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LindaBeans
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| Joined: | Mon Nov 16th, 2009 |
| Location: | Nuevo Leon, Mexico |
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Posted: Wed Dec 2nd, 2009 05:29 am |
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When you meet her for the very first time, you go "Thats the one!" And fall in love. When you marry her thats supposed to seal the deal, that she is your girl, your bride. You have a house together and have kids, you know the whole shebang.
So tell me. Why would you go sleep with someone else? Look at porn at some other women who clearly isn't your dream girl? If you know you have a problem, why waste her time? Why hurt an innocent person who is looking for love. Why? Don't you love them? Didn't you love them that day you decided to pursue her?
Do you even still love them, after your done? After so many times you hurt them?
What i want to know is do you still love that woman, that girl you first lay your eyes upon after so much? Do you still love her the way you did from day one?
Im sorry if im coming of too strong, i just wanted to make my question clear. Again sorry if im causing problems here if i am with this :/
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Ask questions and live through the answers.
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TM2
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| Joined: | Thu Jan 8th, 2009 |
| Location: | Rural Midwest, USA |
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Posted: Thu Dec 3rd, 2009 01:24 am |
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My primary bottom-line behaviors have been visual. I've never had a physical or serious emotional affair while married. My own sense is that this doesn't make a huge difference - visual adultery is still adultery - but I say it just to be descriptive of my experience.
I don't think yours is an easy question to answer. It's hard not because I feel a need to sugar-coat my past betrayal, but because it's not easy to explain why one behaves in ways that seem crazy. If one regards addiction as a mental illness, though, then it's hardly surprising that we behave in ways that don't make much sense either to others or to ourselves. My friends with OCD also don't find it easy to describe why they get caught in nonsensical repetitive behavior - I think of one friend who laughs about giving up eating M&Ms because it just got to hard to sort and count them by color and arrange them in patterns and do all the thing she needed to do with them. She could get the same chocolate fix with a Hershey's bar, she said, and it was much simpler. Her behavior with M&Ms didn't make sense either to her or to others; my behavior with porn is the same way.
For me, the porn use went back long before my marriage, and it was a response to some pretty deep psychological hurts that I think I understand fairly well. It existed before I met my wife, and it continued independent of my wife.
The porn and the rest of my life live in very different parts of me. It's common for us addicts to talk about having two selves - our addict, and the self we try to project. That's how it seemed to me, though I think I didn't really stop at two selves. I was ashamed of my use of porn. I worked very hard to hide it from others. I struggled not to use porn. I pretended to myself that it was a minor thing, not really part of me. I strove to forget and to deny to myself my wrongs. In the end, my perception of having two personalities became very strong. A part of myself I hated and denied would emerge and overpower me, leading me to behave in ways I later deplored. It seemed in some ways a foreign force, not who I hoped I really was.
This isn't to say that I'm not responsible for my actions. Of course I am. Both these broken selves are parts of me. My actions are my own. It is to say that my actions as an addict and my actions as a husband lived in parts of me that hardly interacted at all.
The result is that I never really thought of my wife and my porn as connected in any way at all. I didn't think of porn when together with my wife. I didn't think I was hurting anything as long as she didn't know. I wasn't even looking in porn for something other than what my wife was physically - the models I found most exciting were the ones who looked most like my wife.
I didn't have a sufficiently unified personality to see a problem.
Now, occasionally, the two side of my self would come together. My wife would share how much my actions hurt her, and I would recoil in horror. In the long run, though, that horror was just another reason not to allow my addicted self to think of the rest of me and vice versa. It just built higher the walls dividing me from myself.
My actions look incomprehensible to others. They felt incomprehensible to me, too. Only because I wasn't one person could I live in this way.
Is this making any sense? I'm not trying to dodge responsibility for my actions. I'm trying to describe what it feels like inside to feel one has to do things that any sensible outside observer would recognize as nuts. If you want logical consistency, I can't give you that. But if you want a small picture of what it feels like to behave irrationally, there was an attempt.
Did I love my wife? Yes, as much as I could. No, not very well. I mostly didn't know what I was feeling, and often I still don't. How could I feel love? I didn't love myself, and I still struggle with that, which doesn't make it easy to care for anybody else. Part of my ritual included anger - in my mind, an argument justified seeking solace elsewhere - but my betrayal wasn't driven by a deep hatred of my wife. I didn't prefer anyone to her. For me, she and the porn models lived in different parts of the universe, not competing, incomparable as chalk and cheese.
Obviously this doesn't reflect how my wife felt, what the situation really was. I'm also not feeling very articulate, and so I haven't really captured very well my own feelings. Maybe there's something here, though, that gives a little glimpse of the inner experience of somebody sick in my particular way.
Tim M.
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Crocheter
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Posted: Mon Dec 7th, 2009 03:44 pm |
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| Thanks for asking this question and thanks for TM2 honestly answering the question. I wonder what goes on in my stbx (divorce is final on Friday)head. Although his affairs have also been physical. He does not want to change at all and says not all stuff is porn. He is living with his current affair and belongs to a Swing club. What goes on in these men's heads? It really hurts me. I thought I was in love with him now I am not so sure. He was the first person I ever had feelings for.
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InnerGold
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Posted: Tue Jan 26th, 2010 04:42 pm |
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We have seen many couples come in and if you read story after story, the addict still loves their spouse.
Addiction prevents the addict from thinking logically.
They don't want to act out. They don't want to view porn. They don't want to have impure thoughts. The problem is the addict does not know how to resist. Their brain is saying to different things. Watch two-part brain presentation, if you like.http://www.youtube.com/user/innergold1000#p/u/8/ft_ILdp4qlg
This presentation explains what is going on in an addicts brain when dealing with an addiction.
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Changing the World One Person at a Time - Gain hope, confidence and long-term sobriety. http://innergold.com
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Devastated Wife
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| Joined: | Fri Jul 17th, 2009 |
| Location: | Pittsburgh |
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Posted: Wed Jan 27th, 2010 04:38 am |
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Dear Linda,
My husband told me that he really thought the urges to look at porn would end once we were married. He swears that he did not marry me knowing that he was a sex addict. He thought he just liked to look at woman and masturbate. At the time we were married, I suspect very strongly that he was a sex addict but just didn't know it.
Paul seems to talk about addiction in Romans 7. It seems addiction has been with us since time began.
My best, Devastated Wife
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My best, Devastated Wife
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InnerGold
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Posted: Wed Jan 27th, 2010 02:31 pm |
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Devastated Wife wrote:
My husband told me that he really thought the urges to look at porn would end once we were married. He swears that he did not marry me knowing that he was a sex addict. He thought he just liked to look at woman and masturbate. At the time we were married, I suspect very strongly that he was a sex addict but just didn't know it.
Most likely, your husband was telling you the truth. Many addicts don't think they have a problem and think that they just have a high sex drive that will be taken care of, when married. Unfortunately, when they get married they realize they still have previous behaviors that they want to do but they don't want to. It goes back to the two-part brain.
____________________
Changing the World One Person at a Time - Gain hope, confidence and long-term sobriety. http://innergold.com
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