Dear Matt:

Yes, your feelings of betrayal and deceit need to come first.  In this relationship, in the last 10 months, he was your perpetrator and you were his victim. His history of having been a victim in a previous relationship does not give him a right to victimize you (just as the man in college did not have a right to victimize him).

You wrote yesterday and today: “He kept pushing it deeper… He truly believed all this time that if he kept it secret, it would go away… There was a lot of shame tied to it and he wanted to regain control by.. cheating“-

– I am trying to understand the connection between his shame (a result of him being emotionally abused in college), and regaining control by cheating on you:

Back in college, he felt distress and shame over being under someone else’s abusive power. He felt unbearably weak, unbearably powerless in the context of a monogamous relationship with that man, it being that the man was his one and only boyfriend (?)

Fast forward: at times, he felt unbearably controlled, weak and powerless with you (having inaccurately projected that man into you and re-experiencing what he felt back then), and to get rid of the shame involved in feeling too powerless in a monogamous relationship, he undid the monogamy.. sort of diluting the power he felt that you had over him by adding other men into the mix?

anita