Recovery Nation

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 have known since the day I met my husband that he is a liar. I have also known my entire life that nothing is of greater value to me than honesty. I severely compromised my values to build a relationship with my husband and continued to compromise myself by staying in our marriage as the lies grew.

He was emotionally unfaithful to me in the very early stages of our relationship. We got back together after a short break-up early on and I never really suspected he was unfaithful to me after that. We were married after 4 years of dating.

During my first pregnancy, 2 years after our wedding, I became uneasy with our sexual intimacy and feared that my pregnancy made me look repulsive to him because he never wanted to initiate physical contact with me. I looked through the browser history of his computer one day and found that he was looking at porn throughout my pregnancy. I immediately felt hurt, but I tried to tell myself that it was OK, that I understand, and that things would go “back to normal” after the baby was born and my old body returned. Instead, I suffered postpartum depression and I did not want to have much sexual contact with him. I did not lose the 20 pounds I gained during my pregnancy.

I became aware of another instance of emotional infidelity about 4 years into our marriage, just after the birth of our second son. We had a larger than normal cell phone bill one month and when I looked at the call log I found that he had been spending his entire 45 minute commute home from work each day talking to her on the phone for over a month. When I confronted my husband about it, he wholeheartedly denied that it was more than a friendship and lashed out in a way that I never saw him act before, damaging property.

Around this same time, I started to frantically do “detective work” trying to find evidence of his infidelity because I knew something was going on, and I wasn’t going to get the truth from him. I eventually was able to uncover a chat conversation that he thought had been deleted where he was reminiscing about past sexual encounters with a previous girlfriend of his. At the same time, they were arranging to meet. I confronted him about it, he denied it, I showed him the proof, and he was angry and puzzled about how I found it. He apologized and said he got carried away, they had not seen each other and were only talking about it. I sent her a message saying never contact my husband again and she replied that she understood and that she never would again.

Soon after that, he began spending time with one of my female relatives, who actually started distancing herself from me, and I told him I was very uncomfortable with their friendship. I complained to him and a few other people about the inappropriateness of their relationship, but I had no evidence of actual infidelity on his part with her. I was brushed aside and he continued to see her and talk with her frequently.

At the same time, it became apparent that our oldest son had special needs in the areas of social development and sensory processing. I became enveloped in helping to understand his needs and finding doctors, therapies, and strategies to help him at home and in school. My husband was “checked out” from our family for the next few years, throwing himself into hobbies which consumed any time he had to spend with the family. The moments he did find to steal himself away from his hobbies, I used for retreating to my bed from sheer exhaustion. We were tag-teaming for childcare and living as roommates. We didn’t fight, but we didn’t spend any time alone together or as an entire family. I started going out to see bands at night on the weekends and he stayed home while the kids slept so that I could do something of my own and we wouldn’t ned to pay a sitter.

May:
The situation with our son became worse, to the point that he eventually needed inpatient hospitalization due to his fear of school and inability to cope. I was trying to deal with my son’s health without my husband’s help, all while working full-time, dealing with the school, managing the finances, planning and preparing meals, cleaning the house, and dealing with my own depression.

July:
Soon after our son returned home from the hospital I told my husband that I needed to talk. I told him that I had found concrete evidence of his infidelity and that I wanted the truth. He sat across from me and asked what I wanted to know. It was obvious that he had something to hide, but he was not going to give it up without knowing exactly what it was that I had found. I knew better than to present my evidence this time and tell him my sources. I starting asking him broad questions about deceiving me about being places other than where he said he would be, or with people he was not telling me about. He confirmed that yes, that had happened. I told him to be more specific. He told me that he had met with his ex-girlfriend a few months prior and had brought our youngest son with him to meet her and her kids at a park. (I think he believed my son had said something, so that is why he chose that story). He said he was really sorry, he felt bad, and that nothing happened between them, that they only just saw each other. I felt numb and afraid. I was calm while taking it in because I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t get defensive and shut down further than he already was.

August:
As the days went by I became sick with heartache, knowing that he was hiding more and that my gut had been right. I talked with him again about a week later and said I know there is more. He then cried and admitted that he had met with her before that day and they had kissed. Again, I was numb. I started to asking him the “why’s” and he told me that he was mad at me and didn’t feel like he was in love with me anymore. I asked him if he was in love with her and he said no. I asked if he wanted a divorce and he said he didn’t know. That week I went to see a divorce attorney of my own to find out what I would need to do if we were, in fact, headed down that road. In the meantime, he agreed to go back to couples counseling, which we did for a couple months a few years prior with the telephone/emotional affair.

September:
In therapy I asked him to compose and send “no contact” letters to her and another person who I believed him to be having an inappropriate friendship with, which was based on some loose, but pretty suspicious evidence. He didn’t want to, but the therapist insisted that I needed him to do that before I could begin to move forward. He composed them (copied and pasted from an internet website I sent him a link to) but never sent them.

I continued to feel a nagging sense of incomplete honesty and became obsessed with digging deeper to find further evidence. I found some old chat logs with him flirting with other girls, but he was really vigilant about deleting logs and histories so all I had was evidence of flirtation with several women, many of whom I knew.

October:
I was upset one night and asked if there was more, and he told me that one day when we were engaged, but not married, a girl he did not know approached him while he was out with some friends and insisted that he give her a kiss. He said it was funny because the friend he was with with was always jealous of him getting all the girls. Then he repeated that it was before we were married. I didn’t find it funny, and I still felt like there was more.

November:
I told him that I was uncomfortable with one of his friends on facebook and asked him to remove her. He insisted they were only friends and that he was not going to get rid of her. This was a big problem for me and I talked about it at couples therapy several times. He agreed that he would tell me if she contacted him, but he would not delete her. She sent him a text on Christmas (not sexual, but definitely personal) and he did not tell me about it. He said he didn’t think he should have to because it was “probably sent to everyone on her contact list.” I was really hung up on why he wouldn’t just delete her if they never talked anyhow like he claimed. He said she was one of his only friends from high school. She also happened to be his first girlfriend. Finally, around February he agreed to remove her because I was “making such a big deal about nothing.”

February:
I had mentioned in therapy that I felt like he was being more honest, but that he seemed much more regretful for getting caught than any true remorse. After he removed her from facebook and his chat program I felt much better, and for a very short time felt that he was starting to show signs of remorse and a commitment to working on our marriage. At home one day he suggested that we end therapy because we didn’t need it and it was costing a lot of money. I considered it, but felt we should continue to go for a while longer.

March:
But something was still bothering me! I still felt like he was hiding something-something big. One night I was crying and asked for everything-the whole truth. I told him I knew he was holding back. He was defensive, asking if I was just always going to think that for the rest of my life, and I told him maybe I would, since every time I asked, my instincts were right and something new came out. I told him I needed to know everything. That night he told me about receiving oral sex that past year from one girl (whom I knew of, but never met) and kissing and receiving oral sex once from one of my family members. He was terrified when he told me and cried. He swore that was everything and that he really didn’t want me to know because he was sure I would leave him and tell my family about it. I thought that was it-that must be the thing that he had been hiding! I was numb, hurt, disgusted, and angry, but also relieved. I didn’t scream. I cried with him and said that if he was really willing to work on finding out why he was doing these things so that he could change, that I would stand by him and work as hard as I could to do my part to save our marriage.

May:
We continued couples therapy and I thought things were going pretty well, even though I had some really tough days. Then one day he came home from work, sat on the couch next to me, and said he needed to tell me something. He told me he found blisters on his penis and never wanted to have to tell me, but that he had sex with his ex-girlfriend the week before he had taken our son to have a playdate with her kids. He said everything he searched online pointed to herpes. He said he only had sex with her one time, she was the only one, and that he was so, so, so, very sorry and was prepared for me to throw him out of the house, but begged me to give him one last chance to prove himself to me. Up to that point I felt numb each time I heard something new. This time was more than numb. It was utter shock. But it was also pity. And a deep, deep sadness. I suppose all of the other times I had braced myself for something horrible, because I was the one insisting that he tell me what was going on. This was seemingly out of nowhere. My world was completely rocked. But I didn’t want to throw him out. I wanted to hold him. He was the only person I had to comfort me. What a confusing, distressing feeling. He had a full STD screening done and everything came back negative. I had testing done and all of my blood tests were negative. Our regular doctor tested him again, and it all still came back negative. He then started individual counseling for himself at my suggestion.

July:
I really felt like somehow the (mystery) outbreak was some magical element that brought out complete honesty in him and that he was really, truly going to work on his issues and our marriage after feeling so close to losing it all. We talked. A lot. And it felt real. And honest. And although I was really sad about the outbreak and the fact that we would now need to use condoms for the rest of our lives, which would also always be a reminder of his infidelity, I felt like we could make it.

Then he had a second outbreak. This time he was able to go see the doctor in time for her take a swab of the actual blister and have it run for testing to confirm what it was. It turned out to be HSV-1, oral herpes transmitted to the genital region. It is still genital herpes, though, and it is still contagious.

Remarkably, the herpes isn’t really what bothered me. Besides the cheating, and the herpes, it was the continuous lying, and lying in therapy, and puzzle pieces sprinkled throughout the span of a year, each becoming progressively more difficult to handle. And the timing; it still just didn’t make sense! I understand herpes can lie dormant for years with no outbreak, but this had to be new. Neither of our blood tests showed the virus, and here were two outbreaks, one right after the other. Everything I read said the worst symptoms are usually seen within the first 3-6 months, with the most and worst outbreaks occurring during the first year. He told me he had sex outside of our marriage once. In May. That just didn’t add up.

I told him that I just can’t handle any more lies. The timing doesn’t add up. It wasn’t fair for me to need to make decisions for my life based on spotty information. I needed to know everything, and I just knew he wasn’t giving it to me. I asked him to tell his counselor at his individual therapy everything, every single thing, and find out from her what I need to know and what I don’t. I knew there was more and he was terrified to tell me. He told me he was afraid I would never think of him the same if I knew everything. I told him that I could not promise that I wouldn’t, but that I would listen and try my best to be understanding. Didn’t he see that so far I seemed to be pretty darn understanding?

That night he came home from therapy and we sat together on the couch. He told me there was a lot he still hadn’t told me, but that he told the therapist everything. She told him that I needed to know all of it, but I might not be ready to hear it all at once. She suggested that he start with the BIG thing first, and then as I was ready to hear the other things, I could let him know and he would tell me. Oh my gosh, I was terrified.

So...the BIG thing: he had been having an active affair with one of my very best friends that we have both known for a long time for the past 2 years. And he saw her nearly every day. Crushing. He says the last time they were together sexually was in March and he had called it off for good before he even had the first outbreak. He said he thinks she was in love with him, but he was only using her for sex. She is also his coworker.

I told him I needed to know it all right then. There was another mutual friend whom he had sex with twice. He had sex with my relative. I asked specific questions and now have answers I never wanted to hear. There are a million repulsive visions in my head. I can’t lie in bed with the lights out. I am ill. I have lost over 20 pounds in the past 2 months, and it was not because I tried to at all. I can’t attend to my kids like they need me to. I can’t breathe.

Hi DoingWhatCan,
Welcome to Recovery Nation. You have done an excellent job on this first lesson. I know how hard it is to put this all down on paper, but you did it, and you did it well. It's obvious that you have done your homework in trying to understand your H's lying and the reasons behind his choices as well as painful detective work to validate your suspicions. Nonetheless, this kind of betrayal hurts, and, even though you have always known he was a "liar," none of us are truly prepared to hear about our H's hurtful choices when our "gut" tells us that there is more. We can't unring a bell - but this where the RN healingworkshop can help. Don't beat yourself up over this. We want to trust our life partner - we want to believe and ignore the red flags. Dishonesty goes hand-in-hand with this kind of addiction - it's an ingrained behavior that goes way back. So continue to trust your gut - believe what he does not what he says. It will take time, hard work, and a sincere desire to become healthy on the part of your husband before you can begin to believe his words. Old patterns are hard to break.

For now, take one day at a time and be extra kind to yourself - find your joy in little things like a buying a bouquet of flowers or a beautiful sunset. It will be an emotional roller coaster for a while, but it does slow down as you gain more stability and balance in your life. The lessons will help. Take them one at a time in the order given and try to arrive at a comfortable pace taking time to digest each one. Understand that this is a continuum of learning and evolving with each new lesson building on the previous ones. Cherry-picking won't help. Early RN lessons will educate you about the SA mindset - none of knows what we have been dealing with or how to deal with it now. Keep in mind that knowledge is power so try to stay objective as you begin to understand the nature of his addiction. Later lessons will help you determine the values, boundaries, and consequences you need to make the vision you have for your life become a reality regardless of what he choses to do or not do, to get healthy. The focus now needs to be on you. It will be hard work and sometimes painful but so worth your effort.

If you have questions, the Community Forum is a great resource. We are a non-judgemental and compassionate group who are here to listen, offer advice, share our experiences. You are among friends.

Stay on this thread when you submit a lesson so all your work is one place (use the submit button near the bottom of the page). Another mentor, I myself, or a coach will check in with you from time to time to see how you are doing. Your healing experience will be a process unique to you - there is no one size fits all.

Please give yourself the Gift of Patience.

Nellie James

Lesson 2

I will leave a legacy of compassion and sharing of resources. I am someone who honors her commitments and does not speak ill of others. I enjoy sharing my caring in "doing": cooking a meal for someone or offering a hand to friends who need it, especially when they ask. I am an encouraging and optimistic mother, wife, and friend regarding my own hopes and dreams, as well as those of my children, husband, and friends. I am a woman who provides and attracts fun, humor, and laughter. Earlier in my life, the values of honesty, dependability, compassion, fun, and flexibility guided my life and decisions. These values continue to be most important to me, and I will return to allowing them to guide me in my actions and decisions.


I have been stuck on this lesson for a bit. This is pretty much the total of what I wrote when I first approached this lesson. Still, I feel it is missing something, but I just can't put my finger on what. I have continued to think about this lesson for a couple of weeks but I don't feel I have anything to add at this time. Perhaps it is something I will remember to continuously revisit until it feels complete. I am ready to move past this lesson for now and continue my healing through the workshop.

Hi Doing,

Good insight. Our visions are not to be taken lightly because they do become an individual road map as we each begin our healing journey. Also, our visions provide the context for our determining our values/boundaries. Of course, you can and should add, delete, refine as you evolve in your process.

One suggestion, however, is to change the format language so it is in the present tense and is specific. This makes it more available for you to use on a daily basis. For example: I honor my commitments. I do not speak ill of others. I care for others by cooking a meal or offering to help when help is needed. The idea is to identify those elements that are important to you but use a format that makes each one a practical tool for you to use. Make sense? As you plug these various elements into your life, you can calendar in specific actitivites - it's the action, the doing that gives your vision life.
Fun, humor, laughter - nice element to include in your vision and gives me insight into who you are. What "nuts and bolts" activities come to mind that you could be doing now?

Very good start. I look forward to seeing your vision update.

Nellie

Lesson 3


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).

His long and regular phone conversations with female friends, disregard for my need of quality time, refusing to back off on a relationship I expressed concern about, changing phone and Internet passwords, secretive Internet activity, ludicrous explanations of suspicious circumstances involving females, disconnected sex, emotional withdrawal.



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.

He was “too” accommodating when I used to go out every weekend with girlfriends. He never asked for phone calls or cared where I went or for how long. I always told him, but it felt strange that he seemed to not care at all.
I wanted to be someone who could “handle” having a partner who had close friendships with girls. I would have preferred he not have those close relationships, but in my efforts to NOT be controlling or jealous, I allowed much more closeness then I was actually comfortable with. I desperately wanted to believe him when he would say they were just friends.



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.

It was used in the examples, but it is very true for me. My husband says he is trying hard in recovery and I want to believe him, but the objective signs just aren't there. He came home from a meeting the other night (which he feels is a big sacrificial show of his willingness to recover). He asked someone if they would be his sponsor and said they told him that they don’t take sponsorship lightly and will have a lot of work/assignments and phone or face-to-face time if he was to be his sponsor. My hsband declined and said to me “I don’t want someone making me do a bunch of work.”
His temper is short, he is obsessed with his hobby, he gets defensive when I try to express my feelings.
He still sits right next to the woman at work whom he had an affair with for the past two years. If I text him during the day I get a sick feeling in my gut if he does not reply right away.

Exercise Four
1) Make a list of those values in your partner's life that--in your gut--you believe is a part of him. Set aside the addiction and the behaviors that were a part of that addiction. Focus on what values you believe will survive the recovery process. Post these in your Healing Thread. If there is a time when you are feeling close to your partner, share these thoughts with him--so that he knows that you are beginning to separate the addiction from his core identity.

I had a hard time identifying his core values at first. The only thing I could come up with was his compassion for animals. I found a list of common personal values online and went down the list, hoping the brainstorming would help me dig deeper. That did help. I feel the following values are at the core of his beliefs. Adventure, challenge, orderliness, continuous improvement, family, fun, gentleness, and punctuality

Some are a double-edged sword.


2) Make a list of those qualities in your partner that you believe will continue to pose as obstacles throughout your relationship.

He is a risk taker. This is going to be his (or my) biggest obstacle. He has shown a low regard for safety throughout his life. He does not take care of himself nutritionally. His personal hygiene is lower than I would prefer. He becomes intensely immersed in something for a period of time and then will drop it and move on to something completely different. His pursuit of pleasure in life has overridden his regard for other people’s needs. As far as the lying, of course my trust is shattered. I really don't know if he can practice true honesty. This will definitely be a struggle for both of us.

Exercise Five
Addiction is a rational way to manage life using irrational behavior. Meaning, there is a very logical purpose for the existence of addiction in a person's life. Though to all, the actions/choices associated with that addiction are often completely irrational.

A. How do you manage your stress? What would it take for you to become so emotionally overwhelmed that you would turn to irrational behavior to produce enough intensity to escape from that stress? Can you think of a time in your life that you have turned to such a measure?
I manage my stress by falling into depression, sleep, anxiety, circular thinking, catastrophic thinking, and intense research (yes, I know none of these are healthy and I am working to learn better ways to manage my stress). I have started journaling again, but journaling itself is stressful to me because my mother invaded my space and would read my writing when I was not home and then confront me with it. I never confessed to any of my rebellious behaviors in my writing, just wrote “unsendable letters” to express and release my anger at her. I used to keep a contrived journal because I knew she was reading it. After leaving home I never trusted anyone enough to have a journal of my feelings. I am learning to open up more in my journaling now. I feel like I can express my real feelings to my hisband more now, so even if he violated my boundary of privacy, I don’t think I need to hide and protect my true feelings.

Feeling out of control and disrespected would lead me to engage in irrational behaviors to escape my stress.

This also happened when I was a teenager. I was under intense surveillance by my mother during my teenage years, in stark contrast to being left on my own as a kid. My mom started drinking heavily when she had Thomas and she needed my help with him and the house much more. I resented the fact that she did not grant me privacy and wanted control over everything in my life. I knew that she did not want control because she was trying to protect me out of love. Controlling me served her by wrapping herself in the drama that comes along with adolescence. I was a smart kid, but never felt recognized for it. When I placed on a waiting list for a prestigious high school after taking a placement exam, she refused to register me and forced me to go to an all-girls school near my dad’s work because it was more convenient for her. I turned to rebellious behavior (sex, drugs, tobacco, sneaking out at night, compulsive eating, alcohol) to regain a sense of control over my own life.

B. Consider a compulsive behavior that you have engaged in. Break it down thoroughly. Get a sense for the anxiety that you experienced prior to engaging in the act. Imagine the continued anxiety that you would have experienced had you not engaged in the act. Describe that anxiety in your own words.

Smoking. When I began, I could not legally purchase cigarettes because I was too young. The thrill of going into a store and “tricking” the cashier into selling them to me was probably about 75% of the pleasure I derived from the behavior. The other chunk of pleasure was smoking behind my parents’ backs. I used to always get very anxious when I only had a couple of cigarettes left and would have to plan how and where I would try to get them. The building of the anxiety increased the pleasure I felt once I was successful buying them. If I had been unable to purchase them when I felt I needed them, I would be very tense and irritable. My anxiety would be so bad that I felt like all of my muscles where threads which made up a piece of cloth (my body) and I was being twisted and wrung out.


C. In contemplating the role that addiction has played in your partner's life, imagine what his/her life would be like without this life management skill in place. To be clear, the task here is not to imagine his life without the consequences of the addiction, but to imagine how he would manage his emotions without having the compulsive act to engage in. How would he stimulate himself emotionally? What would he use to regulate his stress? Not how should he, mind you, but how would he?

He would engage in other reckless behaviors. For a time, he drove a sportbike and it made me incredibly anxious. He would ride in a group and would swear to me that he was being safe. Someone did mention to me that he did things like wheelies out of the gas station, which he had told me that he didn’t do. When I asked him about it he then admitted to doing that. He totaled his motorcycle when our first child was only 3 months old. He was very lucky to limp away with only a broken ankle. I made him give up bikes after that and he complied, reluctantly. One of his friends let him borrow her motorcycle for a week about a year later. I have since learned that he had sex with her both when he picked the bike up and when he dropped it back off. I am thinking the idea of the thrill of riding again had something to do with his compulsion to have sex with her. He tells me that she is the first person that he had intercourse with outside of our marriage. I also first discovered his
Use of porn during the time he owned and rode the bike. It seems as though his reckless behaviors are a catalyst to his sexually reckless behaviors.

When we were first together he aspired to go into law enforcement. I told him that I supported that as a friend, but that I could never be married to a police officer because of the anxiety I would experience. He eventually changed his mind about it. It was likely when he saw my anxiety when he was a security officer and assigned to a known dangerous apartment complex where a gang was harassing the previous guard, who quit.

He has always been drawn to thrills like guns and heights. These are two of my most anxiety producing things in life. This is probably one of my attractions to him-his love of things I fear. It is as if I set myself up for anxiety-producing situations out of the comfort of habit.

Amazing insight into yourself. Now - how can you build on this in terms of your healing. You may add this insight to your vision in dealing with anxiety and dealing with fear. Have you worked with a counselor on these issues?
Recovery is a lot of work. Your H will either do the work or he won't. We have no control over what they chose. We only have control over ourselves.

You are here to heal yourself and you have made a good start with good insights. Personal awareness coupled with action plan to ingrain healthy behavior patterns for ourselves is key to our healing. Upcoming lessons will also educate you about the nature of the SA mindset. Few of us know what we're dealing with so these lessons are important. Knowledge is power.

Nellie

Well there is good news. In the past 5 weeks since I posted this, I have seen some positive signs that he is active in recovery. He now has a sponsor in his 12-step program who holds him accountable.

A step in the right direction. It's all up to him - nobody can do it for him.
Nellie