We went through the disclosure process again. But this time we each had our own therapist there instead of just our couples therapist. I prefer this, because it feels better to have someone that's on my "team" rather than someone who is on the team of coupleship and repair. (Although, a couples therapist shouldn't be on any team--it's really for you to choose as you work with them.) Last time around, we started repair way too fast. That was my decision because I didn't know better.
Anyway, I sat through the litany of the Addict's confessions feeling surprisingly detached, but still present. I didn't cry. At the end, I didn't feel much of anything. But a lot of feelings came later. There have been so many lies, and that was something I wasn't really cognizant of until disclosure. There was no new Awful Thing. It was really the vastness of the lying that took my breath away. And the ease and regularity with which he did it.
As I tried to get my thoughts together for our first couples session after disclosure, this is what came out as I wrote.
Statement to the Addict
Hearing the truth of what you’ve done and the secrets and lies that have been going on since the inception of our relationship has helped me understand that the bottom line is that you want to do what you want to do, but you don’t want any consequences from your choices, so you are willing to lie to me, no matter how that affects me. I know this, because you’ve seen how it affects me, you’ve watched me go through deep pain and sadness, and yet you continued to do it. You have repeatedly risked the lives, health and well-being of our family to do what you wanted to do—spend retirement savings, drink and drive, drink and drive with our son in the car, betray me by having sexual contact outside our marriage. You hid the truth of it because you did not want the consequences of your choices and actions.
Hearing that your definition of sexual sobriety is that you can go online and masturbate to another woman’s body once a week for 15 minutes sounds to me like telling an alcoholic that he can have a glass of wine once a week as long as he drinks it in 15 minutes. Looking at images of women online to get you aroused is always the first step toward you having sex with prostitutes. That is not a willingness to surrender to your program and to having a secure, loving relationship with your wife, in which you turn toward me—and work things out with me—instead of outside the marriage into fantasy and prostitutes. It’s the same pattern of doing what you want to do, and following your own thinking—which has normalized pornography and prostitution. This makes it clear to me that the sexual stimulation you feel entitled to is more important to you than your relationship with me. It’s clear not by what you say, because I hear you say how much you love me, but what you do and all the things you’ve done over the 34 years that we’ve been together until I finally caught you again. You were always free to choose differently, but you didn’t want to. Every hand job, every blow job, every pussy you ate, every prostitute you fucked—every betrayal was a choice you made. You chose yourself over us, and you’ve done it consistently for more than three decades.
I appreciate that you have given me the truth, because now I’m free to choose based on who you really are, what you really want and what I want. And I want something different from who you have shown yourself to be.
You have abused my trust, you have gaslit me, manipulated me, lied to me and betrayed me. Then you promised you would never do that again if only we could work to recover. And I did that. My reality was blown apart and my heart was shattered, but I gave my all. I wasn’t perfect, but I was 100% in, which made it easy for you to lie to me again, because I believed all the promises you made. And all the lies you told - I believed them too, because I believed in you. Despite the agony of betrayal, I tried to give you a tabula rasa—a clear space for you to be a new person without carrying the burden of the things you’d done in the past—because I believed you had the willingness and capacity to change, I believed you had integrity, I believed I was important to you. I believed those things because you led me to believe them by lying to me. You took advantage of my willingness to try to repair our relationship to do what you wanted to do and have what you thought you were entitled to. In 2007, I begged you—and over the years after that I begged you every time I caught you lying to me about drinking—not to lie to me again because of how deeply painful the lying was. And you promised you would never do that again, never hurt me that deeply again. That was another lie so you could continue to do what you wanted to do and get what you were entitled to without the consequences you didn’t want. You started lying to me again just weeks after I discovered your betrayal the first time, returning to secretly masturbating to porn without the intention of ever giving it up—I’m sure you felt entitled to it—and you never stopped.
This second time around, when you started getting massages and handjobs again, with all the benefit of Landmark and therapy and Buddhism and 12-step, you knew better. You knew what sex addiction was and where the secrets and lies would take you. You had all the information and access to all the tools and support, but you stuck with your own rationalizations and justifications. Which let you keep doing what you wanted to do to get what you felt entitled to without any consequences. And, once again, you took away my ability to choose for myself whether or not I wanted to be married to someone who was doing the things you were doing.
You are not willing to commit to the things I asked of you so that I could possibly feel safe. You’ve told me you’re not willing to put in weekly or daily practices to check in with a therapist and others on your sexual abstinence, triggers and behaviors, and to be honest in that process, hiding nothing, for the rest of your life. You’ve told me you’re not willing to go to counseling consistently at least every two weeks and to explore trauma-specific modalities in order to understand and resolve the childhood traumas and beliefs that led to these acting out behaviors. You are only willing to pursue insights into these things. But you’ve already had so many insights—from Landmark to therapy to Buddhism to 12-step—and yet here we are, with you secretly squirreling away cash in dribs and drabs, like a child saving his allowance, so you can have threesomes with prostitutes. If you want something different, you have to do something different. But you would rather do what you want and get what you feel entitled to.
Despite the astonishing lack of integrity, care and empathy you’ve demonstrated since the very beginning of our relationship (not always, but when it suited you), you’re not willing to do what I need to feel safe. You continue to want to do what you want to do, but you want me to consider staying in our marriage. I don’t want to be married to you if you have to masturbate to other women, even when you know where it has always led. I don’t want to be married to someone whose feeling of entitlement to sexual stimulation is more important to him than my need to feel safe, loved, secure and cherished.
I have not been a perfect, blameless partner. But I have always given you everything I had to give. I have never lied to you. I have loved you so much, admired you so much, supported you, believed in you, wanted nobody and nothing more than you. And it was never enough. I was never enough. I know that, not by what you say, because you always know what to say, but by what you’ve done. You have hurt me so deeply that I cannot find the words to express the depths of sadness and grief I feel. The emotional abuse you’ve committed is as real and painful and damaging as any physical abuse. A wound to the heart is as real as a black eye. And that’s what you’ve done with every lie. My heart and my spirit are battered and exhausted.
There’s a saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I have lost count of how many times I’ve been fooled. Shame on me. But I think I’ve finally accepted, as much as I resisted it, that I can’t believe what you say. Lying to me is your way of being in the world. You do it so easily, you’re so good at it and so willing to do it to have what you feel entitled to. I don’t believe you will never lie to me again. I don’t trust you. Without trust, a marriage is nothing.
I have been resisting this. I have been living in wishes and fantasy and hopes. I want to wake up and realize this has all been a terrible dream. I want that so badly, sometimes I think it might really happen. I want to wave a magic wand and do it all over so I could do everything right and you could be satisfied with loving me. Being apart from you feels so wrong. I miss feeling your love—because I know that was there, too. But I will never be enough for you. Which means I cannot trust you to love and care for me above the things you feel you need for yourself. And I would never be able to believe you anyway. I believed so much last time and you used my trust and love like a weapon against me—allowing me to believe while you continued to lie and betray my heart. I don’t know if you can imagine what that has done to me. Picture a dog that’s been beaten, crawled under a house to survive, and then gotten lured out with the promise of love and safety only to be beaten to a bloody pulp again. That is how hopeless and heartbroken I feel.
This is not an ultimatum. I already know what you would choose because you’ve already made that choice over and over again with every betrayal, only pretending, when you get caught, to commit to me. I’m not asking you to change. But I need to find someone who can choose me, choose our relationship, instead of himself, without resentment, and without feeling that he is giving up something he’s entitled to.
I wish our story could have a different ending. I always wanted to grow old with you. In my imagination, we are two little old people walking slowly down the beach holding hands sharing a quiet love as deep as the ocean and vast as the sky.
I have to read this regularly, so I don't forget.
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