Run With the Wolves

"Little girls are made of sugar and spice, and everything nice, that's what girls are made of."

Society teaches us that any less is called a "Bitch". A high maintenance nag.

I'm re-reading Women Who Run With Wolves. I'd rather be called a bitch than live a sanitary life of sweetness to be loved. I'd rather speak my mind than live an underground life of isolation for my "Wild Woman".

I'd rather run with the wolves and howl with the pack. Untamed.

My Soul Aches But I'm Alive

My husband did the race he has trained for all of last year. He was amazing......fastest time he's ever done. He placed 19th out of 300 in his age group from people all over the world. It was exhilerating for him and I was very happy for him.

I was also happy it was over. He made a commitment not to do the same type of race again next year because of the extreme hours of training it requires. He agreed (again) to put dealing with the sex addiction at the top of his list and us getting to the place that we can go to therapy together. Within a week he was talking about doing a marathon so he could qualify for the Boston marathon. Within a week and a half he was talking to his brother about doing a mountain bike race out in Arizona. He has such gusto over it. He didn't say a word about the extra focus on his healing process....no gusto about that.

I do have to say that he has made steady, thorough progress in AA. He keeps telling me he knows he needs to follow the steps and make it all the way through step four - the resentment part before he looks at his sexuality. On many levels he is doing better and I do believe he stopped acting out with porn a year ago in Sept. When the porn was discovered I told him the only way I could stay is if he made a full commitment to face it head on. He has stopped drinking. His mind is clearer.

I don't see him making his sexuality a priority. Even when a sex addict embraces his recovery there will be difficulties. What are our odds in this situation if he doesn't embrace it. I can't keep living like this. I have made healing my own issues around sexuality from my childhood a priority, especially since the porn discovery. I have faced so many things and been painfully honest with myself. I've learned all I could about sexual addiction to understand with greater compassion toward my husband. I know in my heart that I can't stay under these circumstances. It's too big for me. I told him that I don't know what is right for him but I know it isn't good for me to keep going like this.....waiting....waiting....waiting.....

I told him tonight that if he hasn't come to the place by the first of the year to begin working on this together then I need to leave, at least until he decides he is ready or he doesn't want to do it. I need to deal with it wholeheartedly - full on as a couple. I said everyone has different needs and if his is to tip toe through this then I'm not the person for him to do it with. It was so painful and scary to say it but I had to. I can't stay in this house and continue to feel that everything else is more important. The message I get is that I'm not important. He must not know how deeply this has hurt me, to just keep casting it aside. I, at times almost feel that he has no understanding of what happened to me from discovering he was looking at porn for all those years.....knowing how I felt about it. My soul was shattered into a million pieces.

He doesn't want me to leave. He thinks I won't be coming back. He said he'll be too resentful and angry at me for leaving. He feels he's doing the best he can. I feel almost at a loss as what to do. In order to cope with the inability to deal with this as a couple for over a year, I find that I am in a constant state of disengaging from him as my husband, as my lover and life partner. I am with him for today. It doesn't feel good.......in a way, it is starting to feel like a slow death of our marriage. We're better friends again, and I have regained some of the loss of respect I had for him. We enjoy one another's company. He's easy to like.

Nothing changes the fact that I feel deep in my gut that if he doesn't truly face this then I will be decimated by some future discovery, event, etc. that has to do with his sexual addiction. It will show up again - it doesn't even take guess work to know it will happen. I feel it in my bones.

I keep reaching to reclaim myself in the midst of knowing I am not getting the very commitment that was made to me over a year ago. It feels like I'm losing my self-respect. I feel brokenhearted. My soul aches.

Today I was looking at a magazine and came across an ad for On Star Emergency Service. Steve Spence was driving home when he was hit head-on and knocked unconscious. It's the quote that Steve Spence made that left me in laughter (bizzarely so...like the cheshire cat or something - I felt my inner madness)...you know those times when you are feeling overwhelmed and something hits you just the right way and you realize the absurdity and ironic dark humor we all have in our lives. This guy had been in a car crash and almost died. I related to this man's statement. It's how I have felt over finding out my husband had a porn problem and sex addiction. The fact that I could find a connection to his feelings over a completely different life event left me laughing until I felt better.

"The collision knocked me unconscious. I'm so thankful I came out of it alive." Steve Spence

Raw

I had my COSA meeting last night. Someone had just gone through disclosure. It was raw.

Over at the JWC there have been some pretty intense threads for co-addicts with sex addicts. It's been raw.

One of the comments left me especially raw. I couldn't even post a response until this morning. My husband saw me at the computer. He asked what was wrong, that I seemed very melancholy. I stopped for a second. I didn't know what to say. "I'm okay. I just need to deal with my feelings". He stood there. "It's just about addiction and how it works". He saw that I didn't want to go in to detail and I saw he didn't want me to. He left for work.

The pain of sexual addiction is so raw.

raw.......

Expert Co-Addict

Much to my chagrin, I have come face to face with the level of co-addiction regarding my sexuality in all my love relationships. Since I started blogging and unraveling the inner workings of my own behavioral patterns, I am facing my husband's sexual addiction, have lost my innocence of my first love upon realizing that he was most likely a love and sex addict and now I believe my first husband is what is labeled a Narcissistic Love Addict. I came across the information while researching the level that narcissism plays in sexual addiction. There was a long list of different types of love addicts. The one below is my ex husband verbatum.

Narcissistic Love Addicts (NLAs) use dominance, seduction and withholding to control their partners. Unlike codependents, who accept a lot of discomfort, narcissists won’t put up with anything that interferes with their happiness. They are self-absorbed and their low self-esteem is masked by their grandiosity. Furthermore, rather than seeming to obsess about the relationship, NLAs appear aloof and unconcerned. They do not appear to be addicted at all. Rarely do you even know that NLAs are hooked until you try to leave them. Then they will no longer be aloof and uncaring. They will panic and use anything at their disposal to hold on to the relationship—including violence. Many professionals have rejected the idea that narcissists can be love addicts. This may be because they rarely come in for treatment. However, if you have ever seen how some narcissists react to perceived or real abandonment, you will see that they are indeed “hooked.”
http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Peabody5.html
There are several other type of love addicts at this site.

He was very attentive to my needs and feelings while we dated. We worked together. He wanted to marry me when we had been dating only 6 months. We got married 6 months later (what was I thinking???). When we came home from our honeymoon he became a different person. It was like someone flipped a light switch. He was completely unconcerned about my feelings and decided he was making all major decisions. I argued and he started yelling in my ear. Anything remotely violent freaked the hell out of me so I would try to get away from him but he would follow me from room to room, berating me as a person. I decided the verbal abuse was worse than going along with everything he wanted. I thought of leaving but told myself how wrong that was to just give up right after marrying someone - I needed to try to get along. At a year, I was pretty damn over his Mr.Jekyl/Dr.Hyde routine and told him I was leaving unless he wanted to go to therapy. He chose the therapy and well....he went back to the guy I dated and maintained that persona for 3 more years until I was pregnant with my daughter. Then he flipped back to being very controlling and berating me if I didn't agree with whatever it was that was on his current agenda. I was heartbroken and felt I couldn't leave because I was pregnant. I didn't feel I could take care of myself and my child, plus we didn't even have health insurance. We had just sunk all our money in to a new business - all of it. I tried to make the best of it. We were together 24/7 because we worked together. He did want to be with me, in fact he wanted constant attention from me.

He was like a slave driver while I was pregnant and told me I was lazy for needing to cut my hours down from 50 a week to 30 at 7 months pregnant. In the midst of all of this, he told me how much he loved me several times a day. He told me how beautiful I was. He showered me with gifts (but never the gifts I asked for). He gave me flowers. He was more than happy to be emotionally intimate having sex but not outside the bedroom. Upon reflection I used the sex as a safe harbor, a place that he cared about my needs and desires, a place that I mattered. I knew I wasn't leaving because of my child so I took the love where it was. Things were going to be his way whether I disagreed or not and I faired better emotionally to just aquiese (this is what I did with my dad as a child). He needs were paramount. He was the biggest braggart on the planet. He took credit for all my accomplisments and embellished his.

But 16 yrs. later when I left he flipped out and had a breakdown. It is the only time I ever saw him cry - he wailed and begged and pleaded. He told me he was nothing w/out me. He always acted like the king of the hill and how I would be nothing w/out him so him saying the opposite was creepy. He scared me because I was doing everything he didn't want and I feared he would become violent. He did. He stalked me and attacked me. I had to get a restraining order and 12 years later he is still bitter and angry at me. I keep plenty of distance between us.

I know I would have left if I didn't have a child and I suppose I finally did when I felt I could manage it all on my own. She only had to go in aftercare at school for about an hour and would get homework done. It was what I got sexually that made it bearable for me. How sick is that, that I was opening my heart and sexual self up to a man that was so self centered and really heartless?

My first love was a sweet guy and never said mean or unkind things to me. But he wouldn't talk about his feelings at all - he showed me his feelings through emotionally intimate sex and I felt very much loved from it. Again, finding the love in sex.

Remembering my dad more clearly and from a obviously clearer place within myself, I think my dad's sexuality is like all three people I have been in relationships with. Let's see....that would make him a narcissistic love and sex addict.

My husband has cared the most about who I am as a person than any man ever has. I do know that he genuinely apprecites who I am. My first love was in love with the idea of me, my first husband was in love with his illusion of me.

I genuinely like my husband (separate from the sexuality thing, at the moment). I have loved and appreciated him far more than anyone I have been with. I think it has been good for us to take sex out of the context of our relationship for a time. It has allowed us to slowly rebuild a friendship with one another. It's been good not only because of his sex addiction but my co-addiction to sex.

This feels like an excavation project.

After a Long Drought

After a long drought, we had sex. It was comfortable and felt familiar. It was a spontaneous thing - unplanned. I'm sure my "blank" stage had something to do with it as my mind is not obsessing or ruminating over things. He was very emotionally intimate and at a certain point I realized that I just didn't want that much intimacy attached to having sex right now. "I don't feel comfortable opening up so much with you", I said. "I'm making a genuine effort to stay connected to you", he responded. "Yes, I know it's my MO to want that but it's way too much for me right now. I'm fine with having sex...I'm just not ready to give deeply of myself.", I let him know. He understood. It did feel good to share what we did. I wasn't looking for earth shattering, only pleasant and nice. More than that would have left me feeling raw and vulnerable....too naked.