Recovery isn't just about us - we need to support our partners too!

This is golden. It took my husband about 4 months clean before he actually saw how selfish he was. How much he had neglected and abandoned his family throughout our entire marriage. Fortunately for him, I had already dealt with much of my trauma that he had caused. So his “ selfish” pursuit to be clean really encouraged me. Then about 6 months in, I told him that now, I felt he needed to start focusing on our marriage as well as his addiction. I’d rather he spent “ selfish” amounts of time on recovery than pmo. I also think, that since he’s been clean, he is naturally very less focused on himself and more attuned to me and my needs. I’m glad you realized that your betrayed partner needs your support! Worthy of her trust is a great book! And helping her heal by wiess is also very good. Just keep clean and don’t lie! Best chance for your relationship to survive

 

It was the other way for me. I realised I needed to stop sexualising my thinking not for me , and not for my wife directly, but for our relationship.I could have carried on thinking the way I did, but our relationship would have failed. If I wanted our relationship to carry on, I needed to drastically change 35 years of habitual sexualised thinking patterns. So we made the decision that we did want to save our relationship.
With that as a focus our attention was immediately directed to rebuilding our closeness and honest intimacy, and as well as the sexual side of our relationship we looked into all aspects of our relationship by working through the '8 dates' book. This showed us that so many of the aspects of our relationship were good and strong, and that we had managed to overcome massive obstacles in the past, giving us confidence that we could work together to overcome this one.
140 days in and we are closer than ever, and more importantly we have created a space where we feel we are able to talk about our thoughts and feels around sex.
But 140 days is not long in terms of overcoming an addiction. I know this from past experience. I know we still have along way to go but the habits and patterns we are developing now are healthy and conscious. We are challenging all the conditioning and societal pressures put on a couple to behave in a certain way and are molding our marriage into what we want for us.