But in college, that changed. I was living with non-Christian roommates and in the kind of environment where pornography was pervasive. I found myself drawn to it, at first when no one was looking so as not to ruin my witness. By senior year, I gave up pretending and convinced myself that looking at porn was not wrong. This wasn’t by some theological revelation; it was because I got tired of having to constantly confess when I gave in.
I got married two years after I graduated. By now, I’d renounced my attempts to make pornography use morally acceptable. I was sure that marriage would solve this problem (by now, it was a full-fledged addiction). It didn’t. No problem like an addiction gets solved by marriage. It made things worse.
Things deteriorated over the years. As technology changed and my resistance diminished, I found that behaviors I’d previously deemed unthinkable became quite normalized. All this while being deeply conflicted, ashamed and terrified of being discovered.
Many days, I woke up not wondering if I’d yield to temptation, but wondering how bad it would be. For several months at a time, I stopped taking communion when I went to church, knowing that the next day I’d probably be back at my addiction again.
Even though, at times, I shared aspects of my struggle (including going to counseling), no one, including myself, understood and realized the extent to which this sin-sickness was consuming my soul. But soon I became desperate; I saw clearly that I was being destroyed and was no longer able to hide my secret life. I disclosed all to my wife, parents, selected friends. For the next few months, I tried to change my life through counseling and accountability relationships.
However, I did not really understand how deeply embedded the addiction was in my soul, nor did I or those around me have a clue about the recovery process. And, in retrospect, I never really stopped addictive behavior. While I cut off the worst forms of acting out, there were many “minor” concessions I was continuing to make to lust. Soon, I was in full relapse and too frightened, proud and self-deceived to admit it.
One summer morning, my wife confronted me after I’d stayed up all night surfing online for pornography. In many ways, that morning, my life ended. In an instant, I went from being a superstar in my community, the ideal husband and father, an admired leader in the church, even the model recovering addict, to being a moral failure, a visual adulterer, a liar, a porno junkie.
As I confessed and came to realize how low I’d gone, as I saw the unspeakable pain these admissions caused my wife, as I bore the humiliation of church discipline (I was a leader and employee of my church), as I tallied the amount of money I’d spent and the time I’d wasted, as I was confronted with my moral bankruptcy, I began to question the ability of God’s love to extend to me. I understood grace, unconditional compassion, mercy beyond understanding, but I started to wonder if I was the exception clause, the one that God had abandoned. I wondered if my family and my community would be better off without me and even considered suicide, though for the sake of my children, I did not dwell on this for long.
Fortunately, my story doesn’t end here.
In the darkest night of my soul, I began a new life. And for the past eleven years, I’ve been involved in a journey of recovery, transformation and restoration. And I can say that today I walk in freedom and victory.
God has used many tools to accomplish this, including deep friendships that involve much more than just reporting my failures, periods of counseling with a therapist who really understands addiction, intense involvement with a 12-step group, the discipline of routine self-reflection and helping others who have struggled like me.
Without question, the most miraculous gift has been in the ongoing restoration of my relationship with my wife. I will never fully grasp the depth of pain I caused her, the degree to which I betrayed her trust and shredded her self-esteem. Our former pastor described the impact of my addiction on my wife as like that of a truck driving though a beautiful stained-glass window.
My actions ruined our marriage beyond repair. God has given my wife the amazing grace, the inexplicable capacity to forgive, so that we could work together to build a new marriage. I can never again question God’s love, for each morning I wake up next to a wonderful, beautiful woman whose love I don’t deserve.
So, where am I now? I am free and I am being freed.
Free in that I no longer worry about how bad it will be. Situations, environments, opportunities, emotions that would have led me to my addiction no longer do. I really can say “no.” Free, because I have developed a lifestyle of rigorous honesty, routine accountability and behavioral safeguards, knowing that I am still vulnerable to temptation and self-deception.
Story Three
At eighteen I went off to college to get an education. Today, at forty-three, I look back on those years and realize that what I learned was far from the intended subject matter. I majored in drinking beer, lifting weights and picking up girls. I began a pattern that lasted for the next twenty-five years. It caused tremendous pain and suffering to my (soon-to-be-ex) wife, my two children, my family, my close friends and, ultimately, myself.
I began having sex as soon as I arrived at school. Each day presented a new opportunity to bed a different girl. I developed flawed views of what love is and what value a woman holds. In the nineteen years that I have been married, I have had numerous affairs, most of which my wife never became aware of. The first time I was unfaithful (three years into the marriage) I felt a bit guilty, but not too awful. For the next sixteen years of our time together as man and wife, I behaved like a sailor: a woman in every port. To me it was a game—a notch in the bedpost. What my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her, I told myself. I was oblivious to the consequences of my behavior, and I justified it as something men do.
Twelve years ago my wife became aware of an affair I was having. Her immediate reaction was horror: tears, screaming, denial. “Why Me?” she said, rolling around on the floor in a ball crying uncontrollably. She cursed me and hit me; the days following this were awful. But after a few months things were back to normal. She let it go, or so I thought, and I returned to the same pattern and behavior. No harm, no foul.
Then two years ago she became aware of another affair I was having. Again there were tears, screaming, disbelief, anger, cursing, rolling around crying uncontrollably. “How could you do this to me?” she cried. “How could you do this to my family?”
What I’m about to say makes me ashamed of myself, but this is the truth: When I was caught twelve years ago, when I was caught two years ago and when my wife was in the middle of her turmoil, I did not care. As she rolled around on the floor in tears, I didn’t think of her. I didn’t really care about her feelings. I just wanted her to stop crying. I actually wondered if there was a ball game on television. Or was there any leftover fried chicken from last night?
The woman I had been married to for nineteen years—the woman I had two children with and shared thousands of hours with—she was laying there in pain and agony, and all I could think about was me. Did I apologize? Sure, but I didn’t really mean the words. They were just words. My thoughts hadn’t changed on the subject, so why would the behavior change? I thought I was justified. My friends tried to tell me to clean up my act, but I didn’t want to hear it. I was the master of my domain.
Six months ago my wife decided that she didn’t want me anymore. She had been betrayed one too many times and didn’t want any more of my kicks in the stomach. Soon after our separation, she began divorce proceedings. It was about that same time that she also began to date. Bingo! Light on! At that very moment, something changed. Not a total change, but something in me was brewing, and I didn’t like the lack of control.
I went to my wife and told her I wanted her back, I would change, I was sorry. Yadda, yadda, yadda. She rejected me. I couldn’t believe it! I tried harder, yet again she rejected me. She continued dating. Something began to change. My heart was ripped out. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work. I d
idn’t want to live. I began taking an antidepressant to help me cope. What was happening to me? The guy who has his cake and eats it too was not getting his way! I couldn’t survive. Each moment—especially the nights—became a horrifying experience. I hated my life. I hated myself. I was in a bad place. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been broken. Now it was me lying on the floor crying.
God was knocking on my door. He took me to a place He needed me to go. He was aware that my life was out of control, that I needed help and that I wouldn’t listen until I was broken. I lost my wife. I lost my kids. I lost my house. I lost my friends. I lost basically everything. In those weeks and months following my brokenness, God spoke to me and educated me. He explained to me that it is He who sits on the throne—not I. It is God who gave His life for me, and the life He wants me to have does not involve going outside of my marriage.
I needed help and it is through the help I received that today I can honestly say that I finally get it. I finally care about that beautiful woman lying on the floor crying. I wish I had been man enough to pick her up and hug her. Better yet, I wish I had been man enough to not go outside our marriage in the first place. I cannot say that I know how she felt, or how she feels even now, but I can honestly say that I have spent long hours reflecting on her pain and what it must have been like. I began to look deep inside myself and to realize that I broke the ultimate vow. I didn’t play fair: I treated the one who loved me the most as if she didn’t matter.
I finally “get it,” because I was broken. I had to be broken to get it. I had to lose something: For me, it was my family. As a result of my loss, I’ve begun mentoring my friends and fellow church members on the sanctity of marriage, on the virtues of monogamy to your mate, on the joy of honoring your marriage.
My divorce will be final soon. God is on my throne, not me. My pride is gone. I am broken. I have repented. I have not only apologized to my wife, I also meant the words I spoke to her. Today I suffer the consequences of my actions and I have no one to blame but me. The lessons I needed to learn have been painful. But in the end my pain does not compare to the pain I put my wife through.
Today my future is cloudy. I love my wife and want another chance, but she may never be able to give me one. Yet I’m hopeful that in time she will see my heart change and she will give me a chance to cherish her the way I should have all of those nineteen years. And I hope that she can realize that when I went outside the marriage it had nothing to do with her. She’s beautiful; she’s young; she’s wonderful. The reason I went outside of the marriage was me. I learned that behavior prior to our wedding, and I continued it throughout our marriage. My wish for all the women out there who read this is for you to understand that what he’s done is not your fault.
If my wife is not willing to remarry me, I will move on. With God’s help, I must do this. I will continue my recovery, recognizing that like an alcoholic, I’m never fixed. But I have changed my thought processes, and through this change in thinking I have been able to change the behavior to this point. Some day—hopefully with my wife—I will finally be able to treat a woman the way she deserves to be treated.
Story Four
I consider myself truly blessed to be married to Katherine. I consider the fact that she is still married to me an unbelievable example of mercy and forgiveness on her part. My wife married at the very young age of eighteen, a naïve young lady whose immaturity was only balanced by her devotion to God and her marriage. I had told her about my “problem” with masturbation when we first met but she had no idea of how deep the issue was inside of me.
This is not about me so I will summarize my journey briefly so you can understand the hurt I inflicted on her for twenty-five years. My obsession with sex began at a very early age. I recall having a fascination for the female body even before I was ten. Like so many developing addicts, my deviate behavior grew slowly over the decades—“playing doctor” with male and female friends, chancing upon a neighbor’s cache of pornography, discovering pornographic novels, fantasy and masturbation. As time went by, I discovered the Internet, chat rooms, sex talk, online porn, all this leading to affairs and one-night stands. As my downward slide continued, I began to view and download even more depraved images, which eventually led to my arrest for possession of child pornography.
The entire journey lasted for almost fifty years. With few exceptions, nothing interrupted the advance of my sexual addiction—not accepting Christ, not marriage, not becoming a deacon and then a lay pastor.
For the final twenty-five years, I had a fantastic job for an international company. I travelled the world and used every opportunity to indulge in my sin. Through it all, Katherine suffered. At first she kept me accountable with weekly check-in sessions but eventually I began to lie and spiritual darkness overtook my life and marriage. Eventually, the end came. I was arrested and spent six days in jail. Released on bail, my slow recovery began.
At this point, I need to purposefully change my focus from me to Katherine.
In her earlier comments, my wife spoke about the trauma she suffered the evening the police descended on our home, a home I should have been protecting. I hadn’t been protecting my wife for years. I was always “away somewhere else” in my sin. Now, the consequences of my sin had landed me in jail. Yet I was again not there for her. She was blindsided and I was nowhere to be found.
Not only was Katherine traumatized by this invasion of our home, my arrest was widely publicized in the local and regional press and TV. It is only recently that I have begun to understand the impact this has had on my wife.
Through it all, I have been so selfish, self-focused and prideful that I was not able to see Katherine for who she was—a loving, faithful, committed wife who was willing to give up everything to stand by my side. Worse still, my selfishness went from an obsession on sex to an obsession on my healing. My life over the past four years has been about my recovery from habitual sin and from shame. It became focused on denying and ridding me of the consequences of my sin. All this, to the further hurt of the wife of my youth. My shame and denial led me to reject my wife sexually. She was trying to speak the truth to me but I could not accept it.
Over the years, God has spoken to me several times, mainly through other people. He has been trying to get me to understand something but I have not been listening. In retrospect, I can hear Him—“Neil, look at your wife. You have and are hurting her. She has suffered tremendously. Don’t abuse her Christian commitment to the marriage. Her commitment doesn’t mean she isn’t deeply hurt.”
About a month ago, God tried again. The director of a ministries program spoke at the church we have been attending for two years. He was speaking about the woman with the issue of blood who snuck up and touched Jesus’ robe. She was healed immediately but that was not good enough for Jesus. He needed to know who had touched Him. He needed to say something to her.
The speaker asked if we understood how a woman like that would be treated in those days. According to Old Testament law, she would be ceremonially unclean, all the time! For twelve years she was unclean. She would have to go around saying “Unclean! Unclean!” She could not touch anyone, not her husband, not her children. What does that do to a woman? What does that do to her spirit? Continual rejection!
I was sitting there listening to this and something happened. Something broke inside of me, but I wasn’t sure what it was. All of a sudden the tears started to flow. Then I knew. I had been treating Katherine like that woman. Because of my shame, my pride, my selfishness, I have been holding so much from her, treating her like an unclean woman. This manifested itself not only in the lack of affection and intimacy but also in many other ways. I have rejected much of her counsel and expressions of hurt. I have judged and accused her. I have blamed her for my sins. I have hidden myself in my “cave”, running from her as from a leper.
I realize now that I have been sinning. Yes, free from sexual addiction but sinning nevertheless. To make things worse,
I have been ignoring a huge truth. Katherine is a traumatized wife. The Christian in her, her faith in God, has helped her stay the course, but the wife in her is deeply traumatized. My sexual addiction through our entire marriage, my infidelity, my arrest and my selfish recovery, all these things have added to the hurt.
My wife and I have now been given the opportunity to work in the lives of sex addicts and their spouses. I, like so many sex addicts, was totally selfish. I believed that my addiction was caused by something outside of me. Addicts will blame abuse, society, their jobs, their marriages, their wives—anything but themselves. I was no different. I was so busy focusing on enjoying my acting out and then my recovery that I forgot about the deep trauma I inflicted on Katherine. May God forgive me.
Story Five
When my secret was discovered, my wife’s response was immediate. I think I was at my desk at work when I got the phone call. She asked my directly if I had been visiting pornographic Web sites on our computer. Maybe I could have tried to make up some story, but I think her direct questions helped me feel like I couldn’t hide it any more. Her initial outward response was quite direct, wanting direct answers from me.
The following weeks were the most painful of our lives. There was fear on both of our parts, not knowing what was going to happen. I saw in my wife pain that I had never seen before. I had turned our life upside down. I think I was like a stranger to her. Everything about me that she was sure she knew was now a question mark. She asked me some questions that I never thought I would be asked: Was I having an affair? Had I been with prostitutes? Did she need to get tested for STDs? Virtually everything came into question. It was very clear that this was the most significant life-altering thing she, that we, had ever experienced.
Your Sexually Addicted Spouse Page 20