New reality, old addiction

Kind of cryptic, but I'll explain. Basically, I've had this addiction for about as long as I can remember. I believe it started at a very young age, before the internet was really a thing, back when my only recourse to dealing with these thoughts was to draw what I was thinking about. Needless to say, that was easily discovered by my parents, and I've since developed many tricky ways to hide my addiction from people I don't trust, namely just about everyone in my life. My parents were always out to label or medicate me, or just destroy my confidence in myself in any way. So that's where the concealment of it started. To find some enjoyment in life, and a group of people I could trust, I joined the military. The addiction only got worse the more stressed out I got with that life, so I had to become even better at hiding it.

This is where the new reality comes into play. At the worst possible time, when my addiction was just starting to really become an addiction, I met my wife. We hit it off so quickly, we were married in less than a year. We had our first kid at my last unit, about a year before I was due to rotate out. The stress of being a new dad, a transfer coming up, a job that I really had to bust my balls to succeed in, it was all too much. My wife moved three hours north to live with her parents until I could get it sorted out, and as I lived the temporary bachelor life, my addiction was only fed by boredom. Now at the new unit for a year and a half, I've been concealing the growing addiction from my wife who did move back in, quickly realizing that I needed to find a way to cut down on it, or make it go away entirely, but not sure how. I made the decision based on many factors to leave the military in a few months' time, and shortly after that I made a trip to the other side of the country to visit my wife and kid, staying in her parents' house yet again awaiting the arrival of our second child. During the trip earlier this month, my wife discovered the full extent of my addiction when she went snooping on my phone, and found evidence of it in downloaded files I'd forgotten to erase. I blamed myself, fell on my sword, she seemed to accept it, but quickly changed her tune, stating she wasn't sure if she could live in a marriage marked by cheating and betrayal. After being back home for about a week, and going through lots of emotional turmoil, shutting down on each other, barely talking, we finally found a way to see things the same way. I needed to stop, and she needed to realize pushing me away wasn't going to help me through this. I convinced her to stick it out, because not everything in our marriage was suddenly tainted because of a collection of bad decisions surrounding one thing in my life.

Now, that was about two weeks ago. I'd managed to abstain until a few days ago, and I went through some major stress at work which caused me a moment of true weakness, and I caved to my tendencies toward the addiction. I haven't since, but I know I won't make it through this alone, which is why I'm here. My wife doesn't know I'm doing this yet, but I plan on telling her later today. She needs to know I'm going to fight for our marriage.

-David