Hi bleedingout~

I don't want to interrupt your conversation, but wanted to jump in because of your comments about the counselor you found through the Focus referral list. While, we don't know all of those counselors personally, they have represented themselves as Christian through an application process with our ministry. You sounded like the jury's still out on the counselor your currently seeing, but if at any point you would like to speak with someone from our counseling department about this, or need help to find a different counselor, please give us a call okay? We really do want to help if we can.

I'm glad that you're part of this community, bleedingout, and we are praying for you here at the ministry.

Blessings to you!

Laura

FOTF Forum Moderator

Hi girls.

Well, there is one more lie to heap on the burning rubble of our marriage.

My cell phone broke so he let me have his old one.  Of course, almost immediately he grabbed it back and started going through the address/phone list.  I asked him to give it back but he kept paging through and then finally gave it back.  Both kids were in the car so there wasn't much I could say at the time.

That night, I told him that it made me uncomfortable.  I knew it was an old phone, and I expected her number to be on it.  Anyway, he said no, her number had never been on his phone but he was just checking to see if my numbers had transferred over with my SIM card.  You and I both know that doesn't even make sense.  So being me, I confronted him.  He finally said that there was one number he deleted b/c he had no idea who it was.  I asked if he had deleted her number but he said No, it had definitely never been stored on his phone.  So I asked how he had called her all these years, but he said he had just had it written down.  I knew in my heart that it wasn't true and I got so mad.  I had expected her number to be there and had just planned on deleting it but the lie made me see red.  This was a small instance that he could have manned up and told the truth.

The next day I checked the phone list against his old SIM card and found two numbers deleted.  The one he had admitted to was a client that I had stored on there a couple of years ago but then there was another one.  The number matched hers but the name was an old co-worker from 15 years ago.  I knew he didn't keep in touch with Elsie and that the number was As.  So I confronted him again, this time in anger about the lying that still plagues our relationship.  Why lie about something so trivial that I expected.  Her phone number didn't have any power to hurt me, the affair is what hurt me.  Now to lie about it makes him seem like he is still trying to hide something.  He said he just didn't want to hurt me anymore and he was sorry.  He thought it would be better for me.  I told him it makes me feel foolish for starting to trust that he is making changes.  If he is serious, then he won't lie about anything.  We had just come from counseling that day where the counselor had addressed the issue of lying and the repercussions.  He told us both about the setbacks that come from lying.

I hope if there is another opportunity, he won't lie b/c if he does, I will be at the end of my rope.  He tried to justify it saying he wanted to avoid the type of scene we had but he doensn't get that there wouldn't have been a scene if he would just be honest.  I knew the phone hadn't been used in 9 months.  I wouldn't have been surprised to find her number and it would have been hurtful, but I would have felt better about his repentance and restoration if he had just been honest enough to let me see and delete it myself or told me he had.  I need to see some tangible proof that he is willing to be honest.

bleedingout

Hello both of you,

Thank you so much for the prayers that you posted. I can hear and feel the pain flowing out of them, and I hope and pray that as the pain slowly trickles out, healing will trickle in.

Bleedingout, I'm sorry to hear about the latest lie. OneDay, you are right - lying is a recurrring theme. I have been in kind of a spin cycle of anger and depression for the past week since I posted, and the biggest issue has bee honesty. Throughout this whole process, my H has told me that he has never lied "to my face". He says that yes, he lied by omission, but never "outright". Comforting, right? He says that he doesn't want to tell me everything because he doesn't want to hurt me (sound familiar?) He says he will always tell the truth if I ask specific questions. To me, it makes no difference. Dishonesty is dishonesty, and even if he didn't outright lie to my face, he certainly has avoided the truth, skirted the issues, and given many vague answers when asked about things. Whenever I hear the word, "Basically.... or Generally... before a sentence, I now know that it means there's a lot more that he isn't saying, and I'd better figure it out. It's like I have to dig to figure out exactly what to ask so that the question is blunt enough for a yes/no answer, then ask another blunt question like "how often"? It is so frustrating. And then there are the mind games... What really made me angry last week was when H said that my parents should have asked him if he had a P / M problem before they gave me away in marriage, because if they would have asked him outright, he would have had to tell the truth because he's not a liar. The nerve!!! I am angry that he didn't tell me about this problem before we got married, but it was HIS job to be a man and fess up, not my parents' job to be suspicious and ask him outright. I asked him if he expected my parents to go through every possible secret sin a man could have had, make a list and ask him about each one? I can just imagine...."Did you steel candy as a kid?" "Do you ever call in sick when you really just want a day off?" The list would never end. The fact is, he portrayed the image of an honest, thoughtful, Christian man, and we believed him. Was it naive? Maybe. OK, enough about that. Honesty is a huge issue, and one that I never thought we had a problem with, until now.

A couple of good things have happened within the past week. 1) I called my mom and told her about it. She was very understanding, and is a prayer warrior, the best ally to have on our side. It was such a relief to talk to someone who knows us both and still loves us inspite of this  . 2)  Our counselor gave me the assignment to write "Angry Letters" to my husband whenever I feel angry, and to bring them in next time to work through them. He will meet with me privately for the first 10 minutes to go over the letters, and then we will bring H in and address the issues with him. Now, the funny thing is, I wrote a couple of REALLY angry letters, and was looking forward to writing more (that's terrible, but true). But now, it seems like I got most of the anger out. Strange. Maybe that was the point of the excercise. But then in went from anger to depression. Sigh. If it's not one thing, it's another. 3) I found a really good resource online - Recovery Nation www.recoverynation.com . It has a series of lessons (I think over 50 of them) for sex addicts, spouses, and couples. My H is very busy with his SA homework and reading right now, so I'm letting him focus on that for now. But I'm taking the partner lessons. It feels good to be finally focusing on my own recovery instead of worrying about what he is doing and saying. It's like a breath of fresh air to finally realize that there are things I CAN control. (Of course, H is not one of those things. LOL) The nice thing about the lessons is that it focuses on healing me as a person, and is helping me reconnect with who I was before I was destroyed by all this. It also helps me focus on things I can do to become that person again, rather than the casualty of war that we feel like now. I feel like recovering from this whole mess is a part time job right now, squeezed between my work, parenting, and household duties. Any downtime I have I seem to sink into despair, so figuring out ways to work on myself is key to survival.

I do see positive changes in my H, but like both of you, I don't trust him anymore, and feel I can't be too optimistic yet, because he lived the lie for so long. He does tell me that he is majorly struggling with temptation to go back to P & M on almost a daily basis. That's tough to hear, but in a way, it's good that he is sharing it with me. I guess I still need to thank God for the positive things and pray that they will continue. Oneday, I totally hear you on feeling like I loved my H in a totally different way than he loved me. I feel like he just married me to fix his problem, and continued to take selfishly from me to feed his addiction, but it was never enough. Ok, enough ramble. I was so blessed by your prayers. I will offer a prayer for all of us too.

Lord, thank you for the positive changes I am seeing in my H. He still has a long way to go. Please surround him with your angels to keep his mind from wandering. Help me to see him as a struggling human being, rather than just a monsterous addict. Lead him to complete repentance and forgiveness. Forgive me too, for I have become self-righteous at times, thinking that I am really good compared to him. Give me forgiveness for him, and healing, in your time. I also ask for Oneday and Bleedingout - please bring their husbands to complete repentance, surrender, and forgivness too. Show these women what they can do take care of themselves as they wait on you to take care of their husbands. Give us all a sense of hope for whatever the future holds. Give us the courage to stand up and be firm when we need to. Give us endurance in this long battle we have to fight. Give us humility, grace, and wisdom. Give us a clearer picture of Jesus, who has borne all our griefs and carried all our sorrows. We love you, even though we don't understand why you have brought us here or what you are doing in our lives right now. Please fill our lives with your presence. May we someday look back and see only one set of footprints in the sand, and know that you carried us through this dark part of our lives.

Hurting

Hello, Ladies!

I want to thank you all for sharing your stories here. I have read and laughed my way through all of your posts. I found myself talking outloud to my computer. "Yes!...That's me!...Yes!....Exactly!...Yes!...I SO relate, Sister!"

Here is my story. I have been married for over 17 years. It was 13 years ago that I got the first inkling that my husband has an issue with p. I got a phone call from a video store, telling me that we had an overdue video. It was a video store that was on the other side of town and we hadn't used that membership (I thought) for years. When the lady on the phone told me the name of the movie, it was obvious what kind of movie is was. I was shocked! More than that - I was outraged! Not at my husband, oh no! It never entered my thinking that he could have rented such a movie. (Sucker...) I was outraged because I thought someone else had used our account and rented garbage in our name. I demanded that the account be closed and that the manager call me. When my husband came home, I told him about it and eventually the truth came out. I had been gone for the weekend and he was mad at me for going, so he had rented the movie. Eventually he began to cry (the first time I had seen him cry) and I ended up COMFORTING HIM.

The issue really didn't come up much for the next several years. There was one other incident right after we got internet service, but when I asked him about it, he told me that he had just been curious. I was pleased that he had owned up to it when asked. I really thought it was a thing of the past. My husband's best friend was his accountability partner and they met for breakfast once a week. For years, I thought the accountability partner was asking him the tough questions and I didn't worry.

Last year, I was flipping through the history on our computer and there it was. I was horrified! I was sickened! I was livid! I confronted my husband when he got home. (He just so happened to bring home flowers that day, which is very rare. Needless to say, they went right in the trash...) The worst part about confronting him was his reaction. He didn't apologize. He didn't ask for forgiveness. It was more of a "Hmmm. How much does she know? What did she find? How much should I admit?" kind of reaction.

The betrayal I felt was to the core. I had a million questions. Each question led to more questions. I wanted to know everything and yet, there were never going to be enough answers. Every answer I got made me more sickened and more angry.  I always knew my husband wasn't perfect, but the one thing he had always promised me was that he would never lie to me. I never doubted his sincerity. Never. Never. Now I had to question every single thing he had ever told me.

I have gone through all of the emotions - anger, resentment, sadness, compassion, worry, doubt - you name it, I've felt it. After a year and a half of living with the truth, I still swing between emotions. We have moved on with life and much of the time it just seems like life as usual. Then suddenly, something will trigger the pain and it all comes back in a flood.

For I long time, I would check the computer daily, painstakingly. His obsession was becoming my obsession. It was draining me. I had to come to terms with the fact that I can't control him. I am NOT responsible for his sin, nor can I stop it. We can have the most comprehensive filter on our computer, and if he wants to view that stuff, he can find a way. I can pray; I can offer resources and support, but ultimately it is up to him.

Well, I could go on and on, but I won't. I just wanted to give you my perspective as someone who is a year and a half into this journey. Time has dulled the pain, but we still have a long way to go to heal our marriage. I will pray for you ladies, and I ask for your prayers as well. God bless!