I copied the name of this post from Glennon over at Momastry. I stumbled on her blog today and I have been eating it up. She is a real person. She has flaws and she willingly shares them. She is amazingly frank and I find it uplifting. She came to the realization that her outsides needed to match her insides, she needed people to know that she isn't perfect or put together most of the time. Her post called Telling Secrets inspired me today.
I want other women to hear me say, you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to look a certain way, behave a certain way or do anything that you are uncomfortable with. None of these things matter in the scheme of helping your loved one heal from their sexual addiction. You didn't cause the addiction. You don't make it worse. It's their disease to heal from. You can support them. You can love them. But their actions are not caused by anything you do or anything that you don't do. It took me at least ten years to learn that. Frankly it is something that I have to relearn at times.
Now is as good a time as any to tell you my secret, my truth as it is. My name is T and I am not only married to an addict but I am an addict. I'm not addicted to visual pornography like B is but rather to both food and written pornography.
My addiction to food started when I was an early teen. I was able to keep it "hidden" more or less until I got to college and it got out of control. I have never conquered that monster. I have taken baby steps in that direction and I want to take more. In a sense my husband's addiction has triggered me to turn to my own addiction to food to help me cope. It isn't his fault, I don't blame him. I did, oh believe me I did, but I have come to realize that just like his addiction isn't my fault, my addiction isn't his.
My addiction to written pornography, well that was a much more tortuous road. I remember reading a book about seven or eight years ago that had some swearing in it and some mild sex scenes. I threw it away. I had paid good money for it but I was so disgusted with it that I threw it away. Over the last two to three years I have gradually let more and more sex creep into the books I read, or rather I have become more liberal in what I will allow myself to read. You might think that it would disgust me, and it did at first. However, just like with visual pornography, each time I encountered it I was desensitized to it that much more. It got to the point where all I wanted to read was "trashy" romance novels. I have e-reader accounts, and just like with visual pornography, the worst stuff is usually the free or cheap stuff. A lot of the books that have real value and don't contain the garbage are expensive. That's how I started justifying it. I even admit to not only reading all three books in the Fifty Shades of Gray series, but several books that were just as bad if not worse.
When B and I hit rock bottom I decided that I needed to take away as much temptation as possible for myself. For a week or so I deleted my e-reader apps so I didn't have any access to them. When I reinstalled them I went through and deleted all the books I knew had sex in them and all the books I couldn't remember for sure if they did. I didn't just delete them from my devices, but completely from my library so I have no access to them. This is my first step. I guess if I am working the program, I have taken step number one by admitting that I have a problem. I am working on step number two…hope. I want to believe in the power of God to restore me to spiritual health, but I'm not quite there yet.
There is no less shame for me to admit to my addiction than there is to admit my husband is an addict. There is no less shame for me to admit to my addiction than there is for him to admit to his. It's hard for me to grasp the twisting nature of my emotions sometimes. Shame, hurt, disgust, betrayal, hope, pain, hopelessness, fear, defeat, and the list goes on…sometimes in relation to my own addictions and sometimes in relation to B's. I will leave all that for another post as it's more than I can write tonight.
Hoping for hope and putting my secrets out there,
T.
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