When I first found out that my husband Mark was a sex addict, I threw myself into the thing that had always saved me in the past: research. I had graduated at the top of my high school class, gone to an excellent college and had a successful career thanks to my ability to analyze problems and find the answers. When I became a mother, I researched. When my son had speech delays and was eventually diagnosed with autism, I researched. So, when I found that Mark was a sex addict, I researched.

I read about sex addiction and looked for meetings and therapists. And I looked for help for myself. Only I didn’t like what I found. Whenever a book or a speaker or a therapist would talk about the partners of sex addicts, they’d talk about this thing called codependency, which totally didn’t sound like me. I started attending S-Anon meetings in the wake of Mark’s admission of sex addiction, not because I had a problem, of course, but because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I would tell anyone who would listen how totally not codependent I was. Why was everyone telling me I had a problem when my problem was Mark? If he didn’t have a problem, I wouldn’t have a problem. Therefore, he needed to get fixed. Problem solved!

It took years of work untangling our mess to see that my problem was not that Mark had a problem but my belief that Mark’s problem controlled my happiness. That was something that research couldn’t tell me. It was something therapists couldn’t drill into my head. It was something that the other people in my S-Anon meeting couldn’t force me to see.

The research had failed to give me the answer, because it simply didn’t make intuitive sense to me. It was like my high school physics teacher telling me that most of everything is nothing, that my body, seemingly so solid, was made up more of the space between atoms than of the atoms themselves. It was so counter to everything I had observed and known to be true in my life, that I wrote in my diary that night “I don’t believe in atoms.” Someone couldn’t just tell me something was so, I had to learn more, to experience it, to draw inferences about it and to see the other ways in which it made sense before I could discard what I had known so long and what seemed so true: my body is solid, my happiness depends on other people.

One of the hardest things for me now, a thousand times harder than dealing with an addict’s denial, is to deal with the denial of another codependent. It makes me uncomfortable, because I see myself: both how I was and how I often still am. And I still have that feeling that the problem with my happiness is that they have problems, not that the problem is that I think their problems have an impact on my happiness. I often still find that I want to ease my own discomfort by saying, “Wake up! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people!” But of course, when I insist they stop holding that mirror up to me, I’m doing the exact codependent thing I want to stop them from doing, so that it doesn’t remind me that I like to do that codependent thing doing. I end up seeing myself in a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror, stretching to infinity.

So I take a breath and say, “Wake up, self! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people! Other people have to experience life for themselves, wear out the other roads for themselves, be crushed down to their own bottoms themselves. I can’t do their research for them; my research didn’t even work for me. I must trust that they are capable of living their own lives, as I am capable of living mine. I must trust that they have their own higher power, and I am not it. I must trust that they will come through it, like I came through it, on the power of their own experiences.” And sometimes, just sometimes, remembering all that even works.