I don’t remember how it was I first noticed the little bird huddled at the edge of the sidewalk. Did I hear it cheep or see a faint movement? But there it was: a little chick that had fallen out of a nest somewhere. It was fuzzy grey with bulging blind eyes and one of its legs was twisted unnaturally out beside it. I stopped in the middle of my evening walk and stood there wondering how best to help it. I didn’t think I could find its nest or return it there, and besides, it was injured. I certainly…

Ok, so I’m a little behind on my Lost watching. Somewhere in the middle of the season my husband and I just couldn’t find time to watch TV together, so we are only now getting back to those episodes we so faithfully recorded. Last night we were watching the episode “Whatever Happened, Happened” in which (warning to those more behind than I am: stop here if you don’t want to know) a young Ben Linus is in danger of dying from a gunshot wound and all eyes turn to surgeon Jack Shephard to save him. And Jack… grows some boundaries.

That’s right,…

Yesterday, I took my kids out to the park and watched my son, long and lanky, swing his way to the top of a climbing structure formed from a maze of ropes. Like many autistic individuals, mastering motor skills can be a challenge for him. He was late to walk and it took months of assistance before he could learn to use a playground ladder. Now he jumps and hangs and grasps in a way that’s astonishing to me and is the result of hours of single-minded and obsessive climbing. His hands are roughly calloused, as if through a lifetime…

I have spent my share of time cyberstalking the women my husband has acted out with. (Hey, I’m codependent; I’m really, really good at focusing on people who aren’t me.) And I’m not alone. Focusing on and obsessing about the activities of acting out partners is an unhealthy behavior nearly every partner of a sex addict engages in at some point. During my last binge googling the name of one of my husband’s former lovers I realized I was engaging in a form of emotional cutting, purposely causing myself pain (and getting something from it).

Since then I have been tempted a…

I roll my eyes as a cluster of neon clad girls buzz, “The way the sidewalk lights up as he walks is so cool! I love that song.” Michael Jackson and that stupid Billie Jean video. Cool? Whatever. He’s so overrated. I mean, if you wanted to talk about enduring cool, who could really compete with Men Without Hats? The girls put “Thriller” on the stereo for the three thousandth time that night, crooning and shrieking as I strap on my Walkman and coolly pop in a cassette for some band that has long since faded into obscurity. My friend’s…

With the story of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s week-long disappearance to visit his mistress in Argentina buzzing about, we’re faced yet again with images blasted through the media of a public figure tearfully apologizing for his infidelity, while his job hangs in jeopardy.* And in the wake of this story, the same discussions will repeat themselves that have echoed down from all the scandals past. Why did he do it? What does it say about our society? Should he keep his job? And, my perennial favorite, was he justified in cheating?

Yes, rest assured, people will whisper about the cause being…

There is so much wrong with this story, I don’t even know where to start… Gentle Path linked to a story about an “investigative report” in which a reporter burst into a closed Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) meeting, cameras rolling, to attempt to interview group members. (The only version of the report publicly available is one remixed with editorial comments is available here.)

I understand, very well, the fear and misunderstanding that surrounds addiction, and sex addiction in particular (why do you think I blog under a pseudonym?), but this kind of sensationalist coverage of recovery meetings is the worst way I can think of…

When I found out about my husband’s sexual addiction, it felt like my emotional landscape faded from bright vivid color to monochrome shades of black and grey. I had three primary emotional settings: fear, anger (shading into full on rage) and heartbreaking sadness. And I’d display these by alternating between screaming, crying and sitting mute and paralyzed. My early experiences with 12 Step meetings were with partners of sex addicts who were in much the same state I was. There was a lot of anger and hurt in that musty little church room, and it was hard, as I slowly…

I’ve heard a lot about the A&E series Intervention, but since I’ve never wanted to spring for the cost of satellite or an extended cable package, I’d never actually watched it myself until this week: I followed The Discovering Alcoholic’s link to streaming video versions of the show on Hulu and watched an episode about a drug addict named Alyson. The majority of the program was focused on Alyson’s drug use and unhappiness, as well as the distress of her family. The intervention itself was quite a small part of the show and the only part of recovery we saw was a…

“Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?” Mark asked the other day, “You said, ‘I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!’”

“Really? I said that?!”

“Yes, you did.”

“That’s completely insane, and exactly like something I would say,” I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of…

My subconscious has been spinning up lovely blog posts for me lately. Having held the mirror up to my own self-doubt, it decided to move on to my magical power to heal others…

In the dream, I was out at a restaurant with a group of women and a good friend who has been going through a hard time lately. In the restaurant with us was a fascinating and radiant woman sitting with her back toward me. I very much wanted to to meet her, but couldn’t pay attention to her yet. My friend was sitting in a corner sobbing and…

Sometimes my subconscious likes to be really mysterious in its messages to me (so, why, exactly, did a frog hop on the big pink bubble gum bubble I was blowing?). Sometimes it likes to tell jokes. Sometimes it (like many a subconscious) likes to play on my fears (hm, what would those be?). And sometimes it likes to tell really obviously metaphorical stories that I can turn into blog posts about living with addiction…

My sister came to visit me in my dream. I don’t have a sister, but you know dreams, so in this one, I did. I hadn’t seen…

Like many people, I walked into my first 12 Step meeting never expecting to wind up there, with no clue what to expect other than what Hollywood had taught me (which I soon learned was nothing accurate). The meetings I first started attending were for friends and family members of sex addicts, and they were tiny, just four or five women sitting in a circle in a church meeting room. After lengthy, scripted readings (those fifteen to twenty minutes certainly never make it into the movies), there would be time for “sharing.”

Because our group was small, sharing was less structured…

Today, I ran into a situation that would have caused me enormous frustration in the past. I’d finished my work around the house, I’d eaten my lunch, I’d even written a blog post about how I couldn’t write a blog post and I was left with a stray five minutes before my daughter was due home from school. Five minutes. Ugh! I can’t get anything done in five minutes.

Oh, sure. I know there are efficiency experts out there who will say there’s plenty that can be accomplished in five minutes. Make a phone call! Dash off an e-mail! Chop some vegetables…

Five months ago, after a four and a half year hiatus, I once again started attending a 12 Step group for partners of sex addicts. I had just finished working the Steps with an online group and my intention was to join the group and work the Steps in this group the good old-fashioned way, with a real life sponsor. However, the group I’m attending, which is the best fit both for my schedule and my philosophical leanings, is brand-new and tiny. There are people in the group who have worked the Steps in other programs before, but no one…

In a comment on a recent Second Road post, patti asked what the possible causes of sex addiction are. I imagine nearly everyone whose life has been affected by addiction asks some version of the same question: Why do addicts do what they do? What made addicts what they are? No one really knows for certain why any of us (addict or not) are the way we are (although many of us will torture ourselves looking anyway). However, there are some biological and

Biological

Researchers believe that, like other addictions, compulsive behaviors such as sex addiction may be related to dopamine receptors in the brain, which…

This weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to hear a sex addict from my husband’s recovery group speaking about his experiences. I know my husband’s story, about as intimately as anyone else can; in a way, it’s my story too. Mark read his First Step — the narrative of his life in his addiction — to me the night before he presented it to his 12 Step group, and it moved us both to tears. I’ve read the stories of other sex addicts in books and on blogs. I’ve had the chance to hear…

This week, when our family pet went missing and later turned up dead, I did an obsessive imitation of some of my favorite literary detectives; like Sherlock Holmes, I tried to piece together the smallest clues and like Hercule Poirot, I strained the little grey cells of my brain looking for answers. How and when did he get out? When did he die? What did I miss or overlook? I tried to pinpoint the time of death, doing google searches for information on when rigor mortis sets in in animals. I tried to talk to witnesses, questioning everyone from my…

There’s a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated…

Earlier this week, I had a rough morning with my daughter, my son was sick, I had an IEP meeting scheduled (those of you who don’t know what that is, be glad you don’t) and on top of it all, I couldn’t find a family pet (which would later turn up dead). After I got my daughter off to school, I called my husband Mark at work. He answered the phone hurriedly, as he often seems to at work, and said, “Is everything ok? Can I call you back?” This is the point at which I usually answer, “Yes, it’s…

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to the 12 Step saying: “Let go and let God.” I was talking to a (non-program) friend about those words a few weeks ago and she asked, “What does that mean? Let go and let God? I don’t get it.” And as I struggled to formulate an answer, I found myself approaching the words anew.

I’ve had a lot of letting go I’ve needed to do lately. Among other things, we suffered the death of a pet this week, and death is the ultimate letting go. And at this very moment, Gigi, the…

When Mark and I were at the very beginning of our relationship, moving from a flirtatious friendship into love, he signed off some early little love note “a thousand ships for my beautiful.” Now who was I to resist a suave Helen of Troy reference to my powerful, intoxicating, doomed and dangerous, mythical beauty? (If I were that woman, I would have married a different kind of man.) But the name stuck and for years that was what he called me: “Beautiful… My Beautiful…” It meant so much to me that he saw me that way: that whatever I saw…

A month or so ago, I did something I dread and despise: I took a trip on an airplane. When I fly, the joy is entirely in the destination and not at all in the journey. The flight fills me with terror: terror that escalates if the trip is turbulent or if I’m in a small plane where I can feel just how fast I’m rocketing through the air or if I’m seated away from the window, shut in, claustrophobic, with no reference point.

Of course, all of those things happened on one leg of my most recent trip. I missed…

Before my first child was born, I swore to friends and family members that I wasn’t going to be one of those people. You know the kind. The ones who would pull out pictures of their newborn and expect me to fawn over it, when I (the non-parent) saw nothing more than a bald, generic infant — nothing particularly cute or interesting — just a bland, tiny thing like every other infant in every other picture from time immemorial. (I used to wish they had pulled out pictures of their dog or cat’s new litter instead. Now those things are…

I’ve got plans for tomorrow that are going to keep me away from the computer, and I knew I wanted to squeeze in one last blog post today. So first thing in the morning I began the day right: by panicking because I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about. I didn’t have an idea! Ack! What if I sat down and couldn’t think of anything? Well, you can see (tongue firmly planted in cheek here) how very catastrophic that would be. There I was with the threat of writer’s block looming in front of me ominously (and…

Earlier this month, Jason here at The Second Road linked to an article by Nina Caplan, a writer who shares her experience of going without alcohol for a month. What struck me in reading her piece was how boring she found life without alcohol. “So I did it. It’s not difficult. Just dull,” she writes. And, “What else did I learn after a month of stone-cold sobriety? That it’s over-rated.” That is the stereotype of sobriety and the fear of almost anyone facing recovery, whether from alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, food or codependency (aka addiction to addicts): What am I going…

When my husband was still active in his sex addiction and I was still unaware of it, we lived our life (as many living with active addiction do) enveloped in fantasy. We frolicked inside a rainbow in a castle made of pink cloud fluff. We grew roses straight out of our heads, and the bees that hummed around our heads courting the flowers would drizzle their honey straight into our mouths. We were love and romance. I was his dream and he was mine. Everything seemed perfect, except when it didn’t quite.

Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse…

Meditation has been a great help to me in recent years, helping me calm and center myself. For the last several months, I have been sitting with a group once a week and meditating for forty-five minutes. I have been meditating regularly for shorter periods of time, but I still find that stretch of forty-five minutes to be incredibly difficult. And I’ve been noticing a pattern lately:

When I first sit down, my mind is tumbling forward and my body is tense, as if I’ve been moving fast but inertia prevented me from noticing or feeling the movement until the brakes…

When I was a child, I had the best cat ever. No animal past or present could compare. It wasn’t that he had a sweet disposition. He was almost universally mean, awful and belligerent. When almost any creature approached him, he’d snarl, hiss, scratch, bite. He would chase away dogs several times his size with his yellow eyes blazing. And it wasn’t that he was beautiful. He wasn’t. Or perhaps he may have been as a kitten, but I wasn’t fond of him then for it to make any impression. When I loved him, he was ragged and scarred. His…

This week I plan to tell one of my best and oldest friends about my husband’s addiction after nearly six years of silence around it. I’ve wanted to let her in to this part of my life, because keeping her out — keeping anyone I feel close to out — feels like I’m creating a huge chasm in our relationship. The million little joys and triumphs and heartaches of recovery that have shaped me are all hidden, and when I think to share them, I have to bite my lip. I can’t entirely be myself in a friendship where I…