fellow recovery bloggers

I am reading Margaux Meade's blog Love In The Time Of Addiction . Such great writing! Seeing her story is making me spin out because it feels so therapeutic to read that someone else has gone through exactly what I went through.
There have been so many times in this recovery where I haven't really been sure if I'm not overreacting. I mean, I know it feels like infidelity but am I just being melodramatic? I know my boyfriend did send a Facebook message to girl he met in a bar saying "I've been looking at your profile pictures and wish I'd spent more time the other night getting to know you rather than getting so drunk"... and that he sent that message in the few hours we didn't spend together that day. Less than 12 hours since we last had sex, less than 12 hours until we would have sex again... at a time when he says he was falling in love with me. But that was the only time he's done that, so am I overreacting? Was it not really cheating? Am I wrong to feel this betrayed? That a time I look back on as being this incredible time of falling in love and not being able to stop thinking about each other was actually punctuated by him having one last attempt at chatting up another girl just because she's got big boobs and wearing a singlet top in her Facebook profile picture?

He hasn't fully said to me that he recognises the betrayal for what I do. He tells me that he feels a huge amount of guilt and shame about his porn addiction, but always says that his rule is that he doesn't cheat, he doesn't do that... he still says he has no memory of ever writing that Facebook message (a moment lost in the midst of addiction) as if that should make me feel better... that he wasn't planning on cheating. It still isn't ok. And since I'm writing about this with such fervour I obviously still feel a lot of pain and anger about it because we haven't had closure about that yet. When I found out, found the message and called him barely able to speak for tears and anger at what he had done, he says it was the worst moment of his life; realising that he had done that and that something he had completely forgotten about could jeopardise his entire relationship with the woman he wants to be with for life. I was away working at the time and we were only able to talk about it over the phone for the next 4 days, whilst I sat in a hotel in Barcelona hardly eating or sleeping, just trying to make sense of this man that I had thought I knew so well.

These posts by Margaux sum up exactly how I felt as well. I wish my boyfriend could read them. It's weird that as time goes on, because we are healing now... it's hard to bring up the old hurts without feeling like we are moving backwards again. I guess it's something I need to think about, because it is still hurting me that I haven't seen him really take responsibility for what it meant... he was just so relieved that I didn't break up with him and decided to stand by him because he is the man I love. It really made me wonder what messages he has deleted though. He says there aren't any... which just goes to show how long a way my trust has to go that I think it would be naieve to believe that.

is pornography cheating?

I am searching around the blogosphere for other partners of addicts... other recovery blogs... it helps so much to feel less alone with this. Weird how reading posts by people you have never met and will never know the identity of can help heal so profoundly... so thank you to all those writers out there that have helped me without even knowing it over these last few months. Links to the blogs are on the right hand side of this page, check 'em out!

A post that really got into my head this afternoon was over at Margaux Meade's blog: Love In The Time Of Addiction on the issue of whether masturbating to porn is cheating if you are in a relationship. It links to an article from 2008 that is worth a read.

I feel that it is cheating. My instincts tell me that it is cheating. It feels like a redirection of sexual energy towards someone that isn't me. That is infidelity. The lack of ability to connect intimately when using porn looks and feels exactly like the way someone who is having an affair comes across sexually (I know because I've experienced that little charm of life too back 8 years ago). When I asked my partner why he had bothered subscribing to a particular porn site that required an email address, rather than just using the myriad resources for totally anonymous porn viewing, he told me that it was because the site had user photos. That made my heart feel like a knife was working its way into it... and when I write it now still hurts just as much. It was infidelity. It was wanking to real people... not Debbie Does Dallas or a centrefold in Playboy, which still would be infidelity to me... but it is a few levels higher than that... it is your girlfriend leaving the bed that you share together and have just slept naked next to each other in, to go and have a shower... and you log on to a site to look for other real girls that turn you on because they exist in the real world and you get to wank to them.

That. Is. Infidelity.

My partner and I haven't really talked extensively about porn being cheating, partly because his shame about his addiction is so overwhelming and he is really working through everything bit by bit, that I really don't want to compound his guilt any further right now. At some point we will talk about it. The rule he has always had for himself is that he doesn't cheat. So to realise that actually he kind of has been cheating as much as he thinks he can get away with, is pretty hard to come to terms with. If it had been a real girl in the room with her legs spread whilst he masturbated in a chair, that would be broadly seen as cheating... even if he had never met her before, didn't know her name, she had just walked in off the street, for free, no strings... it would still be cheating... so why is it different just because it's on a screen?

That said, I don't feel the same absolute devestation with his porn addiction that I would have felt if he had actually had sex with someone else, so I absolutely recognise that there are different levels of sex addiction. It isn't healthy fidelity within a relationship though. It feels like a betrayal. Knowing that a site appealed to him because it was 'real' people is so so so painful to me. It feels like he has been unfaithful... to a lesser degree perhaps, but it still feels like a betrayal. He would wince at the thought of sex with me because he would have spent all day masturbating to porn. How is that not a betrayal of your partner? How am I supposed to feel knowing that other women were getting his sexual attention? I realise it has nothing to do with intimacy or love... but making light of the role of sexual focus within a relationship is, I think, skating on extremely thin ice.

objectifying women

I've been waiting a few days to get a chance to write again, but in the meantime have now gathered about 4 posts worth of stuff to write write write write until it feels better. It's incredible how much writing something down can extract it from the exhausting whirl of thoughts constantly swimming around my brain even when I'm not consciously thinking about them. Some of the time I'm doing well and able to really feel on top of all things 'recovery', but other times I feel a constant sense of being totally overwhelmed and end up bumping into things, forgetting things and not hearing things because my brain is so preoccupied trying to make sense of it all. Ironically I imagine that is maybe a bit what it feels like to be an addict, the difference being that my coping mechanisms are slightly different.

Anyway, writing is good. Already I feel a bit better because I'm not lost to the emotions... I'm moving forwards by writing it down.

It's a lovely sunny day and I have a day off today before about 10 hours of driving tomorrow in total plus a performance, which I am slightly dreading (in my everyday life I am in the arts industry, an arena rife with addiction that is almost glorified rather than ever addressed. My partner and I are almost abnormal in that world in our quest for a healthy emotional life!).

I was feeling pretty good, feeling like it's all on track and we're doing well. Big pat on the back for both of us... then I was walking home from doing some errands at the shops and passed a girl who looked a bit like me, except that she was taller, skinnier, had better makeup on (I have NO makeup on because I am having one of those 'day off' type days), and had hair the kind of length I'd like to get and shade of red that is that tempting shade darker than mine, was younger than me which is something I never thought I'd say because I'm not exactly old, and the fact that I am now even noticing adult girls that are younger than me freaks me out... and even though even writing down that description sounds laughable in its superficiality and ridiculousness, I instantly was on the verge of tears as she passed me. Suddenly all that had happened in my day and how great we are doing vanished and I felt like crying, because suddenly all that my brain was doing was thinking, "what if I had hair like hers, what if I was skinnier... WHY did I just buy that chocolate muffin, shouldn't I be on a diet if I want to keep my man from checking out skinnier girls?? I know if we had been walking together he would have checked her out and I would have felt like crap because I'll never be able to look like that. I'll never be able to compete with girls walking around like that."


so here follows my own personal strict Talking To to myself, because I mean COME ON!!!

• of course I don't look like that. I don't like that because I am me... and being me means that I have other things that are great and it's useless trying to compete with everyone on the street who looks like a model because I am not a model. AND I am attractive. I know I am. There are things about my looks that are attractive, but more importantly there are things about my personality that are attractive. Would I seriously be happy if I was that weight? Not necessarily. I'm a size 10 (USA 6) for crying out loud, I am fit and my boyfriend tells me every day now how much he fancies me, but even if he didn't... I like me. Why would I want to change me?
• the answer to that is obvious... because I want to stop being hurt by my boyfriend's middle circle behaviour of checking out women when we are out together and in my girly head I somehow think that if I looked skinnier (because they are always skinny), or dressed sexier (a low cut top will always do it), or had longer hair like I used to (long hair generally does it), that somehow I would stop him doing that. The answer is NOOOOO nothing I do will stop him doing that. He doesn't see me as less attractive than them. It isn't about that. It is about his insecurity. It is about viewing the world like a porn movie. It is about his lack of self-esteem. It is about his addiction. 
• before I go on I should add that I am not one of those typically jealous, keep your man on a tight rein kind of girlfriends. I never have been. I believe in trusting each other enough to keep a healthy balance of your individual lives and your life together. He doesn't flip out when I hug my male friends or joke about a hot movie star, because he knows he has nothing to worry about. I have never given him any reason to distrust my motivation behind my interaction with the opposite sex. He knows I'm not using their sexuality as some kind of drug to soothe myself, and that in my eyes he is the most attractive man I know. If Johnny Depp came up to me right now and offered me a night of unbridled passion I would say no in a nanosecond, because there is only one of my boyfriend and loving him is about so much more than the way he looks that I would never do anything to jeopardise that. For those reasons he trusts me. And when we first started going out, for a long time I trusted him. I felt completely secure with him. I never got jealous... to the extent that at one point he was slightly offended that I never got jealous (something I now look back on as a warning sign that I missed), but when we moved back to near his mother and when I first started getting a horrible feeling that something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on what... suddenly every goodlooking girl was making me panic. My self-confidence was suddenly in a state of total and utter confusion: he obviously loves me, he says he is happier than he has ever been... so why am I feeling bad? It took me a while to connect the dots that I didn't want to see... that I was feeling bad because I was picking up on the change in sexual energy with him. That his middle circle behaviours were coming back and leading him back into porn & masturbation addiction. It was no longer checking out girls in the distant objective way of appreciating beauty but feeling smug about what you've got... it was changed, and my brain knew it. Even when it wasn't the blatant checking out of a girl to the extent that I would stop what I was saying and turn around to see what he was looking at (which always made me feel great), it was even in the small glances, the clocking and 'banking' of hot girls as they pass. It's hard to describe, but he has admitted it, that at some point he started objectifying women again and it totally freaked him out because he didn't understand why he was doing it, so told himself that all guys do it and it didn't mean anything. Somewhere in himself he knew that wasn't true though, and that's where the confusion really sets in, because suddenly he didn't understand what was the truth any more. He knew he loved me, and yet he was doing this... and his mother's fucked up (sorry, still not over my anger here. Working on compassion, not quite there yet) words from the past and dislike of his stable relationship 'taking him away from her' causing more pain and confusion... ah, it's a vicious circle of destructive emotions and thoughts that all add up to going back to old coping mechanism of acting out, feeling bad, acting out to stop feeling bad, feeling worse, repeat repeat repeat... Getting back on topic again.... it was the change in his direction of sexual energy that I picked up on, and I didn't understand why it was happening and it terrified me. It still scares me now even when I know why it is happening, because it is a break in the connection between us. I check out hot people all the time. I check out girls when they are beautiful too, but not in a sexual way, in a wow you're beautiful kind of way. That isn't the way he was looking. It was not healthy and he didn't realise how blatant and objectifying it was/is. Even now I feel kind of bad because he is trying to really address that behaviour and when we are out now what I see is him consciously not checking out the hot girls, which is really sweet, but still means that the root cause and reason for it still exists. Until he feels truly good enough about himself that his subconscious isn't looking for a sexual buzz to make him feel like a worthy man, that battle is always going to be going on. 
• My theory is that it is a lot a lot a LOT to do with self-esteem. He measured his self-esteem for a long time by the amount of sex he had and the number of girls he pulled. He always believed that the answer to his pain lay in porn, masturbation and having sex. Now he knows how much more powerful an intimate relationship, truly intimate connected sex with the person he is in love with, and a life he is in control of and believes in can be. 
• His mum makes him doubt that though, and she is in his head a lot, and that way the source of the problem lies. She encouraged him to be promiscuous when he was younger, had control over every step of all his relationships and has fallen out with every single one of his girlfriends. I always thought that it was only because those girls were manipulative bully types who made him unhappy; that she would see that I was different and would be able to feel secure in the knowledge that her son was going to be ok, that I was not going to hurt him. I didn't understand the extent of her issues and need to control him. The crazy thing is that I think she actually still likes me... she just doesn't like not having control over him, can't quite believe that he could possibly be making decisions about his own life (so thinks I must be pulling the strings) and it's sending her temporarily a bit cuckoo to say the least! 
• We got together overseas and have led the majority of our relationship away from her. She doesn't like it, and every times he mentions how in love he is, she makes a cynical noise or makes it known that she doesn't believe love exists.  I feel like his objectification of women has a lot to do with his mother not believing that he can make his own choices in life. If he can't be trusted to make his own choices in life then how can he be totally sure that I am the right girl, the hottest girl, the one that is really going to float his boat... this is what I see every time this happens:      what about that girl... no, mine is better... what about that one... great boobs... could I pull someone with boobs like that... wait, my girlfriend is great... what about that girl, is she hotter?... ooh I like her hair I can imagine that writhing around on top of me... what the hell are you doing thinking about that, you bastard, focus!    I feel really sorry for him, I understand where it comes from in his quest to feel good about himself, but it makes me feel like shit. It undermines my self confidence and makes me feel like I'm going out with someone who is sleazy... it is very different to a healthy recognition of other people's attractiveness. I can't explain it properly except to say that I am very far from a prude, I have never felt this insecure about other girls within a relationship and I know instinctively the difference between an idle appreciative look and redirecting sexual energy to use the image of women as a drug to soothe the part of yourself that says you aren't good enough. THAT is called objectifying women. Find that self-esteem somewhere else. Checking out girls will never fix it. 
• It doesn't happen all the time. I think I'd have a hard time feeling as settled in my relationship as I do if it had. It happens when he is sliding towards acting out. When he feels a loss of control over his life. It happens almost consistently after any interaction with his mum. I was so profoundly disturbed by that. But I have a divorced mum who leaned heavily on me too. We just had our establishing independence dramas when I was 15.  I understand how fundamentally terrifying it is to take the risk of losing your mum's love by living your own life... but I am here to bear witness to the fact that a mother's love is unconditional... he would never lose her love. He is only just realising that now, and I totally understand how scary it is to feel like anything you do could hurt your mum. I just wish all of this wouldn't hurt me too. I went through all this when I was a teenager. It has been hard to make peace with being drawn into this sort of drama again, but have decided that the only way to go is to NOT get drawn into the drama. This is their thing. They will sort it out. He is my best friend, my lover, the person I love most in this world alongside myself and my family. I will be here recovering with him. I just wish it wasn't to do with sex. I wish it wasn't something that made me feel bad about myself. But it is. And he is dealing with it. He really truly is. And we are building the relationship we want. I have to be grateful for that. She scares me though. She loves her son and yet when confronted with a son that has a great career, loving girlfriend, stable finances, moving forward in life, taking control of the issues in his life... she starts destroying it through this weird passive aggressive behaviour because she can't bear not having him by her side. It's sad, and I am sorry that she is lonely, but she is hurting her son. That is so selfish. I feel sorry for her. I hope one day we can sit around the kitchen table and laugh and drink wine and feel as relaxed as we all did that first Christmas... not sit there being actively ignored all day, watched like a hawk when her son leaves his seat at the other end of the table to come and sit with me after dinner and then repeatedly called a 'random stray' guest like the next year every time I thanked her for her hospitality. 
• It started and got worse after his mum started being weird towards our relationship once we moved in together and suddenly mysteriously stopped liking me and started making it very clear to him that she didn't trust his choice of relationship. I feel sorry for her, because she is definitely not the first mother in the world to morph into the nightmare mother-in-law when they get scared that their son has finally found his life partner and therefore has another woman in his life... but she has gone seriously crazy with this one. I will write about it in another post, but I cannot possibly describe the stress she has put us through. Rephrase... that we ALLOWED her to put us through. We have changed our attitudes now and hopefully she will work through it without hurting us quite so much, but the force of her character is such that after us feeling that we couldn't possibly be more in love after our first year together, she had me actually questioning whether she was right and that he would be better off with someone else. But then when my boyfriend finally asked her what the matter was, she said that her problem with me was that I am too optimistic and too much of a dreamer. He came home saying that she and his sister thought that maybe I shouldn't try so hard to be nice. What??? I wasn't 'trying' to be nice...  apart from after I started feeling that his Mum was suddenly disliking everything I said or did, then I was trying not to rock the boat (I have since found out this happens with pretty much everyone in her life. Lodgers, friends, family. That made me feel better). I was just being his girlfriend. That made me both furious beyond belief and incredibly relieved. If anyone is at the point in their head where they actually think that someone being optimistic about life could be a character trait that was bad enough to seriously damage their son then it is definitely time for help, and I am better off staying away from it until they sort out their relationship. It was never about me, it was about him taking control of his life and her not making all his decisions for him any more. She still can't trust him enough to believe that he could be a strong wonderful man working on having a happy healthy life... she thinks it's my fault. I infected him with my optimism and have caused him to be nicer to his Dad and taken him away from her. I haven't done any of that. I am very much trying to stay out of it. But oi oi oi oi vey, is all I can say to that!!!
• What also is making me sad is that I have always got on really well with his sister. She is totally awesome. I love her to bits. But at the moment with all the drama going on with his mum, now we aren't getting to see her as much. She is living at home with their mum right now (she is 25, but is living at home whilst doing a postgrad degree at the recommendation of their mum) and is getting this bombardment of talk from his mum, consequently being put in the middle of this. She got angry at my boyfriend on the phone saying that he had changed and (unbeknownst to her) made him cry for the first time in 15 years. She was in pain, feeling like she is being left alone to deal with their mum. She blames the pain on their Dad. The mess that is divorce... I feel like my presence in their lives is hurting both my boyfriend and his sister. That is certainly the view that his mum is perpetuating. It's really hard to remember that it isn't about me. It is about that family and their relationships to each other growing into adulthood. Our relationship is our relationship. It is love and everyone in our lives is happy for us except her. She will get there. It will just take time. 
• My trust is being built up again slowly. Slowly I am trusting that he is not going to act out when I go have a shower, or go to work (that one is still shaky due to a slip recently, but I understand that they will happen and do now completely trust that he is committed to recovery which is the fundamental thing)... but whilst he is still coming to terms with these middle circle behaviours I still am finding it really hard working on regaining my self-confidence when I see these girls everywhere I turn. They scare me. I know they hurt me when he looks at them, so I get angry within myself at him, at them, at his mother, at the world, at the media that created this porn addiction phenomenon in the first place... then I want to cry and go hide inside so that I don't have to be confronted with dealing with this. But that won't work. I have no control over his addiction. I do have control over my reactions. And I know that I'm as much the object of other guys objectification as other girls are of his, so the only really to do is ignore the guys stares or non-stares and focus on feeling good within myself... he loves me and is more serious about shaping his life around a total recovery than anything else in his life, so I just have to find a way of dealing with it in my head. It's hard. It's really hard. When I was being bullied at school (I was classic glasses, braces, into music & drama, strange eccentric girl who suddenly got contact lenses and years of gymnastic training gave a good figure to and realised what a change it made to the guys. Dangerous times requiring some serious self-reflection later on at college!), the blonde leggy tanned socialite girls once made a list of all the things I would have to change about myself to become attractive to guys. I thought they were all total nutjobs and had enough of a good stable background of good friends & stable homelife prior to that to think that what they were saying was bitchy and unfair, but it still hurt and obviously went in... so when I see him checking those girls out, it's doubly hard to stay objective about it because it feels like he is behaving like those girls... shouldn't I be enough? I know I am enough, and so do you, so why give them that energy? 
• the other point to make here is... addiction sucks. It does. For all concerned. It isn't simple, and building up the trust needed is going to be a long process. I feel like a turtle at the moment... slowly feeling safe enough to peek out of the protective shell, then there is that nick of the addiction knife that hurts me and I don't trust outside the shell again. Because we both love each other so much, have had such a huge percentage of our lives together feeling happy (they far outweigh the addiction times) and so much else in our relationship feels so healthy, it is confusing to us both that trust could be so damaged and take so long to recover from it's fragility after stress caused (and was subsequently compounded by), a porn & compulsive masturbation addiction shattered it. I have never seen masturbation as a bad thing, but then again I was never an addict, and now that I have seen what compulsive masturbation has done to him & us I completely understand the difference between masturbation and compulsive masturbation... the difference between it as just one part of a healthy sexuality and as self-harming self-medication for childhood pain. I am just sooo looking forward to the day when I can walk down the street or sit in a bar without feeling like I'm ducking bullets the whole way. 
• And now I feel fine again because I wrote it all down. God this thing is such a rollercoaster. 

the ultimate goal

The metaphoric imagery in this article by Jennifer Jones is definitely powerful and confronting, but I agree with it. For me this is the ultimate goal of intimate relationships in life.

I kind of feel that the various essential areas of my life: myself, my original family, my chosen family (ie: my partner), career, friends... are all like flowerpots in a row that will flourish or wilt and die depending on how much water and care I give them. It can't be taken for granted that any of them can survive without care. It feels like the only way that is possible is through self-awareness and being pro-active about life. To me, happiness is not the euphoria of joy (the opposite extreme to pain & anguish)... it is the peace and deep feeling of contentment that provides the foundation for all other emotions to glide over the top of without eroding what is underneath.

xx

ups and downs

life is most definitely on a an emotional rollercoaster for me right now. Actually for both of us...

My bf is going through withdrawal right now. He thought he'd been through it, but turns out that was only the beginning. NOW the real emotional rollercoaster is starting. Because he is finally having to fully experience the emotions that come up without numbing them by acting out, life is really challenging for him. The scary thing for me is watching him experience these lows with no safety net. He seems to think that he is so strong that he can just white-knuckle his way through all the bad times with nothing to make him feel better. When he starts feeling terrible he goes further into it, rather than calling someone from the fellowship or using any healthy methods to make him feel better, it's almost like he likes the pain. That he is punishing himself. Apparently this is what he would always do when he was little as well. The problem for me is that I see the man I love vanishing into the distance in these times. His eyes get so distant and I can see these warning lights flashing that if he doesn't catch it then, the downward spiral starts until he loses his sobriety in one way or another. It is such a fine line between not trying to fix it for him by suggesting stuff, and standing back and having it ultimately affect me anyway. 

Yesterday he was triggered by having to throw away a bunch of flowers that he had bought for his mum, that had sat on the top shelf in our living room slowly dying. He was hurt by looking at them, went and threw them out, then continued with his work in that room feeling worse and worse and not doing anything about it until he started fantasising about having sex with another girl, any other girl. He stopped the fantasy almost immediately, so his brain in withdrawal started searching for ways to act out. He couldn't masturbate, he couldn't use porn, he wasn't going to cheat on his girlfriend, so obviously the only other option would be to leave, to destroy it, and go have sex with whoever he likes. This thought was completely freaking him out, it wasn't something he had ever thought about before... it was, his therapist and support have confirmed since, an addictive trance prompted by withdrawal... 

Unfortunately I walked into the room whilst he was in the middle of those thoughts and asked if he was ok. He thought that honesty was better than lying and told me everything he was thinking. It felt like my world was falling apart. The only thing I've been totally sure of in our whole relationship was that he was totally in love with me and that our emotional bond was never in question. Everything he was saying, all the language he was using was like looking and listening to a different person. He said later he felt no emotion at all whilst it was happening... all he wanted was to feed his addiction. After about 20 minutes he came out of it and started employing his CBT techiques to make sense of what he had been feeling. He said that when he played his fantasies through to the end, the person he always ends up with is me. That he doesn't understand why his brain was suddenly making him question the reality of his life and relationship... and he felt like shit for leaving me in a dissolved heap of disbelief and grief in the corner. He called people in his fellowship and talked it all through with them, made sense of what had happened, we canceled the dinner we were going to be going to and he went to a meeting... and I went to my first S-Anon meeting. He came and met me for dinner afterwards and is still feeling completely freaked out by both what his brain on withdrawal tried to do to him and what it did to me. 

I feel like a battered wreck. 

Last night was positive and we made some boundaries for ourselves.

• no more reading full-on literature about addiction or his issues with his parents in bed or just before sleep. We need to give ourselves a break and have our own bonding time. 
• I said that what I need is for him to create an Escape Plan/Check List for withdrawal and cravings. Keep it in his wallet, on his phone, whatever... but the moment he hits a stressful situation, whether or not he thinks it's affecting him... I asked if he could follow the list that he makes for himself ie: call his sponsor, contact the fellowship, remove himself immediately from the situation/location, get outside, go for a walk, listen to some music that relaxes you, call a friend that you feel safe with, do something nice for yourself... 

I know that some of those things sound stupid, but it's not the list. I don't know what his list is, but he is going to make it for himself. It was hard to know whether it was ok for me to ask that, because I don't want to try to fix him any more, or take on the responsibility of his addiction... but yesterday hurt me so much, his behaviour was hurting me so much, that I felt it was ok to ask for what I need from the relationship.

It wasn't until we were walking home last night that he realised that the trigger had been throwing out the flowers. That he had completely blocked out that he even did it until that moment. 

We slept well last night, although I woke up in the middle of the night because he was acting out in his sleep again. It's always really violent self-abuse in the form of masturbation and only for a few seconds in his sleep, and he never remembers it. My mind is so hyper-alert still to all those things that I wake up instantly... although now I'm able to see it as a symptom of withdrawal and a warning sign. He only ever does it when he is unhappy or stressed. What a strange thing the brain is...

Today though, he was still in a bad way. He had his therapy this morning and was feeling so down from going through all the childhood stuff that he came back and just descended into a totally isolated 'I'm going to sit here and make the pain worse, be consumed by it' mode. I feel like I'm walking a tightrope of helping or not helping... eventually I forced him to come outside for a walk because I just couldn't handle another day like yesterday, and once he was outside he felt better, then when we got home he felt worse again... it's all such a massive rollercoaster. I don't feel like he has fully taken on the condition that I asked for about the checklist/Escape Plan. He described it as a kind of adult tantrum where he decides to do nothing and make the pain worse. The problem is that it is really really hard not be hurt by and I can't take responsibility for his situation or recovery by making him do things to feel better. He has to come to that point himself. 

I feel well and truly in the middle of Step One right now. Total powerlessness over the situation. A small part of me wants to go away somewhere whilst he is in this phase and let him work himself out, but I don't have anywhere to go right now. None of my friends know what is going on, and I don't have any money right now to take myself off on holiday to a friend for a week or anything. He is going to another meeting tonight. I guess we'll see. I am trying to work out what the best thing is for me right now. I have put a hold on looking for a new place for at least a few days... I feel like ignoring what happened and moving forward like normal wouldn't be healthy. I have to wait and see. The man I love is hurting right now, but that doesn't mean he might not hurt me. Moving won't fix it, even if it will dramatically reduce the stress around us. I need to just sit back and watch where the wind blows this week I think...

And after all that, the S-Anon meeting was incredibly helpful. I recommend it to anyone affected by someone else's sexual behaviour. The link is on the side of this page. 

We've been moving forward one day at a time. Today I feel it is minute by minute.

sunny days, new journeys and relapses

So... just a bit of an update I guess. Life has been pretty good today. Sunny, warm... we had a lovely day going to chill out at markets and in the park. It was my choice of what to do because I was feeling bad this morning. I realised at about 11am that because we were both so distracted with all things 'recovery' yesterday that I totally spaced out and forgot that it was my best friend's birthday dinner last night. Didn't even cross my mind to connect the dots between it being Monday and it being that Monday. ARGH!!!!

Got a text from her this morning, worried about me and checking that we were both alright. Cannot POSSIBLY describe how guilty I felt. I called her almost in tears apologising... half of the tears because I couldn't tell her the real reason why we were so distracted... although the reason that she assumed of shared house stress and problems with his mum were actually true... crazy that she is so sympathetic about how stressed we must be with those things and she doesn't even know half of what has actually happened to us. Anyway, she wasn't angry at all because it was just so absolutely unlike me to ever miss out on a close friend's celebration (I'm usually the one arriving early with cupcakes and cocktails!), that she knew there must be something serious going on. I feel terrible about it, and slightly brought down to earth about the effect that this is obviously having on my life. I just wish I could have told her... but it's not my story to tell. And also there is such a stigma involved in anything sexual, particularly in Britain, that I'm not sure whether even my close friends would really understand.

Someone from S-Anon replied to my email with meeting times, but I can't go to the one this week because we are going to dinner with friends. Not going to miss out on 2 dinners this week! Kind of feel like connecting with friends and keeping that secure foundation in our life present is just as important.

Anyway, we decided yesterday that we are going to move house sooner rather than later and get into a place of our own. We thought we could stay a few more months here to save some more money, but our flatmate is also a sex addict (although he hasn't hit rock bottom yet) which is pretty difficult to be around when we are in recovery, and although we both love him to bits we really need our own space to move on and concentrate on ourselves. We will be a better friend to him that way as well... at the moment we are both distancing ourselves from him a bit because his behaviour feels quite stressful to be around.

 I'm not saying that a new place will solve loads of problems, but it does feel like the stress of moving will actually be less than the stress of staying here for another 4 months. I was just worried about my bf having any more stress whilst he is recovering, but he is really craving our own space as well, so we have decided to go for it. My only boundary that I have laid down about it is that it needs to be something that we do together. I don't want him to feel like it's just another woman like his mother doing everything for him. I definitely don't want to enter that kind of dynamic in our relationship. I kind of feel that it will help his recovery to feel like he is being proactive about creating the kind of life he wants to have, and it will help me feel like the balance is healthy and what I want from life. So as much as I am restraining myself from spending all day looking up estate agents and getting onto it, I'm going to step back and not get into my usual organisational googling whirl. We are going to make times to look together, to sit down and make a list of what he wants from a place, what I want from a place, what we don't want (!), and formulate a plan together that either of us can then follow but feel that it's something we've done together. It's really hard for me to wait, but it's probably a very good thing that I do. I have a tendency to kind of sort stuff out for people all the time and be the one who organises stuff. I want to stop doing that and get a good balance there. We aren't in a massive rush, so the process of doing this is going to be as important as the end result.

He looks better these last few days. I can see into his eyes again. I know that sounds weird, but when he's feeling a lot of pain or guilt his eyes cloud over, and I can see the warning signs of a relapse days and days before. He relapsed with me the other night. During sex. It's amazing how now that he can actually be intimate again, when he switched over into 'acting out' mode the change was so apparent and so scary. He was really upset that he had put me through it, and also that he felt he couldn't call himself sober any more and had to start over. It sounds weird that he could have acted out with me there, but it's kind of like his bottom line behaviour was finding any way to medicate him and take the pain away. We talked a lot about it and have decided that if it starts feeling that way when we are being intimate we will stop straight away from now on.

God, it's all so complicated. Strange that my overwhelming feeling could be positive when this sounds so weird, but he is getting so self- aware and is so on top of things... this slip could have been much worse. Am I being weird for allowing this to have gone on and not stopped it whilst we were having sex though? I just wanted to be close to him and thought maybe it was just a moment... but it wasn't. Ah, we'll get there...

xx

is the term co-addict really helpful?

I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable all week with the way articles talk about co-addiction and how unhelpful it has felt in aiding recovery. I understand that in order to not have got up and walked away from the relationship the moment I knew there was a problem that I must have certain character traits present, but I really feel that a lot of literature out there seems to confuse co-dependency and being the unwitting partner of a porn addict. Admittedly porn addiction is also clearly different to other levels of sex addiction, but anyway that's stuff for another post...

Anyway, it's been really annoying me... I feel like articles are saying to me that I have just as big a problem, I caused this problem for myself, and betrayal was inevitable for me because of my past. Bollocks! I don't believe this to be the case. My self-esteem has definitely been severely damaged by his addiction, but it wasn't at that level to begin with. I was in a very good place in my life and my head when we got together. He was obviously still an addict at that stage but was in one of the most positive mental places he had ever been in his life when we met. We were both single, had been single for a while, were happy, healthy and very pragmatic and realistic about our relationship. We were careful not to rush even though we were in love... were mindful of protecting the relationship long term. When his porn addiction resurfaced 6 months into the relationship it grew over time, made worse by extreme external stressors until it was spiraling out of control. At its worst points I was definitely in a place of trying to control my environment to minimise the damage and save our relationship, but I feel that it was more a response to trauma and self-protection than a syndrome of co-dependency and that damaging term co-addict.


The site that I have found the most supportive, insightful and helpful in the covering almost every aspect of porn addiction and recovery for both my partner and I is www.pornaddicthubby.com
I read over the articles on there often when I'm feeling down or worried about things and it has really helped. Reading all this stuff that was telling me that I was just as sick as he was just made me feel more depressed, it didn't feel right. I kept wondering if those articles were written by men, or perhaps incredibly bitter women because they seemed to be more damaging than helpful in terms of effecting a positive recovery. Yes, I do obviously need to look at myself and my own past just as much as he does, because apart from anything else then we will be on equal footing psychologically long-term... but right now what I need is some support, not someone telling me it was my fault.

I would say that this is just how I feel about my own situation. If this was 10 years ago I would probably say the term co-addict would have been more applicable when I was stumbling through life in a fog of pain from my dysfunctional teenage years, entering into a few pretty unhealthy relationships. I think a lot of us could probably relate to that! But then I worked on myself, really thought about that stuff, got happy with my own company and learned to really like myself and treat myself with respect. The 'me' of 10 years ago is most definitely not the 'me' of now. And the things I loved about my partner when I got together with him was that he really did treat me with respect, I didn't have to be anyone other than who I was. I never got jealous or felt insecure because he made it very clear that I had nothing to worry about. Once the porn addiction resurfaced, all my old insecurities and traumatic coping mechanisms came with it. Then every girl who came across as 'not that safe' (we women know who they are!) sent me into a silent panic, everything felt unstable and confusing, but I coud tell it also felt confusing to him because he genuinely loved me and was looking towards the future and couldn't understand that his old coping mechanism for stress of turning to porn and masturbation was taking him backwards rather than forwards. Both of us were unknowingly reacting to the trauma that he was inflicting on himself. And now we are both healing from it.



One quote I would like to share from a fantastic article which pretty much sums up my feeling on the subject is this:

 Calling the partner of a sex addict 
a “co-addict” is not unlike blaming a rape victim for her assault or a battered woman for her beating. It is blaming the victim, rather than looking 
for ways to support someone who has experienced the unthinkable.