acting out – Betrayedwife.net

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.

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.

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.

The Backslide – Anger

Handsome is off at an inpatient rehab. More on that to follow in a week or three.

I’m putting pen to paper because suddenly, I am experiencing my own two-steps-back in my recovery. Even though Handsome did not relapse and he went mostly willingly to rehab, I am angry at him. Like really, really mad as hell. I thought that I had worked through and processed my anger after all of the DDays. I thought that I had worked through and dealt with my anger at all of the screw up and bombs in between. Yes, there were occasional flares of what seemed mostly like exasperation and frustration, but not like this. Yet, this is where I find myself recently.

I’ve noodled it for a few days. Why now? Why is the anger back with such force? I have come up with a few theories:

1. Yes, he’s in a locked down medical facility, but he’s also playing with horses and going on hikes and singing songs around a campfire while I am breadwinner, chef, taxi driver, washer woman, dog walker and homework helper. There’s some resentment there. While I know it isn’t helpful it also isn’t unjustified. He’s the addict and yet the burden of this treatment falls squarely on me and my kids. That sucks.

2. I’ve never really had the luxury of letting my anger come out before. Yes, I cursed at him under my breath and out of earshot of our kids for weeks after DDay 1, but after that life simply had to go on. Our kids needed me to not be a banshee in front of them. My anger took a back seat to preserving our family. Once it became clear he was a sex addict, my anger seemed somewhat inappropriate (you wouldn’t scream at a schizophrenic for their disorder, so how do you scream at a SA, I thought). I’m sure I was angry – I was devastated, so it was surely in that mix – but I shifted to trying to get him appropriate help and giving him space to work his recovery. I marched on and plastered a smile on my face. Life went on. Without him around every day though, it’s like a pressure valve has been released. It’s all coming out. I tried to change our cat litter last week (a task that I’d never done before in my life) and managed to overturn the garbage can and dump dirty litter all over our laundry room. An hour of clean up, bleaching, and repeated carpet shampooing later and I’m pretty sure that I wished him death in a fire-filled pit of kitty poop hell. I was alone, so the anger poured out without consequence. So did the tears.

3. He simply isn’t here. While it’s clear something is missing, it’s not all bad. Far from it, in fact. Our kids are helping out and literally getting along better than I’ve ever seen them. I’ve rolled up my sleeves and found time to clean and to clear clutter that hadn’t been touched in years. I’ve made such a dent that one thing became evident – Handsome did nothing around our house other than laundry. Before he fell back into his addiction he would dust and vacuum, polish woodwork, mop and things like that. It’s clear to me that hasn’t happened in forever. Given what I’ve been able to accomplish in a few weekends on my own even with working full time + and all my other inherited tasks, any reason he has for not helping is pure BS. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt about being busy (among other things) but the reality is that it’s just another example of how I made my needs small to cater to him. I am dedicated to ensuring that doesn’t happen again.

That is what I think leads to the main root of my anger. I am living a nice, normal, hectic but happy life right now. With Handsome temporarily out of the picture I see clearly how devastating his behavior was both during the throes of his addiction and at the lowest points during his recovery. I am happier and less lonely than I was for the last six months, and yet HE IS NOT HERE. I miss him, but not the “him” I’ve seen since last May, and certainly not the “him” I saw during his acting out.

What I thought was tolerable when I was in the fish bowl with him is clearly intolerable from outside. Addicts can suck all of the oxygen out of a room and, in our case, I see how much he sucked out of this family. I’m really angry at him for that, but I am almost equally mad at myself that I couldn’t see that in real time and that I allowed it to happen.

Before Handsome left for rehab I made it clear that upon discharge he wouldn’t be coming straight home. He can spend a week or three in a tiny AirBnB or economy hotel while he reintegrates into his job and our family. He needs to meld to our new normal. Not the other way around. One good thing to come from this anger is a hard commitment by me to ensuring that things don’t go back to the way they were before.

In the Moment – Part II

I met with Handsome’s new doc for the first time last week. It was not, to be honest, quite the calamity I expected. Handsome was mostly controlled and, for him, almost unusually reserved. I didn’t see any resentment till we were in the car on the way home, and only a very small dose.

I’m a person who never turned down a good visual aid, so I showed up with one. I prepared a “trauma timeline” covering the bigger traumas caused by my husband in the last two years. Think DDays, discoveries (lies uncovered), vacations ruined, waitress-gate, and the like. To each of the 16 traumas on the timeline, I attached a small image: a plain dot for a smaller trauma (but one still big enough to make the list), a small explosion for a slightly bigger trauma, and a red bomb for the biggies. Of note, there were three red bombs on the timeline since June. I asked Doc 2 how I could be expected to heal or stay in the marriage when the traumas are unrelenting. My simple comment was that Handsome needs to stop hurting me.

We talked about Handsome’s struggles with integrity. We talked about his anger. Doc 2 did, at one point, start talking about how wonderful it is that Handsome is throwing himself into this recovery process and how committed he is to his sobriety and… I just kind of sat there. It’s not that I disagree necessarily, but I’m ambivalent at best. Doc 2 seemed befuddled that I didn’t jump for joy so he went on about how Handsome is so forthcoming about what he did and how he is so willing to share all of that with me. Again, he looked to me seemingly for some kind of validation and I said “Well, Handsome has always been willing to tell me things about what he did, it’s just that 90% of the time those things were untrue or grossly minimized. As far as his sobriety, I’m sure that being sober from one’s addictions is very hard. I’m sure it’s a challenge every day. That said, while I appreciate the point you are making about my husband’s sobriety I’m not going to get excited over him not sleeping with other women and having emotional affairs for two years. I never agreed to anything less from him. If all I get out of this is a sexually sober husband, but I still have to put up with all this other BS, that’s not enough for me.”

I realized after I left that the last part is really the essence of my current state of mind. I’m glad he’s sober (beats the alternative) and I’m sure it’s not easy (really, while I can’t say that I understand it I do believe that it must be hard for him), but there simply has to be more for me. More empathy, more kindness, more thoughtfulness, more patience, more honesty, more connection, and more love. That is where I think Handsome has struggled most. It’s as if it takes all he has to stay sober and do his recovery work and so there’s no “more” left for me. (To be fair, he often has little left in the tank for his own needs, which may also be part of the problem.)

Doc 2 intends to increase his sessions with Handsome to twice a week while Handsome is off on medical leave. I think that’s a great idea. He says he has a plan for what he wants to focus on. Fabulous. I’m supposed to go back in 5 weeks to assess any progress from my perspective. Fine. I just hope it all helps.

We did have a lovely road trip. Handsome and my kids had never been to Niagara Falls, so we jumped in the car and did an overnight stay. It was the birthday present I asked for. Grand gestures are not in my husband’s wheelhouse so, although we celebrated his 50th on the Rhine somewhere around Amsterdam, I was unlikely to get anything like that or a theater weekend in New York or a stay in some lovely spa somewhere. I asked for what I thought he could possibly pull off. He had booked a beautiful room overlooking the Falls and bought tickets for different activities and he even helped pack. Aside from some brooding and snark from my soon to be 13-year old daughter (where did my sweet girl go????), it was two great days of fun. We had adventures and some misadventures but I’m glad we did it and I’m glad it was wonderful.

Dissecting a Marriage to Foster Healing

I decided, just prior to Christmas, that I was done pulling punches with Handsome. I was in crisis mode – and thus we were in crisis mode – and I needed him to understand how bad I thought it actually was (particularly after he lied, again,about breaking his sobriety from alcohol, again). It appears that he received and understood the message. Just in case, I reiterated it with our CSAT and she has drilled into him that he is seriously at risk for blowing the most meaningful relationship he’s ever had. His individual therapist has done the same. I cannot say that it will matter in the long run, but I am confident that he cannot say that he didn’t know/ understand/ realize that I have reached my breaking point.

I say that honestly, but the interesting thing is that I’m reasonably sure that I’m at peace where I’m at. Yes, if he screws up again he’ll be working on his recovery in a bed-sit far from his kids and me, but I know that’s on him and not me. Yes, things could still end up in flames. Again, I feel as though he has been given every freaking opportunity possible to succeed. If he fails, it’s not on me. I have not given up… not at all. I’m just placing the burden of his recovery where it belongs: on Handsome.

One thing that he shared with me recently is that he feels like his recovery is in fits and spurts because he struggles to avoid getting burnt out or bored after a bit (this is the adult ADHD in effect). We realized that, to a degree, things were more productive when we were task oriented. You would think that would be easy for him since he is supposed to be working the 12 steps. He asked for other things to be added to the mix.

One of the tasks that we were supposed to do for our couples retreat last year was a marriage timeline. We did cursory ones at the retreat and, to put it mildly, they were quite different. Handsome’s was more or less a straight line along the “highly satisfied” axis, while mine started to look like a roller coaster starting in about 2012 when his acting out started (unbeknownst to me). I think we were each stunned to see the other’s graph. I couldn’t figure out how/ why he would cheat – relapse into his sex addiction, really – if he was so “highly satisfied” and he seemingly had no idea that I was truly unhappy so often during the time he was acting out. We clearly needed a more careful discussion to really share what was going on with each of us. We finally had that chance. That’s my actual timeline at the top of this post. I’d love to tell you that the discussion went well. I can’t. It didn’t (but it turns out okay in the end).

Prior to 2012, the only big dip in my satisfaction with our marriage came when I found out that I was pregnant with my son. (It really wasn’t a slide to that point as the timeline seems to indicate… that’s just a function of the milestones mapped out. It was a sudden drop.) It wasn’t that I didn’t want another child… it was simply that I had just figured how to balance one small child with a full-time job and the rest of life and I found myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to figure out how to keep it all together with the addition of a second child. Handsome seemed to think it was no big deal, and I felt like he ditched me to figure it out on my own. It was not until our son acquired a deadly bacterial infection two days after he was born that Handsome and I immediately re-connected as a team and started to get ourselves back on solid ground. We stayed there until The Flame made her first appearance three years later in mid-2012 (that’s the gigantic 2nd dip you see).

Since then, the roller coaster of our marriage – to me at least – is evident from my chart. Some things are obvious: I am not happy or satisfied in my marriage if I am being cheated on (like his initial emotional affair with The Flame) and lied to. Others are less obvious: times when I was unhappy because he was so detached from me, our kids, and the marriage in general because (I know now, but didn’t then) he was really far down the rabbit hole of his addiction.

I asked Handsome to re-do his timeline thinking that perhaps he was just delusional at the couples retreat and, indeed, his chart looks very different now. He insists he was almost always “somewhere between happy and very happy” in the marriage but his new chart is like a roller coaster during his acting out too.

Data analytics aren’t my thing, but after Handsome started acting out in 2012, the majority of his “happy” periods correspond with vacations and family events. It’s when we were home (and he was acting out daily) that he’s reporting that he was unhappy in the marriage. Coincidence? I think not. He recalls that at certain points we were bickering a lot and he was upset about any number of things but, as our CSAT pointed out, he has only just recently had the epiphany that some of my behavior was driven in large part by his crappy addiction-driven behavior. To use her analogy, he can’t complain about the taste of the water when he’s the one peeing in the well.

I’d love to be able to say that we completed this exercise and hugged it out, but that didn’t happen. I asked why he had indicated that he was “very unhappy” in our marriage when his mother died. Simply stated, he recalled being alone at her funeral. Nope. I handed off our 2 tiny kids (a herculean endeavor that’s a story in itself) to an army of sitters/ nannies… and got on a plane and flew to him and was there for 3 days, all the services, and the 11 hour car ride home. Over time, he just wrote me out of the experience in his mind. Sadly, I’m sure that historical re-write was one of his mental justifications for his acting out. I’m sure he whined about it to his APs. I can picture it… “she’s so mean she didn’t even bother to come to my mom’s funeral… .” In that moment, I got slapped in the face with exactly how deep his illness goes. I am not perfect, but when I KNOW I stepped up and was every bit the wife and partner I was supposed to be? Knowing that he had erased me from the entirety of the experience of the death of his mom? It made me feel every bit as “irrelevant” as he told his APs I was.

So, where’s the happy ending? We talked through this process with the CSAT yesterday. She walked him slowly through a number of things where Handsome’s reality and actual reality differ. She told him that moving forward in life he is going to have to question every negative “season” from that period of time and decide whether the memory is real or not. He’ll have to assess what role, if any, his addiction played in his perceived experience (was he peeing in the well or not?). Since our 2nd DDay Handsome has always acknowledged that he’s an addict, but I’m not sure that he even recognized the extent of his illness and how it truly corrupted his brain. This session was probably the first time that I saw that light bulb go off for him. As pissed as I am that he erased me from such a life altering event, I’m sympathetic to the fact that it surely couldn’t have been pleasant for him to think he was abandoned by me when his mom died. It breaks my heart that his almost sole memory of those days is of standing in the cemetery at her graveside with no one else around. There’s a lot his therapist could unravel in that one memory. (Did he view his mom’s death as abandonment and switch us somehow? Was this really the driver behind his relapse?)

We did end up in each other’s arms at the end of the session, because he realized that yes, I was there for him then, just as I’ve always been there for him. He realized that while his addiction may have been telling him that I didn’t love him, surely I did and still do because otherwise I’d have left a year ago, if not earlier. He realized that the negative narrative he told himself to justify his addictive behavior simply wasn’t real. Now, we can move forward and focus on reality.

A Week of Brutal Honesty – #5 – Handsome’s Clock is Ticking

This is the fifth and final post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first four posts here, here, here, and here. If you’ve hung in there with me all week, thank you. Getting these things off my chest has been cathartic and I appreciate all of the comments.

I keep waiting for Handsome to do a number of things: express empathy appropriately and when needed, get his head out of his alternate reality, and demonstrate a feeling of urgency about his recovery (including addressing his integrity and intimacy issues). So far, I’m mostly still waiting.

I had intended this post to be broadly about the issue of staying versus going and how I continue to struggle with that decision. And then… well, then this past Monday happened. Two things occurred on Monday that have amped up my sadness and apathy about Handsome’s recovery. Note that I didn’t say “anger.” I find myself slowly shifting away from anger and disappointment and into apathy.

Over the weekend I was going through our bathroom closet looking for a particular product I needed and I came across not one, but two boxes of condoms. The first box, a 40 pack (must have been wishful thinking), I recall purchasing myself after our son was born in 2009. He was born in May and I had to wait until September of that year to get an IUD. Thus, the condoms. Handsome hates condoms with the fire of 1,000 suns, and I think we used no more than 3 or 4 of them. After I got the IUD, we had no need for condoms and the box sat in the back of the closet collecting dust. Imagine my surprise at finding a second box of condoms with a much later 2016 expiration date (which would mean they were purchased in roughly 2012 or 2013). It was a 12 pack. Six were left. Handsome and I have not used condoms together since September of 2009.

My truth = Handsome bought the condoms to act out and have sex with his APs.

His “truth” = “I’ve never seen those before, but they must have been for us.”

Mind you, the issue isn’t actually the condoms. I know he had sex with other women, of course. (And a part of me would be glad/ relieved if he actually did use condoms with them because even though he insists he did, he hates them so much that I tend to doubt that.) The issue is the distorted thinking and/ or the lie. He knows he bought them. Even if he doesn’t remember buying them he at least knows that I did not buy them and that we did not use them together. And yet he can’t bring himself to own that reality.

After that discussion on Monday, Handsome headed off to his weekly therapy appointment. He generally calls me afterwards and I wanted to ask him to stop and pick up milk at the grocery store. When 20+ minutes had passed, I checked “Find Friends” on my phone to see if he was still at the doc’s and saw that he was apparently parked at a beer distributor between his doc and home. I didn’t freak out. Find Friends is often less than precise. I called him and asked him where he was. He told me that he was several miles away in a different town. Find Friends is not that inaccurate. I said nothing further. I can’t make him get a grip on his integrity. I can’t force him to tell the truth.

And that brings us to today. He admitted in our session with the CSAT that he drove from his therapist’s office to the beer distributor and bought and drank a beer on Monday. Handsome will still lie to protect himself. He will still gaslight me even when it’s obvious that I know the truth and I’m not buying his BS. I’m not sure what happened in his therapy session, but it clearly stressed him and rather than using any of the tools in his toolbox to deal with it he resorted to drinking. Again.

And me? I believe he is engaging in self-sabotage. It’s as if Handsome thinks he can’t recover so he is going to ensure that he won’t recover. It’s sad. He does so well on some things and on other things he is just floundering, but I’m the collateral damage. I’m going to enforce my boundaries. He needs to get himself to another multi-day intensive program of some kind within the next month. He needs to ramp up his meeting attendance and make daily calls to his sponsor and SA buddies. He can, as always, choose not to do these things, but then he needs to find an apartment to live in.

Boundaries and consequences are great, but my patience is wearing very thin. The goodwill I have for him is diminishing with each lie, with each incident of acting out (not sexually that I know of, but he’s clearly acting out in other ways). I’m not getting mad. I’m sliding into apathy. Our CSAT told him today that if I’m not mad he should be terribly afraid because it means that I’m finding my life jacket and putting it on and getting ready to jump ship. If he can right the ship, I’ll stay on board, but I’m not going to be dragged down with him. I love him more than he can imagine, but the clock is truly ticking. I cannot endure this for much longer. That’s the brutally honest truth here: I wanted deeply to move into 2019 with renewed hope and faith and energy, but I see that I’m still dealing with the same BS I was dealing with a year ago. I don’t think that I can do it for one more year, and that breaks my heart. 💔

A Week of Brutal Honesty – #4 – L is for Loser

Image result for loser meme

This is the fourth post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first three posts here, here, and here.

There really is no easy way to diplomatically address this, so I’m just going to dive right in. There are girls/ women who date broken and damaged men because they either like the drama involved in trying to get them to change, or they enjoy the project of trying to spiff them up, or they think it’s the best they can hope for in a relationship. That has never been me. With one particular exception (it was a brief, 6 month bad-boy phase right after college) I’ve dated guys who were squared away. I’ve never liked drama. I dated men who seemed to have confidence and were secure in who they were and what they wanted out of life. Some of them were selfish assholes, to be sure, but they were far from secretive or apologetic about their lives or their goals and dreams.

I had one long-term (10 year) relationship prior to Handsome and he was not a project in any way, shape, or form. Neither he, nor any of the men I dated, were into porn or escorts or massage parlors. They openly mocked the men who utilized such services. They referred to the women involved as dirty, skanky, trashy and a host of less printable names. Mind you, none of these guys were chaste. Every one of them was completely into sex, sometimes overwhelmingly so, with their own unique takes on kink. Every single one of them was reasonably adventurous, but they wanted that adventure with someone “clean.” That matched well with my sexual background and experience.

I came into my relationship with Handsome fully believing that men who paid for sex or sat in their basements self-pleasuring to porn were losers. Who pays for sex when you just go out and find someone you like and get it on?

If guys who watch porn and pay for sex are losers, what is my husband?

🙄

I struggle with this. Handsome has been a sex addict for decades… long before he met me. His pattern is to start a new relationship sober, and then after several years fall back into a phase of acting out until he walks away from the relationship (he tries to leave first so he isn’t dumped). Our CSAT calls this the “rinse and repeat” cycle. If I knew the truth about Handsome, I never would have dated him. I certainly never would have married him. And yet here we are. I find myself married to a man I deeply love, but now struggle to respect.

That’s a tough spot to be in. I used to look at him with admiration. Now, all too often I see him through glasses colored by sadness and pity, generally with a dose of resentment thrown in as well. When he would walk into a room pre-DDay, even when I was tired, or ticked, or hungry for that matter, I would smile and get a warm fuzzy feeling. Now, I often look away. There is still love there, but it has a lot of hurt and disgust piled on top of it.

And yet this result was very predictable. Nothing in my background would suggest to Handsome that I wouldn’t be violently disgusted by his behavior. His boss is (allegedly) a complete male whore and Handsome and I used to talk about his antics disparagingly all the time and discuss how sorry we felt for his wife. More than half of that time Handsome was doing the same or worse things. (Transference, perhaps?)

Handsome certainly knew that when I found out that he’d been going down on the town syphilitic whore, it would turn my stomach for him to do that to me. He had to realize that knowing that he came inside women who were basically smashed by a steady train of paying guys all day long, having him inside me would be a lot less meaningful or fun or intimate. He must have known that the knowledge that he trolled for anonymous pussy online – and that he’d essentially fuck anything – means that whatever he says to me about wanting me is kind of a moot point. Why wouldn’t he want me after what he’s been fucking?

Of all of the issues I’m covering this week, this may be the one that is most difficult to overcome. Handsome has to work – hard – to regain my esteem and respect. So far, a year in, his record is lackluster. Yes, he has made strides, but then he undoes everything with a giant helping of lies or trickle truth or gas lighting. That can’t continue forever.

I want desperately to rebuild trust and respect for him, but only Handsome controls whether or not that is possible. I want to look at him and be proud of all of the hard work that he is doing to heal himself and us. I have had that at fleeting times throughout the last year, and then it vanishes when he undermines and self-sabotages his own hard work. I’m willing to do everything I can to help him, but he also needs to help himself.

Tomorrow – A Week of Brutal Honesty – #5 – Handsome’s Clock is Ticking

A Week of Brutal Honesty – #2 – Regrets: I have a few (but maybe not what you think)

Image result for regret meme

This is the second post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first post here.

My best friend is one of the few people I have told about what is going on with Handsome. She is supportive of me, for sure, and also of the marriage (if Handsome does the work needed). She is also frank with me in a way that only a best friend can be. She asked me if I regret marrying Handsome in the first place. Hmmm…..

Do I regret marrying him? No. I don’t. I made the choice to marry him based on what I thought to be true. The lies only recently came to light. I can’t undo 14 years of marriage (and 2 awesome kids), but if he wants to continue in this relationship he needs to double down on his efforts to rebuild what he has carelessly and selfishly destroyed. He can’t just float through and be occasionally nicer to me and think it will fix everything. He needs to figure out how to show empathy without pouting. He needs to be able to articulate how he is going to work to make things better, and then he needs to follow through and do those things.

That said, I do have other regrets:

I regret the way that I handled Round 1 with the Flame back in 2012. Here was my husband, in daily inappropriate communication with another woman and, after I found out and pitched a hissy fit, I took him at his word that it was over and done with and that we were all good. I believed him when he said he was sorry. (He wasn’t sorry. He thought that I had over reacted. He had no intention of not communicating with her ever again.) I believed him when he assured me that he wouldn’t humiliate me that way again. (Ha! Little did I know…) I was upset enough to leave him over the incident. I told him that very bluntly, but I don’t think he ever believed it. Still, I didn’t insist on counseling or take any other protective steps. That was stupid on my part.

I regret how I handled Handsome’s drinking. After this episode with the Flame, Handsome’s drinking escalated for a time. He had always had a few beers (2-3) but this is when it got really bad, seemingly out of nowhere. It was taking a toll on our family and on Handsome’s health. I grew so worried about him that I actually reached out to his dad and asked him to come stay with us and talk to Handsome about his drinking. Handsome’s dad has been sober for a few decades and still attends AA. I thought he might be helpful. He was useless. First, Handsome didn’t drink in front of his dad the entire time his dad was at our house (heaven forbid that daddy see him drink 8-10+ beers a night). His dad left thinking I was just a crazy wing nut. I also know now that Handsome’s dad is likely a key component in his family of origin issues. He is squarely in the man-box, and is seemingly incapable of empathy let alone much self-awareness. He probably couldn’t have helped if he had wanted to and my sense now is that he could never admit that his golden child is also an alcoholic (like him, and Handsome’s mom, and Handsome’s brother…). Again, I would have been better off to insist on marriage or family counseling and see if the drinking could have been addressed there.

I regret the way that I handled Porngate. When Handsome finally stopped gas lighting me and came clean, I should have insisted on counseling of some kind. I didn’t. Again, I believed him when he said he was sorry and that it was “just for fun” and that it was over. (Yep. I was such a freaking idiot!) If it was no big deal he would have owned it and brushed it off. He didn’t. Today, I kick myself for not seeing (1) that a pattern of acting out behavior was emerging, and (2) that Handsome was escalating, and (3) that he was lying through his teeth. Perhaps more importantly, I was crushed to find out about all the porn. Handsome never had to deal with that devastation. He never addressed how it impacted me. I just had to push it down inside, and he marched on and started engaging in increasingly outrageous behavior about a month later. What followed was by no means my fault, but I do feel as though I missed an opportunity to possibly prevent things from blowing up in such epic fashion. If he had help earlier, maybe his addiction could have been identified and addressed before it got so terribly out of hand.

Finally, I regret not trusting my gut more and not speaking up for myself. I’ve written about that here on multiple occasions, and it continues to be true. I did not know about Handsome’s affair with the Whore (or all the others) prior to DDay #1, but there were things that gave me a great sense of unease and I just tamped that feeling down and ignored that gut warning. I’ll never do that again. I trust my gut now. If something seems wrong, it probably is, and Handsome no longer gets the benefit of any doubt. Quite the opposite, in fact. Moving forward I am highly likely to always side with my truth (or my sense of it) over his. That’s his fault, of course, and perhaps it will change with proven integrity over time, but we aren’t anywhere near that yet when staggered disclosures continue to occur.

Tomorrow: A Week of Brutal Honesty – #3 – A Crime of Passion (a.k.a. Why I’ll never get picked for a jury)

Why I think Miss Kentucky and my husband have a few things in common

I would like to share a few pictures with you:

…with our kiddo at the Kentucky Derby in 2015

When we met this beautiful, bright young woman at the Kentucky Derby, she was absolutely delightful. She was kind and gracious and went out of her way to make our daughter’s day special. (My daughter told her that she looked like a magical princess and that she loved her crown.) I was dismayed to see last week’s news and the sad developments in her life.

What do I see when I look at these photos? I see a woman not entirely unlike my husband. For the record, Handsome did not act out with minors. Otherwise, I see this as a “there but for the grace of God” kind of thing. I see a physically beautiful human being who is apparently afflicted with some gaping hole in her soul. I see a wife (married just under 3 years, to a wealthy coal family scion) and mother who apparently couldn’t self-soothe or find sufficient peace or joy in her life and who made really, unbelievably bad decisions. She violated a position of trust. She acted out through her place of employment. It all caught up to her.

I am sure that it would be distasteful to my husband to be compared to her. It would probably piss him off. Handsome draws that bright line (minors vs non minors) in the sand. Yes, there is a legal bright line there for VERY good reason, but I’d suggest that bedding down with your “mentee” 32 years your junior is creepy and immoral too. So is being a cog in the sex trade/ human trafficking wheel, and sexting/ meeting up with anonymous folks online (who we hope and believe were over 18, but…?). So is engaging in some of your acting out during your work day, in your work uniform. Handsome would say that there are big differences. I don’t think so.

A year ago, I’m not sure that I would have felt much sympathy for this young woman. Now, I do. And I certainly empathize with her husband and kids. Every single day I am thankful that my family didn’t end up with news crews parked on our front lawn or my husband’s pictures all over the local news. Having them on Facebook was bad enough.

I hope that she gets whatever help she needs to address her issues. I hope that for her husband and kids as well. I also take this as a reminder that you never know what struggles someone has in their life just from looking at outward appearances. A few years ago, she seemed to be on top of the world. Now, it’s all gone.

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
André Malraux