Came To Believe We Could: A Guest Post On Porn & Sexual Addiction
by Anonymous
"Please God don't let
me lose my family."
It was the first words I'd
directed heavenward in two years.
But in this moment, it
came so instinctively. I had no other option. My husband had left the house and
I didn't know if he was coming back.
So this was the rock
bottom I’d heard about in those 12-step meetings. My affair with my
friend’s husband had just been discovered.
My husband returned later
that night and the months of crying and praying began. The God that I had once eased out, filled my
heart with love the moment I sought it.
Even with this strength,
the road back was excruciating. I still had to face how I’d gotten
here. I recalled standing in the grocery
store line years earlier, and realizing that I was lonely. This was a pivotal realization for me because
for the first seven years of my marriage, I was fighting to change my husband.
All of my energy was directed towards him, so much so that I didn’t recognize
that I was very sick.
Immediately into my new
marriage, my husband drastically changed. He lost his motivation and zest for
life. He began to gain weight and seemed to always be angry with me,
demeaning me in front of family and friends. I tried to stop “criticizing him
so much”- his reasons for the anger. This just led me to stop talking
about any concerns I had about our finances, our relationship, or our
kids. We stopped communicating. He had no interest in me sexually so we
were roommates in every sense of the word.
One evening, I discovered
he had been searching for “nude adult pics” on a search engine. I could barely
understand him confess, through choked sobs, that he’d been excessively looking
at these things since he was 12. That night we held each other and I knew that
my love would save him.
I was wrong. How
could I anticipate the next several years we would spend in 12-step-meetings,
the months I'd fume in women’s support groups, and the meetings he’d attend
just to appease me but with a stubborn refusal to truly change? I’d threaten to leave, convinced I couldn’t
take one more day of this pain. And then
I’d feel like a weakling as my threats grew emptier and my resolution grew
weaker.
After seven years of this,
I was done trying to fix him. I had given up on him. I would endure until my
last child turned 18, the “12-Year-Plan” as I coined it.
Then one afternoon at
work, shortly after my grocery store realization, a small box popped up in the
bottom right corner of my computer. It
took me by surprise, as I had no idea that Facebook had a chat function.
“Good Morning!”
It was from a man I
vaguely knew but who was the Sunday school teacher of a past church
congregation. I would sit in his class and recognize something that I saw
in my husband- a broken man in need of someone to fix him.
Since saving my husband
was futile, I was game. His interest in me awoke a dormant desire in me
for emotional connection. Our chatting very quickly turned into sexting. At
first I was guilt-ridden but the excitement of our exchanges outweighed the
shame. Pretty soon I was typing things
that I never thought myself capable of thinking. I became that naughty girl,
completely proficient in pleasing a man- the same type of girl that my husband
had been replacing me with all these years. Sometimes during our chats, it felt
as if an electric current was running through my body. I was lightheaded and my
hands shook.
But what I soon realized
was that I was just part of this man’s own addiction. He could be downright
cruel at times and the lows were some of the deepest I’ve known. In those
moments of solidarity, in the middle of a lonely marriage, I realized I was
strung out on this man. A feeling of crazy possessiveness entered my heart. I
understood those ex-girlfriends who stalked and slashed tires. I wanted him. I needed him.
I couldn’t take one more
day of the drastic highs and lows and ended it, but saw no hope in fixing my
marriage. I white-knuckled through my
life.
Enter new friends from our
congregation who liked to live on the wild side. I was still going to church
for the sake of my children, but was getting drunk and smoking pot in my free
time, recreation that contradicted a major tenant of our faith. These new
friends did the same things and still managed to go to church each week and
flawlessly keep up the facade.
My husband and I started
spending every second with this couple. We would group text about what our next
fun adventure would be. Our kids and their kids became fast friends. One day at
work, I got a text from my friend’s husband about the weekend. This wasn’t a
group text, it was just to me. We
randomly texted about innocent topics at first.
And then it slowly got out of hand.
I was back in the throes of
my love addiction, feeling the validation and excitement. But this time, I had to face my friend as we
spent time together. I’d see her text pop up succinctly after her husband
had texted me. The intense remorse of my betrayal ran through my mind incessantly
and led me to find solace in my love addiction. It was a dreadful, dark spiral.
We quickly allowed the
texting to turn into meeting up with each other. At this point I was completely
out of touch with my consciousness. My better angels had grown silent. The
moments we were together, I felt as if I was in a dream. My heart was racing,
my entire body was shaking, and I couldn’t relax. I never really enjoyed the actual physicality
of the moment. I was at the highest point of my sensory threshold, but
completely absent in my cognitive reality. I was truly a junkie.
We tried many times to
stop the bad behavior but our families were still spending so much time
together that it became too difficult and the desire for our addiction
intensified. I didn’t see a way out- the
truth was never an option. I was trapped in my downward spiral and I
wasn’t strong enough to pull myself out.
The day we were caught, it
was my worst nightmare but my only salvation. The truth was out. I had to
accept who I had become. I picked up my husband’s 12-step-workbook and did the
whole thing in two weeks. I wrote a fearless moral inventory of all the people
I had hurt. My heart repeatedly broke as I watched my husband learn and accept
the things I’d done. I held my children when they cried that they couldn’t see
their dear friends anymore. I absorbed the judgments of people at church who
knew what I had done; of mutual friends we had who would no longer look at me.
I sat at the end of a long, wooden table around which twelve men sat from my
church clergy and confessed my ugliest choices. They loved me and prayed for
me. God’s warmth was in that room,
healing and renewing me.
My husband recognized his struggles in me and eventually forgave me.
My actions were his rock
bottom. We fought our way back up, all
the while surrendering. But what a cost to us both, to my friend, my children, and
my reputation. I’m no longer the perfect wife who had to deal with his addiction. When life gets difficult,
I start thinking about the distraction my addiction gave me. It’s in these
moments, I remember that I’m still an addict. I again look to God to buoy me up
and the strength I’m given sustains me. Our addictions saved us because they
broke our hearts open to each other and to God.
Learn more about internet porn addiction here and sexual addiction here and how these addictions change our brains and cause us disconnect from ourselves and others.