In search of answers..

I'm new to the board, having found it through searching for my answers on Google. I'll try not to bore you, however, I feel some of the details are important. My wife and I have been married for 12 yrs, together for 15, with 2 small children.
Let me start by saying I have a record of infidelity with my wife. It started a few years into our relationship. Nothing physical, just cyber... exchanging emails with women behind her back. I always looked at it as a fantasy, never thinking I would ever actually act upon anything physically. This, along with several porn sites, was my escape from my stressful world. This went on for years until an ex girlfriend contacted me through facebook in 2008. Emails led to an physical affair in late 2009. After two occasions with her, we knew it was wrong and stopped. My wife learned of the affair in Nov 2011. We went to one counseling session and the counselor immediately knew I was a sex addict, using the sex to escape reality. I never thought of myself in this nature, but after reading several books and counseling sessions, I realized it to be true. I got the help I needed and my wife stayed by side. For the past year and a half, I have been more in love with my wife than ever before. I have been a perfect (if there is such a thing) husband and father.
Early March, we celebrated our 12th anniversary. We had a great date night and came back home and had sex. Our sex life has always been minimal so it wasn't too unusual to see she wasn't at all into that night. She has had self esteem / self confidence issues but that was changing by the day with her going to the gym for the previous few months. 5 days after our anniversary, I knew something was wrong and I pretty much cornered her to communicate with me. She said she wasn't happy with our marriage. She said the, "I love you but I'm not IN love with you" and she has been unhappy in our marriage for quite some time. For the past year and a half, I have thought our marriage was growing stronger, but it was only dying without me knowing. We are now in counseling together. We both like the counselor, but I'm not sure if it is helping at all. She has been very honest in our conversations, saying how sorry she is. She says there is no one else and I believe that to be true, but she said she does think about what it would be like to date other guys. She said she even has had thoughts of asking for a temporary separation and / or an open relationship. I know she loves me but she says she is no longer attracted to me, that I'm the friend / brother type / loved because I'm a terrific father. We have fun together and our family gets along great, but there is zero passion from her side. I haven't really kissed her in over three months. We hug a lot...
It's eating me from the inside out. Part of me says I deserve it all for what I have put her through in the past, yet another part of me is begging her to see me for who I have been for the past year and a half and not the cheat I once was. She knows I have changed but I think she can't let go of the past, as she has always just bottled feelings up.
I'm sorry this is so long. I have read 6 books in the past 3 months looking for answers. (I haven't read 6 books in 20 yrs!)
Should I just let her go to see if she can find whatever she may be looking for and hope she realizes what is at home? Do I continue to fight for the wife I love so much? Our therapist stated that we should just start having sex to see if any feelings can come back.. that passion can usually create passion, but my wife has no desire to do anything sexual with me. I love my wife and my children more than anything in the world and I don't want to imagine life without either.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

Many views, however, no replies....
I take that as no one wants to touch this.situation. That's why I'm so damn confused.

I think your main mistake is this:

Deterministic system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is a very common mistake of human cognition. You will see it repeated again and again if you read this forum and the forum on Relationships and Communications.

By making this common yet huge mistake in your way of thinking, you disallow the possibility of chance.

Think of the success of Starbucks: did it happen because they took all the correct steps in all the right order, and only that? Or, did they get a helping hand from what is called "luck"?

...

Your title asks for answers. That might mean two things: 1) you want to answer the query about why your wife is no longer sexually attached to you, 2) you want to answer the question on what your next steps should be.

So, to (1) - very likely it is due to randomness, a.k.a. chance. You should stop trying to connect your behavior in the past with your wife's current state of mind. She might have grown to treat you the way people treat brothers in a nice way, and the way people cherish and value the parents of their children for their being good parents of their children, without sexual attraction, all on her own, without any assistance on your part. The fallacy of believing in the deterministic model makes you discount the possibility of chance, even though, when you check traffic on highways and learn of accidents, you probably realize that traffic accidents happen due to a wide variety of causes but also due to chance (lack of luck).

You should also see that your wife's reaction is in no way symmetrical to your past behavior. You engaged in deceit while she openly acknowledges her desire to either separate or have an open relationship. She has not engaged in deceit, so it is not the case of her reflecting your past behavior back to you. So you should stop the line of thinking about your deserving or not deserving it altogether. Plus, she is not doing anything bad for you to use the language of "deserving" - she is not being deceitful, she just wants to change the situation for the better.

You should probably try an open relationship over a trial separation because you both enjoy each other's company a lot (she, in non-sexual ways, but still), and, it would be easier to parent your small children while living in the same household. perhaps an open relationship will lead her to becoming more sexual with you, because opening the relationship will put a stop to her current agony in which she feels bound to you against her will, and people in general do not like lack of free will (in general, not always).

You said that you are a perfect husband and that you finally start reading books after a 20 year hiatus. If that is the case, I suggest you read or re-read one of the comedic masterpieces of the 19th century, by Oscar Wilde:

An Ideal Husband - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

After that book, read some more good fiction - do not limit yourself to reading books that, you believe, somehow help find the answers for the current situation, because it seems that the books you have chosen to read are of self-help "genre" - right?

You should also make sure the T is good, because the original T, in "immediately knowing" that you had "sexual addition", right off the bat, was unprofessional. The current T who suggests that you just have sex whereas your W does not have any desire seems unprofessional as well (or, out of touch with reality).

Finally, yes, you should stop fighting for the wife you love so much in that you would be fighting a losing battle. Instead, embrace the idea that you can continue to love her, on some level, even if she does not do what you want her to do - in reality, what you want her to do is appreciate your efforts at staying faithful and return the favor by being sexual to you. This is very much like "conditional love" - you do X and expect a prize for your doing X, especially if doing X is difficult for you. It is possible that what she wants from you is unconditional love - meaning, that you would be happy with the fact that your wife exists, regardless of sexual favors or statements confirming that she is in love with you.

To sum up, the situation does not seem to be catastrophic - there is no crisis, no abuse, the children are happy, there is enough money in the household for expenses that go above and beyond the basic food staples (counseling), and you are just going through the process of re-defining the status and dynamics of your marriage in a way that seems cooperative, overall. So nothing horrible is going on, at present.

I think you are failing at counting your blessings and that is what is eating you from the inside out. Count your blessings - your kids are healthy, you have a roof over your head, you must be employed, you are not facing an eviction, you have enough focus and concentration to have read 6 books in a short period of time, etc.

If you do a good job counting your blessings, being thorough in that, the current situation with the wife will become smaller in your mind, as it should. It will occupy just enough space to reflect its true seriousness, which can be described as "average" on a scale of seriousness of life's problems - neither trivial nor overwhelmingly complex, but in-between.

T claims that passion has a self-multiplying quality to it, which is a fine claim, but how does the T offer to catalyze your passion-increasing process if there is no passion to start/ignite the process? Have you asked T? If T says something that does not make any sense, you should challenge T right in the consultation room.

PS Finally, the only way to find out if the change that has happened in your wife is a result of your past behavior in part or in full is to go back in time and re-run the experiment changing your behavior. This is impossible - you and your wife are not laboratory mice, and the experiment called "real life" is unrepeatable. So, you will never know the answer to "why has she changed?" with certainty. So, the time you spend pondering whether you "deserve it" is a total waste. You need to deal with the problems as they present themselves now. It seems that one problem is that your wife is unhappy, and she is offering a trial separation, which seems realistic as one approach, and an open relationship, which seems equally realistic. You also have a T who proposes sex with an unwilling partner as a solution, and that does not seem realistic. To the extent that the T proposes unrealistic solutions, the T is a waste of time and money. However, since, apparently, the wife opens up quite well while in T, the T does do something useful to justify the expense on him/her. So you probably should keep the T for the value of having your W speak sincerely in the T sessions, and all work together on finding realistic solutions and trying them in practice.