How can I move on without betraying his trust?

First off, if he's lying to you, he has lost your trust and he has no right whatsoever to even attempt to call your trustworthiness into question.

Second, I 100% disagree with those who are telling you that putting tracking software on his devices is stooping to his level or an act of control. Stooping would be getting involved with PMO and hiding and lying about it. This is not even close to the same. The way I understand your use is to find out what he is really doing because he is refusing to be honest with you. And guess what? That is what addicts do. They lie. They gaslight. They do whatever they need to to hang onto the addiction. We SOs sometimes have to go to drastic measures to find the truth. Once we find the truth, then we are able to decide what to do with it. Don't let anyone here make you feel bad for wanting peace if mind. If you can't believe a word he says but you want to try to salvage the relationship, you have to try anything.

I tracked my husband online unknowingly for months. He lied about everything concerning his addiction. It killed me to see what he was looking at, what he was doing at work, when I was at work, when I was in the next room (I dont suggest this unless you can handle learning things you dont want to know or never knew existed. It nearly broke me.) I learned that in so many ways, I did not know this man I was married to for 20 years. But I kept on trucking...giving him safe opportunities to open up and tell me. He had no clue I knew what I knew. I wanted him to come to me, not for me to have to blow his secret life open. But he kept lying and hiding and finally I gave him one last shot. We were talking about some other things but I tried incredibly hard to make a wide open path for him to tell me and make him feel like he wouldn't be judged or "in trouble." And he flat out lied to my face. I burst out crying and told him I knew the truth. He lied again and then I showed him the proof. And then I told him all of the things over the past four months that I discovered, all the details. He sat there stunned, and then he started bawling and said he was so happy it was all funky out because he was so tired of hiding it. He was so sorry that I had to resort to tracking software to get any truth but he understood.

That was almost two years ago. He was never angry with me and never viewed it as a control thing, but as something necessary because he was unwillingly to take the steps to move himself forward. In fact, he was grateful. It hasn't been smooth sailing because addiction is not easy, but that tracking software was the catalyst that helped get our marriage back on track. If he had responded angrily or defensively, it would have been a much tougher road, but honestly, he would have had no defense. He broke all the trust, and if he continued to fight me pushing him to get help, we more than likely would not still be married. That would show me that he is not dedicated to our marriage or our family and I won't live like that, nor will I allow our children to live in a home like that.

So dont let anyone make you feel guilty for doing what you feel what you need to do.

But I am in agreement with @TheMightyQuinn . If you are going to do it. Own it. Never be ashamed for fighting for your relationship.

 

I generally don't get into any mars/venus style arguments. But the first paragraph of this post reads a little to me like "it's hard to be a man these days because women are equals". Dunno, just sayin.

Anyways, back to recovery...

So, the program I work, there was a place for all of this stuff, all of these institutional resentments. It was the 4th step. When I would hear people say stuff like that, I would say "write that down on your 4th step." For each of us, our recovery is our own responsibility and no one else's. It begins and ends with us. Yeah, I could never watch "Game of Thrones" or "Orange is the New Black" or all those cable shows due to the nudity. Oh well. That's my problem. I could write angry letters about it or I could be a man, yes be a man, about it and do what I needed to do to take care of myself (not watch, never seen any of it). My addiction, my problem. It's not society's fault, it's not my daddy's fault, it's not my wife's fault, it's not the hot girl on the beach's fault, yada yada yada. My lizard brain, my responsibility.

I hope this helps.

Peace,
-Quinn

 

I honestly haven't reflected much on what men think/feel vs women in my recovery. The point I was trying to make is that for recovery to be successful for me, getting all of that stuff out of the way was necessary. There is a passage in the recovery book my program is based on that reads "it does not matter what others could seem to do without consequence, we could not". And that encapsulates it for me. I keep the focus on me and my recovery. I take no ultimate view on pornography as good vs. bad (I mean I do think it is generally bad but not because of morals but because today's pornography is a product designed to hook people into addiction like cigarettes). But ultimately, I take no view. I just know: bad for me, bad for my marriage, bad for my relationship with my daughter, affects my work performance, turns me into a liar, makes me feel shame, damages my self-esteem, left me feeling hopeless and hollow contemplating suicide.

 

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i read your post as you replied a lot inside my post and I found your posts interesting. My advise if you can recover this pic and find out I would go for it. Otherwise you will keep having this lurking unresolved issue hanging over you. Then you know if it was just desire thoughts and actions like porn or if there was more. It’s clear and you either have a cleared relation or draw your consequences based on facts you gathered.

 

I can understand the urge to find out for sure who she was. But the problem is being in a relationship with someone who you trust so little. I’ve been there... I wouldn’t have trusted my own boyfriend for years. But there are reasons why he does the things he does.

Is he in therapy? Is he trying to make any progress to figure out what factors in his life have led him to understand and interact with sexuality the way he does? The way I understand PAs is that deep down somewhere they have enormous, paralyzing shame and they use “sexuality” to attempt to ignore it or channel it into more tolerable feelings (not all sexual feelings are what I would call sexuality). Shame is strange in that it can be linked to other feelings (notice how often sexuality and shame/taboo are linked) and it is tempting to do so if you don’t know how to manage your feelings in an adaptive (vs maladaptive) way.

I know you know his problems don’t have anything to do with you and that he’s responsible for his own actions. But in a state of mind where he lives in “fantasy land” (as I’ve called it with my own boyfriend in the past) he isn’t going to take that responsibility because he confuses empowering responsibility for shame-inducing fault/blame. You aren’t capable of making genuine choices if you’re acting from fear/avoidance of shame so until he learns how to face his shame and actually does that he can’t/won’t make different choices. It is literally not within the realm of possibility. To me, that’s why being in a relationship with someone who does these actions is so scary, because they’re not actually making choices, they’re just reacting to their environment. And you aren’t always around to see their environment. Which is why it becomes so tempting to see everything they ever do, know everything they’ve ever known.

My advice to you: you seem solidly reasonable and logical and you’re dealing with some really hard feelings. But if you stay in this relationship and don’t learn to face your own shame you’re going to end up farther and farther from yourself, acting less and less from your values. You don’t want to end up constantly angry, demanding, reactive, and resentful.

Trying to find the truth about his actions is understandable and I have been there but in hindsight I wish that I had understood my own motivations behind trying to change or control his behavior, beyond seeing what he’s doing as immoral and harmful to my wellbeing. Of course what he’s doing is wrong but that doesn’t give you a pass to start acting against your own values. If you start lying and doing things you find wrong it will be worse for you in the end, not him. Just like his lying adversely affects him, so will yours, in ways you probably won’t understand until later.

I wish that instead of blaming and shaming him I had done something more healthy for both of us, although I don’t know exactly what that is.

How do you convince someone who is so deeply avoidant of understanding and taking responsibility for their feelings as well as avoiding their shame at all costs (even their own wellbeing, their relationship’s wellbeing, their partner’s wellbeing) to stop running away and do those things their entire life is essentially structured around avoiding? I ask myself this question a lot. I know what did it for me but my situation is not universal and I don’t know what it was about my situation that led to me making a choice to make real changes. I am grateful that my boyfriend has changed so much but I’m not completey certain of how he got here either.

The point is that I think SOs on this forum are typically in the situations that we are in because betrayal is really extremely hard and if we don’t face our pain and shame in healthy ways that help us heal ourselves (in real ways) we become “sick” like PAs are. Codependency, to me, is a result of this dynamic of refusing to let go of something that was never ours to begin with and refusing to accept responsibility for what actually is ours (our feelings and values).

I don’t know if any of this advice is actually useful or applicable to you in your current situation. I know it might sound crazy or rambling but I want to help.

TLDR: No, I don’t think you should do something that you clearly find to be wrong given that you created an entire thread about it because it only harms you in the end. I hope that this can help and make some type of sense, somehow.

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply and discuss, I am happy to have the chance to discuss these ideas with another SO. I want to help someone avoid the avoidable years of misery I put myself through by making poor choices in a situation that was already hard enough to begin with. At risk of talking too much, here is how I have come to understand things:

I would like to clarify that I do believe he is responsible for his poor choices, but I also believe he is not currently capable of consistently making choices (at least within the realm of sexuality and intimacy) that aren’t from avoidance of fear and shame in his current state. This is indeed a matter of priority and the pattern we see in addiction is that the top priority becomes avoiding bad feelings rather than acting from values/ethics. What this means to me is that the thing he is most responsible for currently is taking the steps to heal himself such as going to therapy, reading, writing, meditating, whatever else it may be that will enable him to make decisions that are from his values rather than from avoiding hard feelings.

When you get as far from yourself as he has, it’s really like you have forgotten how to stop only reacting to hard feelings. It was very hard for me to understand (or maybe accept?) that while he is ultimately responsible, he is not acting from a reality where he views himself as having that responsibility. Sadly, I think that often this comes from a view that they are some combination of fundamentally flawed, incapable, entitled, and confusing his own sense of shame and/or guilt with some kind of punishment “put onto him”.

As nonsensical and hard to understand as it may be, the addict lives in a different, compartmentalized version of reality where values are relevant... sometimes. When it’s convenient. Because the rest of the time, he is maladaptively “protecting” a very delicate, vulnerable part of himself that at its core is likely composed of unrecognized, hidden, ignored-at-all-costs (all costs) shame. It is even harder to understand these things when you believe in him so much, really seeing the good in him that he’s sadly blind to.

In this state, though, it’s possible that he feels resentful of the fact that you even care what he looks at because he is so confused about where his feelings come from that when he feels shame it is easier to just blame someone else for that shame. Since he feels ashamed for betraying you and can’t face his shame, he blames you instead. Then there’s an excuse to lie, to “do whatever”, etc. until he can learn to take responsibility for his feelings. I am trying to illustrate how people in his position tend to think (people are unique but the pattern of addiction is not so unique) to help you understand that he isn’t acting logically because he doesn’t have the awareness to do so yet and he needs to develop it over time like a muscle to make genuine choices. He will not be able to take responsibility for his actions until he’s taking responsibility for his feelings first and knowing that they come from within him. You cannot “do” a feeling to another person (see my journal thread for clarification).

Regarding what you said about the goal being to gain knowledge, I can understand that temptation very well. It is really scary to have to wonder if it’s even worse than you’re aware of, if there’s more betrayal to feel even more painful shame over. But ultimately you aren’t responsible for his actions, only your own choice to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t currently make choices from values/ethics (has priorities based on fear and shame), and whether to be someone who also makes choices against values based on fear of shame/pain. Another option would be to adaptively understand what the shame is trying to communicate to you.

Eventually, if he is genuinely getting better, he will most likely tell you the truth about this girl as part of recovery (despite what you may read from PAs on the forum that theyll never tell - I sometimes wonder if it’s because they aren’t truly recovering or some other reason why it feels unsafe.) If you want to hear the whole truth without going behind his back, I think you’d have to build an environment where he feels safe to share the truth with you but until he starts to recover that may still not be enough because his shame may be the source of feeling unsafe.

In the meantime, as you wait, you may have to live with the possibility that there are things he does that would be really painful to hear. That possibility makes it very difficult not to react more and more over time to fear of bigger, worse shame. To what extent does he act in ways that violate the meaning of a monogamous relationship, your personal boundaries and your values (and probably his own values)? It’s a tough question to sit with. I will tell you that for me, the answer to that question got worse over time the more I shamed and blamed him, the more I pushed (figuratively), the more I accused, the more I berated and screamed.

And yes what you said about doing something that goes against your own value is exactly what i was saying about getting farther from yourself, being “more sick” as in thinking like an addict. It becomes harder and harder to make choices that are motivated by acting from your own values rather than motivated from shame from a perceived or real violation of them - unfortunately, the farther you get from yourself (by acting from shame) the harder it gets to discern real from imagined perception. I believe this is part of why you see many of us SOs start to talk about “feeling crazy” over time.

What I meant about your own shame was partially how you understood it, but I also meant the shame that is motivating you to do the action that is against your value in the first place - the shame of being treated as less than other women, of being the lower priority, of having your values and role(s) in the relationship violated, possibly of feeling alienated in a society where P is socially acceptable and sometimes even talked about as if watching it or ogling, inside or outside of a relationship, is some kind of “right” or something. To specify, I am not talking about shamefulness, only the feeling of shame.

As well, I meant the shame you have experienced throughout your life, especially in childhood, which has shaped your ways of interacting with the world and at least partially shape how you are interacting with betrayal (pm me for clarification if you would like to). It took me a long time to begin to understand and accept mine and I still continue to find my maladaptive coping mechanisms hiding in plain sight, almost comedically. The reason I emphasize learning to recognize and understand your own shame is because the last thing you want is to start acting from it without realizing it. The way I know to do that is to learn about shame in general as well as your own specifically. Accepting and understanding your shame and why it exists can help it feel less painful to sit with, once you can get over the hurdle of feeling pain when you first begin. The point of life is not to feel good but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard when you don’t.

In the end, we are all responsible for our own feelings and actions, and we are all therefore responsible for finding the path that allows us to make choices with this in mind. You understandably have a lot of feelings about what is going on for you and I want to be clear and say that your feelings are always valid (see my journal thread for clarification). What you choose to do with them is up to you alone - same as for him. I would say that the things you are responsible for in this situation where you feel little choice is very similar to your boyfriend’s responsibility in his own situation where he also feels little choice. (I am trying to help you empathize with him, I’m not attacking you.) However, I think you are probably more capable in your current state than he is in his (currently, not generally, I’m sure he is a really good guy and that you’re with him for a reason and I know that must make this even harder to understand) because you still have a solid head on your shoulders and actively care about your values.

You aren’t bad for having the temptation to do something you see as wrong - from what I can tell about you I think you’re probably a really genuinely good person. You’re trying to protect yourself, but in ways that will hurt you more later - similarly to how your boyfriend is.

I wish I knew what I could tell you regarding how you can help your boyfriend learn to (at risk of sounding too corny) see the beauty in taking responsibility and the freedom and empowerment it confers. It’s a hard and nonlinear path to get there so to convince someone who is motivated to find the fast and easy way out of hard feelings will be much harder to convince. I suggest encouraging him to seek therapy and learn about his sexuality and where it comes from and why it manifests itself this way for him, but you know him best and have a better sense than me about what he may be willing to try at this point. I hope it’s clear that I am not suggesting that you “coddle” him. He is indeed an adult. But to expect things from him that don’t match the reality of his current status won’t help either of you. I hope this makes sense and is helpful, if I was unclear about anything feel free to let me know.