Two Futures- My Continuing Battle with IT

I had a big meltdown last night. :-( IT decided to come out to play in a big way. I didn't reset or anything just acted like a two year old.

My wife and I started to talk last night, she had a rough day and I wanted to try and be there for her. I didn't do a great job. We were discussing her feelings about my addiction and I let IT out in the middle of the discussion. IT couldn't handle the things she was saying. I was listening to her talk about how I made her feel and I just couldn't help to think she was talking about someone else. Surely the man she was talking about wasn't me! I tried to talk to her about how I loved her through all of this and that my addiction had nothing to do with my attraction to her. She said she heard me, but said she didn't care, it still hurt. At some point in hearing how I acted during my addiction period I just withdrew in. I get into a mode where I just stop talking. I stare at my lap. I am still listening but, I am not there. I am trying to protect myself.

GID sensed this and decided to end the conversation. This pissed me off for some reason and we yelled at each other. I then screamed "I hate myself" and kicked a bag that was on the floor. Luckily I didn't break my foot. I then just lost it and couldn't control the emotions. I sobbed for 15 minutes, and when GID started to try and comfort me, I told her she should get as far away from me as possible because I am only going to hurt her again and again. I was hysterical at this point. I was finally able to calm down and go to sleep.

I am not pleased with the way I acted. I need to learn to control IT and not let him out to roam free in my head. This is my goal of this 90 days. I feel it is integral to my success.

 

Wow its been a while since I have written. It's not for lack of wanting to believe me. Things have gotten crazy busy. At work the training wheels have come off and I have more work than I can handle. If I leave by 5:30 or 6pm I'm doing good. It's also basketball season, which means 3 of the 5 kids in our house have practice and games almost every night. This causes lots of schedule changes and running around. In addition I am tutoring our Freshman in math almost every night. All of that leaves little time for myself.

I have resumed my meditation practice which I really do enjoy. I need to make sure that stays as I think it has been one of the main keys in my recovery so far. The other key, my lifting routine has been sidelined for a few weeks due to tendonitis in my knee. I should be back to lifting in a few weeks after some physical therapy. The third pillar of recovery, but definitely the most important is repairing my relationship with @GID2020 and that has gone well...well with some hiccups.

Last Saturday after GID courageously revealed her troubled past with her stepfather to me, I figured it was time to release the last secret I had about my addiction. The events that happened, which we now refer to as the "Full Disclosure" happened about 13 years ago and was one of the main drivers of guilt and poor self image that was left over from from this addiction. It was the last chain holding me down. I am not going to go into detail into what it was here, this is between GID and I, but suffice it to say it was something I promised I would take to my grave. I wrote her a letter and in a remorseful tear soaked read confessed my deepest and darkest secret to my best friend. I was scared it would change everything, even the way she looked at me. I was right, well at least for a few days. Saturday night, Sunday and Monday were tear soaked mostly miserable days. I tried to listen to her pain, I tried not to go into "protect" mode. I think I did...OK. I wasn't perfect. However, through this confession something amazing happened. After each day, I felt lighter and lighter. Each day, GID and I got closer and closer. We started kissing more, and over the last few days our love making, which I keep saying can't get any better has become "transcendent". Getting rid of everything, having everything out in the open for both of us to see has been amazing.

In further healing I am starting to see the reason why I hid the addiction side of PA from GID. GID knew I used porn, that was never an issue, what she didn't know, and really I didn't either if I am being honest is that I had a huge problem letting it go. I also didn't like the way it made me feel. I want to quote something here that a member of this site, whom I have not talked to, but have read much of their writings. @Strength And Light wrote something on another thread that was key to helping me come clean and bear everything:

I have never read a more clear and concise description of what it feels like to be a good person addicted to porn. Its almost as if he were talking to me. Forever I have been the "good guy", the guy that is everyone's friend, the guy you can always count on. I remember one time when I was 17, I was over a girl's house that I was friends with. I had many more girl friends than guy friends at the time. Lets call my friend Mary. We were alone in her room just talking. Mary's mom was not home when I got there, but came home later and heard my voice from her room. Her mom yelled angrily: "Mary!!! You are not allowed to have boys in your room!!!" Mary yells back: "Mom its just, B4L!" and her mom replies: "Oh ok!!! Hi honey (talking to me)!!! Can I make you something to eat??" lol That is the guy I was, but I had that little secret and these types of pressures to be "that guy" just pushed that addiction further and further into secrecy. How could I reveal how flawed I was when I had this reputation to uphold? That's why it was so hard for me to leave my first wife. I was an "upstanding" husband, father, and citizen, surely I couldn't be flawed enough to have a failed marriage right? The incidents of the "Full disclosure" happened during the peak of misery in my first marriage. It was the ultimate secret rooted around my feelings of rejection from women from as long as I can remember.

I feel like this all goes back to what GID and I call a "choo-choo" moment. Let me explain what I mean by that. There is a cartoon called Phineas and Ferb that my kids watched...ok I admit GID and I loved it too. Anyway, there was a "villain" (who was really a nice guy) who talked about his "horrifying" back story. In the story he had toy choo-choo that was his favorite toy, then one day he woke up and it was gone. From that day on he was a villain. LOL So whenever someone makes a big deal about something small in their past we call it a "choo-choo" moment. LOL

So there I was in 8th grade, a little bit of a dork, but was friends with everyone. There were only 28 kids in my class One day some girls, who weren't even the pretty ones in class decided to rate the boys, 1-10 on "hotness". I saw the sheet and saw my rating "1". I was devastated. I mean I didn't expect a 10 or anything, but a solid 5 or 6 would have been warranted. It sounds so stupid now, but for a guy that has a hard time remembering what he had for lunch yesterday, this memory is as clear as the day it happened. It had a profound impact on how I see myself. I mean how could people that said they were my friends think that way? It must be true. So at the pivotal point of self image development, I learned I was Ugly. My confidence was shot and never would return, well until I saw GID that warm June night

This was huge for me to realize and put it all together. I objectified women because I always felt rejected by them. Then I continued porn use after I met GID because I couldn't admit my flaws so I pushed them down deeper and deeper further ingraining the addiction side of porn use. Until I release that feeling of rejection, I can never fully be healed from this. Now the question is, how do I heal from rejection that happened so long ago?

 

When I look in the mirror, I do see that same person. That is part of the problem. Logically I know I am not that person, but emotionally I still feel that way. I never healed from that, and my experience in my first marriage exacerbated that problem.

Some of the things happened when I was in my 30s, but the causes of them stemmed back to my early adult hood years. They were definitely part of who I was. I know that, because everytime my wife told me what a good person I was, I would think of these events and say "I am not, I am a bad person." Now I that I have disclosed them, I feel like I deal with them and heal from them. I can realize that it wasn't me...I don't think I could do that with out disclosing it to SOMEONE. Sometimes saying things outloud is important.

Word. My wife asked me the other day what I wanted from all of this. My two wants are:
1) A life unburdened with @GID2020.
2) Be at peace with myself.

What I am finding is the two of them are like a circle, I need to have one to have the other.

 

I had a good conversation with @GID2020 this morning. We were talking about addiction and how we had a hard time reconciling the feelings and events that happened with the PA with the people (us) in the situation. We were talking about how PA makes her feel like she is not enough for me. That because I had her, I shouldn't need P, and she is right. I shouldn't have. Unlike some here, my wife and I had and do have an amazing relationship. We are truly best friends. Our sex life is amazing. What PA did however is prevent us from giving ourselves fully to each other. It made me shameful and reminded me of a time in my life where PMO was my only comfort. It reminded her of a childhood trauma where porn was watched in the middle of the living room during a marriage that saw her mother hurt. It was a wedge in between us, and just like a wedge will split a piece of the hardest wood, so will the PA wedge fracture a good marriage if enough pressure is applied. So, she asked with all that we had going, why did I keep going, why wasn't she enough to break the addiction?

This is what made me think. The short answer I did a really good job with compartmentalization. I was able to keep the P in one place, and my relationship with GID in another. I remember the time we fought after the first time she discovered that I spent an inordinate amount of money on some P material. When we discussed this, she asked what I was thinking, that didn't I think of her? (I had recently told her we didn't have money to go away together). I looked her straight in the eye and said with full honesty, "I didn't even think about you, I just wanted it". This was before either of us understood how porn was an addiction. Looking back on that, I meant that with as much meaning as you can read into it. Of course, there is the surface meaning, as in I was a selfish bastard and didn't think about her and her desire to go away together. In addition, I didn't think about her because I was keeping my addiction as far away from her as possible. Finally, because I was in throws of a full on "Gimmee Gimmee Gimmee" dopamine moment, I really wasn't thinking about anything other than what I wanted at the time. As I thought about it, I thought of it like two houses. My house with GID was warm and comfortable, the house where I went for P was messy, ugly and drafty. My goal was keep GID as far away from that place as possible. I love her so much, I think she is beautiful, so why would I want her anywhere near that place? So I told her imagine the two houses were on tracks. The closer her and I got, the further away I wanted my P house from her. So I began to push it away from her. The only thing I didn't realize is that the tracks the houses were on were in a circle. The further I pushed the P house away from GID, the closer it got to her. The two worlds would collide, at some point. For me that day was about 2 years ago.

The thing I should have done, is once my "house" with GID was built, I could have demolished that other house, the P house. It just seemed like so much work at the time. It seemed easier to just nudge it a little. Push it away. The problem becomes over time the strength required to push it away far outweighs the strength it would have taken to just demolish it in the first place.

Our brains are wired to conserve energy. Quitting an addiction is hard, hard work. It's much easier to conserve that energy in the short term, than try and quit. The toll, however, the addiction takes over the long run, takes SO much more energy than quitting ever could. Our short term brains don't see that however. We just see the mountain of work it takes to quit, and we say...eh...not today. That is why the day to day thing is so important to keep in mind. Taking our addiction one day at a time, gives our brain the illusion of progress, the illusion of less work than dealing with addiction. We can trick our brain into completing the hard work of quitting, one small piece at a time. This has been key for me. Its the reason I am here on day 108 and not resetting my counter. I didn't do 107 days of work. I did 1 day of work 107 times, and that has been far easier than dealing with the wedge the addiction was placing on my marriage.

 

I will try to this weekend. Thanks, love.

 

So last week was my first trip away for work. GiD and I were both a little stressed about it. I was stressed about it because being alone in a hotel room was a big trigger for me. GID was worried about the same thing, she didn't want to be hurt again. Well I am happy to say that I made it through unscathed with my days in tact . I am not going to say it was easy. I definitely had the call to PMO, that trigger was a strong one, that even after 100+ days that anticipation/reward signal is still there. I spent the evenings alone talking to GID and the kids, going for walks, playing a game on the computer, watching TV and reading. My next trip I plan on replacing the "time wasters" with more productive work, maybe even giving myself a task to complete while I am gone.

I did a little of that this time as I wanted to write GID a letter. I was really nervous about this actually and I don't know why. I wanted to focus on telling her why I love her. I tell her I love her all the time, but I don't aways put it into words more than that. I completed the letter and read it to her last night. I think I got a lot of how I feel about her out.

My focus going forward is going to be gratitude. I am going to stop wishing for things to happen and focus on being thankful for what I have and having a vision for the future. Sorry this is short, more tomorrow! I got stuck reading and now I am out of time for writing!

 

There are a couple things I want to talk about tonight, the Super Bowl halftime show, a new podcast I am listening to, and shame.

If you read my wife's blog (@GID2020), you already heard about what happened at the halftime show. Basically we started to watch it and I could feel GID pulling away from me and becoming visibly upset. She made some sarcastic remarks to me and it embarrassed me, so I left the room deciding it wasn't in my best interest to continue watching the show. I went to the bathroom and texted a snide remark to her. I was hoping that by watching that and making fun of it with her, that she would see that it wasn't having an affect on me (which it wasn't), but that is not the point. I should have recognized her discomfort and a suggested we turned it off. After the kids went to bed we talked about it, didn't argue, and came up with a plan if something like that happened again, so at least something good came out of it! It was actually a very productive talk.

I have been listening to a great podcast that @GID2020 got me hooked on called The Betrayed (Ashlyn), The Addicted (Coby), and The Expert. (link). In it there are three people, a wife (the betrayed), a husband (the addicted) and a CSAT (the Expert), the story is that Coby started porn use at age seven and cheated on his wife twice. They decided they had enough of a relationship to work to save it and Coby fully recovered over a period of 3 or more years. The beauty is that they chronicled the recovery through the podcast. I have only listened to 5 episodes but I have learned so much. I learned a lot about betrayal trauma and why @GID2020 responds to things the way she does. I also learned techniques to help her through those responses. The last episode I listened to was very beneficial. It explained the difference between sobriety and recovery. Its really something that GID has been telling me for a while: you can't do this for someone else, you need to do this for you. Basically sobriety is refraining from PMO because someone wants you to, or you feel like you need to do this for someone else. Instead, you need to quit PMO for YOU, it has to be self motivated. If you don't want to fix yourself, you will never recover. Having that mindset puts you into recovery. I would advise every couple on here to listen to that podcast.

One of the most important topics that the podcast talks about is avoiding coming at things from shame. For me, this meant sitting and listening to GID talk about all the crappy things I did, staring blankly into my lap and letting IT loose in my head to confirm I was indeed a bad person and I deserved every bit of vitriol and anger coming at me. Over the last week or so I started really listening, not just hearing, to what GID was saying, I realized that she wasn't spitting anger and vitriol at me, it was hurt and pain. In listening to her talk I could understand that pain and agree with her that what I did was not right, but that I was not a bad person. I didn't get defensive and I didn't put up walls to protect myself. Last night we talked about Full Disclosure, a topic she said she wanted to talk about in the morning. I fretted it ALL DAY, complete with anxiety attacks, and a not so stellar parenting night. When we sat down to talk, I took a deep breath and looked at GID. I saw the love in her eyes and I calmed down immediately. I took a deep breath and REALLY listened to her pain. I wasn't shamed, I didn't let IT loose, even though I had to remind myself a few times not to. We probably had one of the most productive talks we have ever had.

So for both betrayed and addicted, give that podcast a listen. Hopefully it will help you as much as it has me.