Waking up from the illusion

SW,

Welcome!  I'm glad you found us, though obviously it's a pity you need to be here.

I have little to say directly to your situation.  I'm the addict, not the partner, so I haven't been where you are.  Still, I wanted to make sure you were welcomed by someone as quickly as possible.

One quick thought on searching his locker: Is it worth it?  You know qualitatively what you're going to find.  Will it help you to see it really all laid out in front of you?  Perhaps the answer is yes: it might give you the strength do conclude that it's really time to leave.  It's going to be pretty hard, though, especially if you're working on continuing the marriage.  It will stay with you.

That's not to say that it may not be important to know the truth, something you have an absolute right to know.  But do think about what you really want to know for your own well-being.  Catching him out and rubbing his face in it isn't worth it if it causes you more continuing anguish.  In the end, detachment from his addiction - whether you stay together or not - may be part of the way to peace.

Would it be worthwhile to work through this question and others with a counselor locally?  You're obviously comfortable doing that for your hurting child; could you do it for your hurting self?

Again, welcome.  Sorry the board is so quiet.  I hope you get better informed replies from folks like truthseeker and DW, who have been in it as partners.

Tim M.

Hi Shatterred Wife,
I know how you feel, unfortunately. I always knew my.husband was looking at.other women. Our marriage.started off.very sick.because i remember worrying on.the honeymoon, that he was looking at other women in the restaurant.
It went on with him being secretly addicted to porn lust and masturbation and me being equally sick as the codependent partner.
He lusted after all my friends neighbors and coworkers.
And i would make every effort to control his lusting.
I screamed cried and threatened him for 20 years.
Strangely i only was able to put two and two together last fall. I caught him on porn sites and found emails to eomen at work. And i finally researched this and realized he is a sex addict.
Everything finally made sense!
We still.live togethr but i have decided to divorce him. He does acknowledge his problem but he tells me he doesnt want to get better for me he tells me he is done being married.
Recently what has heloed me is to remembeer that he has an addiction an illness and i cant fix it only God can.
Please know its not your fault and you do have options.
need2bfree

Sorry for taking so long to reply.

On my own story:

For me, the central initial tool is surrender - stopping fighting, stopping hiding, stopping trying to do it alone, putting everything on the line, getting help, and following that help.  As a counselor I've worked with once said, things start to change when you become willing to follow somebody; it doesn't much matter who that is.

Vital tools for me have included 12-step fellowships (both on-line and locally), getting a sponsor, working the Steps, working with a counselor, getting honest with the central people in my life, talking to other addicts, reading and journaling and prayer and meditation.  The goal, after all, isn't to give up a single bad habit, but to accept that the all-encompassing need to hide from others and from myself in my addictive behavior is a part of a life that is seriously disordered, and that I need to become a new person, to find a new way to live.  As the folks in NA say, we only need to change one thing - everything.

Part of what gave me strength to dare to seek help and to dare to get open with my wife was the depth of my despair.  In the spring of 2005, I was in my early 50's, older, for the first time, than my father had been at the time of his death.  My oldest son was about to leave home for college more than 2000 miles from here.  He was leaving home, I knew, never having seen me well, never having had the father I had wanted to be.  I had been actively fighting my addiction for 30 years, and had made no progress.  I didn't have another 30 years left to fight.  Each year, I was farther from my wife, farther from my kids, farther from my God, farther from myself.  More and more, I was thinking of suicide.

In a way, that despair was what made it possible to seek help.  The embarrassment of speaking to others about my problem had always felt like it was more than I could bear, but the vision of suicide really took that away.  If I'm about to take my own life, then what do I have left to lose?  Why not reach out for help?  If I reach out for help and the result is indeed fatally humiliating, well, I can always kill myself then.

This part is hard to engineer on demand, but another important piece of the package for me was nearly dying of a heart attack when I was several months into recovery.  That wasn't something I was expecting.  I'm a cyclist and jogger, not overweight, largely vegetarian, without a family history of coronary artery disease, and at the time I was in my early 50s.  In another way, though, it was something I was expecting.  My addiction has been accompanied with enormous stress - hiding, feeling bad about myself, catching up on the work I haven't done because I was acting out instead, being angry and alone.  I've spent most of my life filling my metaphorical heart with crud.  Am I surprised to discover that my physical heart is also filled with crud?  Not particularly.

For me, the heart attack was a really important marker of my growing recovery in several ways.  It was a clear marker of where my past way of life had led me.  The fact that I survived with minimal lasting damage was a dramatic offer of a new life to live differently.  My old life had led to death and was over; now I could start anew.

There was more, though.  Especially in the last years of my active addiction, I had grown more and more fearful of and angry at God.  Convicted by the judgment I perceived from Him, I feared death.  At the same time, I thought of suicide.  I had little to live for, and death seemed like the only escape from the hell of my unescapable addiction.

Had I had the heart attack a year before I did, I might just have chosen to give up and die.

But when the actual heart attack happened, I was on a new path.  I was at peace with my wife.  I was at peace with God.  I was being open and honest with the people around me.  I was facing fears that I had hidden from so deeply that I didn't know they were there, and I was finding a joyful way through them.  I was working with other people.  I had friends who really knew everything about me.  I had been granted months of sobriety.  I knew I was loved by others and by God.  So as I lay in the ER not knowing how this was going to end, there was tremendous peace.  I had something to live for, and I hoped I would live.  But I was also absolutely certain that if I did not live, still, God was there.  I would be all right.  That was a tremendously powerful experience, one that by itself kept me moving forward and sober for the couple of years that followed.

I don't want to be over dramatic about the medical issues.  Addicts,and perhaps their partners, often live in a world of seeking the one magic decisive moment that will make everything new and better.  I'm not much of a believer in those moments.  Accepting and building a new life is a hard and scary process.  I took the better part of 50 years learning how to be an addict.  I'm not going to learn how not to be one in the course of a morning.  It's a long process of unfolding.  Unless I had already put in months of hard work and sharing and prayer at the time of my sudden illness, that morning would have passed without meaning and without changing me.  It was a huge gift, but a huge gift because of every other gift that was already happening in my life.

That's a quick history.  There's more, of course, to the story of a life.

If it matters, it was always clear to me that my use of porn was something wrong, something illicit, something I wanted to overcome, something I did not know how to overcome.  I think that's true of many addicts, even if some of us hide that sense of failure and inadequacy from ourselves as well as from others in blustering displays of entitlement.  If there are addicts who don't share that deep sense of failure, then my experience probably offers nothing to those people.  Equally, I have nothing to offer an addict who is not yet ready to feel and admit his own pain.  If that's where your husband is, I have nothing to say to him.  But for somebody who knows he's hurting and is desperate to live a new life, I can certainly say that there is enormous hope out there.  Once one gives up completely, a lot of doors open.

Suggestions on how to detach:

No.  That's not something I know about.  You'll have to hear that from others partners, not from me.

Peace,

Tim M.

Hi Need2bfree,
Thanks for responding. My husband never went after any of my friends or my family. I do know he does lust after other women I see it when we are camping and at the beach. From what I know so far is that it has been porn and masturbating. I hope that is the worst of hit but one never knows. I do know that it is not my fault but that doesn't help the pain much.
shatteredwife