Upon moving and living in a new house with no one to turn to, I almost had a mental break down. I realized I was not at all happy in my marriage so in all my wisdom as a woman in pain, I concluded I needed to either, A) have an affair to fill the need for love, B) divorce to save my heart, or C) forget myself and my needs and pour myself into just loving Cody so that he would be able to love me. If I could just love him enough, then I would be worthy of his love as well.
I had made a marital covenant with the Lord so A) was out. I did not respect my covenant so much to Cody, but I was unwilling to go through with betraying God. We had 3 beautiful children who needed a father, so I threw B) out as well. I had no tools at my disposal to help me with this decision. I thought that only selfishness was at play if I called it quits.
All I had left at my disposal was the deep and complete codependency of option C. After all I had the ability to make someone love me right? This giving of myself to find love had been my crutch before while I was growing up. I put my entire soul and started engaging in super human efforts of perfectionism so I could find love in my marriage. I poured my whole heart into fixing myself so that I would finally be worthy of love. I could control my being lovable. I could control being connected. I could control being valuable. If I would just behave and exhibit these qualities, THEN I could finally be happy and find my worth.
I started going back to school in order to improve myself. I started work on sex addiction and completing courses at the college that would aid me in my goals to become a counselor.
This is when I started cluing into my problems with Cody. I would go to classes and workshops about sex addiction and I was given very basic information that did not sit well in my heart. I would come home and ask my husband why he was okay. I knew that he had all these signs and symptoms. How was he alright when I knew pornography had been such a problem for him before? It made no sense in my brain.
I would come to him and I would ask him. Needing to feed his addiction, he would lie straight to my face and deny everything. He got so good at lying to me. He had been engaged in continuous betrayal for eight years. He was able to lie and not even so much as flinch a muscle to get away with it.
I sensed something was off, but he would lie so convincingly and tell me everything was fine. He had no answers for me. He did not know why he looked like an addict, spoke like an addict, and behaved as an addict. He professed and swore up and down that he was in no way an addict. He loved me too much.
Oh uniqueness.
It allowed me close my eyes and allowed me to stay in denial.
This could not happen to me, especially if I had been abused and betrayed by addict after addict before I met Cody. I had chosen so carefully. This could not be my reality.
He could place the seeds of doubt and lie so expertly that I chose to listen to my denial. I was UNIQUE you see. The situation was different because he did not hurt me like my past abusers. He had not sexually abused me in any way. He was different. He respected me.
My justification and rationalization served my denial well.
My heart and my head still knew. Inside, as a woman, I knew. But he was my husband. He would not lie to my face right? I desperately wanted to believe his lies. I held on to my hope. I could not imagine the alternative. This whole time inside my heart, I knew, but I would not let myself see.
I was pouring myself into marriage, family, and relationship classes. I was becoming the perfect person for him. I was studying the leading cutting edge marriage experts. I went around making his life completely easy, and was carrying the weight of the whole family. I received very positive, rewarding reinforcement for my perfectionism. He definitely he did not have addiction. It was all in my my mind. I was paranoid. He was my best friend. AND we had the perfect marriage. I was creating this for my happiness. I had stopped feeling, but surely my super human efforts were going to work. I could control his love if I was just lovable and charitable enough. After all there was my misinterpretation of Christ's words of love that kept me going.
Matthew 10:39 that findeth his life shall
b it: and he that
c his
d for my sake shall find it.
I just needed to forget all those moments of severe rage and anger when he would throw something and it hit me. He was not aiming at me, and he never intended to hurt me you see. It was an accident.
I just needed to forget all the times he would throw the children when he was in a rage, or pull them across the house by the ear. I needed to forget his face when he looked like he was going to kill the children and yell at them when he was out of control.
I just needed to forget all the holes in my doors and walls and the multiple broken chairs, over turned tables, and wall decorations that shattered and had to be thrown out. If the potty training seat had been thrown in his rage and given me a black eye, it was not his fault. He still loved me. I just needed to close my eyes and remember that I was the problem. I was not providing for his needs. I was not enough. I had not lost my life life like God had instructed. It was me. It was all on me. My marriage had to be perfect remember, so I could feel love, so I could be worthy of being loved.
I would go to school, and he would binge. I would go to three hours of church. When I was not with him, he had two hours to go home and binge. If there was a work trip or a baby blessing he would go by himself and binge. He was in all out binge behavior every opportunity that would arise.
And still he was not the problem. It was me. It was my selfishness. In marriage if you are considering a divorce it is because of selfishness. We kept learning about this over and over in our celestial marriage and family theory classes. We kept getting the conference talk given to us about selfishness being the primary reason for divorce. I did not see the addiction. I never knew it was in play. I only saw my own unhappiness and if I would just take up a positive attitude, stop being selfish, lose myself, and love and serve and find Christ-like love for my husband, then I would find the peace and happiness that always accompanied happy, eternal, connected marriages. I sustained this for three years. I completely lost myself in trying to be charitable. I could do this. I could pull our family through. I could make him love me. I could lose myself in order to make this happen.
I was completely addicted to being the perfect wife. I would not stray. And when I did Cody would rage, and get me right back in line.
And then a miracle happened.
After a tragic death of one of our friends, my husband came to grips with his own mortality. He saw that if he were to be called home he would be taking a terrible secret with him to his grave. It was not so secret before God.
The possibility of his own death shook him to the core. It was two weeks later that I was feeling very disconnected and asking him AGAIN why he was okay. I was learning all these amazing things about sex addiction, and he had all the symptoms. I was crazy for answers. I was deeply troubled that his words were incongruous with his behavior. Never satisfied I had been continually asking him almost monthly.
After the funeral where Cody had just been brought to a terrible consciousness of his own guilt, and finally after eight years of marriage he was honest with me about his addiction when I asked him if he was looking at pornography.
He confessed as much as he was prepared to share with me at the time. He minimized his addiction. He did not share with me his fear of the fact it was getting completely unmanageable. Sex addiction is progressive. It wants more. It wants different. What is potent at one point in time, can no longer excite or arouse in a few months, and the drug gets deeper and the behavior more risky, tuned out, and destructive.
He did not have the tools at the time he confessed that day in order to do a full confession, or even to express his fear of losing himself to the frightening things he was contemplating in his addict mind. He just knew he HAD to stop.
Maybe if he told me it would keep him from spiraling out of control in addiction. He took the risk. He needed my help. After all I had been holding everything else. I could hold this. He came out of the closet and I was pushed inside.
At the same time of the confession, I had been doing hypnotherapy to understand why my body was not letting go of weight. Just days before this confession, I had undergone some serious trauma around finding my fear around food. I had been punished severely with physical abuse as a toddler. The trauma of remembering this blocked out child abuse, as well as the betrayal trauma of my husband's confession, were a one-two knock out that knocked me quite literally off my feet.
My life stopped. My whole world crumbled. I remember watching my heart falling in slow motion towards the ground. I could not stop its fall. I remember the horror of seeing it when it hit the ground. My heart was glass, and it shattered into thousands upon thousands of pieces.
I could not get out of bed. My pain and my agony where felt through out my entire body. I could no longer function day to day.
At that moment I was not equipped to handle all my previous trauma as well as what had just been dropped on me. There were many other major traumas that I had held for so long and had not dealt with, that these two events back to back were enough to break and shatter my whole soul.
My husband did not even know enough to make a one time confession. He confessed, and then felt better. He would get a little more trust with disclosure, and would disclose more and more over the months. This was extremely painful to me as I got to live the emotional infidelity over and over again.
Not only that but my mother would come over to my house and not understand the pain I was in over the physical abuse I had endured while growing up. She would tell me how much she loved me, and would touch me in soft and gentle ways, and I would panic. I was not equipped to tell her what had happened with the hypnotherapy. I just silently suffered the blissful ignorance on her end, while it would just smash the pieces into the ground of my already shattered heart.
This double betrayal took me completely out of commission. I could not get out of bed for the next 2 and a half years. No one knew why. I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was depression. I remember the image of my heart shattering, but I never equated that with being bed bound. Betrayal trauma was not a thing anyone knew anything about in my circle of friends or amongst the doctors and counselors I saw. Depression is a symptom of trauma. All anyone saw was the obvious depression. No one dug deeper to find the cause.
Just because my husband had confessed it did not keep him from slips, relapses, and binge behavior during this time. We went to a counselor that had been a major source of knowledge about addiction up on the campus I attended. He was the best BYU-Idaho had to offer. He had given me the tools to help me identify the addiction in my husband, but he was NOT a sex addiction recovery specialist. He was not trained with specific skills to help overcome sex addiction. He was pioneering his research alone, but never acquired the knowledge to really be of a benefit for my family. This left us just enough rope there to hang ourselves, our marriage, and my heart.
He was knowledgeable to an extent, but during this time of counseling with him, he would blame my depression, being bed ridden, and shattered heart on me behind my back in his one-on-ones with my husband. He told my husband that I was indulging in my depression. He would enable my husband in siding-with-the-enemy behavior telling Cody my trauma was just as addictive and just as bad as the destructive sex addiction behaviors Cody had been involved in. This was so destructive and brutal for our marriage. He was not justified to treat me however he wanted. He was being told he was enabling me in my depression.
This is the same thing as being told that I was enabling him to push my head into a great big tub and hold it there while I scrambled and fought for air, and it was my fault because I was panicking.
We also got no real feedback on Cody's rage addiction. During my time under his care I was just retruamatized over and over again, and had no clue it was happening.
The anger I felt around what was said during counseling was a huge red flag that this counselor was not right for us. The trauma of being thrown under the bus with my husband by this well-meaning, but uneducated counselor was too much pain to handle. We stopped going to him.
Cody during this time went into sobriety. He held his breath for a whole year, and so I thought the sex addiction was far behind us. I started to trust again. The year before we had our fourth son. I was starting to heal as the sobriety date was getting further and further behind us. I started right back into my perfectionistic routine. I did not know any better. I did not know any different. I had no real tools for recovery.
Right before my 30th birthday Cody dropped a bombshell on me. He had relapsed. But big. He was so sorry.
I was just as crushed as before, but went straight into numbing it all out. I continued in my, "love will cure everything," addiction. I could love him out of being an addict.I would strike my selfishness down and charity and the gospel of Christ would heal this.
The very gift that was my biggest strength and has been my biggest and greatest treasure from God was my capacity to love. I was good at finding charity and love for everyone. I had continually done this over and over again as I did not know how else to handle sex addiction or any of my trauma. My greatest strength was now my biggest weakness.
So on we went with our life. Cody started reading the ARP 12-step book from our church. He talked to his church leader. He was obtaining forgiveness. He got his temple recommend taken away. But he was really sorry. He was never going to hurt me like this again. Que 16-months of Cody white-knuckling his sex addiction and holding his breath while I rescued and enabled bad behavior.
I remember so clearly the day he came to me with the news of his last relapse. Again I saw my life flash before my eyes, but I had a new image that had now entered into my mind. This time I saw a house of cards. A beautiful mansion of cards stacked one on top of another, carefully with so much expert precision and love. The cards were our marriage. The cards represented my efforts in reaching out in love and trying to construct a beautiful marriage. Each card was a different value I had decided would enrich and bless our marriage. Each card represented my denial and my efforts to control Cody's love. And now I watched in horror as this beautiful creation of cards came crashing down around me. I tried to hold them. I scrambled to stop them from falling and flying everywhere. I could not stop it. It had all been an illusion. I had based my whole life on this shaky foundation. And when the slightest wind blew my beautiful masterpiece gave out and came crashing down. It was all over for me. I felt like our whole marriage had been a lie.
All my work going to school for my family studies. All of my best super human perfectionistic efforts. All of my forgiving and charitable ways. It had all been for nothing. The house was gone. It was all exposed. There I stood in my pain and there was absolutely nothing I could do.
NOTHING could beat this addiction. We were always going to be like this.
It was never going to get better.
And his rage was getting worse. No one we talked to about this problem would take him seriously. He was after all, "a really good guy."
We were so lucky and blessed to be given at this time another miracle.
We found LifeSTAR.
It is a program of specially trained sex addiction and trauma recovery therapists who offer a three phase group therapy program designed to educate, counsel, and rebuild marriages shattered by sex addiction. It is two fold. They not only are specialized in sex addiction but are trained to help a woman through the trauma of living with a sex addict.
The LifeSTAR counselors were the first ones to look at me and to see what it was like to be the wife of a sex addict. I was taught all about the trauma and crazy-making a woman goes through trying to connect only to be met with rejection. All those years at BYU-Idaho, nothing like this was ever mentioned. All those years in counseling and going to bishops, no one knew. This was the first time I had ever heard about betrayal trauma in relation to what I experienced. The lens was no longer on Cody or his addiction. We were now after ten years finally looking at my recovery as well as his. I had never heard the word recovery before. I finally had faith in something again.
I ate it up. I was so hungry for it. I did not know what to do with all of this knowledge. I felt so validated and understood as for the first time I spoke to other women going through the same thing I had gone through. Each of us found support through each other.
I was given my first lessons of self worth. I was taught that I did not cause the addiction. I can not control it. I also can not cure it.
I was taught to detach from my husband and to learn to start doing self care and for the first time in my life take care of me. Because of this self-care I felt very prompted that this was the answer I had been looking for and this would heal me. I was shown that if I took care of myself that I would no longer need my antidepressants. I was able to go off of them. It has been over a year. I have not needed them since.
If I were to describe that woman who walked through the LifeSTAR doors that first day, I would say she came in absolutely starved and beaten. She had no idea of what self care or taking care of her needs even was. She had never considered it in 32 years. She was drowning and had lived her whole life in a life-and-death struggle to keep her loved ones from holding her head under water.
She was so severely neglected in every self-loving way. In fact I am sure that her self-loathing was the strongest it had ever been when she walked through the LifeSTAR doors that first day.
As I started to have my mind opened to the possibility of recovery, and to see everything I had gone through, I saw I was experiencing severe betrayal trauma very much as destructive as a man with PTSD who had been through combat. It started clicking inside of me.
Oh and I was angry. For the first time in my life I was mad. VERY mad. I was furious. I did not know what to do with this emotion, and I held onto it with all of my might for two months. It was nothing I had ever experienced before. The rage. I could see, finally see how unmanageable my life had become and how terribly I had allowed myself to be treated and I was angry.
Now comes the self care, boundary setting, affirmations, dailies, 12-step groups, and weekly counseling sessions.
It saved my life. In every single way. I was saved in a big way. Not only was I being taken care of, validated, loved, and provided with connection, I was able to pull away from Cody and see myself as a separate identity. You would think this would happen quickly, but took me a year to finally look at myself, and my stuff, and let go of the control of Cody's addiction. It has taken all this time to just relax and learn to take care of myself.
I felt like I took off. My life made sense. I knew exactly the avenue my own schooling would take. I knew where I wanted to work. I knew how everything in my life was preparing me up to this point. I finally had a clear knowledge. It all started clicking and making sense. I was given my own personal inspiration about my future life work in addiction recovery therapy.
The first three months of LifeSTAR even though miraculous and life saving, did not mean my marriage was all of the sudden a good one. In fact it got the most destructive during that time. Cody crossed sideways into his rage addiction. I was starting to sustain the worst of the physical and emotional abuse. It did not stop with me. It spilled over to the children as well. He threw Jordan across the room and he hit Matthew on the head for not being able to get the proper container. He was completely out of control from August-Oct. Finally, one night after being cornered in my room while he was raging out of control, I remembered my affirmations about how I was worthy of respect and no longer had to live in fear of rage and abuse.
In his anger Cody threw the phone, it missed my face by an inch, and put a dent in the wall right behind me. I had already reached out to two different men to come and get him because I was scared. I had already worn his bruises. I was not okay with the bodily harm that throwing the phone would have caused me.
As soon as he threw the phone he went straight into denial and full out rage. He screamed, "I did NOT throw the phone!!" I had said nothing the whole time. I was paralyzed. I just shrunk into the smallest ball possible wishing to escape his wrath. As I saw his wind up, I had quietly slipped away and locked the kids in their rooms with hugs and kisses, and communication to stay in their beds because daddy was angry and I was fearful for them.
As his mood continued to deteriorate as he fed his toxic shame the affirmations from my recovery replayed in my mind. All these words from my work doing dailies and from my LifeSTAR workbooks repeated over and over. I took courage and picked up my cell phone. I told him that I was scared and I needed him to stop or I would call 911. This just enraged him more. I saw the fury in his eyes. It was as if he had become possessed. He continued to rage on and in my fear for mine and the children's safety I called the police.
It was the safest I had felt in years. I could not believe I had people coming to rescue me. I had finally advocated for myself. I was not okay living in fear all those years. Making sure to never move right or move left. It was liberation day. I was finally free to not live as a victim to his rage.
The police came. They asked him to leave and said they would not press charges if I didn't.
Hours later he came home at 2 in the morning because he had decided that his car was not comfy enough to sleep in. I kept my cell phone in my hand the rest of the night and slept very little.The police told me that they would be patrolling and would come get him if he came back. They did not come back for him, but he left again at 8 that morning.
I did understand affirmations, but I had not yet set boundaries and bottom lines. If I had been given that knowledge, the cops would have come back and re-escorted him out because I would have called again. I did not know how deep that boundary was crossed and how irresponsible the behavior was until months out of the situation.
I did have enough knowledge at that time to let him know if he EVER hit me or the children, or threw anything in rage, or swore, or threatened in any way, or broke another piece of furniture, or shattered one more mirror, or put one more hole in the house, I would be calling the police and pressing charges for assault or battery. I felt a new safety that I had not had in 10 years of marriage. I felt very liberated. I did not have to live in fear for one more second from physical violence.
He of course was mad and thought I had gone nuts, but that did not matter. I was finally beginning to stand on my own two feet.
I changed all the locks on the door and I asked him to move out. I was not a popular person at this time with either of our families. My name became a dirty word with all of my family. Margareta was doing Satan's therapy. My LifeSTAR education was absolute trash and evil.
I have to laugh because I finally started standing up for myself and was no longer standing in the shadows of codependency. It was the best thing I had ever done for myself, and my family of origin reacted and keeps reacting violently by cutting me off when they do not like my boundaries. If I am going to behave in a way that is healthy for me, I can do it by myself. They do not offer support.
As the pressure from our family systems pressed down on me when his company laid everyone off that December, and offered us a job in Utah, we fled without even a thought of what we were getting ourselves into. We just ran and didn't look back.
I now found myself living smack dab in the middle of Utah County. What had I been thinking?
Overcoming Betrayal: Part three (years 10-current) is in progress.
