Recovery Workshop: Month 1; Week 2; Day 2

What your partner needs is to have the opportunity to regain control over her life. To identify the ways in which your addiction has affected her. How it has influenced her value system. How it has violated the boundaries that she once held. She needs to have the freedom to explore the damage your behavior has caused and the freedom to repair it. And this is just the beginning.

This healing process is not something that you can do for her, nor is it something that she can do as easily without you. Make sure you understand every word of that last sentence. Whether she is able to heal from these wounds is beyond your control. You control neither her fate, nor the fate of your relationship—no matter how sincere and complete your recovery. But, you can facilitate this healing considerably. She needs your courage to share what will be painful for you both. She needs you to be willing to put her health above the relationship; above even, yourself.

Now, this doesn’t mean that your partner can’t move beyond your addiction and live a healthy, fulfilling life on her own—she can, even in spite of you selfishly choosing to hold on to secrets and lies. But it does mean that without your help, she will not be able to fully heal from the damage that you have caused. It will be a part of her always. And thus, a part of every relationship she is involved in from here on out.

Returning to the example above, imagine how shattered the pieces of your life would be in the wake of such a devastating blow to your identity. Imagine your business partner holding tight to his lies…offering insight only when proof was available. Imagine the questions you would have—questions of which the answers could potentially provide you with insight and closure—remaining selfishly unanswered so that your partner can protect himself from experiencing further pain. This, even though they openly shared, “I will do anything to make this up to you.” How could you trust this person to not repeat what they have done, when they still won’t accept full responsibility for it? The answer is: you couldn’t. Not unless you were a fool.

When you hold back the truth from your partner, when you are unwilling to engage in open dialogue about your past, it is typically for one of three reasons:

1) You are too ashamed and/or embarrassed to reveal certain things about your past—things that you believe would be unforgivable. Things that you believe would serve as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. And so, you choose to protect these secrets knowing that you have nothing to lose. If they are ever discovered, the relationship ends anyway (or so you think)…and so, there is nothing to be gained (again, so you think) by sharing and everything to be lost.

2) You are not yet in a healthy way with your addiction and so, you are still connected to those past behaviors in an emotionally unhealthy way. A healthy person has isolated that addiction from the core of who they are—and thus, can distance themselves from the intense shame that accompanies the behavior. Your inability to do this means that these behaviors are still ingrained within you

3) You are not sincerely committed to developing a healthy life. You are consciously choosing to continue lying and/or holding on to secrets because you do not want to accept responsibility for those actions that they are attached to. In your mind, you just want to get past this crisis and move on—no sense in creating more crisis when it is entirely possible that those lies/secrets will never be known.

Within each reason, the fundamental aspect to note is the selfishness on your part to withhold information that your partner needs to heal. It is your decision to decide for your partner what is best for her…what she can or cannot handle. But what you fail to take into consideration is that your answers—exploring the depth of your addiction, the extreme of your compulsions, the irrationality of your actions—these are the very answers she needs to put the pieces of her own life back together.

“But with the damage that has already been done, won’t it always be a part of her life? A part of our relationship?”

Yes, it will. But—and I don’t expect you to fully grasp this concept until after you have experienced it for yourself with addiction—there are two ways that this trauma can affect your partner in the long run. It can have a destructive effect—forever weakening her values, her identity, her confidence, her willingness to risk, to love, to grow, to trust, etc. Or it can have a constructive effect, providing her with the confidence that comes from not just surviving a traumatic life event, but actually growing because of it. If your relationship is to survive this addiction, your partner will need to experience the latter. If your partner is to fully heal, she will come to see this time in her life as one where she was challenged to rebuild a foundation that was originally built (at least partly) on illusion, into a foundation built of brick and mortar. It is your job to help provide that brick and mortar—not more illusion.

Your role in helping your partner heal is simple. Painful, but simple. Accept the life that you have led to this point, courageously and painfully share that life with your partner, accept whatever consequences result from what you have shared…and then move forward. Move forward with no more lies…no more secrets…no more incongruence. Learn to feel the confidence that comes from sharing your true self the world around you.

Where the Pain Comes From
On RecoveryNation.com, courageous partners volunteered their own answers to this question. Take some time now to read what they have shared by clicking here: The Pain We Feel

Why Can’t My Partner See This as Any Other Addiction?
To most partners, the sex, love and porn addictions ARE NOT perceived like other addictions. Not that this distinction falls solely on partners. Imagine having discovered that your business partner, along with all that he did to destroy your business, had been having a year long affair with your wife AND your daughter. He wasn’t in love with either of them, nor was it casual sex. Instead, the relationships were part of a larger compulsive love addiction that he had. Would you be able to see that behavior in the same way as his gambling addiction? Doubtful.

In a healthy recovery, it is the foundation of a person that needs to be the primary focus of change, not the symptoms. Certainly, the symptoms of that addiction (masturbation, gambling, online affairs, porn, alcohol, etc.) are important, but only in the fact that they provide concrete opportunities for development, measurement, monitoring, understanding, etc., of what is happening at the core of that person’s life. Anyone who has transitioned to a healthy life knows that as you learn to manage the foundation of your life, the addiction (and the symptoms used to measure that addiction) takes care of itself. This is one of the reasons why those in a healthy recovery have the potential to transition so much faster to health and stability than do their partners. Your ability to emotionally detach yourself from the symptoms of your addiction (by focusing on developing a healthy core) is by design…and it is a very effective (and necessary) step in making a healthy transition from both addiction and recovery.

To your partner though, there is no such emotional detachment. Your partner cannot see the world as you see it; cannot process your thoughts as you process them. To you, you are what you think…and as your thoughts change, you change. To your partner though, you are what she has observed—and only what she has observed. You are the accumulation of a lifetime of thoughts, emotions, behaviors, etc., that she has either witnessed first hand or, that you have chosen to tell her about. For most relationships, this is enough. For most relationships, the minor deceptions and disappointments that accompany all partnerships do not fundamentally change the way that a partner is perceived. But this is not so with the sex and love addictions.

It is the rare partner who can separate the addiction from the individual, much less the symptoms of that addiction from the addiction itself. Almost universally, there is a world of difference between how they perceive sexual addiction versus alcoholism, or compulsive porn use versus compulsive over-eating. This, even though the foundation for why you engaged in these behaviors are fundamentally the same. To your partner, your reporting that you have had nineteen affairs over the past year is not the same as your reporting that you have secretly lost over $20K on online gambling. Both are traumatic events to be sure, but the feelings surrounding the sexually-compulsive behavior are almost always more devastating. Your partner’s ability to rationally understand an addiction to alcohol, to gambling, to work, to (enter any behavior outside of sex and/or love addiction) is much greater than their ability to understand THE VERY SAME PATTERN…but with the symptoms of sex/love driving that pattern.

Why is this? It is important that you know.

Sex and romantic love are two aspects of your partnership that ideally, you need each other to fulfill. The elements of just about any other addiction can be detached from the partnership and the foundation of that relationship will remain intact. Not that the relationship won’t suffer significant trauma as a result of the lies, the lost respect, the perceived moral and personal weaknesses involved with drug addiction, alcoholism, etc.—it will. But it does not instantly crumble. Typically, it only crumbles under the realization that the person in recovery is unable to rebuild their life—a realization that is made only after many relapse/recovery cycles.

This is not the case with the sex and love addictions. And it is only sometimes the case with porn addiction (depending on the type of porn, the extent of use, etc.). Quite often, upon the discovery of such behavior, the partner’s foundation collapses. One of the pillars of her foundation (the love and commitment of her partner) has been shattered and that one pillar was providing strength and stability to so many others. And so as that pillar crumbled, everything connected to that pillar was wiped out as well. Well, not necessarily wiped out, but certainly damaged. Damage occurred to every value that she had tied to sharing her life with you: feeling loved, feeling desired, feeling wanted, feeling appreciated, feeling a part of a team, feeling respected, feeling supported, having the ability to share her love, having the ability to risk, to be vulnerable, to trust, to depend, to experience romance with, to experience sexual intimacy with, to…well, you get the idea. Not that all of this damage took place at the time of the discovery. Much of it was sustained long before that—as a consequence of living with a secret addiction. It is just that the discovery brought a devastating clarity to it all. And so, while most other addictions can survive the initial traumatic discovery, this is not always the case with the sex and love addictions. You can do all that is humanly possible to change—and indeed do successfully transition to a healthy life; your partner can do all that she can to heal—and indeed find herself feeling good about the direction of her life once more…and it may still not be enough.

And that is one of the things that you must understand. You do not have the ability to save your marriage. You have only the ability to save your life. Not that you can’t do your part to give your marriage the best chance of success. You can, and that starts with ending your addiction; and ends with learning to fully relate to your partner.

Exercise 9

Ask yourself the following: “If my partner did the things that I have done—exactly as I have done them—what would I need in order to rebuild my trust in him/her?” Really think about this. What would you want from them, expect from them, demand from them? Share these thoughts in your Recovery Manager and/or Recovery Thread.