Dissecting a Marriage to Foster Healing

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.