Reply To: I was an OW, I repent: now I want to change and stop self-beating

I think what you really need is some perspective here. You’re holding on to a lot of things as truths, but largely you are giving them more weight than is appropriate. For example, listen to this:

“Now I repent because I realized how much pain I was making to another person and how I was selling myself low.”

You didn’t actually cause pain to another person. If anything, your ex-FWB is the one that caused pain. He’s the who is presumably in the monogamous relationship. If it hadn’t been you there, it would almost certainly have been someone else. You also don’t seem to have any knowledge of what their relationship was like. You don’t know if she’s aware of his philandering, if she’s blissfully unaware, if she’s approving or even if she’s actively encouraging. You don’t know, and at this point you don’t need to know.

What you do know is that you don’t like the feeling of fooling around with a person who is in a relationship, primarily because you’re envisioning the pain the other partner feels. We can extrapolate a few things from that: You’re a person who deep down values honesty and doesn’t want to hurt people, even people they don’t know. Does that sound like a bad person to you?

Obviously, therapy is a good option. But in the meantime, I think you should explore why you feel like what you did is such a crime. Why do you feel like you need to suffer for this?

I’m not going to tell you that what you did was great (though again, we don’t know anything about the other relationship, so I’m not even going to say it was a bad thing either), but in the grand scheme of things is not worthy of the amount of punishment you are giving yourself. If anything, you’ve learned some valuable lessons about yourself, and that’s something to be proud of.