Years ago, I met a woman who, when she was disagreeing with her partner, would tell him, “That’s not my reality.” She had a way of saying it that implied there was a real Reality (hers) and some alternate Crazytown Reality (his). You had only to hear those few words and know that he was totally batshit and she not only had a PhD in Reality, she was the president and CEO of Reality. In recovery, I’ve found myself clinging to similar mantras — most often “that’s not my experience” or “that’s not my truth” — and often (admittedly) with that…

This morning, Alix at The Second Road forwarded me a link to an article about sex addiction by psychologist Michael Bader. When I saw the title (”Sex Addiction: A B.S. Excuse for Not Thinking“), I almost didn’t click through (the whole “excuse” thing is so tiresome) but I couldn’t resist some good blog fodder, so I did anyway. To my surprise, Mr. Bader wasn’t talking about sex addiction being an excuse for acting badly in addiction. However, not to my surprise, the article did focus on the same old semantic argument: “Sexual compulsions are real and they harm the person…

I was reading over some of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. today, and came across some that reminded me very much of something I used to repeat to myself and my husband in the wake of disclosure of his sex addiction: “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” Dr. King was talking about his love for the church when he wrote those words, while I was talking about my love for what (at the time) was my God and my religion — my husband — but they were true all the same.

I used to…

As someone who lives with the reality of sexually compulsive behavior every day, I have to admit, articles like last month’s Forbes magazine piece on whether or not sex addiction exists make me roll my eyes. It’s always the same thing, “The idea of being addicted to sex is … quite controversial.” Which always misses the same point: the “controversy” (as I’ve said before) is over nothing more than semantics.

Yep, that big sex addiction controversy you hear about all the time. Contrary to what you’ve been led to believe, it’s not over whether or not it’s possible to have compulsions or…

Our family keeps a pretty rigorous schedule, with nearly every night of the week blocked out for some activity or another, but rather than shuttling between soccer games and dance practice, like many parents in our social group, we’re shuttling between different 12 Step meetings.

So, a week ago, as I was lying in bed making the decision to try to attend my first Overeater’s Anonymous (OA) meeting, my first thought was: How am I going to fit this in? I mean, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights as well as Saturday mornings are booked. What if the only…

Before I knew my husband was a sex addict, I knew that he liked flirting with other women. Probably a little too much. I could tell he got a thrill out of it, and I worried that he would accidentally take this “entertainment” too far. He’d lead some poor woman on and she’d get aggressive and Mark would find himself in bed with her before he knew what hit him. So I had a brilliant solution; I would be the other woman. I would give myself a new name, a new e-mail address and a new look (complete with a…

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. (”See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!”) We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I’d even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and…

Just days before I discovered my husband Mark’s sex addiction, we were shopping in Target, when we passed a young woman. “Hi, Mark!” she chimed, smiling brightly. Then she turned to her shopping companion, a man who was glowering at Mark, and said, “Jimmy, this is my friend Mark, you know, the one I’ve told you about. I’ve been having such a great time with him lately!” Then turning back to us, she introduced Jimmy as her boyfriend and chatted for a while before cheerfully parting with: “Well, it’s been such fun to run into you here. Bye, Mark! See…

One day, early in his recovery work around sex addiction, Mark and I were standing in line at the grocery store, when I commented on a headline on one of the news magazines. “I can’t look,” Mark said.

“What?”

“It’s not good for me. Those magazine and tabloid covers are awful. I hate the grocery store checkout. There’s no place I can safely look.”

I hadn’t thought about it before, at least not in terms of recovery. Most of the magazines were insipid and pandered to the worst in people, but when I wasn’t tuning them out, I was mocking them. I never…

“I can’t hear this song without thinking of you,” I said to Mark as The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” came on my music mix a few days ago. It reminded me of falling in love with him in college: how he made me scream, and laugh, and promise to run away with him, how dreamlike and obsessive it was, and how I lost him for a time.

There are thousands of songs in my iTunes library at this point, collected over decades, and nearly every one has an association with some person or event. Play “Footloose” and I’m with giggling with…

“Is Tiger Woods a sex addict?”
“What do you think about Tiger?”
“Aren’t you going to write about Tiger Woods?”

The questions have been peppering my inbox, but I’ve been avoiding the topic. On the one hand, I love a good celebrity sex scandal, both because I can relate and because I see it as an opportunity to educate people about what sex addiction can look like. I remember when my husband disclosed his addiction, I realized that his words and actions bore an uncanny resemblance to Bill Clinton’s (even down to the “oral sex is not sex” line). And I was pissed, not…

Several people have asked me if I watched Oprah’s show on sex addiction last Monday. The answer is “sort of.” I don’t watch Oprah much, and apparently Oprah likes it that way. I missed episode, and while there are clips on YouTube, I can’t seem to get video of the full episode for love or money. Unlike, say, my beloved Colbert Report, Oprah is not available for viewing online. And unlike other favorites, her show is also not available for purchase from iTunes or Amazon. I think Oprah is now going to have to be part of my next 4th…

My 12 Step group had some difficulty recently around a reading that listed some of the behaviors partners of sex addicts might have in common. Many of the women in the group found it triggering, because they felt the list of characteristics implied there was something wrong with them, that they were “sick” for reacting to an insane situation in a way they felt was normal and understandable, or that they were being told they must have reacted in some way that they hadn’t simply because they were part of Club Partner-of-a-Sex-Addict. I knew that feeling. I had had it…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

While I was away on my mini vacation a few weeks ago, I relaxed with some cheesy movie watching. Among the brainless, feel-good flicks I watched was Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which stars Matthew McConaughey as Connor Mead, an alcoholic sex addict trying to turn his life around at his brother’s wedding. Well, I don’t think the movie actually refers to him as an alcoholic or a sex addict, but given the fact that, in an effort to numb his feelings, he trashes the wedding cake looking for a drink and tries to get the bride’s mother into bed, it’s probably…

During the first year after I discovered my husband’s sex addiction, I attended S-Anon, 12 Step meetings for friends and family members of sex addicts. At the beginning of each meeting we would read “The S-Anon Problem.” I hated “The S-Anon Problem.” I hated it so passionately that I used to skip the beginning of meetings, coming in late each week to avoid hearing it. And when I did have to hear it I would seethe and writhe. I wanted to get up and punch someone. I wanted to tear out the hair of the people who wrote it. I…

This summer, I’ve been keeping the kids busy by running them around outside and spending lots of time splashing around in the water. The idea has been to wear them down so that they go to bed on time (an idea which totally has not panned out because apparently it only works well on adults, like me). Driven by the clamor for something continually new, we’ve abandoned our familiar haunts and set off for the great, fun unknown — well, at least as far as the kids are concerned. To conserve my own energy and research time, we’re actually spending…

The Junky’s Wife recently posted about an article that’s been doing its wildfire dance through the Internet. It passed through my inbox several times as girlfriend after girlfriend blasted it out to everyone in their address books until I got the creepy feeling that this was the latest set of helpful household hints, the marital equivalent of that e-mail I keep getting about how to use Bounce fabric softener sheets to do everything from repel mosquitoes to deodorize sneakers. Here’s the answer, ladies! When your husband tells you he doesn’t love you anymore: tell him you don’t buy it, detach from his…

“It is confusing to be in relationships and not know where we stand… We have a right to be direct about how we define the relationship — what we want it to be. But relationships equal two people who have equal rights. The other person needs to be able to define the relationship to. We have a right to know, and ask. So do they. Honesty is the best policy…
“Information is a powerful tool, and having the information about what a particular relationship is — the boundaries and definitions of it — will empower us to take care of ourselves…

The anniversary passed quite unnoticed this year; the days slipped away, and months went by before either of us realized it. Somewhere along the way — on some routine day — my husband and I passed a milestone in our relationship and our recovery and didn’t see it.

One Saturday night, years ago, the world as I knew it feel apart and recovery from sex addiction and codependency began. But at the time, it just felt like the end of everything, not the beginning of anything. One month in, two months in, six months in, Mark would note the date and proudly…