[janine]

I have a problem, Ive been with my husband since i was 16 i'm now 43. 3 children over the age of 19 own a house near the beach good jobs. the year before last we bought a pizza shop that didn't do well and 2 of our kids were out of control for a while so with this and the pressure, my husband smoked more and more pot. 2 years before this i left him and he ended up in hospital with a nervous breakdown, but 4 months later after he was back he was smoking pot again, my eldest son was smoking also. it was like a mad house when we bought the business my daughter and i worked in it. i would come home late to a household of blokes smoking and i was on the outer. my husband blames me totally for the business failure and i know it was a combined failure. anyway the time come where he was so angry because i wouldn't listen to him that he kicked me out of my home. i slept in my car at the back of the shop and than a friend took me in. I sold the shop to pay some bills and am still paying the 90,000 lost in the business against the house. my 2nd son told us his gay. the eldest son nearly went to goal ending up in rehab. my husband went on arapax. my daughter moved to melb. i moved into a flat then my 2nd son moved in with me. my husband stayed in the house. 2 story big house by himself and then sold his business. and is now employed in a good job. 10 weeks after i was gone he started a relationship with a friend of ours and even thought she knew we still loved eachother but needed time to jump over these crazy times she couldn't wait. he was with her for a month before i guessed what was going on. i went crazy. im back in my house now my son is still in the flat the other son is out of rehab and doing well. no more pot in the house and we are trying to work things out. he dropped her when i went off about her and doesn't have any more contact with her although im still not over her we had never been with anyone else since we meet. i found an email from her to him and a letter. i don't sleep knowing she was in my bed. i hate and ive never hated before and can not get over this all the other important stuff i can handle and deal with for what it was but her. now my husband just gets angry at me and shuts down and says he shouldn't have let me back in the house and is not talking to me because i can't get over it and he is being punished by me for something he cant change. im not an angry person i just cry all the time. when i tell him i feel insecure to help me he thinks i need help. so please help

[Benjamin Fry]

Broadly what you are saying is that you have been through some terrible times but things are now getting better. However you have one thing you canít get past which is your husbandís brief affair. I can understand how this is a visceral pain that seems very personal and difficult to banish. Broadly speaking Iíd suggest that you need to find a way to forgive them both and to move on with a life not controlled by what they did in the past. I know how hard this is. You could spend a lot of time talking the issue through with a therapist to discover what were the root issues which made this so hard. I suspect that there might be something in your relationship with your father that is being triggered here. If you can separate out the emotional resonances from the past with the emotional realities of the present then it can help you to forgive and forget the present. If all else fails, thereís a nice technique of praying for someone else to forgive these people until you can find a way to forgive them yourself. Regardless of creed or beliefs, this seems to work quite well for most people. You might try it.