Everything you say about how much pain you and all the other SOs are being put through by this addiction that you don’t deserve is true. I’m not contradicting any of it. I don’t bring up the problems of the addict to make it into a sick horse race. You got the short straw, no question. I bring up the addict’s suffering only to contradict the claim that, if the addict cared about your suffering, he’d quit. That logic doesn’t hold, because he also suffers greatly and he can’t quit. Does that mean he also doesn’t care about himself?
It’s a common pattern for addicts to hard drugs, alcohol, nicotine, and gambling, addictions that are all formally recognized by the DSM and culture at large, to deny they have a problem. It’s common to claim their use of these dangerous substances or activities is appropriate, and it’s other people around them that are being unreasonable. If it’s so easy for addicts to deny with pressure from the outside, how easy is it to deny and blame without that pressure? Have you seen the Wikipedia page on NoFap? “Society” enables porn addiction by denying its legitimacy, and by enabling porn addiction they enable your addict, and they harm you.
Addiction is a vulnerable psychological state that gets the best of good intentioned people. I’m trying to say that, instead of assuming men in general and your addict in particular is an evil and indifferent person, perhaps porn is your true enemy.
I’m not asking for your help. I didn’t before, and I’m not asking now. I don’t deserve your help, I wouldn’t presume to ask. I want you to help
yourself by assigning responsibility to the correct party.
This is such an angry knot of emotion born of raw pain and I hope I don’t sound patronizing when I tell you I understand it.
How?
How could I understand?
I’m an addict, I’m a man, I have done everything I’m being accused of, I am guilty, guilty, guilty, and I’m still here on this forum so I’m still addicted despite the absolute grief, the wreckage I’ve caused. I’ve read the stories, too! I’ve seen the devastation! But more importantly than that, I’ve seen the tears and the terror and the betrayal in my own wife’s eyes and I’ve felt it in the way she treats me, withdrawn, distrusting, afraid I will beat her when I never raised a hand, I see this is what I am and I hate it. I want to cut it all up, I want to set it on fire, or sometimes I want to dispense with the ceremony and put a bullet through it and be done with it. I’m torn between justice in what I deserve, which is to suffer every jolt and shock and protracted moment of misery and loneliness and devastation my wife has felt, and justice for her in ending it already so we can get past it all and she can begin healing and get the life she deserves, if that’s even possible now.
Therapy? I’ve gone to therapy. I’m still going to therapy. I’ve asked for couples counseling, we go to coaching instead and I hate it, I loathe it, because all we do is talk about what a wretched, awful human being I am and how every problem is my fault, but we don’t even have the courtesy to speak in plain terms about it. We wrap it up in weasel words that assume I’m stupid as well as cruel and incompetent, but I know what we’re talking about because if I was different and better none of this would be a problem. I do it for penance. Because I deserve it. Do the work? Put myself through hell? I do that. I can’t presume, I repeat yet again, to know fully what it is like to be an SO and sit there with no control and hope your addict will make the right choice, day after day after day, but I’m telling you it’s a similar sensation for an addict. I’ve got all my systems in place, I’m taking my meds, I’m doing the right things, but I never know when a series of events will trigger a moment of insanity and I’ll flush all my progress down the toilet. It could happen any time. There’s a guy I just saw yesterday, he’s on a 400+ day streak, still had a rough moment where he almost screwed up. And we know, if we screw up it’s not just us. We know if we screw up we’re bringing everyone we love down with us. I’m terrified of that. Every day I live inside a monster’s body and I try to guide it as best I can, praying it won’t slip out of control.
I know, I’m sorry, it sounds like I’m making this about me and addicts again, but this is how I feel and this is why I get so angry when I and other addicts are dismissed so easily. Oh, we don’t care. We persist in addiction because we see everyone else’s pain, but we only care about ourselves.
It’s not true.
It’s not.
I never asked for help. I don’t even want sympathy, what would I do with it? All I want, like you, is to be acknowledged. So I acknowledge you. LonelyStar, the shock of betrayal, the doubt when someone you trusted turned out to be untrustworthy, the insecurity fostered in yourself, the injustice of you, a real person in a real body, being compared to an endless revolving stable of youth concealed by surgery and cosmetics and professional lighting… it’s too much for a single psyche to bear. You can’t process it all at once so it comes in waves, over and over again. You feel like maybe you’ve gripped it, finally, that you can take a deep breath and move on, then it hits you all over again and knocks you off your feet, the enormity of it. The unfairness of it. And it keeps happening not just because it’s too big, too much to process all at once or over the course of a week or a month, this deep, bloody gash carved into the heart of your relationship and the heart of yourself, but because your addict still has the knife lodged in there. He keeps wiggling it, cutting deeper, widening the gap and it’s NOT FAIR. You love him and by all rights you shouldn’t. And that’s also not fair. Your options… what are they? Stay here and keep getting cut, or tear off a part of your own soul? That’s not a choice. And why can’t he stop? Why doesn’t he just stop? Why doesn’t he go back to the person you gave your heart to, before he turned into a demon and started gnawing on it? Because you’re in his power, he’s the one guiding the choices, not you.
That drama plays out over, and over, and over. For you,
@Queenie%Bee , for you,
@Psalm27:1my light , for dozens of others who I don’t remember because I don’t spend a lot of time here, because reminders of the enormity of my own sin threaten to sweep me away and it’s not good for my own recovery, ironically. All I want to say, the only thing I wish was understood by SOs, is that this addiction persists because it runs deep and treacherously, and is part of a construct much bigger than an addict’s preferences or choices or conscious desires. Porn addiction is chemical, it’s cultural, it’s conscious and unconscious, it’s in all relationships and assumptions even you make about your own value, and it’s not something that can be defeated just by wanting it enough or caring enough, like quitting refined sugar or taking the dog for two walks every day instead of one. Quitting porn usually requires a comprehensive lifestyle overhaul, and it’s virtually unguided. Addicts don’t know where to begin, and the whole time there’s that imp whispering in their ear, “porn isn’t really the problem, it’s got to be something else.” So don’t take it as a lack of love when he struggles. Don’t believe for a second it would be easier for him if you were somehow “better” in some way. Don’t direct your hate at him, and definitely don’t direct it at yourself. Direct it at addiction.
That’s all I meant to say.
