Recovery Nation

Exercise One:
A. Because the discovery of your partner's addiction will no doubt reflect many commonalities with others, it is at the same time uniquely devastating to you. Take some time to share your background in relation to the discovery of your partner's sexual and/or romantic compulsions/addiction. Share an unadulterated version of your partner's addiction with someone you trust; or, anonymously in this forum.

I met him in college. We were at a smart school--the kind of place where some kids' grandfathers had buildings named after them, but most kids were just there because they had high SAT scores and were otherwise well-rounded and interesting. He liked things that I liked. Plus, my friend (whom he dated) said she dumped him because he was "too committed." I wasn't into hookup culture or casual sex in general. In fact, I was sure that I wanted to save my virginity for my wedding night. A guy who was described to me as "too committed" was therefore very appealing. 

We talked...we hit it off. Later, I seduced him into kissing me and got him to participate in what I thought was a sexy game. I didn't want to have sex, but I wasn't against having fun or being sexual. Our relationship was sweet and sexy. We had fun for a couple of months during our freshman spring. I didn't know that I wanted to commit to him, for sure, so I broke up with him that summer. But as soon as I did it, I felt bad. He'd been nothing but sweet to me, and I broke up with him because I wasn't sure I wanted to be with him. I don't know why I discounted my feelings about this. I think it was because I really wanted to save sex for marriage, but I also really wanted to have sex...staying with a sure thing seemed like...a sure thing. At the same time, I wanted to make sure I would be marrying the right person. He really did seem like the right person at the time. 

We were long distance over the summer. He sent me some photos of himself masturbating. I sent him some cheesecake-type photos, because I knew better than to take that kind of photo of myself. I thought it was exciting. I was 18 or 19, and I'd had very little experience with sexual relationships. "I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger." Well, those pictures should have been a red flag semaphore for me, but if I saw it, I ignored it. That wouldn't be the last time I saw those photos, but I couldn't possibly have known that. I believed--because I wanted to believe--that he took those photos only for me, as a way to bond sexually while we were half a country away from each other. I deluded myself about this...I don't know why. 

When we got back to school in the fall, it was like we never left. But something seemed off, to me. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was. He wasn't entirely present in our relationship. I started having self-esteem problems. I think some of it was chemical, but some of it was probably because I could sense that his energy was going elsewhere. 

I blamed his ex (he was "honest" with me about still having feelings for her). I blamed other women in his life. The closer we were supposed to be getting, the more I felt him pull away. By junior year, I became aware of his use of porn. I can't remember the first time I found it on his computer.  Maybe I've blocked it out. I remember feeling not good enough. I remember thinking about times when he could have been spending time with me, and wondering if he was using porn instead.  

By then, he was starting to have second thoughts about committing to me, which made me cling to him all the harder. We had some fights. That summer, we both worked on campus, but it was like we were still long distance. He immersed himself in the social life of his job, and I felt like a hanger-on...a third wheel in my own relationship. I felt like he didn't want me to be a part of his life there, and that he would have been happier if he'd been single for that summer. In the fall, he went to a party with his summer work friends. He came back saying ("honestly") that one of the girls had kissed him, and that he really liked the way she did it. He demonstrated for me, and made it clear that he wanted me to do it that way. This didn't sit well with me, and we continued to fight about it until I found his chat accounts. He went so far as to use them on my computer, so I had full access to his filthy profiles and logs on teen chat sites. We were 20 then, so teens were still "within reach," as it were, so it's not like I had any objection to that. But the fact that he was chatting at all didn't sit well with me. He seemed unhappy about it too...unhappy enough to have what I refer to as his first "come to Jesus" moment. Tears--lots of them--apologies, self-flagellation, and even a couple of visits with (an untrained, unhelpful) school psychologist, for us as a couple and for him by himself. 

We tried to do some work after that, but I was still having trouble accepting that this was ok in my life, so I talked to him about breaking up. He initiated the breakup that time, but he was really only beating me to the punch. I was still sifting and winnowing, trying to make a well-considered decision. But he decided, and we broke up. That was the winter. By senior spring, we were back together again. I was still unhappy about the amount of energy he put into his relationship with his ex, and I still didn't get the sense that he was fully there. He was still unhappy with my begrudging him his friendships with women. I don't know why we ended up back together. He says (now) that it's because "it's" what he wanted. But he can't seem to put a finger on what, exactly, "it" was. 

We graduated...our parents met each other at graduation. It was determined that I would be going to his home state for graduate school, and he would be moving to our current state for a job (more distance...I still didn't know that sex-at-a-distance activities were only feeding his addictions, so that happened most of the time). 

One memorable blowup happened when I googled some of his screen names from what I thought was his former life in cybersex. They were still there, still active, with logs enough to prove that they weren't harmless. I sent a bitchy e-mail, with the subject line, "guess what?" and the body basically saying, "I just found out you're still a philandering asshole" (I am summarizing here...it was not so direct or succinct). 

I don't even recall discussing the matter at hand--he just couldn't get over how mean I was for bringing it up that way, and he made sure the ensuing conversation focused on that. He might have apologized and promised to stop. I accepted it and moved on.

After a year, I moved to our current state and moved in with him. By then, with nobody to demand attention from him for the year I'd been gone, his daily porn habits were fairly well ingrained. He worked close enough to our apartment to walk home for lunch. While I was still job-hunting, I encouraged this, hoping to get a little noontime nookie. But when he came home for lunch, he was more interested in watching porn. He tried to hide it from me, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. It was not really possible to hide it.

Our sex life (such as it was, with waiting for marriage) began to suffer. I started to see myself as very sexually unattractive. The seeds of doubt were already sown...they were just being actively cultivated by my access to his addiction. This started the phase that basically everyone here describes...I tried using porn myself, I tried dressing sexier, I tried drinking more, I tried cooking, I tried cleaning up Donna Reed style, I tried reading Cosmo, I tried blowing him while he watched Howard Stern torture some poor bikini model, I tried toys and sexy chats with him, and I briefly entertained the idea of a threesome (his ultimate fantasy, even though the mere thought of it practically killed me...I couldn't do it, of course)...I tried and tried and tried. And when I couldn't get through, I convinced myself that it was me. I failed, and the only thing I could believe was that I'd gotten ugly and that he wanted someone (anyone!) else. I felt like all women were interchangeable for him...and the only thing "special" about me was that I lived there and he felt an obligation to be sexual with me sometimes. We used to be adventurous together, but that tapered off in a dramatic way. 

That is what porn does to a relationship. If anyone is reading this and thinks/knows this is what's happening in your relationship, get thee to counseling STAT. 

I didn't even know he was still chatting then...I thought it was just porn. I thought he might be addicted. I asked him to stop, and he said he would. I thought he did for a while. We got engaged. 

Sometime in the middle of the engagement, I snooped again and found evidence of porn and chats. I didn't know he was still chatting, but apparently he was. We had another "come to Jesus" moment, and he said that our wedding was a deadline for him to stop for good. Why did I swallow that? Why couldn't I see what this really was? I have a few thoughts...at that point, my self esteem was so shot, I didn't think I'd ever have the chance to get married and have a family if I didn't go through with marrying him. The engagement had rekindled some of our sexual stuff, too, so I felt that things were acceptable enough. And, of course, he was sweet to me, and we did fun things together, as we had throughout our relationship. Why would I throw all that away just because he was doing something objectionable that he promised to stop by our wedding? Looking back, I can see how naive that was...maybe even deluded. The workshop warns that some of my greatest pain will be looking back and seeing how I let my boundaries crumble...but I've been at this so long, I feel like I've already done that. 

His behavior with his ex didn't stop, and got worse. There was an incident in which, after being slovenly about his personal care for months, decided to get a haircut and go to the gym a couple of times because she was coming to town for a visit. I felt marginalized in my own relationship. 

Despite this, we had a pretty good sex life for about the first year of marriage (until I discovered I had to go off birth control for health reasons, at which point we had to start using condoms). I found hints of porn here and there. We argued about it. We were married for two years while he sank further into his addiction and I barely knew about it. Our sex life went off a cliff...he had ED and extreme performance anxiety. I still wanted to try new things, but he could barely get it up for regular sex. Sex was an even greater source of stress for us as time went on.

His ex got married. He chatted online to one of his female friends (with whom he'd always had sexual and inappropriate chats) and said that he felt weird about going to her wedding because she was the first person who ever blew him. I found this (and the other sexual chats with her), and I was just floored. It was like, bad behavior wrapped in worse behavior. I think we ended up talking about privacy and how he has a right to it. Okay...? As usual, my opinions on what was appropriate opposite-sex friend behavior were dismissed as jealousy. 

Shortly after that, I checked his work computer. It was fully stocked, and included profiles on teen chat sites. He had a different name, and a different age. There were pictures of his private parts on the internet...some I'd seen before, and some where he looked like he was in a strange place (I later determined that it was the bathroom at his workplace). I checked his phone records when I saw that the bill was higher than usual: so many texts (photos and regular texts) and calls to unknown numbers. I googled one from a particularly long call and found it on a 15-year-old's MySpace page. I checked his credit card bills. He'd bought someone a disposable cell phone. We were 28. 

This precipitated our third "come to Jesus" moment. I told him that phone sex with kids was WAY across the line for me, and if he didn't get help, I would leave. 

We both saw therapists for a couple of months. Mine helped me really understand that this was not my fault. His addiction wasn't my fault. I gave therapy a rest after I got that through my head. He saw a completely ineffective therapist who didn't even screen him for personality disorders. He changed insurance and stopped seeing him. I thought he would be ok. That was 2009 into 2010. 

Things seemed good. I thought he was doing well. He never talked to me about things (good or bad) anyway, so there was really no barometer to tell me that he wasn't doing well. At the end of last year, I had fairly major surgery (related to the birth control issue). He was very supportive and took great care of me when I was physically unable to care for myself. I thought this really showed the depths of his love for me...and it did, really. He loves me. I know that now. But he's had this problem, for the entirety of his adult life, that prevents him from attaching sex to love...and thus prevents him from truly being intimate with me. I think I liked how we were when I was post-op because it was the closest thing to real intimacy we'd had in a while. I was vulnerable, and he let his guard down a little. It gave me hope for our future.

In January of this year, I went up to my home state to help with my dad's major surgery. This was very emotional for me...I felt like I really wanted my kids to know my parents. I made a timeline with my husband with goals for getting pregnant and finally starting our family. I picked out a baby name that I loved and that would go well with his last name (even though I hadn't changed mine). I told it to him. 

I came back for a long weekend before another trip up to help out. While I was home, I found evidence that he was on a teen chat site again. He had to have a profile to view the pages that were in the browser history (which were photo pages). There was also some porn there. I felt stupid for having told him the baby name. I felt cheated on and cheated in general. 

But mostly, I felt the same thing I had felt each time I had discovered his acting out...physical pain in the solar plexus, like I'd had the wind knocked out of me. Cold tingling in all my extremities. Sweating, shaking, panic. I really noticed feeling these things this time...and I vowed that I would never again allow myself to be in a position to feel that particular pain again. I would do what I had to do to protect myself from it. I told him that he had to get help, and this time, did not say what I was going to do. He tried to tell me that he wasn't having sexual chats with any of the teenagers, but somehow I found that even worse. What the hell would a 30 year old grown-ass man have to talk about with teenagers? It was worse because it felt like "grooming" ... But the fact that I knew he was looking at their pictures while browsing porn was the worst part, because it made me feel like I was married to a man who would definitely be spending time in jail at some point in his life...and frankly, that's not what I signed up for when I got into this relationship (actually, it was...but I either didn't know it or was in denial about it for a very long time). But it's certainly not what I want now.

He went to see a therapist (who was recommended by one of the female friends he thinks I don't "let" him have). She screened him for personality disorders...surprise! He's severely depressed and has a ton of generalized anxiety. He's on a waiting list to see a psych to get meds now. After I calmed down a little, I finally told my parents. Then I started telling some friends. It felt really good not to have to feel like I was living a lie anymore. I felt really good about just letting people know that I was hurting and unhappy in my marriage and that I had been for a long time. That's why the screen name, NoMoreSecrets. 

After about 3 sessions with him, his therapist wanted to have a session with me to get more of his backstory and to check in to see how I was doing. So I go, and when I tell her about some of the stuff that happened in 2009 (and the teen chat now) she is concerned that she may have to report him. She does her due diligence and eventually finds out that she does not...but in the meantime, she advised me to go to a friend's house and wait. I packed all of my things that I could pack in the space of an hour (like a fire...what do I save first?)...tried not to succumb to the panic I was feeling while I talked to my mother on the phone, and made arrangements to stay with friends. Even though she found out that she didn't have to report him that night, I stayed there for almost a week. I thought I would get my head straight. I went into counseling for myself. After I moved back, we slept in separate rooms for a while, and went into couples counseling. I recently decided to give it 6 months from the panic day. Dday doesn't mean anything to me because the first one was so long ago (and I've had like, eight of them). But for me, I measure things from the panic day...the day that I could see my life changing in front of my very eyes as a result of this mess...this horrible, twisted mess that I got myself into for seemingly innocent reasons, stayed in because I grew to be twisted with the disease, and now am trying to find my way out of by following a trail of breadcrumbs. There be a lot of hungry animals in this here dark wood...

And that's my story. It's long enough already, I know my husband would criticize it for "leaving out all the good times" and selectively remembering the bad. But I'm answering this question faithfully: it's my background in relation to my discovery of his addiction. It doesn't negate the good times, but it certainly merits consideration in my analysis of my future options and steps. I have exactly four months until I want to return to the question of whether we should stay together, and I am hoping that these lessons will help me feel like I can approach that decision with a firmer footing. 

Typed on an iPhone...something might be odd. 

Exercise 2:

My legacy as a wife, daughter, sister, and friend. As a wife I would like to be a person who was supportive and strong, but who was also her own person. I'm a full partner in my relationship, in everything from financial contributions to housework to decision making. If I am a real partner to someone, we are both working toward shared goals, and we take the time and energy to map out and plan our path to achieving them. Our partnership has purpose. We also have fun together and explore each other sexually with mutual interest and enjoyment. As a wife, I am serious when I need to be and fun when I don't have to be serious. 

After discussing this one a little bit in both of my therapies, I feel the need to add that I do not want to be the judge of my partner. The partner should be satisfied with his own judgement and God's. If my baseline needs are being met in the relationship, I do not need to judge him. 

As a daughter and sister, I maintain good communication when physically separated from my family and make seeing them in person a high priority in my life. 
As a friend, I am there for anyone who wants or needs me, while I respect myself and my time enough to make decisions about what I can and can't realistically accomplish. This one is about telling people no. I am often very guilty of telling people yes to the complete exclusion of my own needs (specifically ignoring my own homebody desires...sometimes I just want to drink a cup of tea and have a bath, but I am somehow always too busy for that. It's because I won't say no enough).  

As a person, which was curiously left off this list, I approach projects with almost headstrong boldness (no trepidation) and I lead a balanced life in the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual realms. If I want to run a 10k, I train up to it and make it happen. If I want to fix my car headlights, I don't put it off, I do it. And if I want to clean the house, I don't think about what anyone else is doing or not doing. I just do it. One of the major effects of living with an addict for a long time is indecision--caused by relying on him to make decisions for me so I don't have to feel responsible for how the consequences affect him. So I need to be decisive and I need to start living my life to the fullest. 

A) Brainstorm the times when your 'gut feelings' have been right about your partner's sexual and/or romantic behavior. Include times when you feel strongly that you were right (though it may never have been proven either way).

1. He's still strongly sexually and romantically attached to his ex. It was a gut feeling until she was coming for a visit...and he went from couch-potato schlub to a gym-going, haircut-getting go-getter. 

2. I think he is more sexually attracted to L, J, L, E, M, E, L, any Asian women, most struggling actresses, teenagers, porn stars, and most women who are shorter than me than he is or ever will be to me. 

3. I knew there was something wrong with him, but wasn't sure what.

4. I had a gut feeling when I checked the history the last time. It was because I'd just gone away for almost a week (tending to a family emergency), and he never did well by himself. 

5. It is my gut feeling that he is still in denial about the "teen" part of his addiction. He denies that it is actually a problem at all, but it's the biggest problem there is (because it has the most adverse consequences attached to it). He has lots of excuses, but still minimizes to his therapists until I set them straight...and it's definitely not my job to police his disclosures to his freaking therapists. 

6. It's my gut feeling that he is a full internet addict in addition to the sex addiction. He spends way too much time checking email and Facebook. He needs more "social" interaction than anyone I know. 
 
B) Identify as many major situations as you can where you allowed your head/heart to override your 'gut feelings' in relation to your partner's behavior.
 
There's really only one major one here...my gut told me to leave in 2009, and I let my heart overrule me. I knew what he was doing was wrong, and I felt that I shouldn't stay. But I did. And he didn't stop. 

C) Relying on the experience you have gained, make a list of likely behaviors, situations and/or feelings that may trigger a conflict between your gut instinct, your value system and/or reality.

1. I'm still going to have problems when he's spending time with any of the people listed above. Of course, it wouldn't bother me if he weren't my husband. 

2. I'm going to want to check the history after every time I spend time out of town alone. 

3. I'm still worried about his job. I believe he's so advanced in his addiction that if he really did do something with a real person (teenager), he would be able to block it out so completely that he wouldn't even remember it when they were in the middle of hauling his ass to jail. 

4. Anytime he tells me that what I imagine about what he did in his addiction is worse than the truth, I'm going to feel that my instincts are being minimized. 

5. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that he uses a computer and a cell phone with a camera all day every day. 

6. I'm uncomfortable with the number of times/amount of time he spends checking email and Facebook per day. 

It’s very possible, but this does not mean that you are in any way responsible, as he would have engaged in these activities regardless. What is more plausible is that it was his involvement with chat rooms and later cybersex that gave him the idea to involve you, by sending photos, engaging you in long distance sexual play.

I hope you know now that this is not at all the case.

Yes, unfortunately this is the case and what is more unfortunate is that purported “sex therapists” do little to recognize the potential danger of porn and instead seem to promote it as a way for bored couples to “rekindle” their relationship. yuck. (addendum: it is good that he later found a competent therapist--but the work of recovery is still up to him)

Either way, if it does come up you will know why and since you have been “at this for so long” you have a solid foundation based in reality that will help you work through and past whatever may come up. And, everyone has different reactions, so you may not be affected as per the “warning”.

and
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I am learning that personality disorders are not usually diagnosed until the patient has been in therapy for a while, with no success. I am not sure why this is, likely because they do not want to go around labeling (or mislabeling) anyone. Unless his supposed PD symptoms are prominent and severe, it is not likely that the therapist would go there. And, there is the possibility that he wasn’t completely forthcoming about what his issues were and could very well have been saying it was the relationship, or your jealousy etc. that were the problem. What he has subsequently been diagnosed with are mood disorders which have a better prognosis than personality disorders do. Mood disorders are considered mutable whereas PD are considered lifelong. This might be good for you to know, as you continue through your healing and make choices for your life.

I really do not believe that you signed up for this! Just because you perhaps ignored some things that maybe “should” have caused you alarm, does not mean that you asked for this, or deserved it! The thing is, you trusted. Maybe not the most wise thing to have done, and it was likely mixed in with denial... but this does not equate to choice! For you to have chosen freely you would have had to have foresight of what was to come (and just so you know, there is no way you could have known because not all people who are involved with porn continue on to develop addiction).

It is so good that you are able to reach out and begin to create your support system. Even the simple fact of letting others know what is going on in your world is a huge support.

Yes, it is and no it doesn’t and yes it will!

Great job on your vision exercise!

I am so sorry that your life circumstances have brought you here, but none the less, here is a very good place to be. Welcome to Recovery Nation, NoMoreSecrets, and to your healing workshop.

Be well.

_________________
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. (Epictetus)