Our Story, Part 6

We saw our bishop on a fairly regular basis.  He was so helpful.  I am glad that we always went together to see him.  He spent as much time in our appointments talking to and about me as he did with my husband.  I felt validated and supported in those appointments.

During these first few months, I was really roller coastering.  After the relapses in December, I really really desperately really hoped that Cyrus would never do it again. I felt like I needed him to STOP if I were ever to heal.  Everything depended on it.  In a way, I was right. It would be really difficult to heal if I were continuing to be injured.  But unfortunately, that is what happened.    Over time, a pattern emerged; after relapsing, he had a period of regret and determination that carried him through for a while, but eventually he would inevitably succumb to temptation and relapse.  That period of time seemed to be anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months.  He occasionally caved in fewer than 6 weeks, but he was never going longer than 3 months.

I really just couldn't understand it.  If he was able to resist for weeks at a time, why wasn't he able to always resist?  I had always believed that addiction to anything included frequent use, but once every 6 weeks does not qualify as frequent.  

For the first several cycles, I would desperately hope that his most relapse would be his last relapse ever.  I would build that hope way up as weeks went by until I would believe that life was going to be normal for us.  And then he would relapse and tell me, and I would feel like I had been hit by a bus.  This may be a cynical response, but eventually I completely gave up hope that the last-ever relapse was behind us.  It didn't feel worth it to hope that, and I had clearly been proved wrong every time I had hoped for that.  Instead, my attitude swung all the way to the other side of the pendulum.  I lived with (and still live with) the assumption that more relapses are in our future.  The most I let myself hope for is that the time between relapses will expand more and more until there are periods of years between relapses.  Again, I don't know if that is ideal or healthy, but it the way that seems to be working best for me.

So once I believed that an upcoming relapse was inevitable, a strange and frustrating phenomenon began to emerge.  He would tell me of a relapse, and I would be deeply hurt and upset.  Then we would gradually both come back together after the latest round of damage to our relationship.  Then life would go back to normal.  Then, as the 6 week - 3 month time frame arrived, I would begin to feel anxious and edgy.  I felt wary and even angry and defensive.  I was on guard of being hurt again.  It was frustrating to Cyrus, because my most disruptive reactions were occurring after long periods of him doing well.  My attitude was not matching his current or recent behavior.  But I just felt scared of the pain that was coming.  And eventually, it would arrive and we would begin the cycle again.

It felt pretty terrible for my emotional landscape to be so strongly determined by his actions and cycles.  This helplessness I felt with my own emotions is one of the things that eventually led me to seek treatment for myself.

Our Story, Part 5

I can't believe that in my last post, I forgot to include the fact that Cyrus was unable to keep his "January 1st" promise to me.  He made it until December.  To his credit, he voluntarily disclosed to me quickly that he had messed up.  But it was so hard to accept.  It was the first time he had directly and obviously broken a firm promise to me.  Why had he promised that if he was not able to keep the promise?  Why wasn't he able to keep that one simple promise?  I could have kept the same promise.  In fact, I didn't look at porn from September to January 1st that year.  It has been easy for me to stay away from porn.

So, we continued to slog through.  I'm not sure what part of our story to include next, so I think that I will interrupt this narrative to discuss honesty.  I feel like there are two components to the betrayal of the spouse of a sex addict: there's the sexual acting out, and there's the dishonesty to hide the sexual acting out.  Most women I have talked to (and there are many women I have talked to) agree that the lying harms the relationship even more than the sexual behavior.  It just feels intolerable.

I have had to deal with implicit dishonesty (not disclosing to me something that I didn't know) much more than explicit dishonesty (lying when asked a direct question).  There were almost eight years of implicit dishonesty.  The dishonesty was the fact that my husband was a pornography addict and I did not know it.  At any point, he could have told me but he did not.  I never asked him about  pornography at all, since I was sure that he would never.  So there wasn't any explicit dishonesty on this topic during that time period.  But dealing with the fact of 8 years of implicit honesty has been difficult.

Since D-Day, there has been almost no implicit dishonesty, and as far as I know, no explicit dishonesty at all.  In other words, as far as I know, Cyrus has never lied to me when I have asked him a direct question.  And there have been very few incidences of sexual acting out when he has not quickly come to me and disclosed what had happened.  There have been a few times when he told me later that he had not disclosed to me what had happened at the time, but he did eventually disclose them, and did not directly lie.

It sounds like I am trying to defend him, and that is not the tone I meant this post to take.  The fact that he has ever acted out with porn absolutely SUCKS ROTTEN MEAT, but I am still glad that he has not enlarged the injury to me by hiding the situation from me, and by not directly lying when asked.

I feel fairly comfortable in my assumption that he has been and continues to be honest because of two things:

1. His life now shows evidence of the recovery efforts he is making.  He is changing into a different, more connected, present and caring man.  I don't think he could be as different as he is from what he used to be if he were continuing the behavior and hiding it from me.
2. He has voluntarily disclosed so many uncomfortable incidences to me.  He has started conversations with absolute dread, knowing that I would be both completely pissed and completely hurt.  But he has found the courage to start those conversations, over and over.

Anyway, the reason why I am focusing so much on his honesty is that it makes me feel like we have the best case scenario within this worst case scenario.  My husband is a porn addict, he took a long time to tell me, and he has continued to relapse much longer than I was prepared to deal with.  But he voluntarily told me, I have never caught him acting out, and he is committed to both honesty with me, and strong efforts toward his own recovery.

I told Cyrus years ago that it is my right as his wife to react however I would like to to his relapses.  I can be gracious and forgiving, or I can be an absolute bitch and throw a fit, or I can draw a firm line.  It is up to me, and it is my right to decide.  If he does not let me know when those relapses occur, he is depriving me of my right to react.  It is not right.

Also, it is terrifying to stay in a relationship and try to invest myself in it if I do not know where I stand.  What if the ground I am standing on is shakier than I think it is?  What if there is no ground under my feet at all, and I am about to plummet a la Wile E. Coyote?  How could I possibly be vulnerable emotionally or physically with my husband if I do not know whether he is being faithful to me?  Isn't that just setting myself up to be unimaginably hurt (again)?  No thank you.

So despite the fact that I am married to a porn addict, and despite the fact that I have felt so much pain, there is a part of me that also feels grateful.  My husband is now committed to being honest with me.  I can trust that I do not have to wonder whether there is ground beneath my feet, because he will tell me when there is not, or when it is uneven or shaky.  That is not to say that everything is smooth sailing in our relationship; there is still so much trauma related to his addiction.  But at least, he is not compounding that trauma by being either implicitly or explicitly dishonest.

Our Story, Part 4

During D-Day, Cyrus told me that he wanted to give me time to cope with the new information.  He promised me that for that reason, he would not under any circumstances have any exposure to pornography before January 1st.  D-Day was in September.  

I really believed that we were dealing with pornography addiction only as part of our past.  I believed that telling me meant that he was ready to put it entirely behind him.  I was positive that he would keep his promise to me about January 1st.  I was sure that if he could go those several months until January, then he wouldn't go back to it at all.  Why would he?

I really did believe that my husband would never again look at porn after the day he told me that he had a problem.  I was very wrong.  But I'm glad that I initially believed what I did.  Grieving the past was very overwhelming.  It feels like I would have crumbled had I known that years later, his addiction would still be a big part of our lives.  Cyrus has been sober for over a year, for the first time ever, and it has been more than 8 years since D-Day.  We're doing well, and we have come so far, but I didn't know that it would take this much time and effort.