My Former Life As A Recovering Sex Addict's Wife
AUTHOR’S NOTE: To all women who read my words below, hear me clearly—I intend for what you’re about to read to serve as a cautionary tale. And if it is needed in your life, a soul-shaking call to action. In the mental space I enjoy today, I cannot fathom acquiescing to the things I share with you. It is as foreign to me as languages I do not know.
BUT where I was then was drastically different. Other than my children, the singular greatest accomplishment of my lifetime is and will always be unwinding the brainwashing of my own mind. For as long as I can remember, my protests to how I was treated were met with scolding. In childhood, I was repeatedly chided for being sullen and unhappy. The abuse I had and was enduring somehow did not merit acknowledgement, much less addressing. My mother had no filter when it came to sharing this script with the “man” I would marry. When he would remark about something that upset me, she would say some version of, “oh just ignore her. She’s always been that way.”
This scorn became a norm I could not escape. Eventually, it became one I didn’t try to escape. If you’re told often enough that your needs and rights don’t matter, at some point, you will believe it. I have avoided many of the typical pitfalls of women who survive trauma like mine. Unfortunately, the brainwashing that kept me in ever more harrowing abuse, I did not.
As I’ve written before, I was divorced for more than two years before I could admit that the incidents in this story (or any others) were abusive. And that’s on top of having an amazing therapist who I trusted tell me that many times over. It truly took ridding my life of his literal voice to allow my mind to heal and see the truth for what it was. To admit this leaves me feeling unintelligent and worthy of mistreatment. It’s just so hard to believe that I allowed so much to be meted out to me by someone I tried so hard to love.
The call to action is this: if you are being abused—even if you don’t call it that—wake up. Get help waking up. Identify the trustworthy people in your life who will listen. DO NOT let yourself be degraded and used like I did. I never deserved any of this. I wish I had believed that sooner.
How can I help you believe and escape??
After a lifetime of being used for sexual gratification and objectification, you’d think there wasn’t much left to surprise or degrade me further. That’s certainly what I thought. I believed that I had seen the worst of human male behavior and that the most painful lessons were behind me.
I could not have been more wrong. Being married to a sex addict was painful, humiliating and destabilizing. When he entered into recovery for a short time though, it became pure hell.
SLAVERY
You see, following my 2013 discovery of yet more instances of infidelity and deception, my then-husband entered a sex addict recovery program. This was run by a local doctor and came highly recommended. I soon came to doubt both his credentials and the recommendations. The first time I met him, my skin crawled. He couldn’t pronounce my name properly or look me in the eye without blinking incessantly and darting his eyes from me every few seconds. I wasn’t comfortable with him and he clearly wasn’t comfortable with me.
The prescribed program began with a mandatory weekend retreat. Following this, individual counseling, attending group meetings and regular contact with an accountability partner were ongoing. Much like my own therapy which I had been involved in for more than a year, it was very expensive. We rearranged and even exceeded our budget to pay for these as well as any counseling that was recommended for our children. Suddenly, our ability to provide for our children was diminished because he couldn’t manage his own behavior.
As I have already established, my ex-husband is a skilled and accomplished liar. He will lie through a can-I-convince-you smile while stabbing you in the back. It is chilling and revolting. I do know that some of the things he coerced me into doing under the premise of doctor’s orders may well have been fabrications or at least distortions thereof. And though I knew that was a possibility then, I was helpless to successfully protest against his directives. Even now, with a clearer head, I can sort out a few of the least likely stipulations to come from a mental health professional. Nevertheless, I was required to attend a certain number of his individual sessions with him. In these, I heard with my own ears what I was supposed to do in order to help him recover.
Much of this flew right in the face of my own healing and what my own therapist was instructing me to do. When I reported back to her the orders I was given about what was expected of me, she was repeatedly aghast. Her distress at imagining me complying was palpable and sometimes, I didn’t tell the full truth because hearing it seemed almost injurious to her. She was my saving grace and the thought of letting her down by obeying what another doctor told me to do was cognitive dissonance I lacked capacity for. I felt continually pulled between what he needed and what I wanted to do to feel more whole. As a dyed-in-the-wool people pleaser, it’s not hard to guess whose needs I chose.
My primary role in his recovery was to be available for sex anytime he wanted. And I do mean any time. It mattered not if I was working at home, asleep or if we were in the middle of a family meal. If he had the urge, I was to consent. Immediately and without complaint or hesitation. This played out in more humiliating ways than I can count. Numerous times a day during the week, he would pull me back to the bedroom, remove just enough clothing to do what he wanted. There was no preamble or afterthought to any of these interactions. These were scenes straight out of Clan of the Cave Bear in terms of forced submission and utter lack of emotion and caring. (There is a sickening term for this—vaginal masturbation.) I couldn’t fathom how this was happening to me with someone who had committed his life to me, had children with me and had spoken of his love for me for many years. As bad as things had always been, this was as incongruent with anything I’d been through with him. These acts felt calculated, cold and intentional acts of dominance and punishment. The anger that I swallowed in those years is unmeasurable.
This “duty” layered on top of my efforts to heal from years of sexual abuse as a child was catastrophic. I began to hide my healing self from the world just as I’d hidden my humanity as a child and teenager. There was simply no way for me to bring these realities together. I fought mightily for my sanity as I tried to manage the dissonance. Screaming in my mind were the lifelong lessons of my mother—don’t refuse or disappoint men—and the teachings of the conservative religion I belonged to—do your wifely duties and let your husband lead.
DISCLOSURE
Other aspects of the program further shouldered me with responsibility. One requirement early on was a complete disclosure to me of his sexual history. Even things that happened before we were together. I protested this to no avail.
“Renée, I don’t know what to say. I’m supposed to tell you every sexual thing I’ve ever done. If you don’t let me, I can’t check off the box in my program.” (This “you need to do this for me” attitude was highly characteristic of his long-standing rationalization for convincing me to do things I didn’t want to.)
In hindsight, I wish I’d told him to go tell his girlfriend and then do what he did best—lie. I doubted his counselor was going to quiz me on his deviant behavior. Instead, though, I relented. On the night we set aside for this, I even went so far as to create a setting to make him more comfortable being vulnerable. It sickens me how often I completely dropped my boundaries and continued to find empathy for a “man” who treated me with such evil disregard. Sadly, it is the truth.
After telling the kids goodnight, I went back to our bedroom. I turned the lights down low and sat on the bed. I scooted back and patted the space between my knees for him to sit with his back to me. Once he was seated, I steeled my heart for the unknown. What I knew about his sexual behavior was deeply painful already. I couldn’t imagine what was to come. I deeply regretted my commitment to him. Taking a deep breath, I leaned my head onto his back and told him to start.
He began recounting deviant behavior at grade school age. Chills overtook my body as I absorbed just how deeply rooted his addictive behaviors were. I had entrusted this “man” with our children. Specifically, I had trusted him as a role model and guide for our son. I was sickened by my failure. The damage of my own long-standing trauma had led me to more or less float through life, including the precious and critical primary years of motherhood. I had not at all been the sentry and protector for my children I had endeavored to be. Instead, I had been unknowingly blind to the monster in our own home. THIS realization is THE thing that kept me rooted in my marriage for those final years. I was consumed by guilt and fear of what I didn’t know about the depth of my failure to protect my children.
As he continued talking through the years and reached the time period in which we met, I felt flooded. I didn’t want to hear anymore of what I didn’t want to hear in the first place. He spoke through the years the children came along and ended with our most recent years together. Most obviously eliminated were his actual affairs. He only spoke of acts not involving touching another person. As he wrapped up his “full” disclosure, I knew this had been a monumental waste of my time. In even with clear instructions to be completely truthful, he couldn’t stand to the task. My respect for him opened up into a larger chasm of nothingness. But he wasn’t quite finished.
Part of his disclosure was to tell me his “type”. (I don’t know what purpose this could possibly serve.) His answer to this was that he didn’t have a type. He simply observed, followed or engaged with women in order to “save” whatever parts of them excited him. From there, he would mentally piece these parts together to make something he could “use”. Further, he said that his true driver was to do sexual things he wasn’t “supposed to do”. He sought to “get one over on women” by taking whatever he wanted from whomever he wanted.
Bile rose in my throat and my disgust for him reached even higher levels.
The next morning, as we got ready for the day, he told me he had remembered more that he should tell me.
“I thought you had properly prepared for disclosure as you were instructed to so this wouldn’t be an ongoing onslaught for me. This is upsetting and you know it. I want it to end.”
He mumbled a weak apology and continued on. This time, he was naming names. Some of them were women closest to me. I was enraged. This was an entirely different level of behavior that he was admitting to but still not the affairs.
“STOP,” I shouted. “NO more. I’ve heard enough. I don’t care about your program. You are a worthless husband and a complete disappointment to me and our children.”
He stopped.
One morning several weeks later, he again approached me in our bedroom.
“Renée, there is one more thing I should tell you.”
I stopped, dropping my head, and sighed. After a few deep breaths, I lifted my face to his and did my best to bore holes in him as I dead-eye stared at him.
“What?”
“I was involved in child pornography for a while. I didn’t know what it was at first. Once I did, I eventually made myself stop.”
This certainly fit his admission that he sought things outside the norm. What I was later told by a man who hunts criminals like him was that no one just stumbles into these images. It takes work to find them. I knew immediately that my then-husband was very good at this type of “work”.
This admission was spoken with absolutely no emotion. Not the merest flicker of remorse. In fact, it was uttered with an almost imperceptible smile of pride and the matter-of-factness of asking me to add an item to the grocery shopping list. Even so, I wish I could tell you that I reacted in the way I’ve wished a million times since that I had. That I would have called the police or the TBI or even just eviscerated him with the most choice words I could think of.
With great shame, I can only tell you that I was silent. I was silent because I was in shock. I was in shock because this was the guillotine moment that severed us spiritually. I welcomed this severing because the abuse of my childhood had now, crushingly, come full circle. My childhood was taken by child predators and now, I knew for certain that I lived with one. I have carried this secret ever since out of shame for my lack of reporting, my befuddlement over how I could have possibly not reacted properly and my rage over ever trusting a person who could commit such evil. What he had done and was doing to me was nearly killing me. This, though, was an entirely different level.
CHECK-INS
We were required to have weekly check-ins so that I would stay appraised of his sobriety. I found this pedantic and utterly pointless. Considering his admission that he was “the best liar” in the estimation of his therapist, there was no reason to trust anything he told me. I’d long known him to be calculating and deceptive. Why should we bother with this at all? Were all the men in his program this devoid of character? For the sake of the other wives and families, I hoped not.
The check-ins had a specific structure which I’ve thankfully forgotten some of. I clearly remember a couple though. The first was for him to state the number of days he had been sober in the manner of AA. I tried to be a decent sport about it and believe him. Often, I felt that if the program could work then maybe our marriage could be restored and our family could stay intact. I knew this was a long shot but why stay and try to do the work only to completely write it all off as impossible, right? I desperately didn’t want my children to be children of divorce. I just couldn’t find proof that I myself would survive these efforts, never mind the relationship.
Truthfully, though, I didn’t believe in his day count. The reason was that there was continual evidence that he was not complying with the program guidelines. For instance, he had monitoring software on all his devices (the ones I knew about anyway) that sent regular reports to an accountability partner. The feedback loop wasn’t closed though. Only his therapist and his accountability partner were privy to these reports. The partner, if he even existed at all, was another addict in his group. Not a sponsor or a mentor who had achieved a measure of emotional healing but a man at my ex-husband’s own level of treatment. This seemed more than suspect to me. Further, as previously stated, I didn’t trust his therapist. Over and over, I was told about “slips” and infractions of his sobriety and day count only to be told it was not enough to warrant resetting his days. Whether or not, the doctor actually gave that advice I didn’t know. The only thing I could be sure of was that I’d never get a single day of transparency and truth from the “man” I was married to.
The other aspect of these check-ins that I recall is that there was a segment in which each of us could air grievances against the other. My grievances were ongoing and rarely changed. I was fed up with him and his ridiculous inability to function as a grown man. This was expressed in many varying ways, always to no avail. Eventually, I said little.
To my great amusement, he only ever expressed a single grievance with me. Each week, I braced for a tongue lashing over something I had failed to do for the children or a lamentation of how he wished I could show him more affection but he didn’t reserve those for the check-in. Those came in everyday conversation. Instead, his singular announcement of annoyance with me was this…
“Renée, I know you have a lot on your mind most days but it really bothers me that you can’t remember not to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher. It’s disrespectful to me and the money I earn for our family.”
My jaw fell open at lightning speed. WHAT?? I had endured decades of torment, infidelity and abuse at the hands and mind of this man and his complaint with me was that I might ruin the wooden spoons? I stared at him for a long moment before getting up with a sharp flick of my long hair at him and left the room. We didn’t speak for the rest of the night.
WATCHDOG
Aside from the abject abuse that I endured for the sake of his healing, the emotional devastation I suffered following incomplete, falsified disclosure and the annoyance of meetings that did nothing but gaslight me about his continued bad behavior and lying, there was one aspect of his program that required an enormous amount of my energy and fully sucked the fun out of much of the time our children had remaining at home.
Because of his uncontrolled lust, all things visual had to be monitored for him. In addition to the monitoring software he installed, all of our children’s devices had to be locked and off-limits to him. Further, I was tasked with previewing or reading IMDB’s parental warnings for every movie we wanted to see. I hated being responsible for deciding whether or not things like two brief images of side boob were okay or not. I had raised three children who didn’t need this level of oversight. WHY had my marriage become so pathetically laborious? Not only was this misplaced responsibility endlessly annoying, by the time I’d read the plot line and warnings for a given movie, there was really no point in me seeing it. Essentially, our entire family became a PG-only family….because of the so-called spiritual leader of our home.
I cannot adequately explain the frustration and humiliation of having to inform your teenage children that they are more trustworthy than their father and that TV shows and movies we wanted to watch together had to be prescreened for him.
Fortunately, I now know just how good and respectable men can be. Though all first dates haven’t been followed by a second and all relationships haven’t held lasting potential, I have not once encountered another man who is so utterly devoid of character or who possesses such cruelty and malice.
I have found meaning in and/or closure for many things that have happened in my life but this particular aspect of the final years of my marriage is not one of them. To me, this still reeks of a great piling on of pain in a time when I could least manage it. Aside from what those years might have meant to my precious children, I deeply regret staying for a single day after July 5th, 2013. Though I was not equipped to support myself or my children, I wish I had changed the locks while he was at work and had the police and divorce papers waiting for him the very day after we returned from that vacation. He was not worth trying for in any way. He was not worth any level of commitment. As much as I struggled during the years I was doing trauma work, I do believe we would have been better off without him in our home. One of my greatest regrets is that his need for affirmation, adoration and respect amid horrific family-destroying decisions was not something I could properly react to at that time. My children will certainly have their own views on this but I do believe I could have spared them humiliation and pain by deciding to split our home much earlier. I will carry this for the rest of my life.
Though I must accept the fallout of the why of my acceptance of such egregious abuse, I can only do so by understanding how I came to do so. I was very heavily scripted to not challenge the authority of any man. I was told from a young age that the only worthy vocation I could choose was marriage and motherhood. I was not supported as a young person or in my marriage to gain education or build any level of career. I was forced out of the only full-time job I’d had as a mother—a job I was very good at and loved very much—reportedly due to another man’s affair that I had absolutely nothing to do with other than his suspicion that I knew of it. It took far too long for my anger to develop over these realities therefore it took far too long for me to do anything at all about it.
I don’t believe it possible to truly heal from what happened near the end of my marriage. I cannot cognitively reconcile the distance of a man staying in a marriage for appearances or any other reason yet treating a woman so horrifically. All I can do is accept that it happened and move on. Because what it felt like was assaults by unknown persons. There was nothing left of the boy I met and agreed to share my life with. It was that abject and dissonant from the person he repeatedly told me he was.
What I knew then, and know with eve more certainty now, is that he is so devoid of conscience and remorse that I will never receive an apology for his acts of evil against me. I have no choice but to do my best to exist on the same planet as him even as he continues to intimidate, terrorize and interfere with my life.
It is a never-ending hell.
Any kind of addiction is a delicate topic and I would not share such things about another person were I not so entrenched in the clutch of it. I talk about the realities and pain of this because the role of women in a man’s emotional “recovery”from sex addiction is absolutely devastating. It does not honor her as a woman, as a mother if she is one or as a human being at all. She is often tasked with giving blanket consent for sex 24/7 and so much more in order to be a “proper partner” in her husband’s recovery. No one should ever be so compelled to take responsibility for another person’s sobriety. Add to this that it is her relationship that has been shattered by betrayal only compounds the pain of being told you’re his only hope. Further, when one person’s healing comes at the entire expense of another’s, a healthy way forward will surely never be found.
In the end, there is not much I can do to heal my family of my ex-husband’s many acts of evil. In the years since my divorce, I have done my best to keep a watchful eye and attentive ear to what little I know of his interactions with our children. What I can do for the future of my family is, when the time comes, gently use my mama influence to ensure that he is never alone with any grandchildren we may have. If I have any say, he will never change a single diaper or have a single moment of unsupervised (by the child’s parents) time. I know who and what he is and I will forever endeavor to ensure that he never harms another child again.
Finally, I am happy to report that, to this day, the only wooden spoon we had that had to be replaced was the one he left in the smoker. The other two I still have and anytime they need to be washed, I do a little dance and plop them in to the dishwasher with a flourish.
They, unlike me, are no worse for the wear.