I have a very difficult and confusing problem. I'm trying to recover from an affair gone bad. (I have a thread about that over in the Separation and Divorce forum.) I already know I was wrong and I hurt my wife badly. She refuses to trust me or forgive me (understandably) but she is allowing me the chance to work toward regaining her trust. She will not even agree to see a marriage counselor yet, because she tells me I have to heal myself before I can even try to heal our marriage.

My problem is that the first thing I have to heal from is a broken heart. The affair ended when my lover was forced to make a hard decision and chose to return to her ex instead of staying with me and working toward the new life we had planned together. I don't hate her, and I'm not angry with her. I have cut off all contact with her as part of trying to save my marriage, but she's not a bad person. I enjoyed the time we spent together. We were already very close from our long history of working together in medicine and firefighting before the romance started, and when it started, it was great. We shared a lot of good times together, she is physically very attractive, and making love with her was by far the best of my life. The last time I saw her, we were curled up together in bed after making love and she told me she knew this was where she belonged. Three days later, our relationship ended.

Even though I am 100% committed to restoring my marriage and never seeing my lover again, I do miss her. It still hurts to think about her, and I'm still grieving for the relationship that ended. I know it's normal to feel this way when a relationship ends, but I feel like I'm not allowed to. I've gotten rid of everything she left behind in my apartment, including some items of great sentimental value, (I'm not allowed back in my house yet) but the whole place reminds me of her. We rented this place to be ours together. When I go to bed at night, I have to sleep in the bed I bought for us.

How do I go about the normal and natural grief that's part of the healing process when every time I think about my lover or miss her I feel like I'm betraying my wife all over again? I can't help but remember every time I see my wife that my lover is more attractive. It's true, but it feels like an insult to my wife. If my marriage ever recovers to the point of having a physical relationship again, I know from experience that my wife will never turn me on the way my lover did.

How can I deal with this? How do I work through the memories and put them behind me when even thinking of them reminds me of the wrong I did to my wife? How can I heal from this without feeling like I'm hurting my wife all over again?