HonestyMatters
Fapstronaut
Hi, I have just joined NoFap and would like to introduce myself....
I am not really sure where to begin and find it difficult to believe that I am here in this situation yet again and writing this after so many years of it. It has been a long row to hoe and I feel like I’ve been to hell and back again countless times on this nightmare journey with my PA husband.
We are married and have been together for 21 years and have 3 children. He is a lifelong porn addict starting back in his teenage years. I am 42 and he is 50 years old. I was unware of his porn addiction when we first met back in 1997. I was 21 when we met, he was 29. We occasionally looked at porn together back then but I had no idea of his history with porn addiction and after we were married and had children we never looked at porn together. Our lives were so busy and the focus was on raising our children and being a family. For the most part we had a pretty good relationship and we always had a good sex life but porn was not something that we got into together.
The first D Day was just over 7 years ago. I perhaps would have cottoned on to this much sooner if he didn’t work in IT and have covered his tracks so well and made sure there was never ever a trace of anything. I have been through ongoing hell since then. The lies, the betrayals, the trauma, pain and suffering I have felt and endured in this time feels like a lifetime and a life sentence.
There have been quite a number of D Days now over the past 7 years despite his ongoing promises and lies that it’s no longer happening, he doesn’t look at porn or masturbate anymore, he doesn’t feel the need for it, he wouldn’t do that anymore because he doesn’t want to hurt me, he’s learned and grown and is a changed person now – it’s all been nothing but LIES, AFTER LIES, AFTER LIES!!! I’ve come to believe that he’s nothing but a compulsive liar and perhaps even leaning toward sociopathic behaviour because he expresses no real remorse, caring or understanding toward me. Somehow, he always manages to turn everything around and despite me feeling victimised and traumatised and in so much pain he plays the victim. He can’t see that he is the perpetrator of this whole situation, its his actions and his choices that have us in this ongoing vicious cycle instead he behaves like he’s the victim and what I’m going through is really not that bad and he can’t understand how I could be so affected and traumatised by it all.
For the most part over the past 7 years he has been in nothing but total denial but it’s really not as simple as that because for years now he tells me what he thinks I want to hear or need to hear but all the while believing none of it himself and not following through on any of his commitments or agreements. For example, he has repeatedly told me for years now that he knows he has a problem and a porn / masturbation addiction and it really started back in his younger years but then on the flip side has also repeatedly told me for years that he doesn’t believe he has a problem anymore and it was never that bad, and that he has healed/fixed himself even though he hasn’t done any really work on himself. In the past 7 years, if what I understand is true, he has had a few occasions where he hasn’t looked at porn for a few weeks. That is it. And even during those periods he was still masturbating. He masturbates compulsively everyday during his morning showers and has done pretty much his entire life. And there were many periods of time he was masturbating up to 5 or 6 times a day whether it be at home or at work in the toilets.
We have tried various types of intervention / help, all which I instigated and pushed for him to do. To this day he hasn’t instigated anything toward his own healing or recovery. Most times he has agreed to go along with it but was not ever really that committed because I don’t feel he has ever truly felt he has a problem but more he feels that I’m the one whose got a problem with his porn / masturbation addiction behaviour and have made an overexaggerated and unnecessary issue of it. Even though I feel it has destroyed our marriage and our lives in such a way that nothing else has.
About 6 years ago we tried seeing a relationship counsellor but she had no background in porn or sex addiction and I felt so traumatised, angry, and in pain that I don’t think she really got it and neither of us could really relate to her so that ended after 2 sessions. Unfortunately, we don’t have any therapists in our area that particularly specialise in porn / masturbation addiction.
I have done years of reading and research online about porn addiction, the way it chemically changes the PA’s brain, the addiction to dopamine, the affects of depression, anxiety, low self esteem etc…as well as much reading on the trauma that partners of PA’s experience all of which I can totally relate to. My husband has done little reading or research on porn addiction in this time bar a few articles that I practically forced him to read and has not shown any interest. Most likely due to his denial and because he felt he didn’t have time for it and had better ways to spend his free time like, watching movies, TV shows or playing games on his mobile.
About 4 years ago, I suggested that he join a SLAA group as maybe that would help. He did attend this weekly for about 12 months and didn’t seem to mind going. He doesn’t have any friends that he socialises with and so I think he felt good to be connecting with other men. The downside in my opinion was that many of these men had much worse problems than porn addiction. Many had full on sex addictions where they were having multiple sex encounters with others while in relationships. I didn’t feel him getting close to these kinds of men was a good influence in anyway. He started becoming infatuated or preoccupied with thoughts about how these men manage to have so many sexual encounters with prostitutes and/or other women without getting caught. I started to feel threatened by this especially so because only 3 months prior to starting SLAA I had discovered that he had created an account with a local Meet up for a Fuck website. At the time he tried to assure me that he had no intention of meeting up with anyone for sex but was just curious and wanted to look at the pictures on these women’s profiles. Either way I was feeling threatened and very disturbed by it and felt this group was perhaps doing more harm than good and so he agreed to stop going.
About 3 years ago, I suggested that we both go to separate psychologists. My doctor was able to find one for him who dealt with sex addiction but not so much porn addiction. He attended about 6 sessions but didn’t feel he was getting much out of it and so stopped going. I have no real idea of how honest or real he was being about his addiction with the therapist. Given how much he has lived in denial over the years it’s possible that he wasn’t 100% forthcoming about the extent of his problem.
Not long after this, I found Recovery Nation online. Recovery Nation has a very extensive and free Online Course for Sex/Porn Addicts, Partners of Sex/Porn Addicts and also a program for Couples in Recovery. The course was designed by a former Sex Addict but was also tailored toward Porn Addiction. I was so pleased to come across this after years of trying to find something that would help. I immediately started the course for Partners of Sex/Porn Addicts and encouraged my husband to join and to participate in the online forum and to start doing the program. At first he was reluctant, but then with my persuasion, warmed up to the idea and joined. He started the program but then read the book by Jon Marsh, the guy that started Recovery Nation and decided that given that Jon was a sex addict and much worse than him that he didn’t need to do the program even though it was still very much tailored toward Porn Addicts as well. He only completed the first couple of topics and then decided that was it, he didn’t need it and it didn’t suit him. I was devasted and told him that if he doesn’t do something that I can’t see how our relationship can keep going like this. Basically, he said he would rather leave than to have to go through all this work on himself. For about 9 months I desperately tried to get him to attempt to complete the program and just give it a chance and that it might help. He point blankly refused.
I started looking into Porn Addiction books that he could read and perhaps work through the exercises and suggestions they contained. He agreed he would read some. He read one and at the time said he felt it helped and didn’t need to continue reading any others.
This is last kind of recovery or help he has done for himself and that was about 2 years ago. We have had regular discussions over the last couple of years with me giving him a safe open space for him to talk about his addiction and for him to be open and honest with me about anything that might still be going on. Everytime, he has assured me that he is no longer looking at porn anymore, that he hasn’t felt the need to look at anything in years and he doesn’t even feel the urge or need to do it anymore.
I should also mention that about 5 years ago I put Accountable2You monitoring software on his phone and that the computer at home was password protected so he could only use it when I was home and he was not in a separate room on his own.
Three weeks ago, I discovered a whole lot of porn and sexually explicit movies that he has been watching on his laptop at work. His workplace has monitoring software obviously so he wasn’t on porn sites as such but instead had everything on hard drives. For years now, he has had this obsession of collecting movies and TV shows on hard drives and there must be about 8 hard drives with thousands of movies/TV shows. Most of these are normal movies etc….but I’ve discovered he was keeping a couple of hard drives at work that contained porn and movies with loads of female nudity and sexually explicit scenes. I also found some of these on the hard drives at home but hidden under different movie titles.
For years, we have argued over the extra time he spends at work and why??? His work hours are 7.30am to 3.40pm with 20-25min travel time each way. There have been countless times over the years where he would leave for work at 6.30am and not get home until 5-5.30pm. I often felt he could be spending time on his work computer looking at porn but he assured me he was not and that he was extremely busy and had a lot of work on. Although, I do believe this has been the case in many instances, it is now very obvious that he was also using his time to look at porn everyday at work. The only reason I now know this is because about 18 months ago they were all issued with laptops that they can take home with them to do work after hours when required. Even though he never bought his hard drives home I was able to access information on his laptop which showed the titles and dates of what he’s been viewing from his hard drives on his laptop. At work he was also using his computer to watch porn and view videos and images of naked women etc through YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, Pinterest, Tumblr and google images. Through using these sites it is harder to trace what is being viewed exactly.
Once again, through my efforts, I have encouraged him to join NoFap which he has and he is also reading Your Brain on Porn and another book too. I am trying to encourage him to join in on discussions and participate by posting in the forums. He has started a PM Reboot and I now also have monitoring software on his laptop. He has given me his hard drives from work but he is part of a group where they all share movies at work and this is where a lot of the porn and nudity/sex scene movies have come from. He assures me he won’t be getting any more but how does one even control that and like he said if he really wanted to he could easily get a media player and watch stuff from hard drives or USB's on that which I’d never know about because it’d be at work and unmonitored.
So here I am, once again feeling betrayed, lied too, traumatised, lost and stuck in this never ending vicious cycle of his addiction…..I feel like the last 7 years have been nothing but traumatic and wasted years of my life where everyday has been polluted and centralised around his addiction, trying to get him to deal with his problem and struggling and trying to cope with my own pain and trauma.
I’m sorry this has been such a long post but I really just needed to vent and get this all off my chest. I feel so helpless and feel like everything is just a vicious repeated cycle, and that I’ve been here before so many times, venting and expressing my pain and frustration and I’m just so tired and exhausted of it all…..I don’t know what to do anymore…..
I am not really sure where to begin and find it difficult to believe that I am here in this situation yet again and writing this after so many years of it. It has been a long row to hoe and I feel like I’ve been to hell and back again countless times on this nightmare journey with my PA husband.
We are married and have been together for 21 years and have 3 children. He is a lifelong porn addict starting back in his teenage years. I am 42 and he is 50 years old. I was unware of his porn addiction when we first met back in 1997. I was 21 when we met, he was 29. We occasionally looked at porn together back then but I had no idea of his history with porn addiction and after we were married and had children we never looked at porn together. Our lives were so busy and the focus was on raising our children and being a family. For the most part we had a pretty good relationship and we always had a good sex life but porn was not something that we got into together.
The first D Day was just over 7 years ago. I perhaps would have cottoned on to this much sooner if he didn’t work in IT and have covered his tracks so well and made sure there was never ever a trace of anything. I have been through ongoing hell since then. The lies, the betrayals, the trauma, pain and suffering I have felt and endured in this time feels like a lifetime and a life sentence.
There have been quite a number of D Days now over the past 7 years despite his ongoing promises and lies that it’s no longer happening, he doesn’t look at porn or masturbate anymore, he doesn’t feel the need for it, he wouldn’t do that anymore because he doesn’t want to hurt me, he’s learned and grown and is a changed person now – it’s all been nothing but LIES, AFTER LIES, AFTER LIES!!! I’ve come to believe that he’s nothing but a compulsive liar and perhaps even leaning toward sociopathic behaviour because he expresses no real remorse, caring or understanding toward me. Somehow, he always manages to turn everything around and despite me feeling victimised and traumatised and in so much pain he plays the victim. He can’t see that he is the perpetrator of this whole situation, its his actions and his choices that have us in this ongoing vicious cycle instead he behaves like he’s the victim and what I’m going through is really not that bad and he can’t understand how I could be so affected and traumatised by it all.
For the most part over the past 7 years he has been in nothing but total denial but it’s really not as simple as that because for years now he tells me what he thinks I want to hear or need to hear but all the while believing none of it himself and not following through on any of his commitments or agreements. For example, he has repeatedly told me for years now that he knows he has a problem and a porn / masturbation addiction and it really started back in his younger years but then on the flip side has also repeatedly told me for years that he doesn’t believe he has a problem anymore and it was never that bad, and that he has healed/fixed himself even though he hasn’t done any really work on himself. In the past 7 years, if what I understand is true, he has had a few occasions where he hasn’t looked at porn for a few weeks. That is it. And even during those periods he was still masturbating. He masturbates compulsively everyday during his morning showers and has done pretty much his entire life. And there were many periods of time he was masturbating up to 5 or 6 times a day whether it be at home or at work in the toilets.
We have tried various types of intervention / help, all which I instigated and pushed for him to do. To this day he hasn’t instigated anything toward his own healing or recovery. Most times he has agreed to go along with it but was not ever really that committed because I don’t feel he has ever truly felt he has a problem but more he feels that I’m the one whose got a problem with his porn / masturbation addiction behaviour and have made an overexaggerated and unnecessary issue of it. Even though I feel it has destroyed our marriage and our lives in such a way that nothing else has.
About 6 years ago we tried seeing a relationship counsellor but she had no background in porn or sex addiction and I felt so traumatised, angry, and in pain that I don’t think she really got it and neither of us could really relate to her so that ended after 2 sessions. Unfortunately, we don’t have any therapists in our area that particularly specialise in porn / masturbation addiction.
I have done years of reading and research online about porn addiction, the way it chemically changes the PA’s brain, the addiction to dopamine, the affects of depression, anxiety, low self esteem etc…as well as much reading on the trauma that partners of PA’s experience all of which I can totally relate to. My husband has done little reading or research on porn addiction in this time bar a few articles that I practically forced him to read and has not shown any interest. Most likely due to his denial and because he felt he didn’t have time for it and had better ways to spend his free time like, watching movies, TV shows or playing games on his mobile.
About 4 years ago, I suggested that he join a SLAA group as maybe that would help. He did attend this weekly for about 12 months and didn’t seem to mind going. He doesn’t have any friends that he socialises with and so I think he felt good to be connecting with other men. The downside in my opinion was that many of these men had much worse problems than porn addiction. Many had full on sex addictions where they were having multiple sex encounters with others while in relationships. I didn’t feel him getting close to these kinds of men was a good influence in anyway. He started becoming infatuated or preoccupied with thoughts about how these men manage to have so many sexual encounters with prostitutes and/or other women without getting caught. I started to feel threatened by this especially so because only 3 months prior to starting SLAA I had discovered that he had created an account with a local Meet up for a Fuck website. At the time he tried to assure me that he had no intention of meeting up with anyone for sex but was just curious and wanted to look at the pictures on these women’s profiles. Either way I was feeling threatened and very disturbed by it and felt this group was perhaps doing more harm than good and so he agreed to stop going.
About 3 years ago, I suggested that we both go to separate psychologists. My doctor was able to find one for him who dealt with sex addiction but not so much porn addiction. He attended about 6 sessions but didn’t feel he was getting much out of it and so stopped going. I have no real idea of how honest or real he was being about his addiction with the therapist. Given how much he has lived in denial over the years it’s possible that he wasn’t 100% forthcoming about the extent of his problem.
Not long after this, I found Recovery Nation online. Recovery Nation has a very extensive and free Online Course for Sex/Porn Addicts, Partners of Sex/Porn Addicts and also a program for Couples in Recovery. The course was designed by a former Sex Addict but was also tailored toward Porn Addiction. I was so pleased to come across this after years of trying to find something that would help. I immediately started the course for Partners of Sex/Porn Addicts and encouraged my husband to join and to participate in the online forum and to start doing the program. At first he was reluctant, but then with my persuasion, warmed up to the idea and joined. He started the program but then read the book by Jon Marsh, the guy that started Recovery Nation and decided that given that Jon was a sex addict and much worse than him that he didn’t need to do the program even though it was still very much tailored toward Porn Addicts as well. He only completed the first couple of topics and then decided that was it, he didn’t need it and it didn’t suit him. I was devasted and told him that if he doesn’t do something that I can’t see how our relationship can keep going like this. Basically, he said he would rather leave than to have to go through all this work on himself. For about 9 months I desperately tried to get him to attempt to complete the program and just give it a chance and that it might help. He point blankly refused.
I started looking into Porn Addiction books that he could read and perhaps work through the exercises and suggestions they contained. He agreed he would read some. He read one and at the time said he felt it helped and didn’t need to continue reading any others.
This is last kind of recovery or help he has done for himself and that was about 2 years ago. We have had regular discussions over the last couple of years with me giving him a safe open space for him to talk about his addiction and for him to be open and honest with me about anything that might still be going on. Everytime, he has assured me that he is no longer looking at porn anymore, that he hasn’t felt the need to look at anything in years and he doesn’t even feel the urge or need to do it anymore.
I should also mention that about 5 years ago I put Accountable2You monitoring software on his phone and that the computer at home was password protected so he could only use it when I was home and he was not in a separate room on his own.
Three weeks ago, I discovered a whole lot of porn and sexually explicit movies that he has been watching on his laptop at work. His workplace has monitoring software obviously so he wasn’t on porn sites as such but instead had everything on hard drives. For years now, he has had this obsession of collecting movies and TV shows on hard drives and there must be about 8 hard drives with thousands of movies/TV shows. Most of these are normal movies etc….but I’ve discovered he was keeping a couple of hard drives at work that contained porn and movies with loads of female nudity and sexually explicit scenes. I also found some of these on the hard drives at home but hidden under different movie titles.
For years, we have argued over the extra time he spends at work and why??? His work hours are 7.30am to 3.40pm with 20-25min travel time each way. There have been countless times over the years where he would leave for work at 6.30am and not get home until 5-5.30pm. I often felt he could be spending time on his work computer looking at porn but he assured me he was not and that he was extremely busy and had a lot of work on. Although, I do believe this has been the case in many instances, it is now very obvious that he was also using his time to look at porn everyday at work. The only reason I now know this is because about 18 months ago they were all issued with laptops that they can take home with them to do work after hours when required. Even though he never bought his hard drives home I was able to access information on his laptop which showed the titles and dates of what he’s been viewing from his hard drives on his laptop. At work he was also using his computer to watch porn and view videos and images of naked women etc through YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, Pinterest, Tumblr and google images. Through using these sites it is harder to trace what is being viewed exactly.
Once again, through my efforts, I have encouraged him to join NoFap which he has and he is also reading Your Brain on Porn and another book too. I am trying to encourage him to join in on discussions and participate by posting in the forums. He has started a PM Reboot and I now also have monitoring software on his laptop. He has given me his hard drives from work but he is part of a group where they all share movies at work and this is where a lot of the porn and nudity/sex scene movies have come from. He assures me he won’t be getting any more but how does one even control that and like he said if he really wanted to he could easily get a media player and watch stuff from hard drives or USB's on that which I’d never know about because it’d be at work and unmonitored.
So here I am, once again feeling betrayed, lied too, traumatised, lost and stuck in this never ending vicious cycle of his addiction…..I feel like the last 7 years have been nothing but traumatic and wasted years of my life where everyday has been polluted and centralised around his addiction, trying to get him to deal with his problem and struggling and trying to cope with my own pain and trauma.
I’m sorry this has been such a long post but I really just needed to vent and get this all off my chest. I feel so helpless and feel like everything is just a vicious repeated cycle, and that I’ve been here before so many times, venting and expressing my pain and frustration and I’m just so tired and exhausted of it all…..I don’t know what to do anymore…..
