________ 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.