Along for the ride

Freedom

Things were dark for a while there. It was a -ball on the floor-fly into a rage-wish I could crawl out of my skin- kind of week. After another painful attempt at climbing back over the barbed wire fence, I have finally found my groove and am feeling re-centered.

I told my husband I don't want to live this way anymore. We are having another in home separation and I am starting to work on preparing myself to be independent. I don't know how long I will continue to live like this, but I know I'm working towards a way out. I am tired of this cycle. Tired of the dishonesty. The blame. The rationalizations, denial, and selfishness. I am tired of always being the one to bring his behavior to light. I won't be his Savior anymore. I can't be. All my attempts at helping him see his ways have just continued the cycle. 

A helpful(aka enabling) wife does not a recovered man make. 

I am feeling much more peace and serenity these days. And I am taking back the parts of my life I was pushing aside. I scheduled appointments, planned and paid for a training workshop, called a counselor to set up an appointment (after the polygraph therapist fiasco I have been dragging my feet on starting therapy again), and I've been participating in multiple recovery meetings. I cook meals when I'm finding the time, and warming up frozen dinners when I need a break. And not feeling guilty for taking days off. 

I'm following my gut. Stepping out of my comfort zone. Telling my fears they are valid, and I appreciate their concerns but I'm still going forward with what feels right. And working on telling my mind to be still. 

I feel a bit all over the place today. I feel the pendulum swinging back and forth and I'm not sure where it is going to stop. But I'm hanging on and going along with it willingly.

This is my life. I am led by God and he knows where I'm going. I'm trying to trust in Him and pray I can hang on for the ride. And learn to appreciate the journey instead of waiting for the destination. 

Battle

In the trenches.
The polygraph is happening right now states away and time feels like it has stopped.

What if he doesn't pass? What if he does????

There was new information that came out before the polygraph. Lies. And irrefutable lies. I already know my husband has been blatantly deceiving me without question. At this point the polygraph is just to know whether my worst fears have come true.

And my husband is still manipulating his way around EVERYTHING.

I have text evidence of his own words where he contradicts what he is trying to tell me I am "misunderstanding".

He is so very lost. And underneath all the pain, anger, and fear, is pity. For a man that is so far gone he believes his own lies even when they are staring him in the face. It is heartbreaking.

Then in the middle of our conversation, when it is clear he has lied so deeply, I end the conversation and ask him to call me back when he has thought about it and realizes his mistake.

Then I get a voicemail.  A big terrible awful voicemail.

It is my psychologist, but she isn't leaving a message for me. She called the wrong person.

My stomach dropped and my eyes grew wide with disbelief. She is leaving a message for our polygrapher on my phone. And saying things that she shouldn't be saying, she is talking about the client's "wife"...."it sounds like you have already figured out that she is really difficult to deal with"......"she's been told repeatedly by me that the things she are asking are not gonna be good questions for the poly"....

She sounds annoyed. I feel betrayed.

Earlier that day we had a phone session. She talked about how my needs would be met, how they would be doing everything they can to get me the answers I need. She said she was on my side. She knew, having been betrayed herself what my pain was. There was compassion, empathy, understanding. She mentioned some of the questions were tricky, but I should contact the polygrapher and she could help me define them so they will be effective. No suggestion that these questions should be changed. No hint of the emotions she conveys in this voicemail.

I was shaking. My teeth started to chatter uncontrollably. My husband calls back, at first I tell him I can't talk about anything else, I tell him what happened.

A few minutes later he calls again. I am very hesitant to put myself through more pain when I am in crisis. A tiny sliver of hope that he will confess his mistake, apologize for the many lies and show me a determination to change. I warn him not to hurt me any more right now.

As soon as the words "I am so sorry that you FEEL like you are being lied to...." slip out of his mouth I hang up. I am broken completely. Every last shard of my heart disintegrates into nothing. The reality of my situation hits me in the gut.

My husband is a liar. He has played his part well. Over a year sober. Multiple addiction meetings weekly, seeing a therapist, working steps with a sponsor, he has a SPONSEE.
All while choosing to stay stuck, and is unwilling to acknowledge the problem. His dishonesty destroys all of his efforts and he doesn't even see it.
Insanity.

I am surviving. I am working like hell to fight against Satan's attempts to destroy me and my family.
I received a blessing and it confirmed to me that I need to do everything in my power to protect me and my precious children from this disease. I need to build them up and prepare them because what lies ahead is not going to be pretty.

My oldest daughter is amazingly intuitive. She has been crying the last few days because she misses her daddy. She feels everything that is going on even without me telling her. She says "I feel like we are never going to live with him again". (We are living with my parents right now) I don't know what to say to her. I don't know if we will live with him again either. I hold her, I tell her I understand how she feels, and that she will be able to talk to him soon. How am I going to tell her we won't be living with daddy for a long time, and that mommy and daddy may never live together again? How can I break her heart like that? I trust in God and His plan for us. I know he loves this little girl infinitely more than even I do. He will give us exactly what we need. Everything is happening just as it should and I feel His strength carrying me through.

Any minute now I will know if my husband has crossed lines I never thought he would cross.

I am strength.
I am peace.
I am doing hard things.
I will rise above.

Winds of Change

My last post was about how we were doing so much better. Well...things have changed. We are separated, living in different states, and my kids and I are staying with family. We have a polygraph scheduled for 2 weeks from now, and we haven't even started disclosure yet. There have been too many unknowns, secrets, gut pangs, whatever you want to call it. Something is just not right.

My husband says he has been sober for over a year, is in "good recovery", goes to a few recovery meetings a week, works the steps, has a sponsor, and a sponsee, and yet.....I can't get far enough away from him. My creepy guy detector has become deafening.  Not that my senses are the only thing telling me something is wrong. I don't know if my husband is still looking at porn, but at the very least he is a dry drunk still stuck in the addiction cycle of blame, defensiveness, shame....

Case in point, my hubs has maintained he has never lusted after a woman in "real life" meaning a woman not on a screen, page, etc. This has been a battle between us for over a year. I don't believe him, and I am upset, he is upset that I don't believe him, and on and on.
So the polygraph gets scheduled and guess what? Within a few days I get a text..."I just remembered there was a time that I lusted after a real woman." He just remembered all of a sudden after 15 months saying otherwise and it was an isolated event. Apparently it has only happened one time. How is your creepy guy detector doing? Yeah mine is going off too!

There have been so many things I have asked him to disclose  to me, only to find out later, from my own checking, that he wasn't, and when I would ask him about it, there was always an excuse. "I didn't know you wanted to know that." "I don't remember you asking me.....", and on and on.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I am always looking for validation that I am not insane, but I am also trying to cross a threshold here. A line that says enough is enough. I don't need anyone to tell me that my husband isn't being honest. I keep thinking I do. A counselor, his sponsor, a polygraph, etc. But I really don't. Whether I discover any "proof" of his lies or not, I can feel the spirit telling me that something is wrong. That my marriage is full of holes and gaps, and that unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach means something! And that something isn't just the trauma from betrayal. It is the same feeling I had when I didn't know about his addiction. When I would tell him I felt like something wasn't right, even when I had no clue what that was. And when he would look me in the eyes and tell me he didn't know what that something was.

I am in survival mode. The fear and panic about "what is going on, where am I going to live, what am I going to do????!?!?!" threatens to tear me apart constantly. I am fighting a battle every day to try and keep moving, keep working on my healing but it feels sometimes like trying to build a sand castle when the waves are still coming in and washing it away.

I know I can't stay here, I know I am scared to move back home and live there(I would live there alone with my kids but I have no family for hundreds of miles out there and since we just moved there I don't know anyone in the area.)

I have been making some changes and starting some new things in my life that I am hoping will cause a shift. I am hoping these changes will give me the boost I need to deal with this mess. I am praying that God will give me the strength to make it through. I can't wait around hoping my husband will save our marriage, our family. The storm has rolled in and it is time to get my kids to safety, with or without him. Things need to change. I need to change. And my kids need a change too.

Trigger Happy

I have a confession to make. 

I am trigger happy. 

Now I'm not talking about triggers, such as something that reminds me of the pain of addiction. I'm talking about the kind of gut response that comes from my fight or flight response. Which for me, happens to work very well, perhaps a little too well. 

For example, when first d-day happened long, long ago at the beginning of our marriage, I was so trigger happy I only had to threaten to pull that trigger and it worked so well(or not well, as you will soon see) that I believed our problems with addiction were a thing of the past. 

On that day, trigger happy sounded like this "You can't ever do that again!!! If you do I will leave you! This is not an addiction, this was something you chose over me!!!!!!!". 

So going along with how well that worked, you can read about that under the My Story tab. If you don't want to look that up, I'll fill you in. It didn't work. I may not have known that it was still in fact, an addiction, and that it still definitely would happen again and again, but the only thing my trigger-happiness did was scare my husband enough to hide his addiction from me for years and years. 

To be clear, I didn't make him hide his addiction. That was definitely his choice. But I also didn't get what I wanted by being trigger happy either, since he certainly didn't stop acting out and lying about it. 

So that brings me to today. I now understand that it is an addiction, and I also know that he has to choose recovery, and nothing I do will change that. 

But...

My trigger finger is alive and well. 

Case in point. 

My husband will omit a piece of information. Perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. My first response? "I can't do this anymore!!!!" 

He will check in with me and say he was triggered at church. My reaction? "And you kept it from me until now? I can't stand this. I am so done with this!"

He forgets to take out the trash. (Seriously though, there is a lot of history with this tiny little chore that cannot be brushed aside). "I never mean enough to you, I can't take this anymore!"

On one particularly dreadful night, when he lied to me again, because he was afraid of admitting something, I lost control completely and screamed at him "you need to get on board, or get the hell out!". 

Okay, now give me a second to regroup because that is pretty embarrassing to admit and type out. 

I am still very much trigger happy. When my husband messes up, I almost always fall right back to the doom and gloom attitude of "this will never get better", and I just want to jump ship. The hard thing is that I feel like that isn't the right course, and I feel inspired to stay and continue working on things, but it is really hard when I feel that urgency to run, and run fast when I know it isn't the right thing to do. 

If I know the right thing is to stay and keep working, for my own sanity, I want so desperately to stop revving the engine when the car is in park.