One wife’s story toward hope:
I have a secret.
I think to love wholly we have to choose love. I wanted to share about this for sometime, but I kept feeling like I would be betraying my husband, or whining, or revealing that we have some serious problem. But all that aside, I think that I am not alone. In fact, I KNOW I am not alone.
My husband and I are on a journey toward intimacy. Whole intimacy. Knowing each other fully and not holding back what is uncomfortable to share. That is not something I thought I’d ever fully embark on, but the last few months I’ve seen how important it is in order to be a good mother. I want to model for Nolie a marriage that has bumps that get resolved and a Mom who has problems and hurts that she strives to grow and heal through. I am done brushing under the rug and forcing change on everyone but myself.
So here we are, counseling once a week journaling everyday, and facing the pain that is the fallout of addiction. I am writing this out, our story, so that any other woman out there knows that just because he confesses and begins healing it does not mean that healing follows for you- you have to pursue it. God is desperate to give you joy and worth restored but pretending that the problems lie only in your husband is not the way to grow.
About three years ago I found out about my husbands pornography addiction. He struggled alone for years and there were no obvious signs on the outside. To me he seemed perfect. Trust me when I say that too good to be true is almost always a sign that things are awry. I found out about this by deleted history on his computer that he hadn’t eliminated.
I sat on the floor of my room and cried loudly while the girls I lived with suffered through the noise. Charlie proposed to me and not two months later I found out about his addiction and how far down the spiral he had fallen. After I confronted him about the porn and a couple of days had passed, I was starting to fall back into our normal and pretend that nothing had really happened. I wanted to move on and adopt the “boys will be boys” mentality. Then he confessed to me that he had gone to a strip club, multiple times. My heart was destroyed. I was devastated. My trust was completely shattered. Every “I love you” and “you are enough” and (especially) “you are beautiful” were lies to me now and stung stronger and stronger with each time I recalled them. I called it all into question. Every time he had tucked me in and then driven “home” because we were trying so hard to remain completely pure for each other was a lie. He had driven to the club. Each kiss and “I love you” felt like it never mattered. I was devastated and angry.
Charlie was lost and alone and humiliated. He had tried to change on his own for years and years without much success or support and now he had to face a representation of all that pain in my tears and obvious hurt. It was at this point that he started healing. That is the common misconception with this addiction. That WE start healing here. But the reality is that for the addict the healing begins with that first true confession but for the girlfriend (fiancé, wife) that first confession is the death of a person you loved. Healing was no where near me at that time, growth was far from me- removed. I had to mourn the man that I thought I had known.
I was too angry to talk. Too angry to even understand what I was feeling. There weren’t many feelings for awhile, just anger and my own need for control. We had a wedding date set, we had a venue, I had a dress and worst of all. I had announced this wedding to everyone. And now, how could I marry this man? How could I trust him?
When God led the Israelites into the promise land He tells them that He won’t remove every obstacle because if He did the beasts would overtake the land. So He leaves some roughness for them to endure. The first year of healing felt like that. We knew that we were moving into where we were supposed to be- heartbreaking honesty and accountability. However, all the same habits, obstacles and pains were there. In that year I couldn’t pray hard enough for God to just heal my best friend. To take this away from him. I focused so solely on everything being wiped out that I didn’t take a moment to realize that if that happened the beasts would overtake my heart would break harder again. Because, if the desires had been wiped away and yet our relationship was still rough and I still felt sick then what would I have to blame? What inspiration for honesty and trust would remain? This first year was the hardest.
We quickly realized that pride aside there was no way we could get married that year. With the support of my Mom and Dad I was able to agree with everyone and postpone. At the time I felt like it would never happen. I would never get married to anyone, but God began to guard my heart and let me sit awhile in my pain before moving me toward any big decision. I praise God daily that he allows me to be a slow mover and changer. So I sat in that pain, but instead of following his beckoning to healing I let it fester and grow into control and anger. The time that follows was sick.
Charlie had an overwhelming hill to climb. Changing his habits and dying to his desires daily became all we focused on. He joined men’s groups, did one-on-one counseling, journaling and actively confessed. But nothing helped, he was still tormented every day with the desire to lie to me and continue on this deprave journey in secrecy. The scariest part of sexual addiction isn’t the acting out, it is the thought life that is cultivated through years and years of fantasy. For Charlie to learn to live outside of his head was one of the first hurtles that he faced.
I didn’t help this process. I had been so broken by his confession that I started to believe that this really was all my fault. If we had, had sex. If I was thinner. If I was more beautiful. If I wasn’t so chatty, annoying, obnoxious, insecure… fill in the blank- I believed it. The effect of thinking this way burned us both. I became a crazy person, obsessed with knowing every detail of his past. Every website, every word uttered to his ‘favorite’ stripper, every minutia of his sins- all under the guise of confession and accountability. Charlie felt obligated to tell me everything because of how convicted about lying he felt. And I wanted to know everything as some means of punishing myself for being less than perfect.
6 months into that year I was hit with another blow. He had lied again. He was looking at porn again. I hit bottom here. Even with my constant questioning he was lying. Even with counseling and men’s groups, he was lying. There seemed to be nothing sacred. The horrible thing about trust is that there is no way to ‘build’ it. Because at some point the person who won’t trust has to just put their fears to the side (only a little) and choose to start trusting. I had to choose to start trusting that God would heal me even through the lies, because I could not believe Charlie. At this point something in the healing process hit Charlie too. He got rid of his computer. He threw it away completely.
We had a conversation around this time that was a light bulb for him. I sat on the bathroom floor of my studio apartment crying in sobs and gasps telling him that this would all never change. That he would always choose every other woman over me. In that word he looked at me and said “you think I choose this?” . In all the years he never truly saw what he was doing as a choice. He hid behind the idea that it was an addiction he couldn’t control, a compulsion. That was a lie. Satan wants us to feel completely powerless to our sins but then I told him “you get to choose” and he crumbled. In just that sentence a weight was lifted. He did not have to be the sick person he identified himself as, he could be who God was calling him to be. The husband he was called to be, the man that he was called to be. He didn’t have to name himself as sick, pervert, out of control, he could believe that he was lovely, pure, chosen and forgiven.
Tolkein describes this moment best… “a thing is about to happen that has not happened since the Elder Days; the Ents are going to wake up and find that they are strong.”
Once choice entered the equation all bets were off. My husband found strength. The last two years have been living in sobriety. That’s right. He has been completely, and I say this with assurance and newfound trust, free of porn and the like for over two years now. That is not to say something clicked and it all got easy. It has gotten harder and taken more and more discipline but he and I are doing the work daily. Also, knowing that we can succeed brings with it a lot of power. Being told you are good changes things in you, when we think all we are is bad then we are bad. But there is empowerment in being honored.
I mentioned that we do counseling weekly. That is a relatively new development. We have done individual counseling and are part of some group things but couples counseling is something we haven’t done since before we were married. I cannot say enough about how this weekly checkup has helped. This has called me into accountability. Previously this entire journey has been about Charlie and his healing and work to get out of addiction. I hadn’t even found the words to talk about how it has affected me. Through counseling I am learning about the imprints that his addiction has left in my soul. I am just as wounded and susceptible to addiction and pain as he is. And now, I have to face that, just like he did. The ease of saying “its his problem” has ended and my work has begun. Because, regardless of it not being my fault (in anyway, I get this) it does have a huge effect on me and has left lasting impressions on my life.
Charlie has been facing this addiction and giving himself over to God daily. He has been walking in the knowledge of needing to surrender and die to himself daily, that is part of the healing that starts for an addict from confession on. I however have not. Remember how I mentioned that an addict starts healing at confession and the wife has to begin mourning there? I never did that. I just started moving-moving-moving, wanting to fix everything and help Charlie go through the motions. I didn’t even realize that in all of this I developed my own addictive behaviors.
I am addicted to negative thinking about myself. Generally I am a glass half full girl to the maximum. I believe that God brings abundant Joy and that I need to notice that and not focus only on the downside of everything. But somewhere along the line I stopped adopting that mentality about myself and my body. Because I began to blame myself, subconsciously, for all of my husbands acting out I started to rationalize all the reasons he “needed” porn. In the same way that an addict has a cycle, so do I. I start down a path (don’t eat that, your just going to get fatter, you won’t work out anyway, your pants will never fit, etc.) and entertain these thoughts for far, far longer than I care to admit. Then I let those thoughts sabotage anything healthy I can do for myself. I am working, along with counseling, to stop this. But that is hard.
That is where we are now. Charlie is working daily on his thought life and on pursuing honesty with himself and me. While I am a little bit earlier on this path and am working on not allowing even a hint of this self sabotage/hate to control me. Dying to self and learning to love the person that God created me to be is my daily struggle. While Charlie may have to work hard to not look at the girl who walks by in a low cut top I have to work just as hard to not compare myself to her.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
(Psalm 139 11-14)
I have clung to these verses and I have started to heal.
The beauty in this is that I have a partner who understands just how difficult it is to pull yourself out of a cycle of thinking and begin to change the very makeup of your identify. Charlie thought he would be ‘sick and perverted’ forever just as I had resolved myself to being ‘not enough and too fat’ for anyone to be satisfied by me. But as God is clothing me in his identify for me and daily reminding me that my name is inscribed on his palm and that he does not make mistakes, I am being made free. ‘
That was kind of a short wrap up for a long history but there isn’t really a neat ending to this. We will, for the rest of our lives, be dying to ourselves and having to ask for help in seeing what our identities in Christ truly are. I remain a glass half full type. I think that through all of this suffering and trial we have grown in leaps and bounds, we have made new friendships with people who hold me up and build me up. There is great joy in this horribly painful growth. And, we are now able to be a ministry to others. I am continually shocked by how not talked about these issues are (sexual addiction and self hatred) and yet how common they are, especially amongst christians. We are here and so willing to talk to others, couples and not about our struggles and how we are growing now and what has helped and worked for us. I know that without Gods divine hand on this I would not be nearly as willing to open up about such shame inducing guilt ridden issues.
I find so much hope and truth in this verse. It has redeemed me from sorrow more times than I can count.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11
