Very good question. I think we all have a different interpretation. If I remember correctly to forgive is to relinquish the desire to make the perpetrator pay. If that’s the only definition then yes I have forgiven my husband. I do not want him to “ pay” for the hurt he has caused me. If it’s moving on without hurting , then no I haven’t forgiven. It hurts. Every time.
Agree with this. For me forgiving also means that I no longer hold it against him at all. That it won’t bring up anger towards him. That I won’t feel like he owes me. That I don’t want him to feel badly for what he did to me (different from wanting him to pay or bad things to happen to him so he feels as bad as me).
To be a phone without blockers is much like an alcoholic walking around with a jack of whiskey in his pocket. He can be doing great, but all it takes is a really bad day. It could be the difference between staying sober and falling off the wagon. I get that feeling though. If he has to fight it, has to fight the urge to go to other women, why would I even want him? It’s honestly about making choices that serve me best at this point. Thats all I can do.
My wife hated it when I first started recovery and used the word “addiction”. She felt it avoided responsibility for the choice. (She also to this day has never looked up any info about what addiction is, to my knowledge
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Absolutely! 100 % agree. However facts are facts and very few get sober much less into recovery with this addiction. So setting up safeguards while you learn to process is most likely the only way to get enough sobriety to get into recovery.My wife hated it when I first started recovery and used the word “addiction”. She felt it avoided responsibility for the choice. (She also to this day has never looked up any info about what addiction is, to my knowledge
Anyway… being “addicted” to sex, lust, M, or P is different than most other addictions because you can’t get away from the source entirely.
Your brain is always with you, fantasy.
Beautiful women exist all around us in this world, lust.
P- subs and even light P is on commercials and billboards.
M, well your body is with you.
Even if you lived alone on an island you would have to learn to process urges from your own brain.
It’s still a good idea to take reasonable precautions with your devices. That’s just being smart. If an app has a history of slips, probably delete it.
Keep the safe search on your browsers and apps.
But in the end, learning to actually process feelings and urges and give your body what it actually needs is the key. Sobriety isn’t recovery
True, crawl before you walk…
As a tangent to this, we continue to keep blockers on all of our devices and use them on the router too. Most social media is too. We keep them up not because my husband is struggling with urges, but to prevent accidental exposure to our children (we homeschool so they are not around kids with personal devices). Our hope is to delay exposure as long as possible so that they’ve had enough education to reject it and get help. Trying to prep them in the same way I do with a gun or drugs - don’t touch, process with a safe adult.
I think about how many people on here were exposed to pornography young when they could not process it and had no idea that it was bad. Or my husband who wasn’t really (we aren’t old but we are old enough that kids didn’t have personal devices when we were teens) exposed to anything horrible young, but fell victim to the message out there that mo and porn can be “healthy”. I want my kids to know that it has the ability to damage them just like a drug could. Or a loaded firearm (we don’t do guns at all but I knew people whose families had them for hunting and treated them as the potentially dangerous items that they are). Or any other dangerous thing out there that we guide our children on so well.
We aren’t projecting it onto you guys. Our stories, our opinions and output give those on here the opportunity to confront possibilities in their own relationships, to ponder and process potential hurt and reactions their own partner’s might experience before diving into the fray. My trauma has been severe given some of the treatment of other people in my life, the betrayal trauma took those as kindling and created a wildfire. I know my story has helped others. If you spend any time reading about betrayal trauma you’ll come to learn that it is in fact as bad as ptsd. And the more that was hidden the worse it often is. We don’t come here to yell at you, to make you feel worse. We come here to give wake up calls to addicts who are stuck in the fog that pmo creates. Because when you are in it, you can’t see how far that fog extends. You can’t see how much hurt you might be causing. You think it’s packed away and only hurting you. But because you are hurting yourself so badly, you then are not at your best. You can’t treat others around you the way they deserve or even the way you really want to. My husband thought he had it so hidden. He knew it was bad. He knew it was wrong and if I ever found out it would destroy me. He could not see that he was already treating me really badly. He was so mean, so distant. I was so lonely. It got to the point that even before I found out, I was regularly looking for plane tickets so I could just leave because I could not figure out why we were so out of sync, why he would hug me and I would recoil. He’d be so cross with our children I kept them out of his way all the time so they wouldn’t have to get snapped at by him. It really was pervasive. We don’t come here to make you feel bad. We come here to say, wake up! Look at what you are doing to your partner, to your children. We want you to heal. We want you do recover. We want to prevent your partners from hurting so deeply or to help you help heal the damage if they already are. Sweeping the damage under the rug is not going to heal anyone on either side.
I think it’s hard for all of us. There are so many elements to hit and it all comes up against the pervasive societal message that it’s all good, sexual liberation and what not. I think we have to do the best we can. Raise our children to be strong, to be comfortable with going against the grain. To value themselves and know that they are investing in themselves and preparing themselves to be really amazing partners for someone one day. We can show them real connection, real conversation, real forgiveness so they don’t have to hide in shame. And then we’ll just be terrified hoping it’s enough.
I think this is a really interesting way of looking at it. We tend to think of wrongdoing in deontological terms, as in, I wanted to look at porn but didn't so I didn't do anything wrong. Your stance here is more in line with virtue ethics, i.e., the person that even wants to look at porn is simply not virtuous in their character.
One would think this is quite clear and just common sense... unfortunately not for addicts.
This is what I was thinking. Are there people who don't think this way or just aren't bothered by their partners WANTING to cheat as long as they don't cheat?
Why would any of us want to be with someone who is so preoccupied with living out a fantasy? With escaping to “be” with other people? At least for those of us who are married, it shouldn’t ever be like, whelp you are a great roomate and do your chores well. It’s supposed to be finding your person, the one that is with you in all areas of life. Not well you can be the mother of my children, someone I socialize with and whom I expect to take care of me but NOT the one I want to experience sexually. It’s so horribly diminishing. We keep blockers up in our home for the sake of our children (and additionally because if something were to pop up it would upset me horribly, I can’t even watch shows with garbage in it now). But I’m in the same camp, I made it clear to my husband that I’m not interested in a marriage where he’s off even fantasizing about other people. We chose each other this is what we’re doing. If he doesn’t want that, he can treat me with respect and leave. Thankfully he did put himself in my shoes and realized he would be horrified. So we’re on a clean slate, trying out our relationship how it always should have been from the beginning.