How Dealing With a Partner’s Addiction Changes You

Faye Reitman has written a great post on this topic over on the Compulsion Solutions blog. Here are some excerpts:

There is so much to process and take in, so many feelings and questions to parse out, and it’s somewhere in the middle of this experience that you realize you’re feeling and acting differently. You’re making decisions or taking actions that you might never have thought possible. These feelings make sense when you realize why they’re happening. When you take your whole life apart and look at it under a microscope, you gain something new: perspective.

We Start With “Why Me?”

The agony and the angst at the beginning of your process seem unbearable. Many women believe that they will surely buckle under the strain of it all. Yet here you are, still surviving. That feeling alone can cause a profound change in you, because now, you’ve gotten a chance to see what you’re made of.

As you work through your own healing process, you will find that you can replace those “why me” questions with something a little more like “why not me?” – meaning you’re actually beginning to prioritize yourself.

Your biggest responsibility right now is you. During this process, many women discover themselves for the first time. When you learn to take the focus off of others and consider your own needs instead, you might join the ranks of women who decide to go back to school, or pick up an instrument that’s been abandoned for years, or become more social with their peers, or who begin having actual, real-deal fun with their children...

[Check out Faye's entire article here]

How You Can Help Her Heal Her Hurt over Pornography

Your pornography habit is out in the open. She's dying inside emotionally because of it. You both still love each other and want to make it work. Where do you go from here?

At this point communication can be a real struggle, even with the best intentions and sincere effort on the part of both partners. She might try to put her pain behind her and move forward, only to find that she can't set aside her feelings so easily. She might feel an urgency to talk and talk about the issue, but pretty soon both of you can get burned out by the draining discussions that continue into the wee hours of the morning.

The following are some steps you might take to make your communication about pornography more productive and healing:

Step 1: When the wound gets reopened, see it as an opportunity. 

If the pain is awake again, that's a good thing in that it can only be healed at those times when she's feeling it. It's a chance for the wound to be cleaned out and for some healing to occur.

This healing occurs when she talks about it and you listen and try to be understanding and supportive.

There are a certain amount of healing time together like this that she needs--a certain number of man hours that will need to be put in sooner or later. It's a lot of time, and you might as well be working on it, rather than letting the pain fester under the surface because it is not being addressed.

Step 2: See if you can hold aside defensiveness or frustration.

It's completely normal to feel defensive: "But it wasn't that I loved porn more than you!" It's completely normal to feel frustrated: "When are we going to be able to put this to rest? I'm trying to put it BEHIND me!"

If you can hold those understandable and normal reactions aside for a time while you focus on empathizing with her, the process of talking things out is actually often quite helpful and healing. Men sometimes fear that talking about the problem over and over again will just mire them as a couple more deeply in the problem. Over the years I've seen that the opposite can be true, if the discussions are carried out in a productive way.

Step 3: Encourage her to talk about how she's feeling.

Sometimes during painful discussions she is the one asking him questions: "How can you say you really love me when I don't look anything like the images you searched out?" "You seriously were viewing porn then, which I thought was one of the best times of our marriage?"

It may be helpful for him to ask more of the questions:

"What was it like for you when you discovered I was on porn? How did you feel? How did it change the way you feel about yourself? How did it change the way you felt about me? About men in general? About sex?"

Step 4: Ask where she feels the distress in her body.

This one may seem odd or awkward to bring up, but it will both help her be aware of what's going on inside and it will give you a handle to hold onto as you try to get a sense of what she's feeling so that you can feel some of it for yourself.

Step 5: See if you can feel a little bit of what she's feeling.

To better empathize with her, see if you can let into your own body a little taste of what she describes feeling. And along with those bodily sensations, some of the emotion that she identified.

Step 6: Let her know that her distress has registered with you. 

Only take this step if, indeed, you were able to feel some of what she's going through. You may let her know by way of a simple statement such as, "Ouch, I get why that's hard for you."

Even if you don't register or her feelings or can't grasp why it's so hard emotionally, you might still let her know, "I want to better understand what you're going through and better support you in it. I'm not sure I get it yet, but I'll keep trying."

We'd love to hear how it goes for you as you put some of these pointers into practice. Were these guidelines helpful? What additional pointers or tips you have for other couples in your shoes, based on your experience?

Human Connection is Emotional Oxygen

Dave spent years thinking his wife would leave if she found out about his pornography habit. "I built a case in my mind for keeping this wall up that kept my porn viewing a secret, and kept my wife out of the nitty gritty details of my heart and mind."

Two months ago Nell found out about Dave's involvement in pornography. She was upset for sure. They'd raised three children together and now had seven grandchildren. He'd served in their church and in their community as a scout leader. He was a great guy, but she'd always been bothered by an emotional distance in their relationship. And their sex lives hadn't been good for a long time. Now that his pornography struggle was out in the open, she was hopeful that they could work on it together AND draw closer in other ways as well. She wanted him to rely on her for support when he was struggling. 

She encouraged him to open up to her about ups and downs of any kind, not just sexual temptation. Yesterday was the kind of day where he might have looked at porn in the past. Things weren't going according to plan with a building project. The customer was so demanding the project was consuming a ton of his time, and it was just in the beginning stages and wasn't even one of the company's more lucrative contracts. In the middle of trying to deal with the city building inspector and the bank and subcontractors about detail after detail, he kept getting calls and emails about other little fires he had to put out.

When he got home, Nell asked, "How was your day." Before Dave had always tried to be perfect in Nell's eyes, to show no cracks in his armor. "I tried to be self-sufficient and in control. Even my work at church was all about performing. I didn't think God was interested in someone who didn't measure up. But all of that pressure sometimes left me feeling like I was being crushed by life and all the demands."

Previously whenever Nell asked Dave how his day was, he always tried to be strong and put the best face on it. Yesterday when she asked, he simply admitted: It was lousy. "It feels so good to open up to her and just talk about how things are really going and how I'm really feeling. It's so liberating!" To Dave, getting rid of the wall he'd built up over the years felt "better than the Berlin wall coming down!" 

Nell had already been up to speed on Dave's stress because he had texted her a couple of times during the day. In the afternoon he'd texted her, "Feels like I'm getting smothered under an endless pile of details to take care of." She'd responded with a 😞. These were times when he would have previously started playing games on his phone for a break from work. They were his escape. "But eventually I'd get wound up so tight that even playing games wouldn't bring relief. That was when I felt like I would eventually need a pornography fix."

Fortunately Dave was developing the habit of reaching out for support amidst the stress. "It's not the same, it's not a quick fix. And sometimes it doesn't seem to help at all--the tension stays high. But I know it's better for me. And usually, fortunately, it is a relief. Connecting with Nell is like getting a shot of life back in me instead of keeping that darkness in. And instead of letting that web of control--the addiction--get stronger, reaching out loosens the bands somehow. Something inside me that has been getting tight and dark, and by reaching out you get a breath of air and it lightens and loosens."

Without knowing it, by staying disconnected from Nell, Dave had been starving himself of emotional oxygen for years. Emotionally he'd been breathing through a coffee straw. It was so good to see him being more real with her, reaching out for understanding and support, and enjoying all the benefits of that connection.

Our new website, Love Heals Porn, is designed to help you replace your porn habit with the habit of human connection. Sign up here and we'll send you 30 days of emails that each include a 5-10 minute lesson and a 2 minute action step that will help you make love, not porn, your new default.