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Tormented
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Posted: Wed May 16th, 2007 07:04 am |
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Here is my short story, my wife found out on Nov. 06 that I had an affair with a woman for 9 years and after some time went by she also discovered that there was more affairs, one night stands and adult book stores involved as well, Since she has found all of this out I have found God and been clean and sober and now feel like I could stay that way We have gone to counseling with our pastor who has dealt with sex addiction in our church and I also see a therapist that deals with sex addiction, about a month ago I found two old playboy magazines and looked at them for approximately 15 min, my wife took this as acting out and it took us back to ground zero. She has since found out more things in my past, but I feel like I can stay clean and sober now and will never reaffend. Its been 5 months now and I have not had the need to or feel like I need to do it again. Have any of you ever felt like this and if so have you ever reaffended and how long did you go before reaffending. My wife feels like I will reaffend for sure and is very upset by it. How can I reasure her I won't do it again? We have been married for 18 years and I cheated on her with porn and all the above for the entire 18 years.
Thank You so much
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TimM
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Posted: Wed May 16th, 2007 07:47 pm |
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A few comments on your questions, in no particular order:
- Of course your wife's upset. What do you expect? The slip could have been worse, but it's very much a step in the wrong direction, and you and she both know where that direction leads. It's natural that she wants assurance that you are taking the slip seriously and doing everything you can to address the deeper issues that led to it.
- Rebuilding trust takes a long time. On another board I frequent, one partner says she thinks it takes 2 years of faithfulness for every year of betrayal. I don't think that's unreasonable. If you cheated for 18 years, that means you'll be ready to be trusted completely in about 2043. For me, it will be more like 2065, which I won't live to see. Thinking that 18 years of behaving in an untrustworthy way can be erased in 5 months isn't realistic.
- I think reoffending is always a possibility. I've been in recovery for about 26 months. In that time, I was sober for 2 months, then slipped briefly as you did. I then was sober for 5 months and slipped again, then 1 month and again. I've now been sober about 18 months. I know people who have had brief slips after periods like 5 years, 8 years, 17 years. I heard a recorded talk by Ebby T, the guy who sobered up Bill W to found AA. Ebby comes across as a saint of recovery in the Big Book, but he had struggles all his life where he would be sober for 5 or 10 years and then relapse. The point is that 5 months of sobriety is a huge accomplishment - Congratulations! - but it's not a guarantee of being over the problem for life. Slips after a couple of years are not uncommon, unfortunately.
- It seems to me that one of the things that leads us to fall is complacency and over-confidence. We get cocky that we have things under control and that we don't need the help of other people or the prayers to God or the journaling and meditation and reflection that keep us on the path. Then, without all those tools, BANG, the addiction cleans our clocks.
I need to remember that I spent 30 years trying to be strong and control my addictiion by myself, and that I made exactly zero progress over that time. The moment I say, "OK, I'm strong and in control," I need to keep reminding myself that 30 years of hell in my life says I'm wrong. What got me sober and is keeping me sober today is the help of God and of my fellow addicts. It's working the steps and being honest and praying and having the courage to look long and hard and fearlessly inside myself and to share what I find there with the people around me. It's humility and accountability and service. The moment I decide I can drop all those things - forget God and stop sharing with my wife and quit counseling and stop going to meetings - all the established patterns of a lifetime of addictive living are just waiting there to move me back into the old "normal" ways which were for me the path to addictive hell. I had 52 years to learn how to live like an addict. After 2 years of starting to learn how to live like someone else, I'm not done with that project.
Be patient. Recovery and restoration of trust are projects for a lifetime, not for a few months.
You might also ask yourself what there is to learn from your slips with the magazines. Things I ask myself include: What's the earliest point I could see the slip coming? How did I feel then? How did I feel before then? What could I have done in order to avoid the slip? What will I do next time? How can I avoid the situation that triggered the slip? Is there anything I am not doing in my program or not doing well enough that I can pick up in order to improve the quality of my recovery? Do I need to attend more meetings, pray more, make more phone calls, schedule more counseling sessions, read and write more, talk more with my wife? Is there anything I am avoiding doing that I now see I neeed to pick up in order to avoid future slips? To me, a slip is the moment at which our recovery is most strongly tested an at which we have an enormous amount to learn. Maybe there are things your slip can tell you that will help you grow in recovery and be more effective next time.
Again, 5 months is great, and it sounds like you are doing a lot of important thngs to get better. But we are trying to build whole new lives and to learn whole new ways of being. that work takes time, and persuading those around us that we are doing it also takes time. Maybe it's enough now to be calm and humble and accepting of that, and to keep moving forward.
Tim M.
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