This is insane

The core principle behind all advertising is to create a sense of lack, insecurity and imbalance in the mind of the person exposed to the advertisement. A lack that only the product being advertised can rectify. Problem-reaction-solution.

All aspects of modern consumer society function on this 'poverty mentality' principle, so it is no surprise that women (men too) have been entrained from an early age to feel insecure, inadequate and neurotic.

The first and most crucial step in breaking free of this enslavement is to recognize that it is true.

 

I think you should start a journal on here ! Get your story out on “paper” . Read other SO journals . It’s a beautiful tribe of women supporting each other and healthy input from PA . Even if it’s just for validation of what your feeling or for support <3 . My journal has helped me heal and not spiral outwardly ( most of the time , I’m human ) I’ve been here 5 1/2 years .

 

I can’t presume to tell you how you do feel, and that it’s wrong, or what you should feel. It’s horrible. It’s also not a problem you asked for, and that’s also horrible. It’s not fair. You are fully in your rights to limit the damage and leave.

All I’m pushing back on is the idea that addicts don’t care, as proven by the fact that we still do it even though it hurts others. I’m pushing back on the idea that it would be fixed if only we loved more and tried harder. Addiction is a pit you can’t just crawl out of for the wanting. It’s a long, difficult, excruciating process, and again, it’s not your responsibility and you don’t have to put up with it. Something in him is broken. It’s not you. He didn’t necessarily get addicted because he didn’t love you or didn’t care about you, either. I don’t know enough about him and his situation to say. It’s just not fair to say he is a hateful person based solely on this addiction.

 

My husband is 48 . It’s actually comical to me at this point . To choose not getting help and staying with that help long term over a beautiful life , all because that is what’s easy . All because of the stigma with it . Crazy town .

 

I think this is the worst part of it. Putting the interests of other before your own, and building unfounded hope only based on the empty promises of your SO.

A lot of women stay in abusive relationships because of the same self-destructive mindset, and when they end up beaten badly and go to the police you guess what they tell them : I thought he was going to change.

 

Exactly. This is just another form of abusing your partner

 

I do not believe my husband loved me, because he didn’t even love himself. I believe Addicts must learn to love themselves before they can love others. Addiction is a form of self harm, I believe they think they love their partner, but there is a vast difference in thinking and actually doing. My husband clean and in recovery is a man who loves me very well. Night and day difference. When he uses he is a miserable creature. But I agree, something in him is broken and it isn’t about me. He must learn to face that and heal what’s broken in him before our relationship can be fixed, if that’s even possible.

 

I've got a few points to make here if I may.

Addiction is not a choice. It is a disease. It is a disease of choice. It is a mechanism of a dysfunctional brain. So let's call it what it is. It isn't any more or less treatable than any other disease. If treatment is refused which they are perfectly within their right to do there are consequences of that disease. Unfortunately we treat sex addiction as something much different than any other addiction in large part because of the stigma associated with it. It's a brain disease. If you expect a dysfunctional brain to think in a functional manner you're in for a very rude awakening.

I don't believe that love has anything to do with it. Why? "If they loved us they wouldn't subject us to it" is extremely short sighted. If we took a very simple analogy "If you loved me you would do 'xyz' for me" whatever 'xyz' is it is a ridiculous attempt at manipulation to get them to do 'xyz'. Whether they love you or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether they will do 'xyz' or not. That sort of manipulation isn't any different than the manipulation they have orchestrated upon us.

Yes they minimize trivialize excuse deny deny deny the fucked up behavior. That's because it is shrouded in so much guilt and shame and embarrassment that they perceive anything that is an attack on it is a personal attack on them. And yes we enable them when we don't do our part. By that I mean tough love. We don't do our children any favors by allowing them to get away without consequences for their fucked up behavior. That's enabling. Why do we allow it with our manchild of a husband?

There are sufficient women in here that know very well what the right course of action is. There are few men who are addicted that do and tend to muddy the waters of an otherwise clear stream. We can blame it on porn but porn isn't and never was the problem. The problem goes all the way back to the childhood wounds that we endured. All of us from addict to victim of betrayal trauma.

Our counselor shared with us something called denials excuses and consequences. It was a light bulb for my husband because when he wrote them down it was a stark reminder of that which he uses to minimize it. I get it. No one wants to believe they are a bad person. We have to look at the actions and not the person because beneath the monster that is Mr. Hyde is a wonderfully beautiful person Dr. Jekyll. The chemical that makes the monster Mr. Hyde? It is dopamine and porn is the medium to get it.

Boys and I mean that almost literally you're doing yourselves no favors arguing this shit with us. We've educated ourselves and we're onto you. So take your "oh whoa is me" arguments elsewhere because we're not hearing them. Like someone said before "it's not about you". It's about us and what we have to endure to live in a state of happiness. It's absurd and if you had to do it I can bet every last dollar I had that you wouldn't if it was a reciprocal arrangement. From what we have learned I have no doubt you're a victim. However you weren't victimized by us like you did us. Figure out where your wounds originated and move along from there. You would be surprised how much of your bullshit has nothing to do with us. It's all within you.

As for me I detached from it. I had to for my own sake. It is one piece of advice I'd give every single woman going through this. When we detach we become empowered. Not to control the men in our lives. But to maintain some level of self control. If we don't we'll go insane. This disease is insanity.

Anyhow I've said more than I intended. To the OP I hope and pray you can figure this out. When we got into see the right person and that is key we each healed ourselves and that led to healing our marriage. It is doable but only if each of us does our part. Beware thought you may find you don't even like the man in your life anymore after you figure out your own self-worth and that you deserve much much more than what your relationship provides. Best of luck to you.

 

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.

 

I for years have been able to separate my husband from the addiction . I know everything we have is true and real . I also know there’s this box over there in the corner that he keeps opening . This for me has nothing to do with hate of him . Love the man hate the addiction . Well he’s backed me in a corner again . I will fully detach WITH love . He does love me . Not in all the ways I love him . That will no longer work for me . I am older and wiser now to see it for what it is . He is older and none the wiser . I have a right to feel pissed off , robbed .

 

Would YOU stay ?

 

Spinster Spotted!

 

Stop it . That’s so uncalled for . I betcha that “spinster “ has a full arsenal of sexy stuff that went unappreciated

 

haha.. never mind.

 

Very true.

Women are inherently visual and studies have shown that they respond very acutely to pornographic imagery. Like you say, men deny woman this trait mostly as a convenient excuse that is not backed up whatsoever by science. The real reason females don't become porn addicts? Here are a few contenders:

1. Women might be more choosy as to what arouses them and this might be contextual.
2. Young women are taught to manage their menstrual cycle and to not get pregnant, while young men are encouraged to masturbate and/or actively watch porn. The askewed sexual education and the societal view on gender is startling and scary.
3. Women learn to talk about their feelings while men are encouraged to refrain from expressing any kind of emotion. That means females in general have a large arsenal of tools to deal with destructive thoughts and behaviors whereas men/boys do not. Let us remember that addictive behaviour is due to a lack of coping skills.
4. 1/3 of porn users are female, a number that's expected to grow.

The day men understand that their behaviour isn't necessarily due to them being born with testicles is also the day they will take responsibility for their own actions and porn will seize to exist.