sex addiction – Betrayedwife.net

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.

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.

Impact.

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

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.

Do No Harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elephant in the Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intimacy Disorder in Sex Addiction

Intimacy has been on my mind a lot lately. Not the kind of intimacy found in the bedroom (although equally true there), but rather the intimacy that exists between spouses or partners. The knowing looks, the inside jokes, the pure depth of knowledge about the other person and their thoughts and dreams and wishes and traumas.

During the first 7 years of our marriage, I thought that Handsome and I were “intimate” with one another. I told him everything. EVERYTHING. I didn’t keep secrets. I thought he was the same, but after Porngate and round 1 of the Flame, I learned differently. He told me only what he wanted me to know. He image-managed quite well.

We are supposed to be doing an exercise now where we share a “transparency of the day” with each other. The share is supposed to be something that wouldn’t be obvious to the other person and, ideally, something that wouldn’t otherwise have been shared. It could be something like “It hurt my feelings when you _________,” or “It made me happy that you _______.” It could be sharing a trigger or a childhood wound or something we’re grateful for or an insight developed. The intent is to get Handsome more comfortable with intimacy and vulnerability, but I have benefited from participating too.

These things aren’t hard for me unless my share might hurt Handsome. As mad or disappointed as I sometimes get with him, there is a part of me that views him as fragile and wants to protect him. I could share all day otherwise though.

For Handsome, these shares are usually visibly painful. A surface level share might be fine, but if he digs deeper they are obviously stressful. He’s not only unaccustomed to sharing what’s on his mind, it pushes him towards fight or flight mode. He intellectually understands that connection is the opposite of addiction, but building that bridge of intimacy feels scary and threatening. If he is like that with me, you can imagine what he’s like with others in his life. It seems such a shame to me that no one really knows him, but it is because it’s so incredibly hard for him to share himself.

There was a point where he told me that he shared “everything” with the Flame. I know now that wasn’t exactly true. He shared the private details of our life with her, for sure, but he never let her see who he really is. He heavily managed his image with her too. She had no idea he drank daily and used sex to numb himself. He never told her about his childhood traumas or his debilitating fear of abandonment. He kept his feelings of worthlessness to himself.

That’s the fascinating thing to me. I know those things… the intimate secrets. He knows that I know those things. I’m still here. I didn’t run away. I have stayed the course even when it would have made perfect sense to leave. In spite of that, it’s still hard to the point of discomfort for Handsome to be vulnerable and open up to me. I’m well- versed in the explanation: the closer we get, and the more intimate we become, the more I trigger his fear of abandonment. Intellectually I understand the concept. Emotionally, it breaks my heart. It must be very lonely to walk through life thinking, feeling, and believing that you are only safe in solitude and secrecy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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.

Support or Sabotage re: Sex Addiction

I recently stumbled across a site called sisterhoodofsupport dot org . I’m not going to link to it because you can find it yourself if you want to after reading this. I am actually speechless. If you all knew me in real life you would understand how monumental that is. I literally argue for a living.

I don’t know the woman who runs the site, but someone clearly peed in her Cheerios at some point. She claims “By 2011 my [old] website marriedtoasexaddict dot com was bursting at the seams. Tens of thousands of women visited the site each month and were asking for a private place to discuss their experiences. They needed a place away from the prying eyes of the public and their families. A place where they could feel safe sharing the most intimate details of their ordeals with others who understood. In February of 2011 The Sisterhood of Support was Launched.” Hmmmm… “tens of thousands of readers” (a claim she states more than once) yet only a few comments and no substantive back and forth discussions on posts. And, in spite of the name of her old site and the mission of her new site, she flat out denies that sex addiction is real.

I’m actually marginally okay with the addiction deniers. There are crazy people everywhere and as long as they don’t force me to join them, they can do as they please. I am, however, indignant when someone with no applicable expertise tries to pass themselves off as an expert. The author/host backs up her opinions by stating “Because of my medical background I also bring a vast amount of scientific research.” Oh really? She was (is?) a nurse. Nurses are awesome. My mom was a nurse. I love nurses. I am, however, unaware of any RN degree that comes with a psychiatry or psychology degree, or even a deep dive in the DSM. According to the site her medical background seems to have been in hospice care. There is no peer reviewed research on her site. None. And yet she makes proclamations like this:

It’s one thing to tell a Partner “Hey, nothing is for certain. He might relapse. He might not.” That would be fair. Telling someone to bail upon the discovery of their spouse’s acting out because “long term change simply does not happen” and using one’s “medical background” as some indicia of authority or expertise??? That is seriously screwed up.

I’m 25 months out from my first DDay. Had I found that site back then? Holy crap. And sadly, the few stories that accompany the blog posts are heart breaking. Partners are reaching out, looking for facts and support, and what they are getting is nothing more than doom and gloom. She somehow manages to make ChumpLady look like Little Suzie Sunshine by comparison. I’m surprised she doesn’t accept ads from divorce lawyers.

To be clear, I don’t think that any partner of a sex addict should be hoodwinked into any assurance that their spouse will recover or that they will stay sober. I also don’t think anyone should put all their marbles in the “my marriage is so much better post-affair” hopper. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t be. It all depends on what it was truly like beforehand and how much work both parties put in post-discovery and every day of your life thereafter. To me it is also true that there is a sex addiction industry blossoming that includes a number of questionable practitioners and methodologies. That said, the mantra of “Abandon hope, all who enter here… [insert wailing sounds]” seems a bit hysterical. And like sour grapes.

I agree with her that there is a lack of peer reviewed research on sex addiction and the benefits (or lack thereof) of certain treatment methods. Her position that data can’t come from surveys or statements from the addicts themselves, however, would invalidate almost all studies of psychological and psychiatric issues, including those regarding betrayed spouses. There is no objective, observable measure of my trauma, for example. You have to ask me about it and I have to tell you or describe it to you. A researcher would need to depend on me to be truthful and/ or build in a margin of error to account for untruths. The author/ host simply can’t have it both ways: citing Dr. Minwalla on one hand (whose own research involves partner interviews), and yet undermining and invalidating addict interviews on the other.

I fully and freely acknowledge that my own husband may fall flat on his face and our marriage may end. Only time will tell. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t think Handsome knows for sure either even though he would bet the farm that he won’t relapse. That being said, this “expert” certainly doesn’t know – or have any legitimate basis to know – and is in no position to make these absurdly definitive proclamations.

When You Can’t Catch a Break

To be clear, the guy in the photo above isn’t Handsome, but it might as well have been him.

When we last left off, Handsome was scoping out rehab centers for a 30-day inpatient stay. We had basically reached the point where he either needed another leap forward or we needed some kind of a therapeutic separation for my sanity. He’s sober, but not in good recovery otherwise. By Christmas Eve he had his choices narrowed down to two rehab centers. We had a lovely Christmas. On the 26th he learned that our insurance will pay for 100% of either rehab center. All that was left was to pick a location and book a plane ticket. Cool.

But also way, way too simple. And NOTHING is ever simple these days. I should have seen the storm clouds moving our way on the horizon…

Handsome thoughtfully decided to get a few chores done around the house before vanishing for 4 weeks. One task involved changing the light bulb in the decorative fixture over our foyer stairs. The light is about 2 stories over the closest landing. There is no good, safe way to remove the glass shade and change the bulb, except possibly driving a rented cherry picker or bucket truck onto the lawn and coming in through a window. Opting not to do that, Handsome tried to stand on the railing of the stairs as he has done other times. This time he lost his balance… with the glass shade in his hand. (Yep, start cringing here… you see where this is going…) He basically fell 2 stories ONTO the glass shade.

I was at work. How do I learn of this? By this text from my 10 year old:

So I call Handsome and my hysterical 13-year old answers the phone. I knew it was bad when she told me that Handsome told her to call 911. (This is a guy who would try to drive himself to the ER in almost any kind of emergency.) Two ambulances and a trip to our nearby Level 1 trauma center later, and he is taken into surgery within hours to clean and close the wounds to his arm and abdomen. He was exceedingly lucky as no major organs were damaged and he didn’t break any bones.

So, in some ways, perfect time to go to rehab, right? Can’t exactly go skiing or even to work. Nope. Apparently he will not be accepted at rehab until his sutures are removed in about two weeks. We’re working on seeing if there is any flexibility on that issue, but if that remains the case a 30-day stay won’t be possible. He’ll have exhausted his available leave and will be just a few days short of the full 30 he needs.

This was an awful accident that could have been much, much worse. I’m relieved that Handsome is home and healing and nothing is broken or severely damaged. I’m sad for Handsome that he’s hurting. I’m also sad that what seemed to be coming together so well for his recovery is at risk of being blown out of the water. It was a big step for him to commit to a 30-day inpatient stay. Having it fully paid for is amazing. I’d hate to see that opportunity disappear. The implications – for both of us – are serious and material. We were both counting on this to help us. It’s not how I wanted to roll into 2020. Please send some good vibes our way in the hope that we can get this all sorted out.

I hope everyone has a safe, healthy, and Happy New Year!

Inpatient Rehab for Sex Addiction – Suggestions Needed

No, Handsome hasn’t relapsed. Yes, he is still sober (2 years next week) but he is … stuck. He goes to his meetings and he makes all of his appointments. Intellectually he knows what he needs to work on and how to go about working on it. He just can’t seem to bring himself to actually DO much. His emotional regulation is still crap. He has a decent pool of resources to rely on, but when his ship is sinking he is unable (unwilling?) to reach out to anyone or to do much of anything about it. He simply can’t bring himself to call on anyone for help when he needs it and yet he remains utterly unable to right his own ship.

Both our CSAT and Doc 2 have strongly suggested that he attend a 30+ day inpatient rehab where he can focus on family of origin issues, traumas, and other things and where he could hopefully develop the emotional regulation skills he so desperately needs. I believe that for proximity issues alone, they’re pointing him towards KeyStone Center outside of Philadelphia. I hear that Russell Brand did a stint there. He writes fondly of his recovery but less so of the facility. Also, rather than staff physicians and counselors they use an “independent contractor” model which seems a bit sketchy to me.

Handsome can go anywhere in the country. He isn’t stuck on the East coast. If you or your partner have insight on any inpatient rehab programs, whether positive or negative, please share them. We originally connected with Dr. Minwalla through relationships built here in the blogosphere (and he was an absolutely fabulous asset early on in Handsome’s recovery), so I value and appreciate any recommendations or criticisms you may have for any facility. Information would be particularly helpful on the program broadly (particularly substance versus fluff), duration, family involvement (if any), and insight on whether sex addiction is truly a specialty or area of expertise. It seems that there are a number of facilities that profess expertise in sex addition when they actually have little training or meaningful experience in that area.

It’s not a sure thing that Handsome will be going, but I’m type A enough to try to get some ducks in a row just in case it actually happens. As always, I thank you all for any assistance you can provide.

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.

In the Moment

I don’t normally post here in real time. I generally take a day or two to draft, revise, and re-think. Not today.

I am scheduled to meet Handsome’s new therapist tonight. Unlike Doc #1, this gentleman is a CSAT and specializes in treatment of sex addicts. (He adheres to the trauma model as far as spouses are concerned, not codependency.) I’m anxious for this meeting as I feel as though Handsome spun his wheels with the last doc. I’m not intending to walk in there and dump all over Handsome, but I am intending to be honest. That means some of it is going to be tough for Handsome to hear.

Even though I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity, I’m nervous to have this appointment as well. Scratch that. I’m start-popping-Ativan-level freaked out. Why? In no particular order:

– On some deep, dark level, I want this guy to fix my husband. I know and fully understand that he can’t. (I get it. I really do. It’s just…)

– Talking about Handsome in a frank but honest way can still elicit a good bit of resentment and anger. If there was a fairly immediate follow up appointment between Handsome and the doc to address any of those emotions that arise, I’d feel better. There isn’t. Seems like wildly poor planning to me.

– My family is heading out of town on a road trip Saturday morning. Trips with Handsome have been hit or miss during recovery. I am not excited to get in a car with him for a 4+ hour drive if he’s in an angry or resentful place. Again, the lack of immediate follow up seems like a really bad idea.

– This doc has been listening to Handsome talk about me for 3+ months. I have no idea what he’s expecting. I feel oddly like it’s a major job interview. I don’t need him to like me, but I do feel like I’m in the hot seat. I’m accustomed to pressure, but I’m feeling overwhelmed.

I have tried to talk to Handsome about how I feel. He assures me it will all be fine. I’m less certain, and I really can’t take another iffy trip with Handsome. My thought is to open with my concerns and offer to postpone if the doc cannot follow up with Handsome tomorrow. I’d rather waste an hour in the waiting room and kick the can down the road than have it all blow up on me this weekend. I have enough posts in the can about long- planned get-aways gone awry.