Past internet behaviour

[partner2011]

Hi there
I discovered my husband had been secretly watching porn throughout our marriage and to cut a long story short, a year later he is awaiting counselling after a mixture of discovery/drip disclosure we realise he has a problem with porn addiction and compulsive mastibation. We also joined an online porn addiction program but his lying has been a major problem. He has constantly lied about details which has led to more problems that the actual behaviour. It makes me wonder what else he is hiding. I feel I made any disclosing as easy as possible for him and supported him but he always held something back and only told more when HE wanted to get it off his chest or if he thought giving a teeny bit of info would make me think he had completely opened up.
I am not computer savvy. I found some basic information by searching history, a free 'undeleter' program for recovering deleted files and a couple said 'adult', 'erotic' but I was unable to open them. Also by checking deleted email I found subscription to a site and checked on a similar one and recovered the password.
But I want a more thorough way of checking past internet history. I am not looking for something to monitor him now as I do not suspect he is currently acting out now although I may still install one at later time for peace of mind.
What I actually want to do is uncover PAST internet behaviour. He has done all he can to delete past activity, so I want to get some software that will uncover PAST internet history. I have tried free ones but what was shown didn't make sense to me and only 2 clues that there was something sexual but I could not actually recover anything useful and it includes all file types and is just confusing as I don't know how to open them or what they are. Some programs say I need to recover them to a different drive (I have tried C and D) but I don't know what that means and it would not let me go any further.
Is there anything which is really easy to use which just shows what sites he has been on and things he searched for. He never saved anything he says, just watched on free sites.
I guess I want to put my mind at rest that there was not any actual contact with people and nothing extreme or even illegal. You hear all sorts about porn addiction escalating. If he has told me everything and he continues with the online program, counselling and making changes as well as working on our relationship, then we could get through this. But if he is STILL hiding things at this point then I don't think he can be commited to recovery and I don't think I could bear discovering a relapse in the future. Also, if he has had actual contact with anyone then that will make a difference to whether I choose to stay with him. I don't have a rational reason to suspect anything illegal, but how do you really know? I had no idea he was into porn.
He says I know all details now but he has lied so much even about silly things that I really want to know if he is hiding anything else.

Can anyone suggest a really good free of low cost program to open files which makes it obvious what the files are and what files are internet history. Can you actually see what sites they went on? Can anyone talk me through the opening up and recovering onto a different drive that it mentions?
Also I have tried searching for the cache and index dat files after reading on the internet but not really had much luck there and again when searching through the computer for possible files, i have been unable to open files because I don't know what they are or what program to open them with. I don't want to damage the computer.. i think he used software to delete things as I cannot find any dat files at all (after following online instructions). We have windows 7.
I do want to move on and hopefully with my husband but I really feel i need to do one last thorough search before I can move on and accept there is nothing significant that i do not know. Thanks.

[Crisodian]

Broken trust from this addiction is the hardest to heal when full disclosure is not "full".

I am the SO of a PA who has been in recovery since 2009. And like you, I needed full disclosure to stop the nagging "what if" voice.

While I don't have much knoweldge of software that will do what you are seeking to do, let me ask you this...

Why do you still think there is more? And is this what you need to heal?

If you think there still may be activity going on, (I know you mentioned you don't, but when trust is gone, it's hard to believe that somedays) then I would highly recommend accountability software like K9. It's free and you can configure it to only monitor, not block. It will generate reports that only you can view with the password to show you internet activity.

The question of "how much do I need to know" is one that has been talked about many times. The bottom line is, how much do YOU need to heal? If you need full complete disclosure and you feel you are not there yet, then you need to convey that to your H. If he is truly in recovery, honest, clean, "relapse is not an option" recovery, then he should be willing to discuss with you the depths his addiction took him and give you the disclosure you seek. If he is not there yet, then he may still not have come fully clean. Sadly, as the SO, we have to rely on the PA to tell us so much during the worst time of our lives when what they tell us, means so very little.

I have always demanded 100% honesty, 100% transparency, 100% of the time during this recovery process. And that goes for all aspects of our lives together because, as one of our SOs here once said, the addiction may be his, but the marriage is ours. For me, my H needed to be 100% honest and transparent about everything or we could not move forward heal, rebuild and I could not have begun to trust him again.

I hope you find peace on your journey.
~C~

[rosie]

If you want to check his past behaviour, this is because there is no trust. Is seeing it for yourself going to change that? You already know he has hide and lied about it.

You can't uncover past internet history. You can recover deleted files, through an undelete program though. Google undelete - there are free versions - dont pay for one.

You won't ever know the full extent of what he has done. One of the best things I ever did was stop looking and stop asking.