________ Your Heart Out

Unrelated thought--- The following song lyrics keep going through my mind:

"No one ever said it was easy. No one ever said it would be this hard." ("The Scientist" by Coldplay)

"Our love is not the light it was" ("How Come You Never Go There?" by Feist)

Anywho. I just spent the last 20 minutes dancing my heart out alone in my room. And it felt. so. good. to express myself, my hurts, my hopes, my joys, through dance. I love dancing. And it helped me get closer to learning something (I daren't imagine that now I have learned this lesson and it's going to stick this time and I'll never need to relearn it again).

I don't have to be the world's best dancer to dance my heart out. I don't even have to be a GOOD dancer to dance my heart out. If dancing makes me feel things that I want to feel, then by golly let me DANCE!

I am a perfectionist. I hold myself to impossible standards (because I'm a human being and I am not perfect. How's that for a contradiction). I have such a desire to express myself creatively, and I've always felt like Heavenly Father was cruel in blessing me with such a strong desire to be creative but no remarkable talent at anything. It's incredibly frustrating. But it doesn't have to be.

I don't need to write good poetry to write poetry. I don't have to dance like the people on SYTYCD to dance. I don't have to be a great painter to paint. And I don't have to be the prettiest girl in the room to feel confident. It's related. You'll see.

Life isn't about comparisons. It's not about being the best. It's not even about being better at anything than anyone else. Life is about finding joy. It is. I promise. And tonight, I felt joy. It was a nice respite from all the un-joy.

What do you love to do but you stop yourself from doing because you don't want to fail or you think you're not good at it? Do it. Go do it. Go _________ your heart out. It feels so good.

The Empty Place

It's not my normal day to blog, but tonight after my yoga class I was feeling words moving through me and felt inclined to record them as a way to process my grief and sadness through this process.

I am not a poet by any means. But here is my poem of betrayal.

The Empty Place

disbelief, denial, shock

a fragile world came crashing down

the paper walls i cling to, gone

destroyed

by one i trusted

i lie here in this empty place

digging graves inside myself

one by one I lay to rest my

dreams and

hope and

trust and

all the pretty pictures that i painted in my head---

dead

hollow, battered, beaten

Stinging with

disappointment,

heart ache,

grief,

and paralyzing fear.

my intimate companions.

they leave me empty

and alone.

i remember when i’d lie ‘longside a husband, friend, and lover

secure inside our paper house

drew close to him for warmth and safety and

slept in comfortable ignorance

i lie now with reality-- betrayal.

a cold, unfeeling bedfellow

the paper walls couldn’t keep it out

it closes in when time to sleep

and pierces upon waking

it pulls me toward that dark abyss

a tempting place to hide

i find no rest,

no solace here

inside this empty place



Have you tried expressing your pain and grief creatively? I encourage you to try it. Paint a picture, write a story, make a dance. It helps. It's okay to feel the pain and grieve what you have lost. Honor those feelings. Express them. Use the darkness to create.

Caring For Myself

I had a pretty good therapy session last week. She said a couple of things that resonated with me and have been helping me along this week.

One of the topics we addressed was what I wrote about last week -- how hard it is for me to believe that my husband loves me, is attracted to me, is satisfied with me, etc. She explained it in a way that seemed to click for me. I will summarize what she said here, in hopes that it can help someone else as well.

Sexual addiction is like any other addiction, so let's compare it to heroin. Pornography and masturbation provide the direct line to the "drug," the rush that it gives, just like shooting heroin is the quickest and easiest way to get the heroin high. It takes a lot more work to get a "high" out of a relationship or out of physical intimacy with a partner. You have to be considerate, spend time together, connect, foreplay, etc. So the addict withdraws more and more from the relationship as he descends further into the addiction. Naturally, as the addict withdraws from the relationship, the relationship will suffer, and his partner will become less satisfied and happy. So the relationship provides less happiness for the addict as well as the partner. Instead of recognizing this as an effect of the addiction, the addict denies that the addiction is the problem (probably even denies that it IS an addiction) and instead blames his partner. It must be her, the addict reasons. She is not making me happy. Maybe someone else would make me happier. Oftentimes this line of reasoning leads to infidelity at some point, but usually the addict returns to pornography and masturbation, because, once again, it's the most direct line to the drug.

For some reason, explaining it that way helped me understand a little bit better how my husband's emotional infidelities were not about me either, and how he can genuinely feel satisfied with our relationship as he is now pulling away from his addiction and investing his time and energy into our relationship and our family.

I still feel skeptical and scared. My husband has just over 100 days sober. He has gone longer than this before (2 years for his mission, 1 year before we were married followed by the first like 7 months of marriage), so I don't feel like we are out of the weeds. But my husband did say that he feels like this is his first time actually being in recovery, because this is the first time he has really understood the severity and nature of the problem and what is required to overcome it.

I am hopeful, but still reserved, as I think I should be. I do see changes in my husband, and I pray and hope that they are permanent changes. There is the obvious change of not looking at porn and masturbating, but for me, the more telling and meaningful changes are the things that change as a result of other changes he is consciously making. I think at some point I will post a list of some of the changes I see, but not today.

I need to practice better self-care. Here are some of the things I have decided I need to do (or at least put effort into doing, while still being gentle with myself and not expecting perfection):

• Read the scriptures every day and pray fervently, morning and night
• Listen to healing music
• Do something every day that I enjoy, like reading (non-addiction related reading) or knitting
• Practice yoga 3x a week, actually attending a class at least once a week
• Drink lots of water and eat good fruits and veggies, limiting sugar consumption
• Work on my own recovery
• Write in my journal regularly
• Be in bed by 11pm every night and get at least 8 hours of sleep
• Focus my thoughts on myself, what I can change, rather than what my husband has done
• Go to individual therapy twice a month
• Be gentle with myself. Make my best effort, but allow myself to make mistakes. Forgive myself for them, and focus on my positive attributes and on feeling the love of God.
• Reach out to others and deepen and expand my friendships

This has been a long and rambling post, but thanks for reading. See you next week. My prayers are with all of you who are struggling, and I also pray that those with addictions will have the courage to come forward and confess, so all of you who are suffering and not even knowing it can begin your healing journeys.

May the peace of God rest upon you and heal your broken hearts.

Negative Thought Patterns

As a result of the betrayal trauma I have been experiencing for the past 3 months, I have found it really difficult not to dwell in a terrible downward spiral of negative self-talk.

The thing is, I know logically that my husband's addiction and related behaviors are not about me. My head can understand that. But the nature of this addiction makes it feel so inescapably personal sometimes.

Self-esteem is a complicated thing. It doesn't just involve how you feel about yourself, and I am realizing that perhaps for the first time. For the past many years, I have felt like I have pretty high self-esteem. I suffered from clinical depression for about 7 years as a teenager, and through medical intervention and therapy, I came to a much healthier view of myself, which I have maintained pretty well since then.

However, one area in which I have suffered-- and I never understood this as being self-esteem before-- is in how I believe others view me. I have been in this mental place for a long time of believing that nobody else in the world likes to be around me. That my mere presence is a burden to other people. That anyone who befriends me is doing so out of charity. That people are generally better off when I am not around. And I just feel bad for people who have to associate with me, and that has included my husband.

It has only been through this process that I have begun to understand the serious toll this belief has taken on my mental and emotional health, not to mention on my interpersonal relationships. It has also only been through this process that I have identified how my husband's emotionally abusive behaviors, which follow a pattern of how my father (among others) has treated me, have seriously exacerbated this issue to a dangerous level.

It is painful to realize these truths, and yet, realizing them is essential to my recovery.

When it comes to negative self-talk, I hear a lot of people are tempted to believe, "If I were better, or if I were prettier, my husband wouldn't have fallen into this addiction."

My negative self-talk is a little different. I believe that I am a beautiful person, inside and out. However, I do not believe that my husband thinks so. I have such a hard time believing him when he says that I am perfect, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, that he is happy and satisfied with our marriage, and that he loves me.

It is so hard for me to believe that he loves me, because how can you do this to someone you love? It is impossible for me to believe that he is satisfied with me, because if he was, why would he seek out hundreds of thousands of other women, preferring masturbating to them above having sex with me? If he were satisfied with me, why would he commit the emotional infidelities he has committed and even contemplate leaving me to be with a woman he doesn't even know?

The problem is, my husband's actions have given me a lot of evidence to support these beliefs that I dwell on a lot:

• My husband doesn't love me
• My husband isn't attracted to me
• My husband isn't happy with our marriage
• My husband regrets his decision to marry me
• My husband wishes I was different in x number of ways
• My husband doesn't really even like who I am as a person
• My husband is only trying to convince himself that he likes (and loves) me and is happy with me

As for the solution for this negative self-talk? I'm not sure yet. I want this blog to be positive and helpful to others, but I also realize that I don't always have the answers. As a matter of fact, I usually don't. I am struggling with this a lot right now. Whenever my husband tells me how much he loves me, I feel like he is lying to himself as well as to me.

All I know is that if I continue in these negative thought patterns, it will destroy me and it will destroy any chance our marriage has at succeeding.

I am welcome to any and all suggestions, and I plan to bring this up with my therapist this week. I'll write if I find any brilliant answers.

Measuring Progress

I have been getting frustrated with myself lately. Every time I feel like I make progress toward healing, something sets me back a thousand paces.

Are you familiar with the stages of grief? They are:

1. Shock and confusion
2. Denial
3. Anger
4. Sadness
5. Bargaining
6. Acceptance

I feel like I have spent a lot of time in the first four stages, and not necessarily in order. I had felt like I was able to move toward acceptance, if not even dip my toes into it to see what it feels like. And then last night I was cycling back through those first four stages again like a mad woman, finally dwelling in the sadness of it all.

Elder Uchtdorf said, "The greatest battle of life is fought within the silent chambers of the soul." How true that is. Every night I go to bed completely exhausted, feeling like I have fought an entire war that day. This process of healing is unbelievably taxing. It takes its toll, and it is relentless.

Tomorrow my husband, son, and I are going on a vacation for a week during my husband's break from school. We have felt spiritually like this will be a good opportunity for us to move forward in our healing. We will be praying really hard that it stays a positive experience and praying that we will experience a glimpse of the marriage the Lord wants us to one day have. My husband even decided to fast today for that reason (that actually meant a lot, because my husband is the biggest whiny baby on Fast Sundays, and he volunteered to do this completely on his own).

One thought that helps me from the Healing Through Christ manual:

It is important to remember that "feelings aren't facts. No matter how intense the feelings may be, they are only feelings. They are reactions to, rather than reflections of, reality." (quoting from the Al-Anon book)

It is also important to remember that it's okay to cycle back through these emotions, and it does not mean that I haven't made progress. The journey to healing is not one straight, direct path in which you only move forward. I need to be gentle with myself and give myself the freedom to fall and get back up again.

I am grateful for the reassurance of the Savior every time I pray, and I am so grateful for the incredible tools there are to help us get through this trauma. The Healing Through Christ manual is amazing, and I recommend it to all loved ones of addicts. You can download the PDF for free.

I have also begun my Addo recovery this week, which is a FREE 6-week course to help you through betrayal trauma. I have heard so many good things about this program and am looking forward to digging into it deeper.

Another resource that I have found useful is this chart, which someone shared on a forum I am a member of. It helps me focus my thoughts when evaluating my progress and recovery.

I think I will start a side-bar with the resources I use that I find helpful. I realize that those of you who have been on this recovery journey longer than I have will probably not find anything new here. But I will add them just in case someone stumbles across my blog who is feeling lost and alone and doesn't know what resources are out there.

I am entering this week praying and begging for it to be a good and positive and healing experience for my family. I also pray that all of you will have healing weeks. I pray for you all every day.

Introduction

I found out about my husband's pornography addiction and emotional infidelity 2.5 months ago. We have been married for about 4 years and dated for 2 years prior to that. He never told me about the addiction, and he never planned to. I discovered it literally through the grace of God, and for that I will forever be grateful.

As part of my personal recovery, I have started this blog to share my experiences as I attempt to heal from the wounds of this betrayal trauma. I am joining in a vast community of women who are suffering similar trials with their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, or sons. I am a writer, and as such, writing helps me process and understand my emotions. It validates them and gives them voice. I have been journaling throughout this process, but I believe it is time to begin sharing my experiences in the hope that some woman (or man) somewhere may find even one sentence that helps heal them or gives them hope.

I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I am LDS. I am Mormon. (these all mean the same thing). I am a Christian. My faith is central to my recovery and will be discussed I am sure in great detail on this blog.

I am also a mother to a sweet, special, 11 month old boy, and his presence in my life heals me. Although my ability to mother has definitely suffered as I have suffered for the past 2.5 months (is that really all it has been?), I am grateful to have him, and I hope one day to be the mother he deserves. He will never know how much his love has strengthened and healed me and the extent to which his very existence has saved me from the depths of despair.

Above all, I am a woman. I know that many women in my situation identify themselves as WOPAs (wives of porn addicts), and I completely respect them using that acronym. However, in my personal journey I find it essential to I define myself as an individual and as a divine daughter of God and not to identify myself in terms of my husband. I have been doing that for far too long.

It is time for me.

Thank you for joining me on my healing journey.