Month: March 2020

Part 3: They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, “No, no, no”

(Missed Part 1 of this series? You can find it here. Part 2 is here.) Handsome’s last week at ST sounds like it was equal parts beneficial and stressful. He remained fully booked throughout the week and had a few sessions he was particularly moved by, including one with a trauma specialist where he reported that things finally just “clicked.” That seemed to set the stage for a lot of therapeutic progress.

At the same time, he was stressed to see many of his new friends depart from both his lodge and his process group and new folks arrive. The shifts in various group dynamics were disconcerting to him. He got a new room mate. His closest friend there left for home. Handsome also had to deal with the reality of what was awaiting him at home. Not only had he scorched a lot of earth here before he left, but I had been crystal clear that he was not coming back into our house. I insisted that he go to an AirBnB or a hotel and that he transition back into both work and home. His therapists at both ST and at home supported this. Throughout his stay Handsome continually tried to manipulate or negotiate his way back home, but I held firm. I wasn’t barring him from seeing our kids or anything like that, and he was welcome at the house whenever he wanted to be there, but he needed to be sleeping elsewhere.

I was reasonably confident that transitioning back to work wouldn’t be an issue for Handsome. He loves his job and he healed pretty completely from his surgeries and injury. Transitioning home, however, was going to be tougher. I wanted to see him have consistently positive interactions with me and with our kids. I wanted to see him put the skills that he allegedly learned at ST to work.  This is where the wheels fell off the bus pretty much from the moment I picked him up at the airport.

Handsome requested steak for dinner the night he returned. I didn’t want to buy it too far ahead and the day or two right before he came home was full of sports practices, doctors appointments, and my job, so I stopped at the grocery store on our way home from the airport. He was really, incredibly put out by that. Absurdly so. He didn’t yell or complain. He just steamed about it. There was no “I’m so happy to see my wife after 5 weeks away” or “I’m glad they’re willing to eat with me” or anything like that. He was ticked that I hadn’t shopped in advance of his arrival. To be clear, he was coming home from rehab, not from conquering ISIS or curing cancer.

The guy who came home is better, in some significant ways, than the guy who left 5 weeks earlier, but worse in others. He does seem to have learned how to manage his anger. That’s huge. He is more insightful into his moods and he can admit when he is disregulated. Again, for him, those are major improvements. BUT…(and this is a big one)… the guy who came home had (at least initially) seemingly lost a ton of empathy for me. He re-framed himself from sex addict to trauma survivor. He decided that 12-step was just too negative and had lost some respect for the program. He seemed to have lost some respect for his therapist and our CSAT.  And those were the obvious changes. There was one other major change that didn’t become apparent right away.

Those initial obvious changes were incredibly anxiety inducing and stressful for me. It’s hard to be supportive when you’re actively being diminished or discounted. Still, as he got a few sessions with Doc 2 under his belt and a few sessions with our CSAT where she got fierce with him, he started to soften. The chip seemed to fall off his shoulder as days passed. He recognized that all of the individual work that he did at ST was terrific for him, but there was little emphasis on working those concepts into a relationship. It wasn’t really ST’s job to teach him how to fix the damage he caused to his family before he left, but the messaging he received (or at least the messaging as he received it) led him to believe he should ignore it and start fresh. Great for him. Less so for everyone else.

Flipping the switch to focus beyond himself was incredibly hard for Handsome. Of course it was, right?  In rehab he hadn’t betrayed anyone. He hadn’t instilled anxiety in anyone. Everyone focused on him and supported him. Within a week of his arrival home, Handsome had a night where he had an appointment with Doc 2 and then he planned to go to an SA meeting. Normally, he’ll call me to chit chat while he’s driving between two places like that. My phone didn’t ring. I can’t explain why, but I just had a really, really bad feeling. For the first time in almost a year I tracked his phone and saw that he was at a bar. Shortly later, he moved on to a second bar.  I didn’t call him. I didn’t text him. I wanted to see if he would reach out to me. He didn’t.

The following morning he stopped by the house and I asked him how the SA meeting was. He stood in our kitchen, looked me in the eye, and told me it was great. I asked him if any of his buddies were there and he told me it wasn’t all that crowded. I thought my heart might literally break open in my chest. I asked him how they managed to find the meeting since it had moved to Bar ____. He had no response. Then he didn’t speak to me for the better part of 4 days. He flat out refused to discuss it.

As this was transpiring, so was something else. Handsome was a part of a group chat of his ST friends. Apparently, whatever addiction issues these folks had transferred over to texting because his phone was pinging constantly whenever I saw him. Handsome is not supposed to text any woman other than me except for work or child care. He knows this. Yet he started texting with a woman from his ST process group and then presented it to me as “she is so helpful to me, you don’t mind, right?” Uh, yeah. I do. And I wasn’t really asked. I was told when it was already going on. That’s a point I made to our therapist. I’m not an unreasonable ass. This woman is both older and a lesbian in a very long term relationship. She was his bestie at ST. If she can be of help to him, and if he isn’t communicating with her to the exclusion of me, I might be open to it. But he never gave me the courtesy of asking. He just broke the boundary and figured I’d get over it.

A week later in therapy I pointed out that he’d still never bothered to have a discussion with me about it. I felt like all of Handsome’s energy was flowing out of our family and into this clique of ST folks. (Not to this one older woman, but rather to the group chat 15+ ST folks had going.) Handsome strenuously denied this, but he couldn’t deny the hundreds of text messages exchanged with them or the fact that he wasn’t in touch with his sponsor, any SA buddies, or even his best friend. In addition, he wasn’t communicating with me about anything other than logistical parent stuff. His whole world revolved around this group. He wasn’t showing any interest in relational healing. Well, that’s not quite accurate. He expressed feeling very sad and lonely and unloved. He said he wanted a good and loving relationship. I didn’t even have to respond to that because the CSAT jumped in and said, “But you haven’t done anything in furtherance of that. You caused a ton of damage but you’ve done nothing to repair it. You have to do more than just show up here and sit on my couch. Do you want this marriage or do you want a divorce? Make up your mind.”  It was a heartbreaking end to the session, but very necessary. He insisted that he wants the marriage, but the next week would call that into question.

 

Part 2: They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, “No, no, no”

(Missed Part 1 of this series?  You can find it here.) I was told Handsome would be able to call to say he arrived safely at Sierra Tucson, but that was not the case. His phone, along with all of his luggage, was taken immediately upon meeting the ST representative at the airport. He wouldn’t see any of his belongings again till very late the following day, and he wouldn’t see his cell phone again for over a week.

Handsome was in lock-down for the better part of two days after his arrival. It’s mandatory and involved blood testing and urine samples and the like, as well as getting a grip on the medications he came in with and making an initial determination about what might be working and what might need adjustment.  For those with substance addictions I’m sure this serves as a detox period, but for Handsome it was fairly torturous. No tv, no internet, no games, no books, and yet exposure to people coming off their drug of choice and being extremely dis-regulated emotionally. I think he looked at it as something to be endured, and so he did.

This was where Handsome was first exposed to some of the… quirky… rules at ST. For example, Handsome took bandanas to wear on his head during yoga and hikes. They took those from him (presumably to prevent self- harm) yet he was allowed to keep his shoelaces and he actually had extra bed sheets in his room. Another example… if you brought your own dental floss from home a nurse kept it and would dole it out back to you in roughly 2  foot increments, but they sold dental floss in regular packs in the on-site store at ST. Go figure.

After the lock down, Handsome was moved to his lodge. He describes it as a timbered Motel 6. (His accommodations and food service at OnSite in Tennessee last year were considerably more upscale by comparison.) ST had three lodges: all women, all men, and co-ed. As I wrote in a previous post, however, they moved the women who caused too much trouble in the women’s or co-ed lodges into the men’s lodge. Weeks later, I still find that disturbing and baffling. As you might expect, my sex addict spouse had some issues with that.

Once settled in his lodge, Handsome seemed to fall pretty easily into the routine of the facility. The days were incredibly long (6:30 AM to roughly 9 PM with minimal down-time), but Handsome dove in without much complaint. To the extent he complained at all it was mostly about the lack of Coke or Pepsi when coffee and tea was permitted and abundant.

When I say that the days had little down time I want to be clear that Handsome’s day was scheduled thoroughly through that time. He was expected to attend everything he was scheduled for. Failure to appear for a session meant that a team of security folks went looking for you (tracking patients by Fit-Bit-like devices). That said, the common work-around at ST was for folks to go to a session, stay 5-10 minutes, long enough to ensure that they were logged in, and then leave and blow off the remainder of the session. Handsome reports that was pretty typical for about a quarter of the patients there. Usually, but not always, the younger patients who were there on mom and dad’s dime.

From a partner’s point of view, my perception is that the treatment at ST was incredibly holistic. In addition to what you might expect at a rehab, they arranged physical rehab sessions for both an injury he had operated on a few months ago and to address the more recent injury he suffered just after Christmas. They paid close attention to a heart issue he has and would have taken him to be treated by a nearby cardiologist if he hadn’t already been under the care of a cardiologist at home. When he developed a sudden and severe tooth ache, they got him to a local dentist.

Moreover, while the offering of a veterans and first responder’s program was of little consequence to me (Handsome’s trauma is rooted in his family of origin, not his job, although that certainly added to the complex nature of his PTSD), being a participant in the program meant that Handsome could avail himself of treatments that were add-ons or “extras” for everyone else. He could do acupuncture, EMDR, somatic experiencing, equine therapy, and quite a few other things at no additional cost. While he did not find benefit in all of those things, he was at least encouraged to try them to see what might click for him. Some really clicked, and others had no impact at all.

Initially, Handsome was calling home every day, but that was just mentally exhausting for me. I wrote a bit about that here. He frequently wrote to our kids, but not to me. I got one letter the first week and after that, nothing. When we did speak by phone, it was often a disaster. The first two and a half weeks, he sounded like a zombie. I still don’t know if his meds were altered or what the issue was, but he sounded very flat and, frankly, un-empathetic and distant. I cut the calls down to once a week. In week 3, things shifted and he just started sounding like an arrogant douche.

During the calls he never asked me questions about my health or well-being or what was going on at home. He talked a lot about himself and about the “amazing” and “tremendous” people in his group. That was when I learned that his process group was Handsome and one other guy and 6 women. I started to pick up on comments about how I “just wouldn’t understand” something or how his trauma and mine are “a lot alike.” During a session with our CSAT that week, I asked her to call Handsome’s therapist at ST and find out what the heck was going on. I had previously spoken to Handsome’s assigned therapist at ST. I liked her. I thought she was quite insightful about Handsome’s issues, so when it was relayed back to me that she hadn’t considered the possible correlation between the validation Handsome was getting out of his mostly female therapy group and his sex addiction, I was floored.  The more he got comfortable and buddy-buddy with his group, the worse our calls went.

This phenomenon wasn’t unique to me. I don’t complain to our kids about Handsome and I try my hardest for them to see us as a united front. To the extent they have opinions about their dad, those opinions are based on their own experiences with him. Starting in week 2, my 13 year old, who I would generally describe as daddy’s girl, respectfully declined to get on the phone with her dad. She asked me if she had to talk to him. I asked her to please try to talk to him 2x a week and she was reluctant to do even that. She said he was completely uninterested in her, didn’t ask her anything about her, and that the sound of his voice made her sad. I didn’t tell her, but that was my experience on the calls too. Most of them ended with me in tears. It was brutal.

I had an incredible bond with my dad. I think Handsome believes he has a similar relationship with our daughter, but he overestimated it. He glosses over the yelling and the tension in the house while he was fully engaged in his addiction. Both kids noticed how peaceful and calm it was when he was gone. When our daughter basically cut off her calls with Handsome it was a bit of a wake-up he needed. My guess is that somewhere in his mind he believed that even if our marriage ended his kids would never find fault with him. He saw how untrue that assumption was. Our daughter was holding him accountable in her own way and while he was hurt by it, on some level he recognized that he caused it. At the tail end of week 3, there was a huge and noticeable shift.

Handsome started to sound more positive and upbeat. He started making plans for home. He started making a transition plan that would hopefully help him integrate some of his practices from ST into life at home. I heard reports back that he was making significant therapeutic progress and that he was exercising good boundaries. He won an award for his participation in sessions and overall dedication to his recovery at the end of the 4th week.

In spite of the sudden burst of progress, it wasn’t lost on anyone that the three weeks prior were rough. He had to work through a lot of anger and resentment to start actually internalizing the messaging he was receiving. For that reason, and because he had the time off from work and insurance to cover the costs, ST had him stay for an additional week. From a partner perspective, that’s when things started to get a bit dodgy again. …

What do you mean by “a**hole”? – an interlude

After my last post about my husband’s journey to rehab, a newer reader asked me what exactly I meant when I said that my husband was being an a**hole pre-rehab. It’s a good and fair question, because the answer may not be what you might imagine.

Handsome does a lot of things right. He diligently attends marriage counseling. He diligently attends individual therapy twice a week. He goes to 12-step meetings at least once a week. He’s not the guy who denies he’s a sex addict or one who tries to gaslight others about his addiction despite being caught red handed.

He has sought out therapeutic intensives for him and for us as a couple and by all accounts he was cooperative and participated fully and appeared motivated to put what he learned to good use.

He is an involved and caring father. He has tried, with varying degrees of effort and success, to be empathetic towards me and to support me.

All of that is wonderful. And yet this is also a guy who could lose his mind over me taking too long to pick out ice cream at the grocery store. Or shut down and accuse me of having control issues if I ask him a reasonably simple question about our family scheduling. Or reduce both of our kids to tears for no good reason within an hour of them getting off the school bus. On the surface he presents as reasonably fine, but right beneath the surface is a maelstrom. That’s the anger aspect of his a**holery.

There is also a liar, liar aspect. Like many addicts, Handsome is an accomplished liar. As a child, he learned to lie to prevent harm and neglect from his two functionally alcoholic parents, and he honed those skills through his lifetime of addiction. He has been working on regaining his integrity, but there are still times where he lies to me for no apparent reason (in addition to the times he still lies purely for self-preservation purposes). For example, if asked, he might tell me that he talked to his best friend and he might go so far as to tell me something they talked about. Then I’d get a call from that same friend a day or so later asking how Handsome was doing since they hadn’t spoken in weeks. Why the lie? I don’t really care if he spoke to his friend, I was just making conversation. Knowing that he lied, however, is a big deal to me when he’s supposed to be reestablishing his integrity.

Last, there is a distorted reality aspect to his a**holery. For me, this is actually the hardest to deal with because I am so often cast as the enemy in his distortions. Frustratingly, when he’s living inside the distortion, I can’t talk him out of it. Usually our CSAT can, but I cannot. I’m viewed as an untrustworthy enemy in those moments. I offer two examples:

1. Handsome and I both have slightly warped senses of humor. We often laugh about some dark stuff. After he returned home from the hospital following his emergency surgery he was in dire need of a shower. Knowing that soap was likely to sting in his fresh wounds I jokingly said “Hey, watch out for the soap!” (As in “wow, I feel for you because that’s really going to suck…”) He chuckled along with me, as usual, and that was that, I thought. It wasn’t though. He repeated the interaction throughout that day and the next and in each telling my few joking words were painted as increasingly sinister and mean. I literally watched this happen before my eyes. By the time several days passed and we showed up for our weekly CSAT appointment, he told her the story as if I had actually wished him harm. He wasn’t lying or trying to be manipulative in that moment. He had fully convinced himself that I wanted him to be in pain. (How awful that must be to believe your spouse wished you harm?? To talk yourself into a scenario where you can’t tell what’s real?)

And another example…

2. Handsome and I had an argument about something – I don’t recall exactly what – but the argument was heated. It was a good ole’ fashioned argument, but there was no screaming or swearing or name calling. None. And yet he convinced himself that I called him a f**k up. I have never called him that. Ever. (And, let’s be honest, there have been times these last two years where that wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable.) It has always seemed to me like one of those things that if I said it I would never be able to take it back or apologize enough or make it better, so I have never said those words to him. In his mind, however, he took my displeasure, frustration, and anger that I did express during our discussion and boiled it down to “She called me a f**k up.” Then, he used that as an excuse to shut down all communication for 3 days. He rationalized his withdrawal by inventing an incident that really didn’t occur. It’s kind of like how he used my failure to attend his mom’s funeral as some of the justification for his acting out. (“She doesn’t love me, because if she did she would be here, so she abandoned me.”) Except, I WAS AT THE FUNERAL.

When I write these things down, I know my husband sounds bonkers. I completely understand how absurd these things must be to those who haven’t lived it. And yet I’ve now had over a half dozen different, unrelated therapists tell me that these actions are all indicia of various mood disorders which are all in turn tied to Handsome’s childhood trauma. Does he get to rage, lie and distort just because he had crappy parents? No, he doesn’t. What he gets is to go off to rehab for several weeks to: (1) learn the emotional regulation skills he never learned as a kid, (2) get him on the right medications and on the right dosages that can help him, and (3) dig deep into his family of origin traumas to try to address them.

Part 1: They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, “No, no, no”

Several weeks ago Handsome headed off to rehab. Not, as you might imagine, for sex addiction. He was sober and not struggling with his sobriety. He was, however, struggling with being an a**hole. Yes, there’s a rehab for that.

When I say that Handsome was not struggling with sobriety, what I mean is that he wasn’t feeling compelled to masturbate, view porn, pic collect, go to massage parlors, or any of the other things he did to act out. He is repulsed by his old, addictive behavior. So what’s the problem? He was struggling mightily with recovery. He was sober, but still not in a good place mentally. On some level, his acting out helped him regulate his emotions.** If you’re used to having an orgasm or two to release your stress when you have a crappy day, what do you do when that’s not readily available? Without the right tools (or willingness to use the tools you have) you bottle that stress up and become miserable. Then you take that misery out on everyone around you.

It’s not that every day with Handsome was awful. Far from it. Good days were often great days. That said, there were enough cruddy days that something had to change. Pre-DDay, Handsome was prone to angry outbursts (never physical, just ranting about whatever he was upset about) and moody. Very moody. In the aftermath of DDay, his temperament improved tremendously, probably because he was terrified and trying to be on his best behavior. You can only fake it for so long though and the moodiness and anger seemed to come back in full force from last May forward.

I admit to tolerating a lot of that before DDay because I foolishly thought it was all some kind of a mid-life crisis passing phase, but I just can’t now. Why? Two reasons: (1) I see clearly the toll his moods have taken on our kids, and (2) I can’t walk on eggshells in my own home. Our kids and I deserve better than that from him. When I met with Doc 2 prior to Thanksgiving, he thought that with two sessions a week he might be able to get Handsome to make some progress with emotional regulation. I was skeptical, but willing to give it a shot. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. We went on a two week vacation over Thanksgiving and he was often a hostile jerk. That was a last straw for me. I told Handsome that either he could go to rehab or one of us needed to move out. When he dragged his feet, I picked a firm date and told him that either he would be getting on a plane that day or I would be packing my car and leaving. I did not run that by our CSAT or waffle about it. I know he was stunned. I know he resented having a line drawn in the sand. I have a feeling he felt betrayed. (Welcome to my world…)

He opted for rehab. There are a million to choose from, but after a good bit of research on our own we opted for Sierra Tucson in Arizona. We picked ST for three primary reasons:
– fully covered by our insurance;
– they have a mood disorder treatment protocol; and
– they have a program for vets and first responders.

Of those 3 factors, the first two were by far the most important to me. Would I have found a way to cough up the money for him to go somewhere? Probably, but I also strongly feel as though we’ve spent a fortune on him already and that comes at the direct expense of everyone else in the family. Not having to pay out of pocket was a huge consideration. (To quantify this, the fees for Handsome’s treatment at ST exceeded $90,000. Of that, we paid $173 for a medical visit he needed off site. The rest was fully covered.) Having him get very specialized care at a highly regarded facility was also incredibly important. There was no point in sending him for treatment if they weren’t equipped to address his particular issues.

In the days right before Handsome departed, he vacillated between being incredibly kind or shockingly mean. When I dropped him at the airport I was truly glad to see him go (and also sad it had come to this). He didn’t say goodbye. He gave me a half-hearted hug and walked into the terminal. I would not have been surprised to find that he changed his ticket and just bailed. He didn’t. He got on the first of his two flights. He called me from his connecting airport in tears. I think it finally hit him that the coming weeks were a Hail Mary to try to save his family. That was, however, the last heartwarming conversation we were to have for many weeks. Things would get much rougher before they got better.

** My dear friend Crazy Kat pegged this too. I swear she is a savant. She would write about how her husband’s addition seemed to help him stay regulated and – for a long time – I just couldn’t relate because my husband seemed so much “better” in his sobriety. It took nearly 18 months, but starting last summer I got to see how hard it truly is for my husband to regulate his emotions and stay on keel without relying on his addictions. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with anything that causes him discomfort or unease. He dealt with those emotions before by tamping them down with alcohol or sex. Absent those things, more recently he often turned to anger and frustration. None of those coping mechanisms are acceptable though, so there was a lot of friction in our home.