Category: betrayal trauma

Showing up

I have spent hours writing here about Handsome’s faults and flaws. I do, however, want to be fair and give credit where it is due. Over the last 6 weeks my husband has shown up for me in a way I haven’t really seen in a long, long time.

When I last wrote we were in the midst of Handsome’s potential dementia/ Alzheimer’s diagnosis. We are still toiling away with that as he has received differing opinions from two cognitive neurologists and also an MRI that purports to rule out both Alzheimer’s and Vascular Dementia. Let’s just say that getting to the bottom of this is a slow work in progress. (I still think there are serious issues. He got in the car two days ago with the TV remote instead of his phone. His ability to keep track of appointments is nil too.)

In the midst of that drama, my 89-year-old mother fell and fractured her hip. She lives with us in an addition we built on our house for her, and I am her only living relative, so coordination of all of her care fell to us. It was a ten-day stay in the hospital followed by a little more than two weeks at a rehabilitation hospital. Then, she was doing great but just wasn’t quite able to come home yet. We moved her to a skilled nursing facility near our home for some additional recovery time and rehab. That seems to be where the wheels fell off the bus.

It’s a highly regarded facility but within a week she tested positive for CDiff (funky bacterial infection that causes seemingly constant diarrhea) and developed a UTI. She is dehydrated and lightheaded and is likely headed back to a hospital to get stabilized.

I try to spend about 2 hours a day with her. And maintain my full time job. And shuttle my kids to their busy Spring schedules. And take care of my mom’s dog. I would tell you that I’m burning the candle at both ends, but there is no candle left. I don’t think that I have been this frazzled, exhausted, and emotionally spent since I brought my eldest home as a newborn.

In the midst of this, Handsome has completely stepped up to the plate. I’ve noted before that he excels at crisis management when the crisis isn’t of his own making, and that’s so true. The man has been a rock star. Our eldest gets on her school bus at 6:20AM (which is both cruel and unusual but that’s a different story). He has gotten her off to school almost every morning just to let me get an extra hour of sleep. He has played shuttle driver and defense coach and grocery shopper all on the same day. He has taken me out to dinner more nights than I can count just so I could get a decent meal and maybe a few moments to relax. He laughs at my bad hospital jokes and walks the dog before bed for me.

When I called him in hysterical tears because I snagged Taylor Swift tickets for our daughter and then had issues checking out, he calmly took over and emerged with the coveted seats. Then he did it again two weeks later when Beyoncé’s tour went on sale and I had a similar issue. (Ticketmaster is literally responsible for the record pace at which my roots are growing out this month. 👵🏻) He’s not a fan of either artist but said it was important that I would have something to look forward to this Summer.

He dishes out random hugs and has watched silly TV shows with me while I try to decompress. He runs interference with our kids so I don’t have to worry about the missing cleat, forgotten homework, or arguments over chores.

Do I wish that he had showed up like this after DDay? Of course. But I’ll take it now. Happily. It’s a much more mature and balanced support than I’ve seen before. There is no hidden resentment, no mumbling under his breath, no sighing loud and useless sighs. He’s just buckling down and helping. I’m incredibly appreciative. This feels like a partnership. As unfortunate as the circumstances are, this still feels good.

Safe Places

While I cannot believe that it’s July already, I am excited that means that my family’s annual summer sojourn to New England is just around the corner.

Handsome has a younger brother who, throughout the entire 20+ years I’ve known him, was in a long term relationship with a lovely woman my kids have known as “Aunt _____.” They never married but they were together as a couple during that entire time. In January, Aunt ____ was summarily replaced with a 23 year-old new girlfriend. (Handsome’s brother is 57.) It is reasonably clear that this relationship started as an affair. They were living together within days of the breakup with Aunt _____.

I’ve met the new GF. She’s what you’d expect from a young woman willing to date a recovering alcoholic who is older than her parents and whose last long term partner still had clothes in the closet when she moved in.

Handsome asked if I “minded” if his brother and the GF would stay with us on vacation. 🤔

Yes. Yes, I do mind. Very much so.

I worked incredibly hard to reclaim my happy place there from any acting out Handsome engaged in while in that house. While she isn’t an OW of mine, the GF is an OW of someone I still think of as family. I don’t need that gigantic trigger around me on my vacation. I also don’t want to normalize any of that for my kids.

I note that Handsome did not ask whether they could vacation in the same place at the same time. Evidently, they are planning to be there. (To be fair, I’m confident Handsome didn’t invite them or suggest that. I believe they planned their own trip.) The only question is whether they stay at our house so I’m compelled to see them 24/7. I think not.

Thoughts? Am I being unreasonable? Should I just suck it up and not make waves? Old me would have done that, to be honest. I’d have chewed on that poop sandwich throughout the main vacation I look forward to all year just to avoid rocking the boat. New me would prefer to burn it all down and have a bourbon while watching the flames.

Unexpected Consequences

On my DDay, almost four and a half years ago, my children were 8 and 11. After assessing who knew of Handsome’s behavior and what the possibilities were of the kids learning anything, I made the decision not to tell them about their dad’s infidelity and sex addiction. There was simply no reason for them to know.

Handsome was drinking often before DDay. While they never saw him drunk, they did see him drink daily. We did have some discussions with the kids when he stopped drinking about why he made that decision. We also talked to them about why he went to Sierra Tucson for 6 weeks for mood disorder treatment and what he hoped to accomplish after his inpatient stay.

Here we are these few years later and, while I still believe that not telling them about his infidelity/SA was what was right for them (given our particular circumstances) I now see some unintended consequences of that decision. Namely, all of Handsome’s prior bad behavior witnessed by the kids has a reason attached to it in their minds. Dad drank too much so of course he was miserable. Dad yelled a lot because he couldn’t regulate his emotions. Dad didn’t have the meds or the skills he needed to control his moods.

Those reasons are true. But…

The cherry-picking of what my kids know vs what they don’t know means that they have some context for his behavior whereas I now see that they have zero context for mine. During an argument, my now 15 year old daughter said “It’s like you woke up one day a few years ago and just decided to be mean.” 💔 I just wanted to hold her close and say “no, darling… one day your father tore my heart apart and irreparably changed me. He took my peace, my patience, my sense of humor, and my sense of self-worth. I’m still working on getting those things back and it’s hard and sometimes I still struggle. Sometimes I fail.”

That lack of context occasionally means that I get blamed for the consequences of my husband’s actions. One child expressed frustration recently that we don’t stay home for Thanksgiving (which would be a trigger for me). I was seen as the one making that decision and thus got the blame. Handsome had to step into that discussion to say “I ruined Thanksgiving at home for mom, so blame me and not her.” They assumed he meant that he ruined it with his drinking, so the explanation was accepted. That doesn’t work so well though for things like “why is mom so quick to anger” or “why does mom startle so easily?” How do we explain my CPTSD when they only know half the story?

Telling them now is unacceptable for the same reasons that were valid 4 years ago. I’m not going that route. They just don’t need to know. It is frustrating though that in my efforts to preserve their relationship with Handsome I seem to have unintentionally harmed my relationship with them in the process. Could we just blame everything on his drinking and call it a day? Sure. It just doesn’t explain everything.

Perhaps the problem is that I’m not the right person to address the issue. Maybe Handsome needs to step up more, like he did when the matter of Thanksgiving came up. That was incredibly helpful. I don’t mind being the “heavy” with my kids when it’s needed and appropriate, but I didn’t anticipate catching flak for things I can’t really control.

Amends: Better Late than Never

If you’re keeping track, my DDay #1 was in December of 2017. After multiple fits and starts Handsome did a full, therapeutic disclosure this past January, a hair over 3 years later. My presentation of my impact statement took place just a few weeks afterwards. (I had written it ages ago but it just sat in a file on my computer till he finally reached the point where he could hear, absorb, and appropriately respond to it.) The next, and last, “step” on the path towards healing that our CSAT uses calls for an emotional restitution letter to be prepared by the betraying partner in response to the impact statement. It’s an attempt at an emotional, empathetic amends.

I have a feeling that for many SAs, the exercise is painful but doable. It probably flows fairly naturally as a response to the impact statement. “I heard clearly how I hurt you and I take full responsibility and I’ll do whatever it takes to help you -and us/ heal.” Handsome isn’t typical though. I knew this would be a challenge for him.

First, my impact statement was long (16 single-spaced pages… I had a lot to say) and doing a deep dive would have him sitting in discomfort for quite a while. Handsome is better with discomfort now than he used to be, by far, but it’s still challenging for him.

Second, it would require him to take responsibility in a way he has struggled with in the past. Yes, ever since he did his intensive with Dr. Minwalla he has been clear that everything he did was about him and not me and he has been out of his addict-y deflection mode for a long time. There is, however, a difference between the type of responsibility one takes in doing a disclosure (“I brought Angel Baby to our house for two nights when you and the kids were out of town.”) and the way that gets addressed in the emotional restitution phase. In the latter, it’s more like: “I know that by having AB in our home I destroyed your sense of safety there and that no amount of paint or redecorating will undo that damage. I see how physically uncomfortable and triggering it is for you to be in our basement and I’m so sorry that I caused that…” etc. It’s the same deed addressed two very different ways.

If I’m really honest, I thought the concept of the letter would die on the vine. I didn’t expect Handsome to go through with it. Months passed. Our CSAT would occasionally bring it up, but I didn’t say peep about it. A few weeks ago I was told it was done and ready to be presented to me. We’ve been doing tele-health sessions since the pandemic started, but we did this one in person. I won’t tell you that it was brilliant, but he put more effort in than I thought he would. More importantly, it was very heartfelt and sincere. I have no doubt that he meant every word. I could not only feel that, but I could see it on his face and hear it in his voice. I haven’t felt that way about anything coming out of his mouth for a long, long time.

So, are we all good? We are still a work in progress, but actual progress has been made. Handsome still has a lot of work to do. I have more healing to do as well. I had an EMDR session last week to help me address a particular memory. I know it doesn’t work for everyone but I’ve found it works well to diminish my trauma response to certain things. (And I have some absolutely wild dreams for about a week afterwards.) As we move into this season which is generally fraught with triggers for me, I’m feeling good. While that feeling has been a long time coming, like the amends, it’s better late than never.

On being small

I recently had an experience with my 89 year old mother that opened my eyes to a lingering side effect of my husband’s infidelity and related nonsense. Namely, I am accustomed to making myself small.

I am not small in stature or in voice. Despite that, I realized that my goal since DDay, has been to blend in with the wallpaper. The seeds were certainly sowed before then, during the period of my marriage where I was slowly manipulated into making my needs nonexistent. I was astonished though to see how it still impacts me, even when I least expect it.

Picture a stereotypical New England clam shack at a beach. Great lobster rolls and seating at picnic tables with paper towels for napkins. It’s me, Handsome, and my mom. We have a terrific meal. As we go to leave, my mom gets her legs kind of caught up on the picnic table bench. At her age, her skin is incredibly thin. She immediately has blood pouring from both shins.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a normal person slow trickle from a scrape. By your standards or mine, these were small contusions. Nonetheless, I’m talking about a blood thinner- induced river of red that was running down her shins, pooling in her shoes, and soaking the ground around her feet. We were totally silent, but yet the mere fact of the situation made every movement seem loud.

I’m somewhat accustomed to this. It happens any time my mom gets cut and the slightest bruise makes her look like she has been battered. But there we sit, in the midst of this outdoor dining area, and I found myself resenting my mom for drawing attention to us. For inconveniencing the other diners. For ensuring we were sticking out like sore thumbs. For taking up too much “space” in that moment. WTF??

Of course, like a diligent and loving daughter I was on my hands and knees in the sand trying to stop the bleeding, fielding offers of assistance, and trying to get my mom situated to get her to our car. And I was so incredibly, terribly uncomfortable. Just to pile on, I recognized the absurdity of the discomfort in the moment and it made me angry at myself. Have I really allowed myself to be shoved into such a tiny box that a minor accident makes me feel bad for inconveniencing (at worst) a bunch of strangers??

Having had some time to sit with this I can look back and note times where, during Handsome’s acting out, my whole being revolved exclusively around him and our kids. Therereally was no me. Yes, I worked, but I never really got to enjoy the fruits of that labor other than on a vacation or two. Forget self-care. I recall enduring incredible inconvenience and sacrifice to accommodate him and his needs. I recall not asking for anything, ever, because I knew my request would be discounted or ignored. I’ve written elsewhere here about the one Christmas where I got absolutely nothing from him, and the birthdays and Mother’s Days where I bought gifts for our kids to give me because he couldn’t be bothered and had probably spent all his money on skanks and sex.

When you grow accustomed to that smallness, of course you start to believe that your very existence is likely a nuisance to those who don’t even know you. Fast forward to a sunny day at a clam shack and I was turned right back into that gaslit, manipulated woman, undeserving of space to exist. And I deflected that right onto my mom. How dare she have needs, in public.

I swear, trauma is a bugger. Every time I start to feel like I’m making some progress, something like this kicks me in the butt.

I often de-escalate myself in these situations by telling myself “that was then, this is now.” I need to deliberately remind myself “this is reasonable” to counter all the residual effects of the gaslighting telling me that my needs or wants are unreasonable.

In this instance, Handsome was there, working with me to help my mom and offering reassurances to us both that it would be fine. He wasn’t focused on himself. He was present, both literally and mentally. He was trying to be helpful.

He knew I was suffering, but not why. I wouldn’t know how to explain it. I’m not sure I could make it sound logical. And yet clearly this compulsion to not take up space, not make waves or rock the boat, is still deep inside me. I want it to be gone.

“You’re doing so great…”

Someone who regularly reads this blog recently commented to me “it’s great to see that you’re doing so well.” Hmmm. I really appreciate the kind words, but perhaps I need to point out some of my ongoing struggles.

I am doing well. Most days. I am often great or nearly so for extended periods of time. That is true and real, but I don’t want to “image manage” away from reality. I don’t want to give the impression everything is peachy. A few fun facts:

– I haven’t spent more than 10 minutes in our basement in the last 3 years… since finding out that’s where Handsome and Angel Baby shacked up. It’s large, finished, and beautiful and yet I avoid it like the plague. It would be the ideal place for my home office, except I can’t bear the sight of it. A paint job and new furniture would just be putting lipstick on the pig. I just act like it doesn’t exist.

– I haven’t visited Handsome at work since before DDay. I used to occasionally swing by with lunch or take the kids to give him hugs if we were nearby. I’m still too embarrassed to see his coworkers, particularly since I now weigh about 30 lbs more than I did the last time I was there. I can imagine the “Look at her, no wonder he cheated…” comments. (They’re mostly un-evolved dicks.)

– I don’t stalk the social media of the other women (I never really did) but I do run their criminal background checks every few months just to be sure wherever they are spending their time now and getting arrested is nowhere near where we live or where Handsome works. Every single one of them that I know of found time during COVID to get themselves arrested. Every. Single. One.

– I still occasionally rely on anxiety meds. I had no anxiety pre DDay. Give a speech in front of a few hundred people? No problem. Ask for a raise? No sweat. Work the room at a cocktail party? Happily! And yet these days I sometimes feel like there’s a truck parked on my chest over truly stupid stuff. A simple trip to IKEA today was nearly my undoing. And that’s BEFORE I try to build what I bought.

– I have always been sentimental, but I find myself clinging to “stuff” – particularly my kids’ things – from before the betrayal. For example, since they could walk both kids have had really cute rain boots (Wellies) with whales or sharks or frogs or rocket ships or pirates on them with new ones picked out as they changed sizes. Over time, these boots took up residence in a bin in our laundry room. With both kids long grown out of them, Handsome wanted to toss the entire bin. I can’t. I just can’t. Even if the thought of doing so wasn’t causing me to break out into a sweat, it brings on a deep and profound sadness. It’s as if I feel that in tossing the boots I’m tossing my kids’ lives pre-addiction. That probably sounds stupid, but that’s just one example. I know the boots and other items are symbols of the life -and the innocence- I lost. Somewhere in my mind I don’t want to experience that loss again.

So, yes, I am doing great. It just doesn’t mean that I’m back to normal. That still seems a long way off.

My Person

I married a man who had become my one of my best friends over the course of our four year courtship. I have two “ride or die” friends from childhood, but Handsome was a different kind of friend. He was my partner in life. By the time we walked down the aisle I felt that he was as much a part of me as anyone could be. To pull out an old-timey Grey’s Anatomy reference, he was my person.

I was all-in with Handsome. I told him everything. Always. I was an open book. As we now know, he was not the same with me. He kept a lot of very damaging secrets. The way that betrayal trauma screws with your attachment to your betrayer is nothing short of a mind f**k. When your person rips apart your soul, it changes things.

Our CSAT is looking at utilizing a new assessment tool in her practice. Having worked with us for a pretty long time, she asked us if we would take the assessments so she could get a feel for its validity and usefulness. We agreed. On my assessment, for the betrayed spouse, one component was the “Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support.” That’s a high falutin’ name for 12 questions that triggered the heck out of me.

The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (Zimet et al., 1988) is a 12-item measure of perceived adequacy of social support from three sources: family, friends, & significant other; using a 5- or 7-point Likert scale (0 = strongly disagree, 5/7= strongly agree). Here is what it often looks like:

Answering this threw me off my game for hours. In particular, these statements geared towards your relationship with a “significant other”:

– There is a special person who is around when I am in need.

– There is a special person with whom I can share my joys and sorrows.

– I have a special person who is a real source of comfort to me.

and the kicker…. – There is a special person in my life who cares about my feelings.

Ugh. Pre- DDay every single one of these would be “Very Strongly Agree.” Today though, I struggle with reconciling that my person very nearly destroyed me. Literally. Today, on a good day, I would probably check “neutral” or “mildly agree” with each statement… at best. I don’t yet know how I can get back to “strongly agree” when my “special person” is the sole source of trauma in my life.

Handsome clearly wasn’t around when I needed him when he was checked out in his addiction, and for a long time after discovery I couldn’t open up about my pain because he couldn’t handle the shame it caused. That occasionally still happens. He’s fabulous if a crisis has nothing to do with him, but if my pain is at all related to his acting out he sometimes still fails to show up for me.

As far as being a source of comfort…? Again, if my pain is unrelated to him he does fine. I’d actually say he’s awesome in those instances. More often than not though I need to be comforted as a result of something he did, and seeking comfort from him then is often futile. He still struggles with how to show up for me. So, does he care about my feelings? Yes, but…

He would say that of course he cares deeply about my feelings. I would say he occasionally cares only to the extent that my feelings don’t interfere with the prioritization of his feelings. If he can console me without feeling bad about himself, fine. If he can meet an emotional need of mine without cost to himself, fine. Anything else is something of a crapshoot. I have seen where I stand. I know from experience that if he perceives something as a choice between my interests or his, he will almost always pick his. There is not a self-sacrificing bone in his body.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about practical things. He’ll take his day off and get up early to run errands or shuttle kids or handle any of the home drudgery at any time. But I could hire someone to do those things. It’s when I’m sad or lonely or hurt or whatever and I need my life partner’s support that I want him to be there for me. That’s when -even if it’s hard or uncomfortable for him- I need my person.

Maybe I’m the weird one for being willing to give anything or do anything for my partner. Maybe I give more than is normal. I don’t know. Even if I do though, it’s not a crime.

What I Know Now

I am 3 years and almost 5 months to the day after my DDay. In the scheme of life, that’s really nothing. A blip. In my heart and soul, however, it feels like decades. I feel as though I have endured a lifetime of pain. In many respects I can’t believe that it has been “only” that amount of time. I have certainly aged more in 3 years than I did the previous 10.

A newer member of this very unfortunate club emailed and asked me what the present me would say to the version of myself that existed on 12/9/17. I’d say a few things, as it turns out. Here are my top 10 in no particular order. Feel free to add any of your own advice to your DDay self in the comments.

1. I know it hurts. It’s like being fully cognizant of your own murder. Days will come when you no longer feel that way. It will take time and hard work but you’ll get there.

2. As hard as it is, don’t waste a minute on the other women. It’s easy to focus on them, but they really aren’t the issue.

3. Each bad day will pass. Relish a good day when you have one. (Good days can be fleeting too, but notice and make the most of them when they appear.)

4. Progress is NOT linear. Whether you stay or leave there will be steps forward and back.

5. The best people to have around you are those who listen well and simply offer nonjudgmental support. It’s okay for someone to say “This happened to me and here is how I handled it and how it played out.” It is less helpful to have people around you who pepper their stories with “you should” or “you must.” Be very picky about who you surround yourself with and who you trust with your story.

6. You’re going to hear a lot about self-care. Just do the best you can. Don’t feel shame if you can’t make time for a walk or yoga or meditation. Some days self-care can be as simple as showering or ordering take out. Some days it can also be crying your eyes out if you’ve been holding it in. What works for someone else might not work for you.

7. Prioritize your physical and mental health needs. It’s very tempting to pour all of your attention into your spouse and focus on getting them help to “fix” them. I won’t tell you not to work to get help for your partner, but make sure that you have good therapeutic support too. And do see your doctor. The physical impacts of betrayal trauma manifest themselves in many ways, from PTSD to Kawasaki syndrome to a laundry list of auto-immune disorders.

8. Gaslighting and lies don’t suddenly end on your first DDay. Trickle truth is real. You can be as understanding and nonjudgmental as can be and your addict may still feel compelled to lie to you. Expect it, and know that your hyper-vigilance is not codependency but a common trauma symptom.

9. This experience will change you. I’m honestly not yet comfortable with the new me, but I have a feeling she’s going to change a bit more before all is said and done. I still mourn the loss of who I was, and working through that grief is both necessary and okay.

10. If you stay with your partner and they do the work you can rebuild trust and mend your relationship. I’ll never, ever forget about what my husband did, but it appears now as an occasional dull ache and not a daily stabbing, blinding pain.

You’ll notice that there is no advice here on whether to stay or leave. I could only tell my DDay self not to make a hasty decision either way. Traumatized brains don’t function really well. I needed space, time, and some therapeutic input to be able to think clearly.

In looking over the list I think I’d like to squeak in a #11: Don’t make your needs small and certainly don’t let anyone else make your needs small. Scream from the rooftops what you need. Those around you will either rise to the occasion or fall by the wayside. Either outcome is fine. Those who wither or fail to show up aren’t worth your time, and those who support you and meet you where you are at are irreplaceable.

A Different Kind of Trigger

My relationship with my in-laws is complicated. For the most part they welcomed me and have been kind. We’ve had some moments, but mostly with my FIL and mostly once my MIL passed and he lost his filter and I started to see the veneer peeling back on the family picture. I harbor resentment though at the trauma their alcoholism inflicted on my husband and their abject denial of same to the present. They image-managed the heck out of their lives before I married their son. That’s a little like spitting in my scrambled eggs and trying to sell it to me as a soufflé.

I’ve written before about Handsome’s Complex PTSD. While a good bit of the genesis of his CPTSD stems from his job, an equal if not greater part stems from growing up with two functionally alcoholic parents.

My MIL was already quite ill with emphysema when I met her, but she was still mobile and somewhat self-sufficient. I saw her drink, but only at dinner and usually just one cocktail. My FIL has been sober for years and, if anything, is probably now only addicted to AA. And cigarettes. And being a controlling ass. I have often thanked heaven for the 10 hours of distance between our homes.

I was at their house one day and looking for a sheet pan in the kitchen. I opened a cabinet and out spilled several fifths of vodka. My MIL wasn’t driving at the time so that means my FIL was facilitating whatever drinking she was doing. On another occasion I picked up her 24oz water bottle to wash it. To my dismay, it was filled with vodka, not water. That was about 6 months before she died.

My MIL’s death unmoored my husband. I’ve written before about how he disassociated during her funeral to the point that he convinced himself that I wasn’t there. Then he used the resentment from me not being there to “justify” his acting out. (“My wife doesn’t love me. She couldn’t even be bothered to come to my mother’s funeral.”) The fact that I moved heaven and earth to be present and that I was there, standing beside him and holding his hand, was just lost in the recesses of his mind and replaced with resentment. All of his major acting out rolled forward from there.

Now, as I write this, my FIL is in failing health. It seems unlikely that he’ll see Christmas this year, and next to impossible to believe he’ll last a year. I can already see the toll this is taking on my husband and it’s nerve wracking.

I don’t want to make this all about me. It’s not. But my experience tells me that when the time comes and my FIL passes, my husband is going to be adrift. There will be no more parental affection to chase. No one to try endlessly to impress (to no avail). No one to be a theoretical safety net.

Handsome is not the same person he was when his mom died 8 years ago. He has experience and resources and tools to bring to bear, but the loss of a parent is no small thing. That’s particularly true when you’ve spent your life trying to connect with that parent and chasing the unconditional affection you could never exactly muster from them.

A part of me wishes that Handsome would be more angry at his dad. If not for himself, then maybe for our kids who are mostly ignored by the man. He either forgets their birthdays entirely or he remembers one child and not the other. Handsome acts as though he could care less. Maybe that’s true, but I doubt it. This is the dad whose behavior – no matter how deplorable – he excuses. The dad who told Handsome he was fat (he wasn’t) which prompted Handsome to pursue months of dieting. (FIL told my size 0 daughter the same thing during a visit. Not “wow, I’ve missed you” or “I’m so happy to see you,” but “you’ve put on a lot of weight.” Jerk.) It’s the same dad who never attended a single school event or sporting event for Handsome – even though they lived only 3 blocks from the school.

Handsome enlisted in the Marines and went into law enforcement because his dad did those things. He’s been chasing attention and approval and love from his father for decades. Getting those things from his dad has always been just out of reach. Just beyond his grasp. It’s not that Handsome hasn’t earned or deserved them. His father just has no idea how to give them freely. Once it is literally impossible to get those things from his dad, I have to wonder if the longing will stop. I suspect that it won’t.

Impact.

Impact. And also just a drop in a bucket.

After Handsome’s disclosure, it was my turn to present my impact statement a few weeks later. Fun fact: I started drafting it over two years ago so it was 98% done by the time of the disclosure. I tweaked a few things afterwards, but not much.

Due to COVID, while our disclosure was done in-person in our CSAT’s office, my impact statement was presented to Handsome (read out loud by me) in the front seat of a Ford F-250 Super Duty parked in a local park while our CSAT participated by Zoom. It was far from ideal, but we made it work.

Handsome had been pretty agitated the day or two beforehand. I’m sure it was hard to know he was going to be gutted for an hour. I was reasonably calm, except that I was worried that Handsome might spiral emotionally afterwards. I was concerned that he’d fall into hopelessness. At some point I had a choice to either soften my words to be more palatable, or be honest. I chose honesty. I chose to give my feelings and emotions all the space they needed, especially my anger. I so rarely let my rage out, but I did so in my impact statement. I didn’t do it with yelling or cursing or name calling. I let the YEARS I had to draft it work in my favor.

Our CSAT is usually pretty chill, but she was in tears through much of it. Handsome was in tears multiple times as well. I hit a lot of nerves. Hard. I covered the impacts to me emotionally, physically, socially, financially, and the impacts to my job and to our children.

For a good bit of the last three years, my pain has taken a back seat in therapy. We spent a ton of time focused on Handsome, as we needed to, but that left little time for me. All my feelings that went unsaid, all the things I stuffed down just to be able to function, all the words that had bubbled up only to find they had nowhere to go… they all had a voice in my statement. It was 14 single-spaced pages of gut-wrenching truth. My truth, at least.

I wrote about things we have talked about, like how violated I felt that he brought Angel Baby to our home. I wrote about things that were seemingly off-limits before, such as his blatant disregard for my health and the physical safety of our family. I asked rhetorically how gaslit and abused I had to be to not buy myself a single article of clothing for almost three YEARS because of his raging rants about money. I addressed how foolish I feel now that I know where all of his money was going. I described the hurt of the birthdays and Christmases where I bought my own gifts for the kids to give me because he couldn’t be bothered. I told him I had no intention of dragging him kicking and screaming towards a better marriage.

Perhaps the title of this post should have been “The Unburdening” because that is exactly how I felt. If his disclosure was freeing then presenting my impact statement was like taking flight. I took off my heavy cloak of shame and anger so that I could soar.

In the end, it honestly didn’t matter to me how he took it. It didn’t matter whether he heard all the words or whether he agreed or disagreed. I couldn’t control any of that and didn’t care to do so. I felt better. It helped heal me, and a healthier me is a better mom and daughter and friend, and probably a better wife. That matters to me, and by those measures it was a success.

Onward!

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…

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.

Aftermath – and some new trees

Handsome has been home from rehab now for over two months. The first month home was every bit as rough as my previous posts would indicate. His second month home also did not start off well.

Handsome had been living in a local AirBnB since his return from ST. I was fine with that. He was not. A few days before his stay there was due to run out (a stay which I fully expected him to extend), my son texted me at work and happily announced that Handsome was moving back into our house. You can imagine my response. He had apparently started unpacking in the master bedroom but he was clued-in enough by the time I got home that he had moved himself to our finished basement instead. We used to have a guest quarters there, but then he brought Angel Baby to our house and bedded her down there, so the bed went out with the trash. He was supposed to replace it. He never did. He was shocked to find that he would have to sleep on the floor. Oh well.

The initial days with him back in the house were like a battle of wills. The more he complained about being “banished” to the basement, the more resolute I was that (i) I was absolutely entitled to enforce my boundaries, and (ii) he’d remain in the basement till I decided otherwise. In those first days he tried everything to weasel his way back upstairs. Nope. Not happening. Apparently Doc2 told him to knock it off, and our CSAT ripped him a new asshole. It was hard for him to fuss at me when his hand-picked professionals were telling him he was in full jerk/ control freak mode.

Our in home separation was working, but strained. Under lock down conditions we were mostly managing to stay apart, but meals just weren’t working. The kids were confused, the pets were confused, and trying to stay separate seemed to cause more stress than it was worth so we resumed deliberate family meals. Smart move, it turns out, as the overall stress level in the house plummeted. The change was immediate. 

Then, very slowly, as all the professionals kept working to bring out the positives from rehab and to set aside the gunk Handsome picked up, and as his meds really started to kick in, I started to see a better version of my husband. He went out and bought an air mattress without complaint. He delved into helping around the house and with the kids. I saw signs of humility. He started coming to the grocery store getting personally invested in our lock-down meal choices. (I know that may not sound like much but pre-rehab he would leave all of the shopping to me and then sigh about what I bought. We’d have a fully stocked pantry and fridge/ freezer overflowing with healthy options and he’d complain that there was nothing to eat. No more.)

He started initiating our “Intimacy of the Day” exchanges and spending time with me, when it worked for me, just hanging out. I was actually enjoying spending time with him because he seemed healthy and “normal” again. We had CSAT sessions where we could report that things were uneventful at worst and actually going pretty well. Holidays have been fraught for us in the past, but we pulled off a lovely Easter.

Handsome also decided that he wants to do an organized full disclosure. He tells me that there is nothing new to disclose. Nonetheless, he’s (still) on Step 4 at SA and he wants to complete that step and move forward. He also knows that I’ve always been ticked that he couldn’t/ wouldn’t get through the disclosure process before. The impromptu staggered disclosures and trickle truth were devastating while they were going on and, frankly, he’s never had to sit with me or anyone else that I know of and tell them ALL of his story in one dump. He eventually seems to disclose everything, but it has been parsed out in chunks to make it…more palatable? Less likely to cause rejection?

Handsome has been working on the disclosure now for several weeks. To me, the effort matters somewhat more than content. I don’t expect that I’ll ever know everything that went on. There are likely several things he intends to take to his grave. (Remember the mysterious tampon in the master bedroom that he claimed the cat put there? Yeah, I know how it got there whether it is ever spoken out loud or not.) I am also certain that there are things he did that he legitimately can’t remember at this point. (He did a LOT of stuff and his meds have obliterated his memory.) I know how hard it will be for him to pull this off to the satisfaction of our CSAT and Doc2 though, so that effort is meaningful to me even if I wish he had been willing and able to do it two years ago before time and mood adjusting meds took their toll.

One day earlier this month, Handsome asked me to go to a local nursery and pick out some trees. (As an agriculture-related business our nurseries remain open even during the lock down.) When he asked me what I wanted last year for Mother’s Day, I requested a few new trees for our yard. Despite repeated promises, I never got them. That added  insult to injury because of his conduct on many Mother’s Days during his acting out. I was surprised when he asked me to go, but out we went and we picked out the cool Dragons eye pine (we call it the Dr. Seuss tree) in the picture above, as well as a flowering plum. To make room for them, Handsome spent hours and hours clearing two large trees in our yard that had succumbed to bore infestations two years ago. He probably could have/ should have hired someone or at least rented a stump grinder, but he put all the labor in himself to remove the old trees and stumps to make room for these new additions. I figured that they were for Mother’s Day this year. They aren’t. Handsome told me that he wants to start making amends to me and that he figured he’d start by making things right for last Mother’s Day. That was unexpected. And appreciated.

Things are getting better, slowly but surely. He is still sleeping in the basement, but the separation isn’t strained and seems to be working well. I’m not counting chickens, but I am enjoying this period of relative peace in the midst of the pandemic.

Part 4: They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said , “No, no, no”

This is the last piece of this series. (Missed earlier parts of this series? You can find Part I  here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.) I should point out that I’m not writing in real time. These events happened several weeks ago. I haven’t seen a partner write about their loved one’s inpatient treatment though, so I wanted to cover it here in some detail. That’s particularly true since Handsome’s didn’t go as quite as planned.

Handsome’s struggle with integrity didn’t end with lying about his missed SA meeting and his drinking. A few days after our brutal CSAT session, Handsome asked me out to lunch. It was an olive branch, so I took it. This was weeks before the virus was keeping people home, but the restaurant was mostly empty. We actually had a lovely time together. During the meal, Handsome raised the issue of his communication with the older woman he met in rehab. (I’m not a complete idiot… I had already googled her and confirmed her age, long term partnership, and other pertinent facts.) He assured me that he understood how awful it was that he broke the boundary and that he was willing to cease communication if it was what I wanted or needed from him. He relayed that he thought she was smart, insightful, and that he felt she would be helpful to him in implementing what he learned at ST at home. It was the discussion he should have initiated with me before he broke the boundary.

My boundaries have always been focused on keeping me sane, safe, and secure. I know that they have seemed punitive to Handsome, but that was never their point. This woman isn’t a threat to me or my marriage. I told Handsome that as long as he didn’t communicate with her in secret and as long as he didn’t communicate with her instead of with me, I could live with him staying in touch with this one particular well-vetted woman. I explained clearly that although it was still triggering, I’d deal with that trigger if it would be helpful to him. He thanked me and said he was absolutely clear on the limitations of what I had agreed to.

A few days pass. Things were actually quite good when I’d see Handsome. He was still living at the AirBnB and miserable about it, but he was great when he was at our house. And then, quite out of the blue, he asked me a question about when our kids were going to be in summer camp. Not a broad “July or August?” kind of question (which would be typical for Handsome) but a very pointed, date-specific question. Handsome doesn’t care about those kinds of details and he especially doesn’t care about them 3-4 months ahead of time. The last time Handsome asked a similar question was during his acting out. I had been clueless and answered him. I found out later that he had promptly reached out to his brigade of whores and gleefully announced that he’d be alone for 6 weeks in the summer and started plotting. Immediately, there were sirens going off in my head. I dodged the question and changed the subject completely. It was triggering. He took one more shot at it and I again avoided answering with any specificity.

When he went to take a shower that night I checked his phone. As I feared, he had been texting with a young girl (she’s about 20) he met at ST who lives in a town that’s about 15 minutes from our summer home. I confronted him. He initially denied it. Then he admitted it. That’s when it got really fun because he tried to gaslight me “I thought you said at lunch that my ST friends were okay to stay in touch with.” But you see, I’m smarter now. I know exactly what I had agreed to. He quickly saw that the manipulation of reality that worked so well for him during his addiction is a complete non-starter now.

I specifically did not agree to this girl because, frankly, she scares me. She has serious daddy issues. She is one of the women I felt Handsome had a weird dynamic with at ST. He told me on a call that she was “like a daughter” to him. The last time I heard that about a young girl, she ended up in my house in bed with Handsome while I was out of town. He has access to this girl (via our summer home). And, to boot, unlike his other APs this one is drop dead gorgeous. She is waaaaay out of Handsome’s league… like laughably out of his league… but sex addicts don’t seem to notice such things. Nothing is improbable to them. (Hence the success of the “girlfriend experience” part of the sex trade).

And therein lies the less obvious thing that Handsome brought home from ST. His treatment – sitting in a process group of mostly women for 150 minutes a day for 5 weeks – apparently reactivated aspects of his sex addiction. All of the support, the empathy, the bolstering of morale, and yes, the 8 second hugs (not kidding) had to be like a tsunami of hits to his addict brain. After 26 months of sexual sobriety, Handsome was again communicating with a woman in secret, and when confronted about it he lied, deflected, minimized, and tried to gaslight me.  In my book, that’s a relapse.

So what was this communication? Nothing sexual. He complained to her about how he knew he had made strides at ST but that no one at home could readily see it. No one appreciated what he had done and how hard he had worked. And what gem of advice did this very sage almost-still-a-teenager have to offer. “Oh, forget about them! No matter what your family says you know how awesome you are and how much progress you’ve made. Keep being you! Don’t let them bring you down!!”

That’s just genius, right? “Eff your family. Who are they to get upset by your lies? Zheesh!”

I had three fairly simultaneous responses to this. First, I seriously considered restoring his phone to the factory settings and thus deleting all of his contacts, photos, apps, etc. (He doesn’t back up with any regularity). Then I realized that would be my trauma response… to hurt him back. Plus, he certainly knows how to buy and use a burner phone. I won’t police him.

Then I scheduled an emergency session with our CSAT. She is clearly fed up with Handsome but desperately trying to stay marriage-positive and neutral. Or as neutral as she can be when he’s engaging in mayhem.

Last, I waited several hours and then I called Handsome at work. And I vented in a way that I likely haven’t done since the very early part of 2018. I let him have ALL of my sadness, angst, anger, fear, distrust, disgust, and every other emotion I was feeling. I held nothing back and I certainly didn’t coddle him. There was nothing left to coddle, in my book. I’m not going to bend over backwards to keep him from doing something stupid when he’s already doing stupid stuff. He’s used to me being angry or sad but I’m usually reserved and dignified. This was far from that. I think the rawness of it terrified him. I dumped it ALL on him.

In closing that discussion I reminded Handsome how much love for him the kids and I had. I used the past tense on purpose. It wasn’t lost on him. I pointed out that he was sabotaging the very thing he claimed to want most in the world and that it was, indeed, all his fault. ALL. HIS. FAULT. Yes, he had a terrible childhood. It doesn’t mean he gets a free pass to torture his family now.  Yes, he has cadre of previously undiagnosed mental health issues, but he’s also had 2+ years of treatment by a virtual team of therapists and multiple intensives. At this stage in the game, it’s all on him. ALL. OF. IT.  He was sobbing by the time I was through.

And me? I knew that the re-entry from 5 weeks at inpatient would be hard. It’s a sad reality that once those intensive supports are removed, many people struggle and some completely fail. I KNEW that. I anticipated it. And yet it was still brutal to see my own husband fall on his face the way he did. I had hoped he’d be different, or even that we’d finally catch a break. Nope.

The measure of a person isn’t really how hard they fall though, it’s how they pick themselves back up. Handsome fell hard. Really hard. Watching him pick himself back up – step by step – actually gives me hope.

 

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.

 

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.

Things I wish I knew before my husband went to rehab

I intend to write in detail about my perspective of Handsome’s inpatient experience after he returns home, but in the interim I thought it might be useful to someone to put some of this down in my blog right now. I should clarify up front that although Handsome is a sex addict, he went to inpatient care for his mood disorders, trauma, and to endeavor to manage his medications including new medication for ADHD.

In no particular order, here are things I wish I knew beforehand:

1. I did not know that he would have extensive contact with women. While he is not in an SA program, the fact that he’s a SA is woven throughout the intake materials. The facility did put him in the housing unit for men, but that is also where they put all the women who create too much trouble in the women’s housing unit or the co-ed housing unit. (That fact continues to blow my mind.) His daily group meeting was also 6 women, plus Handsome and one other guy. Handsome is over two years sober, and by the account of his therapist he maintained good boundaries, but I’m told it’s not unusual for these process group folks to keep in contact after they leave. That’s awkward since one of our boundaries involves Handsome not texting, emailing, or calling women outside of work, childcare, or relatives.

2. I did not know how little time he would have to communicate with anyone. I knew he’d be on literal lock down when he checked in, but I figured things would loosen up afterwards. Not really. In the 3rd week he earned the ability to use his cell phone 2x day for about 20 minutes. Given that one of those sessions is when I’m at work and the kids are at school, that leaves 20 min or less a day to read some news, take care of “life stuff”, work, and family. And that’s only if the class he has before his media time ends on time.

3. I did not realize how iffy a discharge date can be. We were under the impression that Handsome was pre-approved for 30 days. Nonetheless, on day 25 the insurer did a review and could have cut off his coverage that day. They didn’t – and in fact they authorized an additional week of treatment – but Handsome watched others in his unit get sent packing early because their insurance ended coverage earlier than expected. (People were pulled out of meals and classes and told “Hey, your insurer cut you off so you can switch to self-pay or you will be discharged right now.” Like pack-your-bag-and-don’t-say-good-bye-to-anyone kind of right now.) My advice? Don’t buy a return ticket that isn’t easily refundable or changeable.

4. I did not know how hard the limited communication he could have with us would be on me (and at least one of my kids). I’m not sure what I expected, but the first two weeks he sounded miserable. Angry. Withdrawn. He actually sounded worse than before he left. I hadn’t expected that, and it was awful and disheartening. I cut our calls down to once a week (just me, he could still call the kids). It didn’t help. I’m not sure if I was expecting to hear something that I didn’t hear or if he was just drugged (they were certainly adjusting his meds regularly) but I ended up being a ball of anxiety after each call. My daughter held out a bit longer and then asked me if she had to do the calls. I asked her to try once a week. Handsome was devastated, but it might have been the wake up he needed because things seemed to turn a corner after that.

5. I did not know what an IOP is. If you’re like me, an IOP is an intensive outpatient program. After an inpatient program, they like to discharge patients to the care of an IOP as a step-down process. Broadly speaking, most are about 3 hours a day, 4 to 5 days a week. It sounds like it would be helpful BUT the burden of finding such a program seemingly falls to the family at home and, to a lesser extent, on the patient’s home therapists. Through my involvement in that research I learned a lesson about the single biggest issue with IOPs. If your loved one is coming out of an inpatient program, especially a good one with highly trained staff, they are likely to be (at best) gravely disappointed and (at worst) possibly set back by the way many IOPs are run. Very often there is no discernment between substance and process addictions so the treatment isn’t individualized. Also, it seems to be the case that much of the care is provided by interns working towards their degrees. After investigating every option within a 50-mile radius of our home, Handsome’s therapists opted to develop a Plan B – a custom plan that they would coordinate among themselves that would involve individual, group, and marriage counseling as well as EMDR.  I am honestly not sure how well this will work, but time will tell.

More to follow…