Should I tell my wife???

Yes.  For all kinds of reasons.  You're called to be one flesh, and you can't find intimacy and true union if one of you is hiding from the other the central moral and emotional and spiritual issue of your life.  She is an adult human being, and she has an absolute right to know the situation in which she is living.  We are only as sick as our secrets.  Addiction is all about hiding and isolation, and recovery therefore has to be about openness and trust.  The list goes on.

I agree with truthseeker that disclosure doesn't have to be the first act of your recovery, but it does have to come fairly soon.  I found it useful to read Corley and Schneider's book Disclosing Secrets in order to find a good way to disclose that felt safe for both of us.  I also did not disclose until I had begun attending meetings and working the steps, had a sponsor, had located a counselor, and was moving forward.  Even then, my sponsor had to really sit on me to make me do what I needed to do.  It was the right thing to do, though.

It certainly not the case that we need to disclose our addiction to everybody in our lives.  The people who know my story are my wife and older kids, my mother and sisters, clergy and physicians and therapists I've worked with, and half a dozen close friends.  Plus, of course, my fellow addicts from meetings.  For me, that's about the right number of folks.  I've talked to those folks over a period of several years, as it was important to talk to them, though.

Tim M.

Thank you for the advise... That really does put a different light on things... I see now that it is very important to my healing and to hers that i do tell her... She has noticed me acting strangely at times... It has effected our intimacy in significant ways...  

Is it wrong to just want to remove it from my life, and fix things without her ever knowing about it? Or is it even possible to do this?

You have to expell it from your life........and I think you need to tell your wife.  She has been living with the consequences of your unilateral decision for two or more years......probably doubting her sanity at times.  She deserves to know that she's not nuts.  She deserves to know that what she has been feeling and observing were not normal, not part of a healthy relationship, NOT HER FAULT IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM.

If you do not tell her, it will always act like a wall of separation between you; an obstacle to true intimacy.

hi. i am a wife standing by her recovering sex addict husband.   in short yes you need to tell your wife.   but there are a few things i would mention - be sensitive there is never a great time to tell your wife you are about to back over her head with a truck repeatedly. she isnt going to take it well, you know that.   ask her whens a good time to slice open her chest and rip out her heart and stomp on it.   my husband chose to tell me when our 2nd child was only a few weeks old and i wasnt getting ANY sleep and was ravaged by hormones. PLEASE use wisdom and dont do this when something else stressful is going on for her.    you will experience relief even though you are terrified the unknown reaction you will get from her - while she will be handed a huge burden she isnt sure what to do with.

what is important in confessing to her is that you cannot be in a partnership where there are lies. you need to tell her the truth and give her the choice about whether she wants to partner with you.  ( my husband told me about over ten years of cheating with sex workers AFTER the birth of your second child - i felt so trapped and deceived ).   give her the choice.    be prepared that while you may want to sweep it under the carpet and get on with things, she will replay and torture herself with the hurt until time and the Lord heal her wounds.  noone can guarantee what she will do but she does deserve to know. and she deserves a husband who can and will be strong for HER while she grieves the relationship she THOUGHT she had.  you have to man up and be strong because this is the time she needs you.    after a disaster is the best time to  'start' again.      best wishes.

Hisheart,

Thanks for the friendly question, which does not sound ignorant at all.

On boards like this one, the use of the word "addict" is often controversial.  Some of that is because "addict" means different things to different people.  Some of it is because different people with problems with porn have different experiences.  Some of it make come from deeper theological or other disagreements.  Obviously, nobody's going to settle all those questions, but I'm happy to try to explain why I think the word applies to me.

My first real progress in addressing my problem with porn came through Sex Addicts Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which are 12-step fellowships patterned on Alcoholics Anonymous.  They obviously use the word "Addict," and at meetings I introduce myself as, "I'm Tim, and I'm a sex addict."  (Doing this helps us to look at ourselves calmly and honestly, taking away the shame and the hiding.)  So part of my answer is that there's a social reason for the word.  It's what my people say.  I'd give the same answer to why people at Virginia Tech, where I spent some time, call themselves Hokies.  I don't know.  We just do.

There are deeper reasons, though.  I've never had a problem with drink, but when I read the AA Big Book, my first thought was, "Yes!  These are my people!  I'm just like that!  I've found people who understand me!"  There are people who find the word "addict" disheartening, and who shy away from it.  My experience was rather the reverse of that.  Accepting myself as an addict meant that I wasn't alone, that there were other people like me.  It let me shift my self-understanding away from shame for my evil deeds and toward acceptance of myself as a person with a spiritual disease/mental illness/whatever one wants to say.  It gave me hope, because I know that although many millions of people die as active addicts, many millions of people have also gotten clean and sober and stayed that way.  So if I could follow the path of my fellow addicts toward freedom, then there was hope for me, too, a hope I had never really felt.  My path over the last 6 years has been in part that of the 12-step program, where I am finding a new a beautiful life; so I am disinclined to give the term up.

Now, what about the notion of being an addict for life?  This is a common understanding of 12-steppers, and there are a lot of stories consistent with that thought.  I know 2 or 3 people who stayed sober for 8 years and then slipped, including one who has been stuck in continuing relapses after that point.  A friend of a friend in AA went back to drinking after 45 years sober.  I, myself, slipped after somewhat over 2 years of sobriety and what I thought was very solid recovery.  That and a lot more of the experience and culture of the rooms (that is, the 12-step rooms) leaves me inclined to be very humble and to respect the cunning, baffling, and powerful nature of this disease.

That said, there are certainly people who object to the idea of being an addict for life, either because it seems to deprive people of hope or because it seems to ignore the power of God.  Here's my take on that:

I consider myself as having three chronic conditions: addiction, coronary artery disease, and epilepsy.  Two of those are physical illnesses, and one is a mental illness.  I expect to be relieved of all three of them simultaneously at my death, but I don't think they'll go away sooner.  Does that negate the power of God?  I don't think so.  God can raise Lazarus from the dead.  If He can do that, he could clean out my arteries and repair the area damaged by my heart attack.  But I don't expect that to happen.  I think it happens only very rarely.  However much I pray, my heart isn't going to be up to spec.

Similarly, God heals the boy with the demon that throws him to the ground and into the fire with what sound like the tonic-clonic seizures that I've had.  But most people with epilepsy don't get healed that way.

Could God change me psychologically in such a way that the patterns and habits of a lifetime went away?  Sure, but again, my sense of how psychology works is that this is not a common experience.  I think I can become happy, joyous and free, but that, as the Big Book says, all we have is a daily reprieve contingent on maintaining a fit spiritual condition.

Saying that I will always be an addict doesn't feel to me any more horrible or any more a denial of God's power than saying I will always be a heart patient and a person with epilepsy.

But isn't it awfully discouraging to say those things?  Not really.  I'm a sober addict.  I've been seizure-free for several years.  My heart disease doesn't restrict my activities.  My life is fine.

My life has some restrictions, though.  I have to watch what I eat.  I have to get exercise and watch my weight.  I have to manage stress and get enough rest. I have to take some drugs.  I have to pray and meditate and journal and talk with other addicts and be open and honest with the people around me.  If I don't do those things, my various diseases could reassert themselves, and I could die, spiritually or physically or both.  Again, I don't see my restrictions as an addict as particularly different from my restrictions for my heart and brain.  Stress is a killer for all 3 diseases, for instance.

It turns out, though, that all those restrictions aren't really restrictions.  They're blessings.  Yes, I have to do those things or I might die, but you know what?  When I do those things, I feel better, better than I would if I didn't do them.  I may not want to go for a run or a bike ride, but after the run, I feel energized and joyful.  I may not want to drive to a meeting, but after sharing with my friends, I feel inspired and blessed.  I may not want to take the time to meditate, but after meditation, I feel more balance and peace.  Pity me!  Here I am, condemned to do things that bless me!

OK, that's enough.  That's why I call myself an addict and think of myself as an addict for life.  Other people may have different self-understandings and may describe themselves differently.  That's fine.  May they be blessed!  This is my way, but it needn't be theirs.

Does this make sense?

Tim M.

(1) For me, "sober" is a rather minimal goal of not acting out in our bottom line addictive behaviors.  I'd contrast that with "recovering," which means to me that actual deep inner change is taking place.

I think different people have different addictive bottom lines, and that one has to work to discern what those are.  For me personally, the primary issues have been visual, so sobriety includes no use of anything that could be construed as pornographic, that is, anything that I would find sexually arousing.  This would include for me a lot of things that others might see as innocent in movies, catalogues, art, etc.  It would include searches for objects of desire which don't result in seeing them naked.

Does this give a reasonable idea without offering a more specific catalogue that some might find triggering, and others distasteful?

(2) This one's a little more complicated.

The Big Book says this about alcohol (pp. 84-85):


(I quote as much of this as I do because it's relevant to the earlier discussion.)

I don't claim always to be in this state, but this is my normal condition.  So I absolutely think we can reach a point where we are not fighting temptation, where the desire to act out has been lifted from us, where we are, as the Big Book also says, happy, joyous and free.

For me, and this is not universal, my wife is very much my physical ideal, and the women I sought out in porn were often very close to her in appearance.  I can go into the psychology of that if you want, though this is getting a bit personal.  Also for me, and again this is not universal, she and I were always alone in bed.  That is, I didn't carry with me images from porn and focus on them when we were together.  (Of course, I obviously can't offer any proof of either of those claims to you or to her.)  When I was with her, I was therefore attracted to her; and when I was acting out with porn, I was often seeking women who were in some sense stand-ins for her.  That doesn't reduce the betrayal, but I'm trying to be accurate here.

The upshot of all of this is that in recovery, I don't need completely to change my arousal template, as some people do.  I'm not in the position of straight men who end up escalating to watch gay porn, or of people who end up watching violent porn or of people working with pedophilia.  On that level, my idea of sexual allurement is just fine and doesn't need to change.  Of course, that needs to focus on my wife alone and not just on people who look like her, but that's part of learning to let go the temptation, and part of learning emotional intimacy.  Stuff like that can happen.

I make no claims to be at the end of that process.  The notion above is that it's a continuing journey, after all.  I'm a work in progress, and after 50 years of living unskillfully, I always will be.  Neither I nor many people, addicted or not, can claim never to see an attractive person and experience some inner rush.  But can we learn to step aside and let that rush pass by, to turn it over to God and to go on?  Yes.

I feel like I'm rambling.  Am I at least in the right neighborhood to be helpful?

Tim M.