From The Poop Deck

So husband went under general anesthesia on Friday to have the varicocele (varicose vein in his left nut) repaired so that he can start making some sperm. He was in surgery only for a few hours and then came home with a goody bag of percocet, codeine and vicodin. Husband isn't in the habit of taking pills. He does 1-2 glasses of pinot most nights, and occasionally gets drunk, but he's never taken drugs (even weed! wtf?) and so they affect him in the most curious way. The way everything affected him after his surgery was a great deal of constipation. Yup, husband was full of shit. Every night he would take a few of the stool softeners that the doctor gave him and every morning-- nothing! So, finally on Sunday, I gave him some smooth move tea to help him go. But the smooth move gave him spasms, but no poop. I told him to go sit on the toilet and relax. So he did, but nothing came out and husband began to panic. The longer he sat, the more he panicked. He began pounding glasses of water. He had like 5 or 6 giant glasses of water, but dude was so panicked that his sphincter muscles started to jam up, locking all the shit up inside of his intestines. Husband starts screaming for me. I walk into the bathroom and find him standing over the toilet completely naked, a look of terror on his face.

"You need to take me to the emergency room!" he screams.
"Um, why are you naked?" I ask him
"Just call 911, we have to go to the emergency room!"
"Wait. Can you at least put some underwear on?"
"No, I can't! I need to poop and I'm gonna poop all over myself but nothing's coming out. I think I'm going to explode, you need to take me to the emergency room."
"Wait. So why are you naked?"
At this point, I can barely keep a straight face. He looks totally pathetic, standing over the toilet naked, his belly all distended, toilet paper in hand and um, leaky ass... I was thinking "really? really this guy wanted to have sex with other women?" I was so annoyed and amused at the same time. thinking about what if the 22 year old bimbos could see him like this.
"I'm not taking you to the emergency room."
"how come?"
"because people don't die from constipation. I think you're having a panic attack, tell me where the emergency xanax is" (he hides the emergency xanax because unlike him, I do like drugs).
He took a xanax and I offered to read to him while he sat on the toilet. So he sat and relaxed and I laid in the bathtub reading him the biggest piece of shit book I've ever read-- Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. Anyway, low and behold, the combination of xanax and Dave Ramsey made his ass explode and for that I'll always be thankful to Dave Ramsey. And by the way.. psssst... stock tip. If you can, buy some shares in Preparation H. i think we might make you rich.

I dined and dashed

Yeah. I did. It was a bit more than a month ago. I was on my way to therapy and I decided to get breakfast at a diner next door. My bill (for a couple of eggs and a cup of coffee) came to 11.25. I was so angry and resentful. When I gave the waitress my debit card, she told me that their credit card machine wasn't working and could I go get cash from the ATM. I told her that I had no time right now, but would be back later. Well, I didn't go back. I was angry at the waitress, angry at my therapist, angry at my husband, angry at everyone. It's been haunting me with joyous delight for more than a month. I knew that I should send them money, but I didn't want to. Anyway, yesterday, reluctantly and annoyedly, I put a $20 bill in the mail with an anonymous note telling them that I dined and dashed, and telling them the date and the time and a description of the waitress, asking that she please get her tip. So, she was getting a 77.777% tip instead of the 20% tip I would have left her if I stayed. I'm not justifying my action. In fact, I did that because I didn't have small change, just a $20 on me. I didn't send the money in because I felt a deep sense of moral obligation. I did it in the end because it was the right thing to do. I didn't believe that if I did it, things in my life that were going wrong would right themselves.

See, I came from a belief system that when you did good things, you were protected from bad things. If I was good, kind, took care of people, was loving, overtipped, etc. etc. that I wouldn't get sick, that I'd make money, that life would be good. When I found out that husband was out buying condoms and looking for 22 year olds to have sex with, and having violent, masochistic, cybersex with women on the internet, well then that theory was shot to hell. How could this happen to me? I'm a good person. I don't think that being a good person can protect you from the pain and suffering of life. So, why do we choose to be good? I don't know. My husband certainly didn't. He came from a similar belief system too, yet he still actively decided to stray and to cheat on me. He chose to be bad. And still, he doesn't have consequences. Sure, I'm angry at him, but he got away with it for 2 years and in the end, I didn't leave him. What good is being good? Why do good things happen to people who do bad things and vice-versa?

I have to figure out what the point in being good is. It didn't feel good to send the diner the money. It felt better to think that I'd gotten away with something. That felt good. Is that the same with husband? Was being with me better when he was getting away with something? Was cheating on me awesome because there's no real benefit to being good?

If I were following the blog formula, I'd have formulated an answer for the question, why be good? But I don't have an answer. I was a good a great wife and I got cheated on for 2 years. My goodness didn't come back to me. What's the point?

Sitting in My Shit

Action. Action is one of the things that helps me become me again. Being an active participant in my life and reintegrating who I am is how I'm beginning to heal on my end. When I was a young teenager, 15 I think, I had a boyfriend who broke my heart. Literally broke. my. heart. The first heartbreak might be the worst. And to think that no one loved me through it or helped me to heal through that. To think that my mother or my father or stepmother didn't hold me and rock me and tell me how much breakups hurt. To think that they didn't acknowledge my broken heart or even my tenuous punk rock al a Sid&Nancy type relationship, they just berated me for walking around mopey and gloomy. To think that they didn't tell me that I was perfect, whole and complete just the way I was and that his breaking up with me had nothing to do with me, that I was fine the way I was and that they loved me for me. No. I didn't get that. I was told that I had to change. That my feelings were not acceptable. I gloomed around for a year. Seriously, it was a year. A whole year too. When I think back to it, it feels like much more than a year, but a year for a 15 year old is like, forever. But things got better eventually and I got on with my life and started wearing colors, and let my hair grow and put on (non black) lipstick and things got better. After that happened, I made a rule for myself. When I am unhappy about something, I am allowed to "sit in my shit," for a specified amount of time. After that, I stand up, dust myself off, and persevere. Perseverance is something that I've always had. The crisis level of the situation is decreasing, the trauma is beginning to wear down, and I'm ready to pick myself up and go forward again. And I'm willing to try it out with husband. Don't get me wrong, I'm still totally angry at husband and I will be for a very long time, but I'm not stewing in my juices anymore. I'm coming back to me again.
Husband told me last night that one of the things that kept him in the acting out behaviors was the addiction to the validation. Like if he could get someone to talk to him, it gave him a sense of being validated or being okay. He feels so intensely not okay in so many different ways. Like me, he grew up in a pretty crappy family that gave him no validation. I can totally relate to needing to know that I'm okay. And hearing it from just me was not enough for him. That has nothing to do with me. That's all about his crappy self esteem and his sense of worthlessness. That's about his mother neglecting him and his father not protecting him from his mother's insanity. I can understand that. I have often felt not good enough and needed lots of external validation. I've done lots of shit for it. Not just having sex with people or trying to make people think I'm hot, but running a marathon, writing a novel, starting a business... things that will make my parents think I'm good enough. Getting skinny and having sex with men was to make men think that I'm good enough. But you know what? Good enough is good enough. I don't need people to tell me I'm good enough. I am fine. I am fine just the way I am. And I don't need to change because husband doesn't think he's good enough. Nothing I do to myself will make him change the way he feels about himself.
So, for now, it's all about being an advocate for me. Getting out into the world, enjoying my life, meditating in the morning, working on my 2nd book, learning to play an instrument, thinking about other things that make me happy. Husband has his own work to do that has nothing to do with me.

How do I become Me again?

I've been thinking for the past few days about who I want to be. It's all confusing because I feel that since I have been with my husband, I've been less myself. It's something that I haven't wanted to admit, but it's true somewhat. I've gotten lazy in a sense because I felt so secure with him. To be fair, I've also started a business that's taken up all of my time and my work is tiring, so when I'm not working, I'm zoning out in front of the computer. For the past two years, while husband was doing his acting out behaviors, I began to just zone out myself. I'd pour myself a glass of wine and sit in front of the TV in the evening, laptop on lap, semi watching TV, semi surfing the net (for what? I don't know) and semi getting drunk. All of it was shutting me down. We discussed this, husband and I, when all of his SA stuff came to light. I'd be waiting for him in bed, and he wouldn't come in, so I'd take a sleeping pill and pass out with the TV on. If I called for him to come to bed, he got annoyed. So I stopped. It was hard for me to have him so distant and disconnected from me. I was depressed, so I did the only thing that I could think to do, I distanced myself from him. I took wine and sleeping pills and passed out. A few hours later, at 2 or 3am, he'd come into our bedroom, change his underwear and come to bed. When I asked him why he was changing his underwear, he said he had sweaty balls. Yeah right.
Anyway, after all his acting out behaviors came to light, we began to try to do things different. I stopped turning the TV off and realized that I escape too much into the internet. And honestly, I barely look at anything on the internet. I peruse the NY Times, I look at a few gossip blogs, I read about the newest weight loss fad, I look at facebook (which mostly annoys the hell out of me) and I answer work email . I barely answer friend emails because there is this big secret between us. I have been so depressed and isolating from my friends. It's just too much to talk about. Which is so sad because part of me losing me, is me losing my friends. I've been feeling disconnected for quite a while now. Drinking wine at night and watching TV makes me disconnected. The other thing is that I project a perfect life and people think my life is perfect. I thought it was too and now it's all falling apart. I thought it would be awful to let people know that it's not perfect, but it's actually kind of a relief, for those who know. I'm depressed a lot. Not only just because husband is a sex addict, but also because our money situation is bad. We have almost $45,000.00 in debt (this doesn't include a house), we can't seem to get pregnant, and my husband spent two years having cyber sex relationships with woman (or 14 year old boys and old men- who knows) who weren't me, and putting up ads to try and meet up with women who weren't me. THIS IS NOT MY FUCKING FAULT. I am a hot lady. I am sexy, smart and fabulous. I am quite brilliant actually. And, if I might say so myself, I'm pretty fucking hot. In fact, I should go out and make out with a boy the way I used to. But I've not done that in six years. But boy, was it fun when I used to. But husband and I are trying to work through this, and so I can't do those things. As much as I want to.
But I digress.
If I am so fucking fabulous, than why am I sitting around being depressed and surfing the net? I know I said that I used to do that, but I still do that. I'm kind of addicted to the internet. I don't think that blogging counts as internet addiction, because this is me trying to work through my shit. This is positive. Outer circle behavior they'd call it in COSA. If I am so fabulous, why am I stuck in this rut of being depressed that I'm not pregnant, being depressed that my husband did the fucked up shit that he did, being depressed and thinking that I'm fat, ugly, and old (at 36, which I think is not old), and spacing out in front of the internet pretty much all day long. WTF?
Because for some reason, I need to spend hours looking for the perfect tight, bellbottom jeans to squeeze my lovely, curvy ass into. I need to spend an hour a day on the treadmill, I need to look for the best low carb diet to go on so that I can be sexy and skinny for my dipshit husband. I can't even tell you how many times in just the course of writing this post I've gotten up and gone into the refrigerator or looked at Shopstyle
I mean, for real. It's so odd. Husband always told me that he wasn't attracted to other women and didn't even look at attractiveness levels in people and didn't understand it. I sort of thought that he might be on the autistic spectrum. The truth was, he was lying. He was afraid to find people attractive, so he had to take it out on the internet and try to act like a douchy guy on the internet, while I just wanted so badly for him to tell me that I was pretty. He never did. He's trying now. I really began to not like myself. Think I wasn't good enough before I found out about the SA, because he was so neglectful. I kept asking him, "are you not attracted to me?" "I am," he would tell me. He might well have been, but he was getting his needs met somewhere else and I was not getting any needs met, so I met them with wine and ambien. Or unisom.
But now, I have to remember who I am. What do I need? What do I want? Who did I think I was before husband? Who did I think I was before we started trying to have a baby?
I thought I was a writer. But now I no longer write. I thought I had a serious spiritual and meditation practice. Now I don't meditate or do yoga ever. I thought I had a lot of friends. Now, I don't talk to people. WHERE THE FUCK DID I GO? AND HOW DO I FIND MYSELF AND GET MYSELF BACK?

I am not a fucking object full of eggs. I'm an awesome lady with a great ass, exquisite tits, and a sharp as knives wit and a brilliant mind. But I'm wasting all that shit just sitting around doing nothing.

So what do I want?

1.) I want to finish book #2
2.) I want to finish super-secret project that I've been working on for years.
3.) I want to read more.
4.) I want to do projects, like sew clothes and learn to play some musical instruments like guitar and saxaphone and piano.
5.) I want to learn to play tennis for fun
6.) I want to meditate more and pray more and channel more and reestablish my relationship with God as I know her to be.
7.) I want relationship with husband to be kick ass, where we are connected. I know that husband is willing. I am too. But we're so used to being so disconnected that it's tough.
8.) I want to reconnect to friends.
9.) I want to get back into writing short stories and begin to submit them to journals.

How the fuck do I do all this? I certainly have the luxury of time. I don't work a ton, especially now that work is going down hill. I work less than 25-30 hours a week.

I guess that the first part is giving up the disconnecting so that I can connect. Probably that means letting go of wine. Ugh. I can't tell you how many times I've said that. I am so addicted. I am probably an alcoholic. A typical, yuppie, housewife, hyper-functional alcoholic. I use wine to numb me. I don't want to give it up. It's like my best friend. But maybe instead of saying I'm going to give up alcohol, I have to welcome in reconnecting.

Reconnecting means not spending more than one full hour (combined) a day fucking around on the internet. It means not getting sucked into fantasies of winning the lottery or spending a ridiculous amount of time filling out sweepstakes- another one of my addictions. As much as husband would escape into reality, so would I.

So, how do I do this? I guess it starts with my relationship with myself. I think that I start by waking up and meditating in the morning. First things first. Then, perhaps do a little channelling, then make a list of things that I want to accomplish that day, and make time for friends, journal, blog posts, work and play and create some time for other fun things.

I would say that I need to get more into my COSA program, but I'm not really into my COSA program. I am very interested in figuring out my codependent traits, but COSA is triggering all my shit. I feel inferior to a lot of the women in there, like they don't like me and I'm not good enough for them, and superior to others. It's all shit that I need to work through in therapy. I don't know that I want to do 12 steps. If I do, I'll do them with my blog, right here. Not with a sponsor. I can't deal with anyone telling me what to do. I can't deal with character defects. I don't believe in them. I think we're all just works in progress. So, if I can believe that, I can sometimes even feel that way for my husband before I get angry at him for betraying me. But it's all so hard.

Step One. I admit that I am powerless against my need to check out.

Tomorrow morning, meditate, make list. That's it for now.

Choosing My own Reactions

I choose my own reactions. My husband was the one who went out and put profiles of himself and pictures of his penis all over the internet. However, I'm the one who began hating myself and feeling like he did it because I was fat and ugly and old. I am not old. I'm 36 years old. And I'm cute. And at 130 pounds, I'm definitely not fat. And I'm smart. My husband did this because his self esteem is in the gutter. I can be angry at him, I am angry at him, but my reaction can't be to hurt and hate on myself. It has to be to love myself more. To be more confident. To do the things I want to do with my life. I don't have to be down in the dumps all the time. I don't have to hate him.

However... hating him makes me less vulnerable. If I hate him, then he can't hurt me again. It feels better somehow.

Still Depressed

I am back home with Husband. He picked me up from the airport last night with a chicken Caesar salad. As soon as I saw him, I was instantly depressed. To think that this man was the person whose arms I would jump into when he got home from work. This is the man who I talked to several times a day. I feel so low, so defeated.

My FSH increased 3 points over the past one year. So I'm nervous and afraid. It seems we just might not be able to have kids between my husband's sperm count and my FSH. I'm feeling depressed and defeated. I know that I should try and do things for myself. But I'm so depressed I don't want to get out of bed. I want to lay in bed and just be absorbed into the atmosphere.

One of the Noble Truths

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths*. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. - M. Scott Peck "The Road Less Traveled"

This is an important passage and I read it whenever I am feeling sad or desperate. We all suffer. Yet, I often believe that I shouldn't suffer, and that my suffering is so much worse than anyone else's. But, it's not true. We're all suffering together. And that's not all the time, but we go in and out of it, and we'll all suffer differently at different times.

I've been away from Husband for 48 hours, and I'm feeling nervous that he's not going to need me or love me anymore. It's weird. He's getting better and I'm feeling insecure. It makes me feel angry at him. I don't know how to navigate through all this. I feel a little more comfortable when I'm angry at him, despite the fact that anger is horribly uncomfortable for me. But when I'm angry at him, I feel safer. It gives me more control. When I'm angry at him, I don't need him. When I'm angry at him, I can ignore him and I can bask in the safety of him feeling terrified that I'm going to leave him, which will keep him with me.

I know that I need to find safety and security in me so that I don't need him to feel safe. But that's hard, you know? How do I do that? How do I completely be me without worrying about him, while still being interdependent as a couple?

not good.

I'm in the place of hating my husband right now. My anger is taking over my body. I can barely take it. How could he do this to us? How could he push me aside to try for years to fuck other women. After what we had. What a fucking ass. I'm so sick of him.

Not doing any better

Today I sent Husband this email at work:

i made the mistake of looking at facebook this morning. which put the question in my head, "how did my life get so bad?"
I had a great job, a great boyfriend, no debt, I was going to have four children.

and now. no kids or possibility of it, crazy debt, a husband who tried obsessively to cheat on me for 2 years. how did this happen to me? I just want to die.

And he replied with this:

I know - I did all this and you are suffering for it. You had no idea what you were getting into.

But we do still have a chance to have children and a great life together.

Nobody has a perfect life - everybody gets some bad stuff. And I've done a bad job of dealing with a bunch of my bad stuff up to this point in my life which led to this. Like a closet stuffed full of dirty emotions, it bust open all over the floor.

I love you and I'm not going to flee when you are depressed.

I may give a call in a few - but I'm off to a busy start. I have alot to get done today.


I am about to fly across the country to see my folks for a few days. They don't know. But, it's going to be hard. I've not worn my wedding ring for 2 months since I found out and I can't bring myself to put it on. I think I'll just tell them I was bloated from my period so I took it off. Anyway, I'm really being triggered by this visit. See, my husband admitted the other day that he was happy when I went away to visit my parents because that's when we would try super hard to find someone to meet up with and have sex with. He was happy to get me out of his hair so he could spend all of his time having cyber sex. I'm so angry and I hate him.

How Did My Life Get So Bad?

I feel that I almost can't deal anymore. I had a promising life. I had a good job, married a great guy. Was going to have kids, security... But my husband is a sex addict and he can't get me pregnant.

Depressed

I'm premenstrual and depressed today. I still can't believe that my husband did what he did. I spoke to someone who wanted to help me through my step work yesterday. It mostly annoyed me. COSA is really hard for me. Sometimes, I don't want to empower myself. Sometimes, I want to sit in front of the television, drinking red wine, surfing the internet and zoning out. Sometimes I just can't fucking take it. The thing is, sitting around and trying to do things to make myself feel strong and powerful, journaling, blogging, exercising, and reading Patrick Carnes books, and whatever else I'm supposed to do to care of myself is hard. It takes a lot of work to figure out how to feel better. It takes virtually no work to sit around and do nothing but drink and read gossip blogs and watch lame ass TV. It makes me forget how much my husband hurt me, and how angry I am at him, and how much I sort of hate him, and how he betrayed me.

Husband is at a meeting now. He came home the other day with a 30 day chip. Wow, 30 days. That's nothing compared to how long he was communicating with other women.

Maybe tomorrow I'll work on myself. Tonight I have wine.

Self Worth Part II

My self worth and self esteem is in jeopardy. I think that's why a lot of people become codependent. They don't feel good about themselves, so they save others in order to give themselves worth. I did that with a very broken ex bf of mine. He felt so badly about himself that he thought I must be insane to love him so much and care for him like that. He treated me like shit, abused me emotionally, and cheated on me.
My self worth issues began young. My father moved out when I was 10 months old. My mother worked a lot and left me at school or with sitters and was always late to come pick me up. It made me feel unimportant. As I got older, she was critical. Critical about my weight and about my looks. When I asked her if I was pretty, she told me that I was interesting. She was overly concerned about my weight and my weight gain. At age 13, she brought me to Wannamakers for new clothes. She found that my size was a (brace yourself) *GASP-- 7. Oh no! A size 7. She told all the neighbors (in front of me) that I was a size 7 now and that she was taking me to Weight Watchers, so if anyone saw me eating or buying junk food around town, they had to tell her. And so began weight watchers. I went from 112 pounds to 105 pounds. But that wasn't actually the start of weight watchers. It actually started two years earlier, at age 11, when I was 106 pounds. Back then, I went down to 98 pounds. But weight watchers taught me all about calories. And I learned that if I ate nothing all day, I could eat a candy bar (or five) for dinner and that's it. So, you probably don't have to guess too much about what happened after that... yup. Eating Disorder. I remember my first Thanksgiving with laxatives. I found them in my Grandmother's boyfriend's daughter's medicine cabinet. Three chocolate ex-lax let me eat as much turkey, creamed corn, mashed potatoes, bread & butter, pecan pie, and ice cream as I wanted. Then I came home, stepped on the scale, and with every trip to the bathroom, weighed myself again until the magic number (98) was there. Then I could go to sleep. I experimented with purging, but was never a good bulimic (thank god). I never really got super into laxatives. But what I struggled with for years was bingeing and restricting. As a young teenager I would pop dexatrim and smoke cigarettes and guzzle diet coke to avoid eating. I'd binge on bagels and chips and ice cream late at night when everyone was sleeping. Mommy called me "sloppy fat." I wasn't very overweight. Don't get me wrong, I was a bit over weight, but perhaps more like 10 pounds overweight, yet my mom made it seem like I was morbidly obese. She was really appalled by me. She's say things like, "Charlie thinks your pretty, but he says you need to lose weight," or "Grandma thinks you've gotten fat." And of course she would say things like, "Laney, no man will want to be with you if you're bingeing." Little did I know that Mommy was a binge eater too. I found out years later. But she was like me, binge/restrict and her balance threshold kept her skinny. Anyway, I began having sex with any man who wanted to have sex with me. I didn't understand that any many would have sex with me because, well, I was a woman. I was desperate, and kind of pathetic, and had no self esteem, so if someone wanted to fuck me, I'd do it with them because I thought it meant that they were attracted to me and that I was pretty. I stopped binge eating (and only restricted), lost 30 pounds and had men falling over themselves to have sex with me. I had sex with many of them. I wanted love, but just got sex. It was empty and terrible. I did this for years. More to be continued.

Boundaries

Today at my COSA meeting and we talked about boundaries. Now, here's the thing, everyone discussed how they were having trouble creating clear boundaries with parents, husbands, friends.

Husband and I definitely have trouble with boundaries, but rather than diffuse boundaries (that very codie sticky i don't know where I end and you begin), we have very, very, rigid boundaries. I think it's the same issue, but played out in a different way. See, husband and I both grew up in households with very diffuse boundaries. My mother beat me and tried to control me. She was a codie herself -- (Grandpa was an alcoholic as was her very married boyfriend of 25 years). My mom was so in love with me that she just couldn't let go of me, so she tried to control me with name calling, insults, physical abuse, criticism, and massively unhealthy overprotection. Husband's Mom is just a crazy mess, she tries to control everyone in orbit in the most insidious way. I hate her, in case I've not mentioned it before. Anyway, growing up with these very diffuse boundaries has caused husband and I to have very rigid boundaries. We don't tell anyone anything. Very few friends and no family members know that he's an SA or about what we're going through. We've told very few people about our fertility issues. And, for crying out loud, we didn't even tell anyone that we bought a house until after it closed. We are both so self protective. And, in our own relationship, I think that we can tend to be sneaky and self protective with each other. Obviously husband was with his SA acting out behaviors. But I can be sneaky with money, and also with food. Not so much about overeating, I always tell him when I overeat, but I also do a lot of telling him that I've eaten when I haven't. I also don't tell him if I've drank a glass or two of wine. I mostly don't tell him if I buy a new dress or new pants. Though, I don't know why, it's not like he gets mad. But I think that it's because we both grew up with these overprotective, overcritical mothers who judged everything we did. So in order to do what we want to do, we have to be sneaky. It seems that in order for me and husband to have a better relationship, we should have a no-secrets policy and recognize when we have the urge to hide something from the other. We're good to each other. We don't have to worry about being hurt by the other if one doesn't like something the other does.

Self Worth

When husband and I were in couples counseling this week, I told our therapist that I felt extremely depressed about my aging process and that this was a new thing. I told him that I have always felt that growing older was a blessing. But all of a sudden, I felt old, insignificant, ugly, used up. I told him that I felt that being 36 makes me worthless because husband was on all those dating sites looking for women ages 18-24 to have sex with. I said that my process of growing older has become not something to cherish and feel blessed about, but a reason to hate myself. Husband began to cry. Dr. T. asked him what was up. He said he didn't know, but that he was really sad. Dr. T. asked him what he was sad about and husband said he didn't know. Later that night, I asked him if he was sad that my perception of myself was so skewed by his actions. I was hoping that would feel so guilty, and tell me that he loved me and he didn't know why he was looking at young girls and that it killed him to know that I was doubting myself and berating my age because of his actions. But he said he didn't know why he was sad. Dr. T. pointed out that this was something that I should be working on in individual therapy. My own sense of self was probably tenuous to begin with and his acting out triggered all my old stuff.
I went into individual therapy with a plan to terminate my sessions because really, we have no money. I've been working much less since disclosure, it's hard to do my job when you're totally fucking depressed, couples counseling is $180 a week for a 50 minute session. Which is crazy money for us. (Addict husband is bad with money-- making it and spending it-- surprise, surprise). But my therapist wound up cutting my fee from $130 a week down to $60 a week. I can't tell you how grateful I am for that. I know it's not easy to cut your income like that. I'm super grateful. Husband was grateful too. And now I can see her weekly, which I wasn't able to do before. It's still crazy money for us. However, I know it is money well spent.
So, on the note of my self worth--

Well, here we go. I have self worth issues. I've always felt that my worth was tied up in the way I looked. I've always skated by pretty easily on my brains and abilities, and though nurturing those gifts a fraction of the amount that I've worked on my looks would have yielded me really amazing results, I've not done it because in my mind, my looks are the most important thing. How fucked up is that? When I got together with husband, he never looked at other women and let me know that he didn't really think about how people looked. He didn't think of women in terms of attractiveness and he didn't see it. That was partly a relief, but partly sad for me because he never validated me in that way by telling me I was pretty or hot. He never went nuts when I was changing into my pajamas or coming out of the shower unlike previous boyfriends who went crazy for my body, my hair, my eyes, my looks... but not husband. He said he just wasn't the type of guy to quantify women in terms of their physical attractiveness and it wasn't something he even noticed. So, I felt very safe with him. I *knew* that he would never cheat on me, that the thought would never even cross his mind. Ick. So, of course I was shocked to see on his many hundreds of online dating site profiles that the most important thing to him was level of physical attractiveness. Huh? Who the fuck is that?
It fucked up everything inside of me that I'd taken so long to heal.

I read in Patrick Carnes book that eating disorders go hand in hand with Sex Addiction. He said that most of the SA's came in and their wives had been engaged in overeating and that many were morbidly obese. Well I've definitely been in and out of eating disorders and right now, though I'm trying not to engage in my behaviors, I find myself restricting food and exercising a lot. I've dropped 8 pounds in the last 7 weeks. Which is significant for my size. I will continue this post later.