"You Just Can't See it Yet"

I met with a former sponsor last Thursday, and as I take steps to build my support foundation I'm glad that he's a part of it.

We talked about divorce and recovery, and on those two topics managed to fill 3 hours at a small Italian eatery. The whole time I was fully aware of how much of the talking that I was doing - telling my story, complaining, hurting and seeking. As a part of my recovery I've been trying to find it in me to do my best to care for and listen to others, but I realize that I'm still in a state of crisis and I really need to just let others care for me for now.  I just talked, and talked, and talked.

And through my talking I healed a bit. I realize now that healing doesn't mean happier. It doesn't even mean not being as sad. I don't know if I even feel more acceptance of my situation, or even if I believe that things are going to be okay.   If I could describe what healing feels like to me, it just seems like my soul and everything inside of me is just making more sense of things.  It's not as loud in my heart and in my head. My soul has just stopped screaming for a moment.

 Right now, it just feels like my heart is quietly absorbing everything: the magnitude of what's ahead, the sadness of moving out, how I feel like everything is out of my control, and how hopeless the whole situation is.

And the way that I see it, it just seems so hopeless. I have to get a new place, I will see my kids less, and I won't have the companionship that I had with my wife for 20 years.  She's my best friend, and the crazy love that I had for her is starting to resurface now that I've made some steps to recovery. It's awful knowing that telling your wife that you love her will just make things worse... so you don't. That's not the way things should be at all.

I told my sponsor that the only paths that I have going forward are:

1. I move out, and then I go on a bender with my addiction. It's what I always wanted, isn't it? I've always felt like I had a wasted youth, as an awkward and shy teen that could never really read signals from girls.  I know that feeding this addiction will ruin me in the long run, but it's been with me so long that fighting it is going to be exhausting.  Or, I can
2. Stay sober and in recovery my entire life. While it's the opposite path as the above, it's also what I really want. But doesn't that sound so depressing? I have to spend hours each day reading recovery material, getting accountability and NOT doing some activities that I enjoy for the fear I might get triggered.  I still don't get my wife back, or my life back to "normal." It looks like if I follow this path, I might have a lot of missed chances for happiness, or at least I might have several missed opportunities to have some fun while I'm still healthy, young and relatively good looking.

Either path seems awful to me, but I'm drawn to both - almost exactly 50/50.

My sponsor listened to my rambling. It felt weird to unload and word-vomit all of my anxiety and insecurities to somebody. I was having a very controlled panic attack in a public place and I was having trouble breathing. Having an epiphany that you've ruined your own life and there is no happy path forward has a way of shutting your brain and body down. The carb heavy plate of pasta and buttered bread didn't help either.  I finally shut up to take some deep breaths.

"I think through all of this, your life will be better.  You're just not in a place right now where you can see it."

As a person who plans conversations in his head and runs exhaustive 'what if' scenarios for every situation in my life, being in a place where I can't see one happy path is painful.  But for my sponsor to say (with a smile, mind you) that my life would be better someday was brain-breaking. I couldn't see what he saw. It's not that I didn't believe him. My mind had just stopped working. It just seemed so impossible. Even though I know other people on the other side that have made a better life for themselves (my sponsor included), my situation seemed so much more hopeless by comparison.  It felt that way, at least. I knew it wasn't, but it felt that way.

I think my sadness is deepening.  I feel terrible, and my heart drops at random times during the day. I find myself in meetings at work, and I'll just completely black out with sadness (instead of the usual boredom), not hearing or seeing anything for a few dozen seconds.  But I'm healing. I guess. And it makes each day easier.

Relapse

I kind of knew that the day would come when I would have a relapse, and I thought it would be easy to do a write-up about it and how I would feel like a failure and what I'm doing to recover from it. I thought I would come out of it stronger or that there would be a feeling of devastation or loss.

Problem is that writing about it is not easy at all, and it's taken about a week for me to figure out how to write about it and I still don't have an answer.

The thing that surprised me most about my relapse a week ago is that absolutely nothing happened.  I'm not sure what I expected, but what I expected certainly wasn't nothing. I didn't feel too much guilt. There was nobody there to set me straight or to shame me. I didn't feel like calling out to anybody. I didn't feel like God was rolling his eyes and that I let Him down.  It was like the countless number of times I had indulged when I was thick into my addiction. Just medicate, and get on with life. Nobody knows, nobody cares, and nobody got hurt.

But a few days after, I'm starting to realize that feeling nothing is something, and it's what started this whole mess in the first place. Prior to the relapse I was a whirlwind of emotion. I was feeling the crippling guilt, the shame and the damning sadness for all the things I put my wife and family through.  Moreso, I felt empty, lonely and desperate for change in my life.

For the days after my relapse: nothing.  Of course, there's still some of the sadness in moments when I'm with my kids, or am in close enough proximity to my wife to feel that warm but painful energy that only love or heartbreak can bring. But overall, I feel like there's a numbness all over my body and soul as if somebody shot novocaine straight into my heart.

I know that it makes me so much more prone to relapse again, as I'm so unaware of how the addiction is affecting me now. I'm no longer white-knuckling sobriety and my guard is down.  I haven't relapsed again, but the big problem is that I just feel so safe with the addiction.

When I close my eyes, there are so many things that the addict in me is saying right now:

• Nobody cares about my addiction, and with the divorce I'm no longer hurting anybody by acting out.
• I've gone 5 days "sober" with little effort after I acted out. Perhaps letting myself indulge every once in a while is better than the hard path of stressing myself out every day.
• Sobriety is of very little importance compared to being truthful and honest about it.
• It just feels better to feel nothing.
• I'm making huge progress.

The addiction I have is like a best friend. It tells me the truth from their point of view. It might not be the full reality, but it sure sounds like it. I actually do believe all of the above, and arguably it's all true. Very true in fact. But I have to keep reminding myself that, while the above may be true, this friendship I have with my addiction is very toxic. It's not healthy, it's enabling and I can't listen to these targeted truths that weaken my soul.

Planning

My wife and I started to talk about how the separation process is going to work. I don't think any amount of time could prepare me for even just the 10 or 15 minutes that we talked.  My brain kept short-circuiting as the reality had set in that we would need to prepare for the logistical consequences and aftermath.

We talked about how each of us would take turns with the kids' evening routine, including dinner, playtime, bathtime and bedtime... while the other leaves the house and makes themselves scarce.  Up until now, the ritual for bedtime is we would each take turns with a kid for one night, and swap the following night.  The kids were good with this as they loved us both.  It was honestly my favorite time of my day and what I looked forward to every night - spending time one-on-one with one of my kids, which is rare any other time of day as they both vie for your attention. That's gone now.

It feels so surreal to be planning this out. I feel like I'm planning a vacation. When planning a vacation you know that even though there will be a disruption in normal routine, you also know you'll be coming home and things will eventually get back to normal.  But for this they won't. We're moving towards something bigger. I will eventually not be there to put the kids to bed some nights. There's no going back to normal, and my kids will be forced to adjust because of my addiction and dishonesty.

My therapist told me today that my kids could really grow and flourish still in the midst of all of this. Perhaps they can see how a model divorced couple should be, where we love them and still treat each other as human beings. Perhaps they can see my journey and recovery and, as they get older, perhaps they can find strength in my resilience through my failures.

It's hard to see that far ahead.  It's hard not seeing my kids hating me for this. I let my kids down so early in their lives.

I'm a wreck.  My wife, on the other hand, seems so strong with so much resolve.  She was emotionless, as I realized I have been to her for so many years.  Before our conversation ended, through tears I asked her, "We're not going to be friends, are we?"  I don't know why I asked her, because based on her demeanor and the way she carefully worded things, I didn't want to know the answer.  I knew I hurt her so bad, and I was trash.

She surprised me with her answer: "I hope we can be."

Now I feel worse. I haven't unpacked why. I just do.  I should feel better, right? I think there was no answer to my question that would have made me feel better.

Treading Water

So since my wife found out about my relapses and the secrets I've been hiding from her, I've set a few helpful boundaries for myself as I aim to keep sober.

1. No Porn (of course).
2. No Masturbation.
3. Stay off the phone unless I have a specific, worded purpose in mind.  "I am opening my phone to..."
4. Start reading recovery material
5. Start attending recovery groups
6. Find friends
7. Find a sponsor or an accountability partner.
8. Get off Reddit.

I sort of break the last boundary from time to time as I need to keep up with sports chatter and I've found a few recovery subreddits that I go directly to.  I do think it is still a danger to my recovery so I will need to deal with fencing off Reddit in the near future.

I have started to realize that with the boundaries I have a lot more mindspace and time in my brain. Right now my mind has the urge to just go and do things. So I've started a few projects that I probably won't finish, chatted with old friends who are very surprised to hear from me, applied for a few new jobs, am about 10 pages in for about 6 books and am trying to keep up with this daily journal.  I'm thrashing. I'm treading water trying to reach out for something to cling to.  My mind is trying to keep occupied as it tries to avoid getting triggered or trying its best to stay distracted when triggered.

For now, I'm not sure if me getting involved with so much busy-work is good for my recovery.  It's distracting, sure, but at the same time I'm tired, mentally exhausted and at the same time having a lot of trouble sleeping.  I'm unfocused at work, and I feel like for some reason I'm forcing my mind to suffocate.

I wonder if there's any peace in recovery.  One of the lines in the Serenity Prayer is to "accept hardship as a pathway to peace."  That doesn't sound like peace to me. I hear in SA meetings of people that struggle every day like me, and they've been at it for years. That doesn't sound like peace either.  I'm working hard on my recovery right now, and I haven't tasted any piece of peace.  It's just work, will and walking daily towards a goal of sobriety that moves away the same distance every day. 

Maybe I'm just equating peace with nothingness.  In the midst of all of this craziness I would love to taste a nice juicy nothing-burger right now.  But I think I had a lot of that while in my addiction. Acting out could erase all those stresses in my life temporarily and it would be easy to sleep, easy to rest and easy to ignore all the things I had to, or wanted to, do.

Maybe I should try yoga or meditation.  Let me add that to the list.

My Sexual Addiction I

I attended my first recovery group over VOIP phone today. It wasn't bad. I have to say it's nice knowing there are others like me all over the world and really struggling every day.

I also purchased and downloaded the Sex Addicts Green Book, and the little that I've read so far has been helpful.  Many of the programs out there use the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous as the guideline for recovery, but even though the steps and the addiction pieces are the same I think I'm going to find the Green Book a lot more relatable.

So yes, I am a sex and love addict. The addiction has consumed my life, soul and spirit. It's not something all that easy to talk about, as it has an incredibly negative social stigma tied to it and a lot of people out there still don't recognize it as a real addiction.  But the way it has taken over my life, ruined relationships, and stripped me of any hope of a normal future makes it just as much of a disease as alcoholism or an addiction to narcotics.

I literally cannot understand how there are people out there that don't have the urge to look at pornography or close their eyes in fantasy every single day. Or need their daily dose of affirmation, either through a perceived flirt from a cashier or a "Like" from social media.  Since first going into recovery a number of years ago I've learned to temper those urges.  I white-knuckle my urges to look at porn (probably not the healthiest thing), which has reduced the sexual fantasies that swim like jellyfish in my head.  I'm rarely on social media, and if I post it's probably about my kids so that I'm not fishing for compliments. However there's still a moment every single day where I have to make a decision. Some days the decision is really easy, and some days it's hard. On occasion I make the wrong decision.  And this daily struggle... the grind and the resistance and the conscious decision to not act on it -- I think this is something normal people do every goddamn day. But they don't. Really? Really. They Don't.

Isn't it messed up how I started this post saying it's nice to know that there are others like me all over the world like I was part of some exclusive club? And then just now I just said I thought everybody was just like me? There's still a lot that I need to figure out, and I think that's okay.

More on Being Good, Moron

In my last post I talked about what it means to be a good person, and I explored that a lot today in the echo chamber of my mind. I don't know if I really learned anything new, but sometimes it's just good to let something sink deeper into you - good or bad.

I spent some time watching episodes of Bojack Horseman. It's a show I fear, but also love at the same time. It's about an alcohol addicted man (well, a horseman) whose addiction touches everybody's life around him. As his alcoholism spirals out of control, so do his self-loathing, cynicism, hopelessness and self-destruction.  If you've seen the show you'd know that every character has their own flaws, and while I relate to all of them, I relate to Bojack the most.

In one of my favorite episodes, "Free Churro" (an emmy nominated episode), Bojack gives a 20 or so minute eulogy for his mother who had just passed away. There's so many parts of that episode that hits home for me - not so much Bojack's own resentment for his mother for the way she raised him (I had a very loving mother), but more about how he realizes that he was born broken, grew up broken, and how he will continue to be broken because he doesn't understand what it means to be human (or horseman, in his case). Or maybe he does understand what it means to be human, but he knows he's incapable.

"All I know about being good I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that's what love is. But in real life, the big gestures isn't enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good.  You can't just screw everything up, and take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so... hard."

I always think a time will come where I can finally show everybody that I am a good person, flawed as I am. I'm always waiting for that perfect opportunity where people will say, "Wow, JC is a great guy. Look what he just did."

But being good isn't a thing you do.  It isn't even many things that you do. It's just something you are. Because you care. Because you're there. Every day.  I missed the memo on that somewhere along the way. And I filled the "goodness" void in my life by gestures that held no emotional risk, like writing a cheque to charity or... well, who am I kidding - I can't even remember the last time I even made a good gesture on my own initiative. I guess I can't even be good incorrectly.

Have any of you ever written anything, like a journal or diary entry, and had a mid-writing epiphany  that you're a complete asshole?  Yeah.

Something is Wrong With Me

A few minutes ago, my wife and I finally had a conversation today after a few days of silence.

It didn't go well.

I have a problem. And in no uncertain terms she dropped a number of truth bombs that made me reevaluate my entire life, purpose and identity. She talked about all the pain I've made her go through, and how cruel I've been to her our entire relationship. Cruel is a word that was tough for me to swallow. I never intentionally tortured her. I never plotted or planned in causing her any pain. In fact, the opposite is probably true... I did everything I thought best to protect her from pain, including keeping secrets and hiding things from her. But most importantly I also never cared for her.  I mean, I loved her.. absolutely, in the way that I thought was love.  But it's true, I never cared for her in a way another human being should care for another. And with her being my wife, that's cruel.

My wife had a health scare and has been in and out of the doctor's getting evaluated. Not once after those evaluations  did I ever check with her on how they went. In fact, I should have been in those evaluations with her to support her.  I have no excuse, other than the severity or importance of the appointments never worked their way into my heart. Or maybe they did, but as I said before, my heart and mind don't communicate. And when the heart and mind don't communicate you lose compassion and caring.

And it's not just her. I seem to block any and every bit of pain other people experience. I don't check in with my aging dad or mom when they have health problems. My brother has been going through depression and stress causing him to take months off work, and now you know as much about it as I do. I have a friend who has recently also gone through a lot of pain and transition in her life, and I never followed up. Another friend has moved several times, and I never find out until months after their move.  I just can't seem to care.

I struggle lots with emotion, and I tie a lot of that to my addiction. But after the painful conversation with my wife, what if this is just the way I am? What if I have recovery from addiction and I find out I'm still uncaring? What if I'm a sociopath and am incapable of caring for someone... Ever?

That led me into a spiral of thoughts that just ruined me this evening.

Being a good person has always been important to me. It's a core part of my identity. It's a success factor in this short life and I consider it to be pretty much the minimum bar for the clichéd deathbed reflection... "Well, I might not have made millions of left a lasting legacy, etc... But at least I was a good person. (Dies)"

Every night I recite a prayer for my eldest son... Part of which is:
"We pray that you grow in kindness and bravery, treasuring truth, loving others and doing good, even when it's hard."
Doing good is something so important to me, I want to instill that philosophy into every fiber of his being.

I always thought of myself as a good person. What is a good person? Well, I obey the law always. I never jaywalk. I get disgusted when I see something block an emergency exit. I follow rules. I've never hit anybody in my life. I open doors for everybody. I am generous with money and, whenever possible, my time. I even believe you can be an addict and still be a good person. Obviously, I'm a horrible, stupid piece of shit to my wife and family because of all this, but I'm not beyond redemption and if I work towards change and recovery I can still become a good person, right?

But what if I am incapable of caring for anybody, including people I love? What if I overcome my addiction and still am utterly incapable of empathizing with people? What if it isn't possible be a good person if you don't care about people?

It's true. You can't be a good person if you don't care for others. It doesn't matter what else you do, if you don't care, you're just not a good person.

So I guess I'm not a good person, and it's hard to say whether or not I ever will be. And I'm not saying that in a self-pity kind of way where I'm looking for sympathy from anybody.  It's just a logical conclusion. I'm cruel. I'm uncaring. I'm very likely faulty from day one. I don't have much to say for my deathbed reflection.

I'm not the person I thought I was.