My Time Machine Entry

So, Angel has proposed a bit of an experiment :-)  All of us that are in the thick of this battle write up what our lives look like right now, post links in her 'Time Machine' post today, and we all come back in a year and see how far we've come.  I love the idea.  And it mildly terrifies me.  But mostly love it.  :-)

I think it scares me a little, 'cause while my husband is doing the best I have ever seen him do, and so am I, I would've said the same thing a year ago when he was 6 months in to an almost 11 month stint of sobriety.  And then it all came crashing down again and crushed me under the lies until it felt like I couldn't breath all over again just a few months ago. 

*Of course, as much as it hurt to have it all come back and to be so thoroughly lied to again, after things had been going 'so well', as I write this I'm realizing that here we are a year later and we are actually in a better place!  Sure, we had a big ol' messy disaster in the middle of it all, but we are both doing so much better than we were, really truly entering recovery for the first time.  That horrific bump in the road didn't completely derail us, 'cause here we are stronger and better and closer and healing more than we ever have been before.  I'm coming to realize that each 'setback', each 'failed attempt', each 'spectacular blunder' are all just the pieces that culminated into a situation that left my husband finally realizing that his life had become unmanageable, that he truly had lost to pornography and his addiction, and he could no longer do this on his own.  Without those mistakes, I don't think he'd be in recovery right now.  Wow, Angel, this has been really therapeutic and I haven't even started writing where we are yet!  :-)   A couple months ago when it all came out again, I thought it was the bottom falling out from under me and everything was 'lost' all over again -- and yet, I think it was exactly what he needed to see that this was never going away unless he took it more seriously.

I'll start with me (it's my recovery, after all) :-)
So, right now, I am:
• A work in progress.
• Generally much happier than I have been.  I still have bad days and feel really low . . . but they're not as frequent, they don't last as long. 
• I finally feel like I'm making spiritual progress (I felt 'stalled' for a long time, my Church attendance was pretty spotty (with sick kids and stuff), praying had become increasingly difficult, and my scripture reading, while daily, was fairly meaningless, as if I was just going through the motions.)  My prayers are coming more frequently, and I can (usually) even focus on what I'm thinking or saying without my mind wandering to what we have planned tomorrow with the kids.  I'm seeing more evidences of God's love for me in the tiny miracles and blessings in my life -- they've always been there, I think, but now I'm trying to notice them.  I'm experimenting a couple different ways to read scriptures (out loud with J, along with a Institute text book, topical) and figuring out what works best for me, but I feel like I'm getting more (and not just the "That!  That right there!  It's totally about porn!"  Not proud to admit that for a long time, when I read scriptures the only thing I got out of them were all the things J is doing wrong and how they apply to him and his struggle.  Um, yeah, turns out that's probably not the most useful way to read scriptures and gain personal insight and revelation.  I'm getting better at finding what God has to say to me, not my husband.  (Please tell me I'm not the ONLY person who struggles with this?!))
• I am gaining a very real and very powerful testimony of the Atonement, and of the power of recovery work to bring me to Christ.
• I am very happy in my marriage with my husband.  We are finding out tons of ways we'd never even noticed before that we have been seriously lacking in our marriage -- and we're deliberately and with effort, seeking out and fixing our problems.  I have a renewed love for him (I never stopped loving him, and in fact, if I just forgot about the pesky porn problem I thought we had a pretty much perfect marriage -- I'm now realizing neither of us were as happy as we assumed we were, and I kinda walked all over him, due to our personality differences and his trying-to-make-it-up-to-me-ness combined with my you-owe-me-'cause-of-what-you've-put-me-through-ness.  We're sincerely apologizing for the negative things we've each brought in to our relationship and working on it.)
•  We are not currently having sex, as J decided when he started recovery that he needed 12 weeks to sort out his head and give us both space and time to heal.  It was a surprising sacrifice on his part.  But for me, I just felt relieved.  And sad that I felt relieved (as sex was something I enjoyed a great deal with J, and when it was suddenly 'off the table' I realized how much I'd grown to resent and distrust sex and our physical intimacy.)  He's also made a very conscious effort to be 'respectful' and not overbearing in his physical advances towards me.  With this space we have reignited a physical closeness that I hadn't realized we'd lost -- I am much more likely to reach out to hold his hand, rub his back or cuddle up close.  We're both finding that as our physical and emotional intimacy grow and strengthen simultaneously, we're feeling better about our intimacy than we have in a long time.  I realized in the last couple weeks that I was beginning to miss, and desire, more physical intimacy with him, and would be happy if the pesky 12 weeks of abstinence were over with.  This was huge, and I was both surprised and really happy about it. 
• I have often used shopping to self-medicate.  I am making huge improvements in this area, and have stuck to a budget and saved several hundred dollars of my own side-business-hobby money in the last couple months.  (Interestingly, I started the budget and a desire to get this under control just weeks before my latest discovery of my husband's lies -- I really feel like the timing of my awareness of and desire to improve this problem was not coincidence.)

Where I'm struggling:
• Those bad days.  They're usually not horrible, but I do tend to wallow more than is necessary some days.
• Feeling lonely.  I don't remember what I did without this online community, because it has made a HUGE difference  in this -- but even with all your amazing people who have TOTALLY enriched my life and made me feel more whole and less alone, I really wish sometimes I had someone who was flesh and blood in my life to go out with and talk to and get a hug from when the bad days hit. 
• It's not as frequent as it once was, but my self esteem and self worth still struggles from time to time.  Even when things are going great, like as we've been rebuilding our physical intimacy, I'll suddenly get hit with this idea of 'all of those thousands and thousands and thousands of bodies you've seen' and suddenly want to run and hide from my husband. 
• I'm less honest and transparent with my husband than he is with me.  He's become an open book.  I still dole out info, thoughts and feelings when I want to, and could probably be a lot more open than I am being.  Don't get me wrong, I've brought up a lot of things that I would have never brought up before, but I'm definitely more on guard, more cautious and less trusting that I should be given the situation we're currently in. 
• My eating has spiraled out of control.  I feed my family really pretty healthy; all whole grains, little meat, lots of fruit and vegetables.  My five year old is just as happy to eat a spinach salad with quinoa and fruit as she is junk food -- and was telling her Grandma the other day that most fruit tastes better than candy anyway.  I make a lot of really healthy food around here.  But I have almost no appetite for most of the day, and seldom eat breakfast or lunch with the kids anymore.  (In fact, upon thinking about it, I'm skipping a lot of dinners -- coming upstairs to nurse the baby while J eats with the kids).  But I'm getting almost all of my calories from junk food that's easy to grab and eat without thinking about -- crackers, granola bars, handfuls of nuts and candy.  I eat most of my food out of a little cupboard in my bedroom that I've been keeping stocked with protein bars, trail mix, nuts, M&Ms, chocolate covered pretzels and other such things.  I know it isn't healthy.  It's not great for my nursing baby either.  I know it's getting worse and not better. In March and April I lost another 10 pounds of baby weight (this last 'surprise' baby left me with more weight than I usually have to lose, since I got pregnant with him before losing all the last baby's baby weight) and in the past month (while I haven't gained any of it back) I haven't lost another pound. 
• I worry a lot still -- about the future, about whether he's lying to me or not.  I can have mountains of evidence he's where he said he was (usually a 12-step meeting), he has notes he took and talks about what he learned -- and in the back of my mind I start to wonder just how proficient of a liar he could be.  What if he's making it all up?  What if he's sitting in some parking lot with wi-fi, or going to the library or something, and takes a minute to jot down these things, think about what stories he tells me, then looks at porn for the next hour or so of 'free time'.  This is crazy-talk.  Every single thing I'm seeing tells me he's in recovery -- including my gut -- and I know he's where he says he is and he's giving this every thing he has.  But I still worry.  Then I feel bad about worrying.  
• I still battle feeling like 'the victim' -- the whole 'he owes me' and 'it's all about him' mentality that doesn't allow me to progress.  I'm making improvements, but if I'm completely honest with myself, I have a ways to go. 



How J is doing:
• In a word: awesome.  I believe he is truly in recovery.  (Not to say he'll never, ever look at porn again -- but that he thoroughly and completely on the right track.  As he puts it, "I have all the tools to do what I need to do.")
• He is a changed person.  The words my Bishop used were "powerfully meek."  He's humble, honest, transparent and changed.  He talks about everything with me.  He was leaving his 12 step meeting on Friday night and called to tell me he was on his way home, but that while he'd been at the meeting he'd just gotten this bad feeling he couldn't get over, it felt like he was 'hiding something', but couldn't think of anything it could be, but it was making him increasingly uncomfortable and he needed to figure out what it was.  He was on his way to the Temple (he always walks the grounds after his Friday night meeting) and I told him to just pray about it and take his time there, and we could talk afterwards.  He called me a half hour later, driving home from the Temple, and said he realized he'd pulled out his phone at work a few times and killed some time playing "Oregon Trail" for 5-10 minutes.  He'd deleted it off his phone before leaving the Temple.  Seriously, this was the man who was something spending 6-8 hours at work looking at porn, and now all the sudden he's feeling bad about killing 20 minutes of time playing "Oregon Trail" while waiting for contractors to get some stuff done.  He is so increasingly self aware (and this is a person who has never let himself ever recognize any slightest resentment, negative feeling or complaint in life).  He is honest, with himself and with me and with others.  He isn't holding anything back -- he's no longer protecting himself, the porn, or me.  It's not always easy, and it's often painful, but we're getting to such a better place in life as we deal with the reality of our situation, our relationship and our lives, rather than the painted facade we both believed in for so long. 
• J has always been a good and helpful husband and father -- I've never had any complaints in this area -- but now it feels like he does things for us out of genuine love and service, and not a place of guilt or burden.  
• J is attending three 12 step meetings a week (2 LDS, 1 SA) and has recently started going to LifeStar.  He attends all of these with a willing heart and has said he has never regretted going to one and gets something from each meeting. 
• He is making a real effort to be there for me -- to stand as a witness to my pain in hard conversations, and not try to 'make it go away' or even 'wish it away', but to let me talk and to try and see where I'm coming from.  (He calls it 'standing in the flames' from this excellent blog post.)  I feel like he has a lot more empathy that he ever has before, but it's still kinda hard to see that he doesn't fully 'get' it.  (After his first LifeStar meeting he talked about what's typical for spouses to experience -- I think it almost surprised him that I was so 'normal'.  :-)  Not that I think he thought I was over-exaggerating or blowing things out of proportion, I think he just doesn't really understand how this could be so earth shattering when it's 'his' problem.)
• He is finding out things about himself he never knew before, and he is trying to understand how he thinks and what he feels.  I don't think it had ever dawned on him before to be introspective.  :-)

The Not as Good:
• He still really struggles with not objectifying women out in public.  But he is improving.  He still notices more than he wants to, but is making a conscious effort to not look any longer than the initial glance that got his attention.  Sometimes he's more successful than others.  He feels like this whole experience will bring him to such a better place -- that most men objectify women to some point or another (although not as much as a sex addict, I'm guessing), but now that he's so painfully aware of his shortcomings in this area, he can make a real effort to improve and is hoping to end up better and more respectful than most men would even think to be. 
• The desire to act out isn't that strong right now.  Now, how is that a bad thing you ask?  I feel like since he's entered recovery he's done everything right, and I appreciate it more than words can say.  But, it hasn't been much of a temptation since entering recovery (he usually goes a few weeks and even months after a big discovery where he doesn't look at porn for awhile anyway) -- it's been 72 days today since I found out it was back, and he hasn't looked at it once.  But he hasn't really, especially been drawn to it.  He's had the thought come up, "You could just get on the internet," at work, which could have led to it, that he just internally shot himself down and it went away.  And one harder time where he called me, got up and walked away from the computer and took a break to 'stop' the temptation.  But, other than that, he's not really been drawn to it.  He credits this mainly to the fact he's learning to turn outwards -- that when a negative feeling first shows up, he comes and talks about it, never allowing it to get any further into the unconscious and into the porn cycle.  I'm so happy about this.  I just carry a small fear that when life gets harder, or he gets hit strong with the urge, it won't be as easy as what he's doing right now.  But, he is working to change all of these things about himself, so maybe he really is cutting it off before it has a chance to even make it deep enough to become a compulsion to look at porn?





So, things are good.  We're both making progress -- I feel like he's making more than me, but we're both doing it.