One morning, eight years ago, I turned on the desktop computer my husband Mark and I shared and called up the keystroke logging software I had installed. Mark didn’t know that the computer was secretly taking notes on every character he typed, and I didn’t want him to know. He had been staying up late at night on the computer often enough that I was concerned about it. I’d asked him what was going on, but he said he was working, and just playing around on the Internet, blowing off steam. It was no big deal.

When I opened the file, I was shocked to find that he had logged in to an e-mail account I didn’t know he had, that he had logged in to an account on an adult website I didn’t know he had and that he had been participating in adult video chats as well as exchanging private sexual messages with at least one of the women who worked for the website. I visited the site and found you had to pay to participate in chats, so I called our credit card company and found he had been spending nearly $100 a day.

I called Mark home from work and confronted him with the evidence of his wrong doing. And he didn’t get it. Wasn’t this just like porn? And I was okay with that. What was the big deal? The more he didn’t get it, the harder I argued. I was going to show him how crazy he was, damn it! I was going to force him to see what he was doing wrong. And although I wouldn’t have put it in these terms at the time, I was going to call him out on his denial and I wasn’t going to rest until he saw it. And he seemed to. After hours of hysterical screaming, he admitted he was wrong, told me that he understood and said he was never going to do that again. Ta da! Denial fixed! See how powerful I am?

Of course, the truth was I hadn’t done anything at all, but work myself into misery trying to change the things I couldn’t change. His sexual behavior didn’t stop at all; it only got worse from there, until eventually he had fallen far enough that he had to admit that his actions were something he couldn’t stop, even though he wanted to. He had to see that he had a problem and want to get help with it. That wasn’t anything I could make him see, as hard as I tried.

But that wasn’t apparent to me right away. It took years, and lots more bullying for me to realize how much I can’t speed the process. I yelled at him in early recovery about joining an online social networking group: “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re a sex addict and you’ve acted out over and over again with women you’ve met online! You’re totally in denial!” Then I yelled at him about his plans to attend an ex-girlfriend’s wedding, “Are you nuts? You’re going to be in a ballroom full of drunken ex-acting out partners! It’s so obvious that your addiction is driving this! You’re so in denial, it’s unbelievable!” Then I yelled at him about the women in his 12 Step program, and when he thought about taking a job working for an attractive woman, and when he worked extra special hard to help female (but not male) ex-coworkers with their job searches, and whenever he would muse that maybe it might someday be safe for him to have female friends again (”because,” I would say, “yeah, that worked out for you so well in the past”).

I found I was expending a whole lot of energy and making myself crazy, yet he seemed to stubbornly work through things his own way in his own time, and when he was ready, would often end up coming to the same conclusion I was so insistent on forcing him to see. So, one day, and I don’t remember when, I saw what I thought was denial and I took a leap of faith. I didn’t boss or badger, I just sat with that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the one I’d come to recognize as fear — fear that he’d act out again, fear that I’d get hurt, fear that he’d leave me — and I waited. And Mark came through it himself. Wow. He worked his recovery and he worked through things all by himself. Go figure.

I was so sure that the problem was his denial, when the problem was really my own fear. Does he slip into denial sometimes? Sure. He’s not perfect, but it’s not my job to ensure that he is, and trying to make it my job has led to nothing but pain on both sides. But it is my job to deal with my own fear of being hurt. It’s my job to learn to trust that I will be okay with or without Mark, and he’ll be okay with or without me. And it’s my job to believe that, even if we slip, we’ll each get back up and keep working, and that as long as we both do, we’ll do it together.