As I share about this season in our story, I feel the tone getting darker. I do believe there is hope, but recovery journeys can get worse before they get better. Ours did! And I think it needed to be that way to uncover real roots of the addiction. I don’t think many partners are prepared for that to happen, and it does quite a bit. If you need hope around this issue, hang with me. I promise in a post or two things will start to get more helpful.

Once I saw a cute saying that summed up my crazy family to a T: “In the south, we don’t hide crazy. We put it on the front porch and give it a cocktail!” Growing up, my family’s dysfunction was more “out there” than Phil’s. And while my family is far from perfect, and even far from healthy in many categories, we did practice individuality, freedom in decision-making, and healing together through some very painful situations – even if in a messy way. My family majored on the relaxation of rules to a fault while Phil’s was quite rigid in every category. I didn’t grow up going to church regularly. In high school, I began attending church with a neighbor friend. I enjoyed being involved there and seeing how Christian families function. That is where I met Phil! This responsible, rule-following good guy was my dreamboat. I loved being his cheerleader and domestic goddess. A lot of this has to do with my temperament. In the Big 5 model, I am very high in extraversion (focusing on others) and empathy and very low in neuroticism (sensitivity to negative emotion). Phil is high in neuroticism and withdrawal. It’s easy to imagine how our attachment “dance” looked. Positive and traditional at heart, I seemed to have an endless amount love, attention, and patience to give to Phil. And I enjoyed it to boot!

I did the menial stuff like laundry and loving our little family with all the devotion I could muster. I loved being a mom and homemaker, and I don’t regret it today despite the painful chapters in my story. Our faith community really encouraged this kind of arrangement, with the husband being the leader and the wife submitting. For me, it was exhausting and dreamy at the same time. I often said “It’s easy to submit to Phil” because it was. We never had disagreements and he seemed magnetically drawn to me. I was living my dream. That is the pedestal I fell from. In the few weeks after Dday, I asked Phil over and over “How could you hurt me like this? I really loved you.” I didn’t ever boss him around or talk back to him. Rarely complained. I packed his lunch each day, cut his hair and even clipped his toenails (yeah, I know that’s pathetic. Trust me. Never. happening. again.) I managed our home and social calendar out of love and enjoyment. I looked up to him and appreciated him. I taught our kids to appreciate the material blessings we had because dad worked so hard for our family. It came from a place of strength and overflow, not from a place of inferiority. I gave him the best I had to offer – it required a lot of maturity – and I expected the same from him. But sadly I wasn’t getting his best in return.

Looking back I have some shame around these things. But at the time, we got a lot of comments about having a perfect marriage. In evangelical terms, we were doing a great job at marriage roles. Phil and I both thought so too.

A couple of weeks after Dday, after I could think just a little, I told Phil he had to tell me everything, even his passwords. (This was before we knew there was a therapeutic process for disclosure.) He begged me to not make him share this information, but he agreed in the end. He wrote all his acting out behaviors down. It was on a small piece of paper, like the size of a napkin. (ha, yeah right!) I asked numbers – how often, how many times, how many women did you see, sites, etc? “What did you see exactly?” He answered my questions and said that he told me everything. (napkin-size paper) It didn’t take long for me to see he was changing his story pretty often. I wasn’t going to request a polygraph initially, but it became apparent that “the truth” was often up for his interpretation. The polygraph was about six months after Dday, and he didn’t pass. It may sound crazy, but this is when my mind first felt peace that I wasn’t insane for being so thrown by this “good person acting badly” quandary. He had a problem being real, and the problem had nothing to do with me. He wasn’t going to be able to impress the therapist or polygrapher.

Some time passed and we finally made it to the right therapist to take us through the polygraph process again – and I also had a coach who helped me dig into the specifics of our relationship dynamics and my heart. I am not a feeler by nature, so I needed help with this. Looking back, I can see Phil was often keeping me at arms length and going “one up” on me. This entire season was so bizarre: sometimes he’d be broken in genuine sorrow, sometimes he’d endure my pain more as a detached observer, sometimes he’d correct me and try to shut me up, sometimes he’d lavish me with a special date, sometimes he’d try to avoid smiling when I’d cry. (That was a first, and very disturbing because he told me once he wanted to smile at my tears.) He took me on a cruise for the first anniversary of Dday. Ugghhh I was still really broken, but we went. It was one big crazy mess of grief, remorse, my hopelessness and his frustration. Emphasis on crazy. But he was still being “nice” a lot of the time.

He was attending therapy and engaging with a support group. Then, out of nowhere, something happened that was a game-changer for me about 17 months into our recovery journey. Working on his second disclosure, Phil confessed some recurring cruel thoughts he had had about my appearance and my his lack of sexual attraction to me and told me this had been happening for years in our marriage. We had what I thought was a very healthy physical relationship, and I was shocked at this “confession.” He pursued this part of our marriage regularly, and I was almost always available. He never seemed disinterested in my body, so obviously this news rocked me in a bad way for multiple reasons. >>>This would be an example of things getting worse in recovery!<<<

What he said was so mean and hurtful (and I was already in a state of trauma from the sexual acting out, disclosure, etc) that I thought he’d come back and tell me he had a moment of insanity and none of it was true. He delivered it in a detached and cold manner. He clammed up and refused to talk about these comments. It took about six more months for us to make it through the second disclosure/polygraph process so we could engage in couples therapy to address this issue. While we waited for a chance to go over this in therapy, I gave Phil chances to explain himself, to take the statements back, to be tender with my heart, but he refused. All Phil would say was that he didn’t know why he had those thoughts. He didn’t understand it and he was ashamed, and he wouldn’t talk about it without a therapist present. This was also out-of-character for him because he’s typically pretty verbal about his feelings. We finally got to talk to some professionals who were so tender with me. I don’t know that anything substantial surfaced in Phil as to what was behind the thoughts and comments. A part of me died toward Phil during those months after those words left his lips and sank into my heart. Something changed in my heart and in my body. I could barely walk a flight of stairs without being very winded. Even walking to the car seemed like a big task. It was as if my life energy drained out. There were no big revelations in therapy and no concrete steps taken to heal that particular rupture, so I’ve been left to make sense of the pieces. Betrayed partners are often left in places like this….holding lots of pieces, sharp, damaging pieces.

On Dday, I really didn’t think Phil was an addict. This man was careful with everything he touched. And yet, I discovered he didn’t tell me truth. He was an addict and a darn good actor. And when we should have been making progress, recovery seemed to make him meaner and more distant at times. I was increasingly feeling like I had never known Phil AT ALL. The best “explanation” I could come up with would be something like the bad treatment a person receives from a narcissist after you’ve “unmasked” them. I’ve described Dday being like when Dorothy finally meets the fearful, great Oz, who is inadvertently exposed as a fumbling, quiet man hiding behind a curtain and a microphone. Dday leaves our husbands unmasked. Behind the addiction, some addicts are humble and explanatory like Oz after they’re exposed. But others turn vicious and attack. And experiencing this kind of treatment from someone you had only known as gentle and upright is psychologically shattering. They harmed you and now they’re making you pay for hurting… Living in this messy middle for so long during recovery showed me the kind of healing that really needs to happen in Phil’s heart. I also saw it truly has nothing to do with me. It’s deeper and darker than either of us would have imagined.

I’ve heard it said not all addicts are narcissists but all narcissists are addicts. In part three Tim Fletcher mentions that usually narcissists can only be humbled by something like an addiction. The process of recovery with a “good guy” was, for me, like a descent into more and more cruel and disturbing behavior, albeit sporadic with moments of progress too.

During addiction, Phil kept all the external marital habits up like regular dates, celebratory events, kind gestures, and a close physical relationship. In fact, he said he’d be extra nice after acting out. Phil and I had never had a serious fight before Dday. To say I was blindsided by what had been years of acting out and secrets is an understatement. However, given the man I knew Phil to be, I honestly thought we could get back on track in about a year. Not so.

The recovery process for me has been long stretches of feeling stuck while he was sober and “nice” but not authentic. We also tiptoed around his shame A LOT. We’ve been on the slow (confusing) track for sure. The perpetual attempts to cogole me or be combative, when I was in such brokenness due to his betrayal, was beyond my comprehension. The messy process and difficulty of recovery let me see someone very different than who I thought I had married. Our recovery has been the opposite of what I expected early on, and partly because Phil had to “unbecome” so much of who he had been up to this point in his life. We haven’t solved the issue of the cruel comments, but he did say recently, “I can’t believe I ever said those terrible things to you, but what’s worse is I did it when you were in such trauma. Despicable.” It felt genuine. Despite some promising growth lately, I still have a lot of boundaries up in this area, and it feels safe for where we are right now. I can get myself to safety. What happened in that dark place after the comments and the lack of repair was I was able to detach – thoroughly detach – from who I knew Phil to be. That was an incomplete version. When you’re married to someone with serious issues such as addiction, infidelity, and abuse, healthy detachment is your first step toward healing.

I often repeat this quote from my coach: “It’s harder to heal when you’ve been harmed through apparent kindness.” If you’re married to a nice guy, your brain has registered a lot of “evidence” of your partner being caring and good. Your ears have heard all the right things. After being informed of the addicted and disordered parts of your husband, it’s very difficult to see these opposing behaviors in the same person. James says that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. Good men don’t have secret lives. Our husbands are divided, broken, misshapen. It’s taken my brain so long to get THAT message. He’s broken and wanted to take that out primarily on me, for some reason. For us to have a healthy and safe relationship, a lot has to change.

As I try to slowly heal from trauma and reconnect with my old self (a life I truly LOVED), I spend a lot of time telling myself that I was genuine. I was really in love and really faithful. From my side, things were good and as they seemed. I am proud of that history. I am proud of the years I spent investing into my kids and our family. I don’t regret it, because it’s who I am. Good guys really know how to play your heart and knock you over with charm. When you start relating to a nice guy, they know something you don’t. They’re running a simulation of sorts. A simulation of pinning apples – we will talk about this in the next post. Your marriage was a mirage. I know… YOU were sincere. You were all in, which is why you never suspected your partner wasn’t. Your heart was healthy! He knew what you longed to hear, and he was playing a part. I was really attached not because I was stupid but because I was healthy, and I expected the same treatment I was giving in return. These days I grieve losing what I thought we had a little less and celebrate that I loved for real. And that’s enough for me, because I am enough.