Always a sucker for both science fiction and anything vaguely related to time travel, this season I’ve started watching ABC’s new series, Flash Forward. The premise of the show is that everyone on Earth simultaneously loses consciousness for approximately two minutes and sees visions of a few minutes of their lives six months in the future. The show follows Mark Benford, the FBI agent leading the investigation into the cause of the “blackout,” as well as the lives of several intersecting characters, and then examines how their visions of the future affect their actions in the present.

The interesting thing about…

I’ve been working through the 12 Steps again, more slowly this time than my last time through. This week, I worked through an exercise where I looked at patterns of compulsive behavior in my life and I was struck (again) by how powerfully my life is dominated by fear and by how much I react from a place of fear.

I’ve engaged in everything from shoplifting to underage drinking to unprotected sex out of fear that I wouldn’t fit in, that I wouldn’t be liked, that I would be rejected. I overeat out of fear. I stay in relationships and run…

Last week, oddly inspired by the humorous book The Year of Living Biblically, I decided I wanted to try to add a little Sabbath into my own life. Couldn’t I use a day of rest once a week, even if I didn’t have an organized religion backing me up? And because I’m not part of any organized religion, I’m not bound to keep my Sabbath on a Judeo-Christian Saturday or Sunday. In fact, I didn’t want to. After all, if you have kids (or maybe just if you have my kids), you’ll know that “rest” and “the kids have a…

“What am I going to say to people? I mean, they’re going to ask, ‘What are you doing these days?’ and what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to make small talk anymore, let alone tell them what’s been going on,” I told my friend Jess after she met me at the airport.  She didn’t answer, either because she wisely clued in to the fact that I was speaking rhetorically or because she was (as she later told me) feeling sick at the time. I’d flown to my old home town for a high school reunion, after…

A few days ago, The Junky’s Wife sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Lois Movie!” (Yes, I am shamelessly piggybacking on JW’s superior recovery research skills and pop culture knowledge.) Now for most people, that might imply that a new Superman film is coming out. After all, in spite of the fact that Google seems to think it’s Family Guy’s Lois Griffin, isn’t Lois Lane the world’s most famous Lois? But if you have spent time working a 12 Step Anon programs for friends and family members of addicts, you have Lois Wilson, founder of Al-Anon and wife of…

“The level of sexual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can’t believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there’s this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her glasses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report.”
~ A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically

Warning: the links in this post lead to material that may be triggering to sex addicts and their partners.

Years ago, when my husband Mark and I were first…

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity. I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice. That’s a nice goal. I like that image. Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday’s episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail. And it turns…

Creative Commons, photo by Jeff Christiansen

I rashly went out Halloween costume shopping a few days ago. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Well, I know I needed to pick up a costume for my daughter — Yes, a few days shy of Halloween. I’m totally on top of it as a mom. — but for some reason I thought maybe I could find something cute for myself. You know, something suitable for a 40-year-old mother of two married to a recovering sex addict. There must be tons of costumes to fit the bill, right? At the very least there had…

Creative Commons license, photo by snogglethorpe

“So at my meeting last night, I wanted to say that sex addicts are hot, but there were a few newcomers, and newcomers don’t think that’s so funny,” I told my husband Mark as we were getting ready for bed. Mark laughed. He knows my running joke; if I’m ever looking for a relationship again, I’m going to go to a 12 Step meeting for sex addicts: given my history of being attracted to addicts, at least that way I’ll end up with someone in recovery from the start.

“Why don’t they think it’s funny?” Mark…

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…

Creative Commons License, photo by "geishaboy500"

Silk is a sexy fabric. It’s smooth and soft and falls in glistening ripples like waves. Years ago, shortly before I moved to another state to be with Mark, I sent him a pair of silk boxers as a gift, and he wrote me an erotic letter about them in return. When I arrived in my new home, he had lined our bed in silk. At my bridal shower, a friend gave me a silk nightie for my wedding night and I was married in a dress of silk. I told my husband Mark I…

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,…

Eight years ago, in spite of the fact that we were both exhausted by caring for our infant son, I found that my husband Mark was staying up later and later at night. He had to be up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work, yet I would wake some nights at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. to my son, wailing for a feeding or a diaper change, and find Mark’s side of the bed empty, cold, untouched. Then I’d glance to the bedroom door and see the eerie blue glow of the computer screen in the next…

I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I’d never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners. We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first…

I’m a party pooper. I’m a downer. I’m no fun. I ruin other people’s good times. (Because I totally have control over other people’s good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch. We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze. But I woke up a few hours into my night’s sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of…

Years ago, I read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and was especially fascinated by his use of affirmations to focus on his goals and achieve success. I even tried the technique myself and found the process of spending some time each day affirming, in writing, some measurable, long-term goal was helpful. But I didn’t want to stop at writing affirmations about things like finding a new job or exercising more. What I really (secretly) liked about the idea of affirmations was the notion that it might be possible to use them to somehow control…

My husband Mark and I may be spending too much time talking about issues related to addiction and recovery, as it has lead to a series of double takes in recent years…

A friend told me that a computer geek she works with is a member of SCA. “You’re married to a geek. Are they all into that kind of thing?” she asked. I gasped, thinking she was talking about Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, a 12 Step recovery group for sex addicts. Was she asking if sex addiction was a geek thing? Um, no. It turns out she was talking about the…

I started keeping a journal semi-regularly when I was in middle school.  My very earliest journal entries are a thrilling roller coaster ride through the life of a suburban tween: from the heartbreaking lows of the cancellation of my favorite TV show to the giddy highs of eating raviolis from a can for lunch.  But by high school, my journal had become my closest confidant, not because I had any terrible secrets, but because the secrets I did have became so tiresome to the friends who had to hear them again and again.

I’ve never smoked, never done drugs and never…

“Worry brain, your mama’s so ugly, she makes onions cry!” I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband. I had to hang up the phone because I’d burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me. I’d read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts. As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn’t use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that’s probably just my…

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He’d actually been better than usual in this morning’s version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I’d found him in the end.

I’ve had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I’d…

Warning: this post is self-satirical in nature. It should not be read by the sarcasm impaired.

So, you know, I’m not really codependent. (I hate that word anyway. Sincerely I do.) I just like to do nice things for people. Really nice things. Like that time in college when my boyfriend’s parents were going to come for a visit and I helped out by vacuuming his carpet. Only he wasn’t actually my boyfriend, but I wanted him to be, and I didn’t, technically, vacuum the carpet, I went a little overboard, which really was not my fault because I couldn’t find a…

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I’ll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen’s autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn’t the one closest…

A few months after I first met Mark in college, we ran into each other in a campus dining hall. As we chatted, he admired my high school class ring. I held my hand out to let him see it more closely, and peering down at the ring, he said, “Would you mind taking it off?” So, I took off my ring and handed it to him, expecting that he wanted to look at it more closely still. To my utter astonishment, he simply said “thank you,” pocketed the ring and walked away. I stood there in the lobby, open-mouthed…

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me — or at least like the me I used to be — find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of…

“Where’s the ketchup?”

“Don’t you remember?” asks Mark, a little exasperated. “We had this conversation,” he says as he begins to describe it to me in elaborate details: all the full sentences I said to him in response to what he said to me about some colossal ketchup accident and grocery store followup fiasco.  I wish I could remember, it was probably funny.

“Sorry, honey. I just don’t.  I, um…  I wasn’t looking you in the eye when I said any of this, was I?”  I’m embarrassed, because I’m fairly certain he’s not making this up.  I know, we both know, that…

When talking about my own codependency, one of my favorite tongue-in-cheek lines (which came out of a recovery group I’m in) is: “I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!” Whether I forgot a birthday, miss a deadline, stick my foot squarely into my mouth (or sometimes my keyboard, as the case may be) or am otherwise imperfect, I’ll quip (often internally), “Oh no! I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!”

So imagine my surprise when I flipped a my copy of recovery writing queen Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go open to a random page today and…

I know few partners of addicts who (whatever they may think of 12 Step) don’t look forward with breathless anticipation to the glorious day when their addict reaches Step 9. Wonderful, special Step 9. Step 9: making amends to those who have been harmed. Step 9 where the focus is (for once, it feels) on all of us long-suffering codependents. I wanted my husband to start recovery at Step 9 and spend every day for the rest of his life working it. I wanted him to feel, deeply and in perpetuity, every little hurt of mine and to spend each…

I logged in to my e-mail tonight for the first time in a busy few days, capping a busy few weeks in which we’ve done everything from smash up my car (we are all fine, but it had to make a trip to the body shop to render it safely drivable again) to visit the ER (totally unrelated to the smashing of the car, but again everyone is fine) to host a party for my daughter’s entire first grade class. If I could afford to go to a body shop for humans (otherwise known as a spa, I believe), I’d…

When I was 8 years old, the company my father worked for underwent a change in ownership and began to purge their payroll. These were the days before the common use of such staid terms as “laid off” or “let go”; the term I heard my parents batting about anxiously was “fired.” At first, set off by the anxiety in my parents’ voices, I pictured people literally being set on fire (that was some harsh new management!), but eventually I came to understand that people were simply losing their jobs: a much more abstract and less scary prospect for me…

“Have you blamed others for something for which your own codependency was responsible?” asks the First Step workbook I’m using. I have been working my First Step again through a 12 Step group for friends and family members of sex addicts, and at first, this question seems easy. Yes, I’ve blamed others for my own craziness! I’ve blamed my boss for making my life miserable when I couldn’t say no to a proposed business trip. I’ve blamed friends for taking advantage of my kindness when my actions weren’t truly kindness, but attempts to tilt some imaginary balance sheet in my…