Month: March 2021

A Long Time Coming: Disclosure

Some sunshine, at last

Long-time readers know that there have been a few false starts on the way to my husband doing a full therapeutic disclosure. The closest we came was last May or June when it was essentially fully drafted but his buddy from rehab convinced him it was a bad idea.

Prior to that I mostly had 2+ years of staggered disclosures. My husband did A LOT of things during his acting out. I knew just about everything, but it was still more of a Rubik’s cube than a simple puzzle. I didn’t have a good sense as to how various pieces fit together. It was like having almost all of the pages of a book, but none of the pages are numbered, or in order, and you don’t know what you’re missing.

I know that some people can move forward and heal absent a full disclosure. I couldn’t. At some point it became less about what my husband was going to say and more about the fact that he refused to say it. The pain was less centered around what he did, and acutely focused on the fact that he knew it would help me (and us) heal and yet he couldn’t bring himself to show up for me the way that I needed. It felt disrespectful, dismissive, and selfish. When he finally (FINALLY!) moved forward with the disclosure in January it was literally like a ton of weight was lifted off my chest.

The disclosure took place three years and one month after DDay #1.

Yes, it hurt to hear specifics of how my life was undermined and blown apart without my knowledge, but it was also freeing. The pages of the book that told the story of our marriage were finally being put in order. A few of the pages I was missing were added. Questions that arose were addressed. It was hard to hear, and yet so necessary for me.

I know some disclosures take an hour or two. We were at our CSAT’s office for over 5 hours. He had a lot to read through. I had a lot of questions. There was no Earth shattering new information for the most part, except for one thing.

Our CSAT believed that it would be helpful to me for Handsome to walk through the history of how his addiction developed and how it appeared in his prior relationships. (In other words, she wanted him to clearly show that his addiction had nothing to do with me because it had been going on in various forms throughout his life.) During that part of the disclosure I learned that Handsome blew up his first marriage with the Flame. I didn’t know that. I thought she came into the picture after that marriage ended.

As mortifyingly embarrassing as it is to point out, she was a 17 year old high school student at the time. Handsome was 27. 😳 WTF?!?!? Knowing that my husband was once “that guy”… the awkward and creepily out of place adult date at a prom … was always cringe inducing and wildly uncomfortable for me. Finding out that relationship started as an affair?? There are no words. I was flabbergasted.

Our CSAT pointed out that at that time – thirty years ago, and closer in proximity to his trauma-filled childhood – Handsome probably only had the emotional maturity of a teen. True… very true until recently… but still… yuck.

As distressing as it was, it was still “good information” as they say. I didn’t really see the cycles in Handsome’s acting out or understand how early in his life he started his destructive behavior. I also had no idea of the extent of the Flame’s home wrecking resume or that she was Handsome’s go-to side ho for decades. It explains a lot.

Our disclosure was a long, long time coming, but as I walked out of the CSAT’s office that evening I felt … free. I had just heard hours of really terrible stuff, things no one should ever have to hear from their spouse, and yet my relief was palpable. I was really looking forward to the future for the first time in a long time.

Rock Bottom…?

After Handsome’s break from Doc#2, I found myself back at our Summer home for a few weeks in late September and early October. Even though I had the kids and work and other usual busy things, it was peaceful. Blissful, in fact. Zero drama. Handsome, who was back at home, would call daily and he sounded… fine.

I wanted him to be motivated to action by the break from Doc#2. I wanted him to have a game plan to move forward. I was looking for some self awareness that maybe he wasn’t doing as well as he thought. What I heard from him was not those things. I heard some indifference. I also heard some relief that he had one less appointment each week. That made me angry.

His game plan, if you could call it that, was to simply continue working with his somatic experiencing (SE) therapist and attend marriage counseling with me. The issue with that is that the SE therapy was never intended to be his sole individual therapy. It was intended to help him work on his family of origin trauma. Nothing more. The therapist has no background in sex addiction. She doesn’t hold herself out as specializing in mood or personality disorders. The areas where Handsome needs the most work would simply go untouched.

That didn’t work for me and I knew it wouldn’t bode well for our kids, so I extended my stay in Massachusetts through Thanksgiving. The kids were doing school online, and my office was fully virtual, so I didn’t need to be home. Handsome did join us for the holiday, but he still had no intent to do anything any differently than he had been doing. Nonetheless, I think he realized on some level that I could stay there forever if I wanted to. I didn’t have to come home.

Our CSAT is very careful to maintain neutrality with us, so when she called me out of the blue one day after Thanksgiving I was surprised. In a nutshell, she told me that Handsome was never going to budge or make any changes if the status quo didn’t get shaken up. She had reached the point where she didn’t feel like she could be helpful to us if Handsome couldn’t find his way to doing the disclosure, securing more suitable treatment, and generally committing to actually work on the marriage recovery (as opposed to just participating with her for an hour each week). I read between the lines and said “If you need to fire us too, I understand, but I’d ask you to take us back if it prompts him to get his head out of his ass.” She agreed.

And so, a couple of weeks later, after trying and failing to cajole some movement out of Handsome, she fired us too. I think it was a week before Christmas. I knew it was coming but it was still unsettling. It felt like a lifeline was cut.

Handsome was stunned. I think he sincerely believed he could just keep treading water forever. He knew it meant that I would leave with the kids again, but permanently this time. After a few days of some deflection, he seemed to have an epiphany. He came home from work and found me and told me that he did not want to loose his family and that he would do the disclosure and everything expected of him. And then he actually started to do the work.

Similar cycles have happened before, but this felt different. There was humility in his voice and earnestness in his actions. To put it bluntly, he finally realized that he was the problem and he decided to do something about it.

How was that different from any other time he seemed to recommit? In retrospect, he never fully bought in to seeing himself as the source of the problem. (The issue wasn’t with his refusal to do the hard work. The therapists and I were just unreasonable.) Getting canned by two therapists he relied on shifted that perspective. He was finally able to take a real look at himself and say “Okay, it’s not everyone else. It’s me. I’m the problem.”

The CSAT firing us turned out to be the best Christmas gift we could have been given. It made it clear that our marriage was really at rock bottom. Not because we were fighting. We weren’t. Not because we didn’t love one another. We did and we do. Our marriage was in trouble because Handsome decided not to meet our needs to heal. He wasn’t prevented from meeting them or unable to meet them. He had simply chosen not to put the effort in that was needed. His cherry-picking of being willing to do some things and not others had failed. Once he realized that and actually owned it, he could choose to course-correct and fix it. And he did.

Do No Harm

I’ve written about this relatively new path of stability Handsome and I are on. It’s great, but I feel like I – we, really- walked through fire to get here. It’s important to me that other partners who may be newer to this journey know that progress, if it comes at all, does so in a dance that often seems like two steps forward for every three steps back. Healing isn’t linear. Not individually, and not as a couple. In this post and the next few I’ll address some of the steps backwards, and then forwards, we took to get here.

Handsome’s therapist, Doc #2, basically fired him as a patient in mid- September. It completely blindsided Handsome. And me. (It apparently wasn’t a complete firing. His parting words were “Call me when you have something to talk about.”)

You run through a checklist in your mind about whether insurance was an issue (nope, great coverage), or cancellations (also no, only one in over 50+ visits a year), or anything else that might have prompted the move. Handsome was left wondering why someone else in his life decided he wasn’t worth the time or effort. He felt abandoned. He was hurt.

I’ve had months to ponder that decision and I have to say that I still don’t fully understand it. Perhaps I never will until I get to speak to the Doc again at some point. Our CSAT and Doc#2 are professionally acquainted and have multiple clients in common. I’ve heard through her that the Doc grew frustrated with Handsome’s lack of progress, particularly after the disclosure process imploded last summer.

Fair enough. I can understand that to a degree, but what therapist doesn’t expect any regression in their patients? This is a practitioner who specializes in process additions. Handsome has been sober for over 3 years, but what if he had relapsed? Would Doc#2 have booted him out of therapy? That’s a frightening thought to me as a partner. I’m sure it’s a horrifying fear for Handsome.

Doc#2 is the one who diagnosed Handsome with borderline personality disorder. That all good/ all bad thinking that alternately led Handsome to work crazy hard on the disclosure or totally give up on it is a hallmark trait of BPD. Maybe Handsome was more than he wanted to handle? I don’t know.

Doc#2 added insult to injury in early January. To prepare for his disclosure, and at the urging of our CSAT, Handsome swallowed his pride and reached out to Doc#2 to ask for help and to get back on his schedule. Doc#2 said “great” and scheduled an appointment for about 10 days later. Handsome waited patiently and worked on the disclosure. The morning of the appointment Doc#2 called Handsome and cancelled, telling him that he was overbooked and likely couldn’t fit him in for 2-3 months. All over again, Handsome was hurt, his fear of abandonment was triggered, and he really had to fight to stay centered and focused.

What therapist does that to a patient with mental health issues? And take Handsome out of the equation for a moment… how are you “partner sensitive” if you don’t see how these actions might negatively impact the partner too?

It’s easy for me to write here to vent about all the things Handsome does “wrong” but the fact is that there are many things he has done right. He is lightyears ahead of where he was in December of 2017. Can he still be a self-centered dolt? Absolutely, but it happens far, far less than it used to. His rage is mostly gone. He strives to show empathy. (It still doesn’t come naturally to him, but he tries to be intentional about it… when it occurs to him to do so. It’s still a big improvement and he does work on it.) I’m not a mental health professional but even I can recognize that his reluctance on the disclosure stemmed from his fear of abandonment. (“If I tell her everything she couldn’t possibly love me and she’ll leave.”) I was incredibly frustrated by his reluctance, but I was never surprised by it. Certainly his therapist shouldn’t have been surprised by it either.

Our CSAT advised Handsome to try to schedule at least one final session with Doc#2, basically for the purpose of confronting him about how he felt abandoned. I’m pretty sure that Handsome would have preferred chewing glass during a colonoscopy to making that phone call to Doc#2, but he made it. They actually met twice. Handsome reported that their first session was wildly uncomfortable, but the second session was incredibly helpful on an issue of importance. It likely saved their relationship. Handsome will no longer be seeing Doc#2 weekly but they have mutually agreed to work together intermittently as issues arise.

If you’re keeping score at home, as of early last Fall Handsome had stopped 12-step, refused to do the disclosure, and gotten himself fired from his therapist. There was one more big shoe to drop though before 2020 would come to a close…

The Elephant in the Room

My husband has had a lot of therapy the last three years. We occasionally joke that he has ALL the therapists. He did an intensive with Dr. Minwalla. He did OnSite’s Living Centered Program. He did a 6+ week inpatient stint at Sierra Tucson. Since 2018 he has often had two or three therapy sessions a week of some mix between his Psychiatrist, a Somatic Experiencing therapist, and/or our CSAT.

I could never put a finger on it but I always felt as though all the professionals were missing something. He had received multiple diagnoses from different professionals – no doubt some of them were right – but I felt like we were playing wack-a-mole with pharmaceuticals (“He’s depressed? Here’s a pill. He’s got ADHD? Here’s a pill. Anxiety? Take 3 of these, etc. etc.”) Yes, between the drugs and all the therapy, he improved. Nonetheless, something was still… off. He was either happy or miserable with no in-between. His responses to daily events often seemed grossly out of proportion to whatever had occurred. He was better, but he still wasn’t “well.”

Apparently I wasn’t the only one seeing this. His psychiatrist ran him through a variety of structured and semi structured interviews, the Mood Disorder Questionnaire, and other assessment tools. His conclusion: Borderline Personality Disorder.

Cue the violins and rending of garments here. I knew that “BPD” is a highly stigmatized diagnosis. I knew that it was deemed untreatable till a few decades ago. I knew it was a serious enough diagnosis that it can trigger eligibility for SSDI benefits. I knew it presents in a very, very small proportion of the general population (<1%). In short, I knew enough to be scared. I really didn’t know much else. At the time, I didn’t realize how the diagnosis was truly the missing piece of the puzzle.

So what is BPD? Per the DSM-IV, BPD is a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects [emotion], marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

  • Chronic feelings of emptiness
  • Emotional instability in reaction to day-to-day events (e.g., intense episodic sadness, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
  • Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
  • Identity disturbance with markedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
  • Impulsive behavior in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
  • Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
  • Pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by extremes between idealization and devaluation (also known as “splitting”)
  • Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self- harming behavior
  • Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

Of those 9 criteria, Handsome ticks 7 of the 9 boxes. He is not and has never been suicidal, nor has he had paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms. Everything else is squarely him. It’s so on point that I can’t believe no one saw it earlier.

What, if anything, does this change? For me the diagnosis legitimizes my experience. It gives me an explanation for some of what I’ve been dealing with. I’m not crazy or overly sensitive or any other negative description of a partner. For Handsome, once you are armed with a diagnosis you can pursue treatment. If we thought options for sex addiction treatment in our area were bad, the options might actually be worse here for BPD. (And we live in a city with multiple highly regarded teaching hospitals, including a psychiatric hospital. It’s sad.) Yes, his psychiatrist can help but dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) seems to be the preferred method of treatment. While many therapists claim that expertise, few do it in the type of intensive outpatient program thought to be most impactful on BPD patients. The one lone program that seemed to operate locally had been shuttered due to COVID. Handsome was game to try though, even if the therapy had to look different than usual.

Slowly the various professionals started working elements of DBT into their sessions with him. Equally slowly – very slowly – it has started to help. It is an ongoing and likely long term effort. He still misreads the temperature of my emotions and those of our kids and occasionally responds … unhelpfully. At least I know where it’s coming from.

“Stop Walking on Eggshells” is a well known book for people who have someone with BPD in their life. The title is really on the nose. Living with someone with untreated BPD is like walking on eggshells or making your way through an unmarked minefield. Every day. It’s exhausting. (Probably true for the BPD sufferer as well.) I am glad to be getting off the eggshells. Glad that my footing is more secure and that my days are uneventful. I do not miss the drama and I’ll be delighted if it never returns. I realized today that it has been months (maybe 4??) since I heard my husband yell. If your spouse isn’t a screamer that might sound like no big deal, but in our house Handsome’s angry outbursts were a daily thing during his acting out. Sometimes more than once a day. I certainly don’t miss them. If naming the elephant in the room has enabled Handsome to laser focus on important issues and get some really targeted help, I’m all for it.

It hasn’t been a smooth path to this point (more to follow on that), but we are at a great place now. I love a day that is simply uneventful. Nothing remarkable happens. There is no drama. No eggshells were crushed resulting in a tirade or tears. Again, it sounds small or like it should be a given, but for a period of years that wasn’t the case in our house. I’m delighted that this is our new normal.

Flooding: Triggered About Consent

I was scrolling through the New York Times on Friday and I came across this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opinion/sexual-consent.html

On the surface the article might seem to have little to do with my life. What I learned, however, after reading it and finding myself triggered and flooded with feelings for the better part of 24 hours, is that I have nagging, unresolved issues related to consent and my husband’s betrayals.

The premise of the article is just a few sentences: “Frank and Ellen meet at a night course and end up getting drinks together after class several times. The drinks start to feel like dates, so Ellen asks Frank if he is married, making it clear that adultery is a deal-breaker for her. Frank is married, but he lies and says he is single. The two go to bed. Is Frank guilty of rape? To most people, even those who consider Frank a dishonorable creep, the answer is clearly no. … But why?” The author goes on to compare and contrast procuring a loan through lies – which is fraud, punishable in criminal court – with Frank who duped Ellen into a sexual encounter.

I have to wonder what the author would think of my situation? I married a man who had been a sex addict for nearly two decades before we walked down the aisle. His addiction was completely hidden from me. We had sex because I thought he was only having sex with me. That wasn’t true for 3+ years of our marriage. I didn’t know.

That’s the rub for me. I have yet to resolve my feelings about things happening to me – very directly- that I did not consent to in any way. My then fiancé never said “Hey, before you commit to me for life you should know that I have issues with compulsive masturbation and other forms of sexually acting out.” I was never enlightened that it might be a good idea to use protection during sex because my husband decided to have affairs, visit massage parlors, and hook up with internet randos ten years into our marriage. I did not consent to STDs. I did not consent for pictures of my children to be sent to affair partners or for details of my life to be discussed with them. And yet those things all happened, all without my consent.

I was flooded with sadness that choices I thought I made well and deliberately weren’t based in reality. It eats at me that my husband’s lifestyle of deceit robbed me of an opportunity to consent and make informed choices. I know that my choices now are informed choices. I can and do take comfort in that. Great comfort, in fact. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mitigate my feelings of being duped by my husband for years. Those feelings are going to take some time to process.

My trauma therapist has her work cut out for her this week…

*** A side note- if you have commented and not seen your comment published or acknowledged, bear with me. (Thank you for commenting!) Some glitch is causing my WordPress to not play well in the sandbox. Hope to have it resolved soon.