Our CSAT has given me some homework for next week, and I would like to request your help. We had a good and very productive – but highly emotional – session with her yesterday. In advance of our next session, I am supposed to create a list of needs that I consider to be baseline needs from Handsome in order for me to stay in our marriage.
Here is what I have so far, ranging from the subjective to the more quantifiable/ provable:
truth (Stop lying!)
fidelity/ loyalty
respect
integrity
empathy/ compassion
exclusive love
intimacy (emotional and physical)
healthy selflessness (demonstrate that you can be self-sacrificing – not a martyr – for the benefit of others without the expectation of something in return)
give me your first and your best
sobriety (sexual/ alcohol)
full disclosure
financial and other transparency
complete and abide by an updated circle chart
post-nuptial agreement
annual STD testing
ongoing weekly attendance at individual therapy
ongoing weekly attendance at SA meetings
participation in group therapy if available
ongoing weekly CSAT appointments
stop engaging in other behavior that’s harmful to the marriage (e.g. deflection, minimizing, workaholism)
dedicated time to talk about the marriage/ check-in
dedicated quality time (i) as a couple and (ii) with family
This is where you come in, dear readers. I’ve pondered this list till I’m bleary-eyed. What am I missing? No matter where you are on your journey, and no matter whether your spouse cheated once or is an addict, please let me know in the comments what you think I’m missing – even if it might be aspirational. What would you ask for? Similarly, if there is something on the list you think shouldn’t be there, let me know that as well.
I should note that Handsome is doing a lot of this already. The list of what he isn’t doing is fairly small. There are, however, significant things on that list.
As always, I look forward to and appreciate your thoughts.
Handsome made it home in the very wee hours of Monday morning. I heard him come in the door, promptly fell asleep again, and awoke sometime thereafter as he loudly brushed his teeth. He got into bed, we talked briefly about what Monday’s schedule looked like… and then he wept. I’m not sure why. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. (It seemed like the wrong time.) I just held onto him.
We still haven’t really talked about what he learned from the week or what strides he made or anything like that. He did tell me that he thought the intensive was amazing and if he had known what it was going to be like ahead of time he probably would have chickened out. Handsome is used to cognitive behavioral therapy. He’s not exactly comfortable with that process (intimacy disorder), but he’s grown accustomed to it.
His intensive was mostly experiential therapy. Think role-playing and acting out dialogs and scenes from your past in front of a group. It also involves other hands-on experiences to process and evaluate past emotional experiences. As Psychology Today says, “The client focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under the guidance of a trained experiential therapist, the client can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.” Asking Handsome to do this is like asking a mime to give a dissertation. It’s more than simply “not his thing”… it’s so far beyond his comfort zone that I am reasonably sure that if Handsome had driven himself to the intensive he would have turned right around and driven himself home.
He hadn’t driven himself though, so he stayed and sucked it up and he says he tried to make the most of it even though it made him incredibly uncomfortable at first. There were 50 men and women there – all veterans of an armed service – but they were divided into smaller groups to make it more manageable. Handsome only had 8 people in his sub-group, and he seems to have bonded with most of them as well as with one of his roommates and a bunch of folks he ate with almost every meal. They all exchanged contact information at the end (including a woman who was in his meal group – a boundary violation for Handsome – but I’ll cross that bridge later). I’m incredibly happy that he has some resources to reach out to beyond his small circle of SA contacts.
We’ll debrief more over the coming days, but I’m glad he’s home. I missed him. I did not miss any of the baggage and BS that has accompanied him all too often these days, but I missed my guy.
I did have a truly wonderful week with my kiddos though. We watched movies in our jammies and did homework and we cooked and talked and joked about our days. I showed up with a smile on my face for work each day. I also managed to read two awesome books and I listened to my favorite music on the highest volume in the shower. It was great. I signed up for a glass blowing class (something I’ve always wanted to do) with a few other lawyers from our local bar association and I made two beautiful paperweights. (I toasted my right arm too, but it was well worth it. I just need to wear a thicker shirt next time.) I also met some cool and interesting people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. When I was growing up I always loved arts and crafts and sewing and different hands-on projects, and then I feel like I aged into being an adult and lost my creativity mojo. It was terrific fun to get it back, even just for an evening. And these lovelies can now serve as tangible reminders that when I take time to set my mind free, the results can be beautiful.
When Handsome was caught at the beer distributor in December and blatantly lied about it, I turned to my boundary work. Both drinking alcohol and lying are inner circle activities for Handsome, so the consequences needed to fit the severe violations. Frankly, had it not been the week before Christmas, I would have asked him to move out and find an apartment. I just wasn’t up for dealing with that drama, ruining the holiday for our kids, and all of the crap that would entail which was bound to waterfall forward into the new year.
The best alternate consequences that I could come up with were for Handsome to find and attend another week-long intensive program, and either to attend a meeting or call an SA contact every single day until the intensive started (whether it was one month or three away). Due to his intimacy issues and preference for isolation, the second part of that consequence is much more challenging for Handsome than the first part.
Handsome found a 7-day program in Tennessee with a special emphasis on getting at the root causes of addiction, addressing ones’ family of origin and trauma, and learning to live a centered, healthy life in spite of those circumstances. He leaves on Sunday. The program is for all people with addiction issues, not just sex addicts. I believe this is a good thing for him now. He’s not acting out sexually, but he keeps breaking his sobriety from alcohol and acting out in other ways (anger, pouting, etc.). He needs to address that. The program is co-ed which, frankly, freaks me out a little. Handsome acted out with broken women and he’s going to be off with no contact with his family, sponsor, or SA friends, surrounded by a bunch of them. He’s going to have to police himself and rely on everything he has learned thus far. Mind you, there were huge warnings in the materials about how relationships between attendees are verboten and must be reported immediately. They also mandate that two people cannot be alone and that there must be a minimum of three people in any group. That’s great, but if it wasn’t an ongoing and constant issue I assume they wouldn’t have the warnings in the first place.
Handsome missed a day or two of calls at the holidays, but he has otherwise reached out to his contacts, attended an in person meeting, or participated in a phone meeting every day. I know that’s hard for him, and it’s good to see the follow through even if he’s not exactly enthusiastic about it. He freely admits that he feels better after the calls, so I hope he’ll keep up with them even after his intensive.
And what am I going to do while he’s gone? Absolutely nothing. I want to live like a normal person for a week. No discussions about boundaries or acting out, no SA or betrayal podcasts, no workbooks… nothing. (I am going to keep our regular CSAT appointment, just to get her to myself for an hour.) I hope to enjoy my kids and bask in the absence of crazy. While he is off getting his head straight, I want to get mine straight too. I want, even for a few days, to try to be unburdened by the fallout of my betrayal trauma and my husband’s sex addiction. That’s my only goal for the week.
I decided, just prior to Christmas, that I was done pulling punches with Handsome. I was in crisis mode – and thus we were in crisis mode – and I needed him to understand how bad I thought it actually was (particularly after he lied, again,about breaking his sobriety from alcohol, again). It appears that he received and understood the message. Just in case, I reiterated it with our CSAT and she has drilled into him that he is seriously at risk for blowing the most meaningful relationship he’s ever had. His individual therapist has done the same. I cannot say that it will matter in the long run, but I am confident that he cannot say that he didn’t know/ understand/ realize that I have reached my breaking point.
I say that honestly, but the interesting thing is that I’m reasonably sure that I’m at peace where I’m at. Yes, if he screws up again he’ll be working on his recovery in a bed-sit far from his kids and me, but I know that’s on him and not me. Yes, things could still end up in flames. Again, I feel as though he has been given every freaking opportunity possible to succeed. If he fails, it’s not on me. I have not given up… not at all. I’m just placing the burden of his recovery where it belongs: on Handsome.
One thing that he shared with me recently is that he feels like his recovery is in fits and spurts because he struggles to avoid getting burnt out or bored after a bit (this is the adult ADHD in effect). We realized that, to a degree, things were more productive when we were task oriented. You would think that would be easy for him since he is supposed to be working the 12 steps. He asked for other things to be added to the mix.
One of the tasks that we were supposed to do for our couples retreat last year was a marriage timeline. We did cursory ones at the retreat and, to put it mildly, they were quite different. Handsome’s was more or less a straight line along the “highly satisfied” axis, while mine started to look like a roller coaster starting in about 2012 when his acting out started (unbeknownst to me). I think we were each stunned to see the other’s graph. I couldn’t figure out how/ why he would cheat – relapse into his sex addiction, really – if he was so “highly satisfied” and he seemingly had no idea that I was truly unhappy so often during the time he was acting out. We clearly needed a more careful discussion to really share what was going on with each of us. We finally had that chance. That’s my actual timeline at the top of this post. I’d love to tell you that the discussion went well. I can’t. It didn’t (but it turns out okay in the end).
Prior to 2012, the only big dip in my satisfaction with our marriage came when I found out that I was pregnant with my son. (It really wasn’t a slide to that point as the timeline seems to indicate… that’s just a function of the milestones mapped out. It was a sudden drop.) It wasn’t that I didn’t want another child… it was simply that I had just figured how to balance one small child with a full-time job and the rest of life and I found myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to figure out how to keep it all together with the addition of a second child. Handsome seemed to think it was no big deal, and I felt like he ditched me to figure it out on my own. It was not until our son acquired a deadly bacterial infection two days after he was born that Handsome and I immediately re-connected as a team and started to get ourselves back on solid ground. We stayed there until The Flame made her first appearance three years later in mid-2012 (that’s the gigantic 2nd dip you see).
Since then, the roller coaster of our marriage – to me at least – is evident from my chart. Some things are obvious: I am not happy or satisfied in my marriage if I am being cheated on (like his initial emotional affair with The Flame) and lied to. Others are less obvious: times when I was unhappy because he was so detached from me, our kids, and the marriage in general because (I know now, but didn’t then) he was really far down the rabbit hole of his addiction.
I asked Handsome to re-do his timeline thinking that perhaps he was just delusional at the couples retreat and, indeed, his chart looks very different now. He insists he was almost always “somewhere between happy and very happy” in the marriage but his new chart is like a roller coaster during his acting out too.
Data analytics aren’t my thing, but after Handsome started acting out in 2012, the majority of his “happy” periods correspond with vacations and family events. It’s when we were home (and he was acting out daily) that he’s reporting that he was unhappy in the marriage. Coincidence? I think not. He recalls that at certain points we were bickering a lot and he was upset about any number of things but, as our CSAT pointed out, he has only just recently had the epiphany that some of my behavior was driven in large part by his crappy addiction-driven behavior. To use her analogy, he can’t complain about the taste of the water when he’s the one peeing in the well.
I’d love to be able to say that we completed this exercise and hugged it out, but that didn’t happen. I asked why he had indicated that he was “very unhappy” in our marriage when his mother died. Simply stated, he recalled being alone at her funeral. Nope. I handed off our 2 tiny kids (a herculean endeavor that’s a story in itself) to an army of sitters/ nannies… and got on a plane and flew to him and was there for 3 days, all the services, and the 11 hour car ride home. Over time, he just wrote me out of the experience in his mind. Sadly, I’m sure that historical re-write was one of his mental justifications for his acting out. I’m sure he whined about it to his APs. I can picture it… “she’s so mean she didn’t even bother to come to my mom’s funeral… .” In that moment, I got slapped in the face with exactly how deep his illness goes. I am not perfect, but when I KNOW I stepped up and was every bit the wife and partner I was supposed to be? Knowing that he had erased me from the entirety of the experience of the death of his mom? It made me feel every bit as “irrelevant” as he told his APs I was.
So, where’s the happy ending? We talked through this process with the CSAT yesterday. She walked him slowly through a number of things where Handsome’s reality and actual reality differ. She told him that moving forward in life he is going to have to question every negative “season” from that period of time and decide whether the memory is real or not. He’ll have to assess what role, if any, his addiction played in his perceived experience (was he peeing in the well or not?). Since our 2nd DDay Handsome has always acknowledged that he’s an addict, but I’m not sure that he even recognized the extent of his illness and how it truly corrupted his brain. This session was probably the first time that I saw that light bulb go off for him. As pissed as I am that he erased me from such a life altering event, I’m sympathetic to the fact that it surely couldn’t have been pleasant for him to think he was abandoned by me when his mom died. It breaks my heart that his almost sole memory of those days is of standing in the cemetery at her graveside with no one else around. There’s a lot his therapist could unravel in that one memory. (Did he view his mom’s death as abandonment and switch us somehow? Was this really the driver behind his relapse?)
We did end up in each other’s arms at the end of the session, because he realized that yes, I was there for him then, just as I’ve always been there for him. He realized that while his addiction may have been telling him that I didn’t love him, surely I did and still do because otherwise I’d have left a year ago, if not earlier. He realized that the negative narrative he told himself to justify his addictive behavior simply wasn’t real. Now, we can move forward and focus on reality.
A Happy New Year to you all! I offer a big, hearty “thank you” to everyone who read and commented on my Week of Brutal Honesty posts before the holidays. It was very cathartic to me to write those posts and to participate in the comments, and I hope it was for others as well.
So here we are, rolling into 2019. Handsome’s primary focus at the moment is eliminating his compulsive lying. To a “normal” brain, it sounds fairly ridiculous, but addicts are relentless liars. Handsome’s compulsive lying likely started in his childhood and escalated in his high school years when he first started living a kind of secret life. (His parents would think he was at school all day when he would actually leave and go hang out at the town library for hours on end. He was dying to learn, but hated school for a variety of reasons.) It certainly set the stage for the decades of addiction-driven secrets and lies that followed.
His assignment is essentially to do two things: (i) not lie, and (ii) journal about every time he thinks about lying, whether big or small, and explore his motivations behind why he was going to or did lie. If he lies he is supposed to fess up and correct the lie immediately. (I am fully aware of the irony in relying on an expert liar to admit to his lies, but it is what it is.)
I was working on some recovery materials this past weekend and one of the topics involved trickle truth and the damage and trauma it causes. As is often the case, this got me thinking very specifically about Handsome’s disclosures. In short, it occurs to me that the use of trickle truth – staggering his disclosures and lying by repeatedly stating that he had told me “everything” – was likely highly effective for him.
To be clear, I am not saying that there were no negative consequences of the trickle truth. I am instead suggesting that – on balance – the negative consequences of the trickle truth for him were likely less severe than the consequences of telling me everything honestly from the beginning. Handsome’s initial disclosure was that he had one physical affair. In those initial, highly charged days after disclosure, I was making a decision to stay or to leave the relationship based on, I thought, his extra-marital involvement with one person. If I had any inkling that there were at least five other long-term emotional and physical affair partners, plus all the pros and online randos, my initial analysis would have been very different. I tend to think that I would have simply thrown him out and filed for divorce.
It’s almost as if to stay in the marriage I had to ease into the concept of being the wife of a sex addict just as he had to ease into the disclosure of his acting out and acknowledgement of his addiction.
With that said, I do believe that we reached a point – probably about 2 months after our 2nd DDay (when his addiction truly came to light) – after which additional disclosures became nothing but destructive. After that point we had both put considerable time, effort, and money into healing separately and together… we were staying together if we both did the work… so further trickle truth just undermined the new foundation we were trying to build.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that trickle truth is a good thing. There are power dynamics and certainly selfishness and self-preservation at play when one is asked to tell the whole truth and they do not do so. It is also unquestionable in my mind that trickle truth exacerbates betrayal trauma. Instead, I think I’ve just come to the conclusion that trickle truth from a cheater is to be expected. It often works, to a degree, for them.
Perhaps I handled it all wrong with Handsome. Perhaps the mantra shouldn’t have been “tell me the truth or I’m throwing you out” but rather “move out until you can prove to my satisfaction that you have told me the truth.” Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, that would have been the smarter move.
