What am I feeling at this moment?

[JenMac]

I can't believe it has been almost a month since I discovered P in our home. It has certainly turned our world upside down!
I feel like I am operating on 2 different levels, one in which I am able to communicate and support my husband and another where I drop into a scary place where I have to deal with my raw emotions.
I have been married for over 30 years and I thought I had the sweetest man in the world. To discover this secret was devastating and shocking to me. It is very hard to find out that you have been betrayed by the person you trust the most, the person who is not only your husband but your best friend.
I don't like what this knowledge does to me. It makes me feel much weaker than I felt just one month ago. I become obsessive, jealous, suspicious, etc. etc. etc.
I have to say that I have not felt anger. Is that weird? Maybe it is yet to come. I feel an extreme tiredness, an inability to find any energy for the day to day business of life. I feel let down, very sad. I feel cheated on, lied to. So of course it makes me question everything else too.
This has affected my physical and mental health. I feel a sickness in my stomach. I have not been sleeping and this preoccupies my mind almost all of the time. Like a lot of the other SOs here I have a hard time dealing with the reality of my husband seeking out and watching all of these videos etc. and what that all entails. It feels horrific to me to imagine what he has been into. I must say that the only other times in my life that I have reacted with such emotional turmoil is with a death of a loved one. This does in fact feel like a huge loss of something important in my life.
We are moving ahead. We are able to talk and communicate. My husband is taking steps to help heal our relationship and to get help for himself.
It will be a long hard road but as long as we are moving in the right direction I will try to remain hopeful.
One day at a time!

[Life-lies-trust]

JenMac,
The anger takes a while to come and then it is not pretty. You are going through a greving process. This is normal. I understand you feelings completely. I found out in December when I was shown proof of his actions at school were we both use to teach and I still teach. I turned him in as the law requires. So I understand your feeling that the world has fallen out from under you.

You will find support here but it also helps to have several people that you can confide in. You will find that there are women in you circle of friends who have or are going through similar process as you with a H that has done stuff close you what yours has done. Also you may want to find professional help. The SA support groups for partners that I have found assume that we all knew what our PA were doing and we are in denial. This I have talked over with my counselor and she said "How can you be a co-addict when you have no knowledge of the addiction." This has helped me.

Warning if you read my journal it is brutal at times because this is where I write my raw emotions.

Sorry to find you here but HUGS to you because you deserve>:D< them and need a big one.

[JenMac]

Thank you LLt,
I am sorry for all you have been through as well! It must be very difficult to be in the situation where your work is involved. I work in a school setting as well so I know that must be devastating.
I have sought out counselling for myself as well. I have had a couple of sessions and it helps to have someone to share with. Before starting with the counsellor that was one of the hardest feelings - the feeling of being so alone. My husband is the person I could share anything and everything with so I was left feeling very isolated. I don't feel like I want to share with family or friends at this point. I have had past experiences which have taught me to be careful who you share your problems with. I don't want judgement or opinions! But I do agree with you, that there are probably people I know who are struggling with this as well. There are probably a couple of people I could confide in, I just haven't chosen to do that yet.
I am hoping by sharing and connecting here that it will help to offset that feeling of being so alone.
Thank you so much for answering me! It is a good feeling to know I am not alone in this! I am just learning to find my way around this site, I will definitely look up your journal.

[Life-lies-trust]

JenMac,
It took me at least a month or more to talked to anyone about this. This week I connect with someone at work who went through some of this with her H. Except he was SA, Drugs, and Alcohol all rolled together. So she is a great help since her discovery was when his mistress called her and told her, 24 years ago.

Hang in there we can make it for ourselves.

[maggie]

Welcome JenMac,

I have been posting here since Nov 09. Trust me.. the anger will come. But, I was devastated like you the first few months and was walking around in a fog of misery and despair. I couldn't eat or sleep either. " How could he do this ? "

It's been 6 months since I discovered my H of 20+ years was addicted to p. Shock..disbelief...the feeling of losing my best friend and confidant. As you said about your H, he would be the one I would be turning to in this horrid crisis, yet, after 20 years of a good marriage, I couldn't turn to him. He was the betrayer.

SHOCKED!

You also wrote that you don't want to tell your friends, and that you had experience with private info getting repeated. Good. Don't.

My best friend for 20 years tried to cajole me into telling her why my H and I were separated and I was forced to make up a story. Bad, I know. More lies. I lied and said we just weren't getting along and that he wasn't content with our marriage any longer.

Now that I write this, it really has some truth to ! But, I asked her not to tell anyone, because my H and I had decided to go thru the holidays together, as a family, for our children's benefit.

The very next day, I had 2 friends call me about being separated.
She told them that very day! She is a nice person, really. But I guess when a 20+ year marriage breaks up, everyone wants to know why. She says that she just wanted to bring support to me.
I don't know, I don't trust anyone anymore.

I'm so glad I didn't tell her about the P. That would humiliate my H and my children. You know how people talk. So, like you, I found a therapist to tell this awful secret to. She didn't really give me any useful advice, but it felt better to tell someone about the horrible discovery I made.

I have a few questions I'd like to ask you, because your situation sounds very similar to mine. If you don't want to answer, that's fine. It's so painful. I know.

My question is: Since you have a long history together, did you notice his behavior changing? Did he get cold and distant ? Did he seem to stop enjoying the things that he liked in the past ?

I'm asking that because my H, stopped looking forward to our summer beach vacations, and this was something he loved to do.
He likes the ocean, salt water fishing and touring the shore towns. The last few years, he became reclusive and I thought he was physically ill.

So, basically, I had a gut feeling that his mind and spirit were derailed because of physical ailments, even though his doc said he was fine. I kept having this feeling that something was very wrong with him, by his distracted behavior and inability to focus on family conversations and activities. He became distant.

Any input?

[JenMac]

Hi MaggieLiz,
Thank you for responding! You have asked questions that I will try to answer but I'm not sure I can think clearly yet about this part of the situation. I am still trying to understand it myself.
My husband has been sharing with me the timeline of this happening and if he is being honest he was fairly new into this in a serious sort of way. Does that make sense? I feel like I need to give a little history in order to explain. We have had a few issues around this problem over the years. First with books, magazines. That was early on in our marriage. That was addressed and I thought taken care of. Then 11 years ago we had a major situation when I found a movie. We struggled through the situation but it was definitely a major event in our marriage. This latest problem started after my husband started working from home. He says he started exploring sites last fall and quickly became immersed in it. He ended up viewing it daily when he was home and had the opportunity.
As for your questions about did he change or become distant? I think looking back I would say yes and no. I noticed an irritability at times, perhaps a disconnect between us. I didn't put it down to that though. I believe marriages go through lulls and highs and that is the natural flow to things. Funny but we had conversations in the weeks prior to me finding out about how content we were with life and how we would be together for the rest of our lives, grow old together. Seems strange now but that is where we were at. I do remember him making the comment "unless I do something to screw it up". I think part of why this is so difficult is because our lives seemed so perfect. We have grown children, we're free to come and go, we have great holidays together. Maybe he was heading to the point that you are talking about, where he would have been looking for ways to get more access by staying home etc. but because he was home alone all day, he had plenty of availability for where he was at at the moment. Does that make sense?
We did not have the internet in our home up until about 3-4 years ago when I got a computer so the availability was not there in the same way. My husband started working from home about 1.5 years ago. I believe my husband has probably always been drawn to this sort of thing and now with having the internet access it has allowed him to get more involved and a serious problem has developed.
So I guess to answer your question, I am still in the process of trying to see if there were changes in his behaviour. Some things jump out right away, like him discouraging me from using his computer or erasing history etc. The irritability, less intimate encounters, a little more distant at times perhaps. I'm sure I will uncover more as I move through this because of course this is exactly where my mind is at.
Can I ask you - How much did you want to know about details? I find I am struggling with that right now. I don't want to self torture but I feel like we need to deal in the reality of it all honestly and openly in order for both of us to come to terms with all of this and to move on without further secrets or untruths. Does that make any sense to you? How did you deal with this?
Are you able to address this or is it too painful?

[maggie]

Thank you JenMac for answering so quickly; I know the first few months it is hard to even breath.

I want to answer your question, but it's all so emotional, I'll end up going off in another direction. Sorry. I'll try.

"The details of it all " If you find my original posts here in Nov, you will see that was one of the questions I asked everyone here.

" How much do I need to know ? "

Various answers, some PAs & SO's said, as much as I needed to heal, but I didn't know how much I needed to know in order to heal. I think I originally wanted to know every single detail.

After I found it all hidden on his computer, my H denied even looking at all the p I found there. He angrily denied that he saved it or MB to it and told me I was insane!!

Believe it or not, he was a good man before all of this.

I basically tried to read every psychololgical study on PA and then read most of the PA journals on this site and others to get information about this, since he wouldn't tell me anything at all.

After about 2 weeks of my crying and begging, he finally admitted that he began using P about 3 years earlier. Working out of his private office here in our home, with his private computer that was company issued and I couldn't log on to.... so he, like your H, had plenty of time to view it all.

He still denied MB to it, or ever thinking about it when he was downstairs with all of us at dinner or watching tv together.

I kept accusing him of thinking about it, since I read all about how " p images live in the mind " and the littlest thing can trigger an urge to seek it out and mb. I knew he had been acting disconnected with us at dinner and during family parties, acting distracted or impatient. I now knew why.

But, he emphatically stated that he never ever thought about p when he wasn't directly looking at it.

This became one of our biggest battles, since from what I had read, the subconcious grip of porn, is ferocious in its tenacity, and men can see some of the images for years. It lives in their mind.

Finally, after weeks of emotionally draining fighting, he admitted to mb to it and admitted to having the images in his head, which triggered urges for him to mb and look at more. He was home alone all day and had total privacy for 3 years.

I saw a therapist, ( too young & inexperienced with PA ), and I asked her," how much I needed to know about what he was looking at. " She looked it up in her Social Worker's manual and said that, it is important to find out the level of p he got into because the common progression is from soft core, partial nudity, to hard core, unusual s.x acts, and then progress to very sick stuff.

I asked him repeatedly what level he got to and naturally he kept insisting that it was just softcore, and really most of the pics I found saved on his computer were soft core.

But after more hysterics, based on what I had read and researched, that didn't make sense in his 3 years of use.
I finally got him to admit to viewing hard core clips.
The more I asked, the more I found out and the sicker I felt.

I cried more in three months than I had cried in all of my life.

So, I have pretty good understanding of what he was looking at, and he fit the pattern described by most research on PA, that it starts softcore and gradually that isn't enough to arouse and they seek more and more for the original thrill. He uncomfortably admits this happened to him. The hc pics he was looking at by year three, had sickened him in the beginning.

The other questions I have asked over and over again, he's still holding out, are about frequency of use, days, hours, and how often. Was it more than once a week, more than once a day. Unfortunately, this is another complicated one, since my H, as well as many of the PA s here, say it varies, it can be once a day, five times a day, once a week or even skip a week. There wasn't an exact pattern of frequency and times, but I have sort of pieced together the facts and think that he checked it every day and mb about once or twice a week. This is so sick, isn't it? I still can't believe it all.

He is in therapy. I think he has been free of it for 6 months now, but I will never again be certain of anything he says or does.
Sad, after totally trusting him for 20+ years..

[Life-lies-trust]

I think that the lost of trust in our best friend and partner is the hardest for all the SOs. The PA just do not get it that trust is an extremely important to us and that they have broken it. The lies are to protect their addiction which has become the most important thing in their lives, sickens us and breaks our hearts.

Hugs to everyone because we need them.

[JenMac]

Thank you LLt for the hugs. I agree that they hide the truth from us in order to continue with their p use. Also I think they tell themselves that what we don't know won't hurt us and that this is separate from their relationship from us. This is just for them and it is not hurting anyone.
MaggieLiz, I can see that you are still reeling from this as well. My husband wanted to deny it I'm sure but there was no way he could. Whether he has divulged the extent of it, I really don't know. I may never know. He has divulged things that have been very hard for him to say out loud. I don't know a lot about pornography so I don't know all the different levels but I would say my husband was into some pretty hc stuff. He has not admitted to anything criminal or deviant and the sites I found did not go there but I was startled at the content. Keep in mind that I have never visited anything like this before.
I have this compulsion at times to see what he has been viewing. I know I have no way to ever really know everything but I still have the need at times to know. I'm just not sure it is healthy for me or my relationship for me to know.

[Life-lies-trust]

"I know I have no way to ever really know everything but I still have the need at times to know. I'm just not sure it is healthy for me or my relationship for me to know."

The way I deal with this issue is that I need to know enough to be able to check him computer use. My PA used normal words that you would expect a science teacher to look for pictures when putting together a lesson for students. This is why I do not have extensive logs of what he has done. You need to know enough that you feel that he is not using again if you check. I do not think that they will EVER tell the SO everything.

"Also I think they tell themselves that what we don't know won't hurt us and that this is separate from their relationship from us. This is just for them and it is not hurting anyone."

This is true and most of the PA are shocked when we SO's tell them that PA/MB is a form of cheating. My PA has been doing this since he was about 9 years old so I say nothing out of what I knew as normal. Some PA start later but I am not sure if recovery is any easier on them.

Hang in there you are a good caring person.>:D<