I would not expect your wife to be in love with you any more after what you did.:nope: Sexual abuse has to be the most invasive abuse there is. That just doesn’t get better with time. It takes something a *whole lot *more than just time.
What you did is SO FAR from married love that it is truly closer to pedophilia than it is to married love. And you would not expect a person who can commit THAT to be capable of married love. Also I would NOT expect anyone capable of doing what you did to be capable of married love.
You see, married love is all about “self-donating”. “Self-taking” is the* opposite*. The evil one’s ways are opposite God’s ways. God’s ways build up. The evil one’s ways tear down. You have embraced the ways of the enemy of God, and in doing so you have torn your wife down. So if your wife behaves like someone has torn her down, you know why. I think she is behaving GREAT for someone who has had her heart and soul ripped at.
This is so bad that there is NO hope in this world for you. But in Christ there is hope, provided you are willing to face your error, and provided you are willing to desire for God to help you change. Without that, its true there is no hope for you.
It is good for your children that they did not have to have a broken home (yet), though you can be sure they feel the tension and that is not good for them. Its good you have both not gotten third parties involved (affairs). That helps a lot.
Your problem is DEEPLY serious, and you need a counselor who sees how deeply serious it is and can help you see it. Probably it has something to do with the huge mess our culture is in that you got to such a despicably low place. You would need a lot of GRACE to get out of your hole. However, the good thing is the more grace you need, the more grace God will give you.
Also now her problem is DEEPLY serious, because of the deep strike to her heart and soul.
I think that Gregory Popcak’s counseling service is the ONLY service I think can help you, unless you happen to have something really amazing in your area that I have never heard about. Here is a link:
catholiccounselors.com/services/ You can see they address “Faithful Solutions to Sexual Problems” and they can help you see how serious it is and how much it takes to heal it. It will take a LOT. It will take DEEP understanding of your problem and an understanding of how it affected your wife, and it will take spiritual healing, which they can lead you to.
Popcak truly understands marriages, he puts them on a sort of a “scale” from worst to best in his book, For Better Forever and certainly yours is at that bottom of the barrel. Its a long crawl up from the scum you sit in. However, Popcak knows that, and he DOES believe that bottom-dwellers such as yourself CAN work their way into truly great marriages, and he has a plan for how even the worst can become the best, if they desire…
I am surprised at some of the mild responses you got in this thread. I can only think that people are too polite to put themselves in your shoes and your wife’s shoes, and to imagine what it would be like to live with what you confessed to. So they did not grasp the seriousness of your offense, and their answers reflect that. Or, they are not married and do not know the joys of marital love as God intended it. Popcak’s book Holy Sex. A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving does a great job describing how marital love is SUPPOSED to be, in God’s plan, and when you know that its perfectly clear what an *offense to love *your act is. You cannot expect your wife to just “get over it” with time, and resume things with you. But Popcak’s service can help her heal from it, and she will need a GREAT DEAL of God’s grace, too, in order to ever feel safe near you again. So you will both get what you need to understand what happened and to call on God’s grace for healing, and understand and go to where God would have you go.
I don’t know any other place than Popcak’s that could help you, though. I know there are a LOT of BAD and incompetent counselors out there! In my experience, I would say there are LOTS more bad than good. And I would not risk going to a bad counselor. And its not just money and time wasted. You might lose your only chance to save your marriage. She may be unwilling to go to counseling ever again if she goes to a bad counselor after the bad experience. The only understandable thing for her to do, then, may be to
run.
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.
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