up today and the response has been the same since the aha moment. I hate him. I almost lost everything because of him. I think she has lingering feelings of fondness for how he made her feel but also a hatred of how she allowed herself to get manipulated. I also think she puts some blame on my shoulders for why she was vulnerable to the affair. But poor coping methods led her to her choices. She has agency like everyone else. She says she blames no one else for the affair but herself. She said that from the beginning. But it took her some time to see how the AP was manipulating her. That hurt me quite a lot waiting for her to "Get it"

It took my wife about a month to realize what a pos her AP is. A very long, slow, painful month. In retrospect and after seeing many stories here and other sites I realize now that's actually pretty fast. The first week or 2 was "its over, we're 'just friends' now" which I tried to tolerate (this was before I discovered SI), but soon realized there was no way I could stay under those circumstances. I pulled a 180, and when I took steps toward divorce it really opened her eyes, and she realized she was on the verge of truly losing me. That's when she sent a more definitive "it's over, don't contact me anymore" message, blocked him on everything, and she began to see him for what he truly is. She hates him now. She's said some of the harshest things about him that I've ever heard her utter about anyone in almost 28 years.

He, like my wife, is epileptic. One day when I was ruminating, and she was feeling horrible for her life choices, she wished death on him by seizure. That blew my mind. She's VERY sensitive about that, and I couldn't believe she said it. She's said it multiple times since then. I'm convinced she hates his guts now.