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Susannah's Going to Stop Trying to Control Things .....Tomorrow

Discussion in 'Significant Other Journals' started by Susannah, Nov 28, 2018.

  1. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    I think you aren't far off here. But at the same time, I have no trouble admitting that my own gullibility and delusional thinking contributed. Doesn't mean he was justified in taking advantage of those things, but there is no doubt I let him. Now I need to figure out why. I mean, aside from the being human part.:)

    Thank you for your support.
     
  2. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    So why did I stay as long as I did? (warning: this question will not actually be fully answered in this post. In fact, this post will go completely off the rails, so please don’t expect a tidy wrap-up. Turns out it’s a complicated question. :))

    Why did I endure the mental torture I went through? I have led a long and full life – taken lots of risks and had a couple of the big failures that sometimes come with those risks. But nothing I’ve gone through compares to the hell of loving an SA. I KNEW I was in hell, but could not seem to get out of it. (Maybe another thing in common with the experience of the SAs?) So were the denial, dissociation, and other coping mechanisms the cause of my “stuckness”? What part did they play in my decision to stay in hell? (I say “decision” because, although at the time, it didn’t feel like a decision, certainly no one had a gun to my head.) Well, they were an aid to survival, but I now see that they helped obscure the real reasons I was staying. Those reasons seemed to me to be hidden behind what I am thinking of as a dark curtain (denial, confusion?). The curtain was there to block the realizations and fears that lay beyond. I could see just enough of what was back there to be terrified, and this kept me from lifting the curtain. And being terrified to lift the curtain meant that I stayed in an exhausting cycle (yet another parallel to the experience of the addict), which I suspect may be familiar to some other SOs. It went a little something like this:

    D-day


    Disbelief/disorientation – what?! Who is this man and how is this possible?!

    Numb - a strange combination of being too completely overloaded to think or feel WHILE my mind was simultaneously racing.

    Angry – blind fury

    Administrative mode – He is just standing there, looking at the evidence, not only of his deception, but of his disease, and is unable to move or speak. I am in disaster response mode. “Okay, this happened. Now what do we do? We are not going to bed until this shit is out of my house. I WILL restore order!”

    Hurt – The just plain hurt of knowing the one I loved preferred others. The agony of being rejected by the one I chose.

    Feeling stupid – Constant berating of myself for being a fool and believing the lies. The feeling that my whole life had been a lie and I was too stupid to know it. Seeing all the giant clues in retrospect.

    False bravado – This one I think was most damaging. I wrote this over on @kropo82 's journal. I would crow about how strong I was, make bold pronouncements, issue ultimatums to myself, declare to the world that from now on, I’m working on me. But as anyone who has spent any time on these forums knows, that attitude only lasts for so long. The anger fades, the insecurities grow, the practicalities and responsibilities of life step in, the curtain lowers, and before we know it we are extending the 2nd or 10th or 20th “last chance”.

    Hope – Slowly, allowing a little hope to creep in if things seem to be going better, usually because he is now a better liar.

    Second-guessing – Wondering if I was being “fair” to him. Maybe I was making too big a thing out of this. I should ease up. He’s really trying. I need to be more supportive. Are my demands for accountability just making things harder for him?

    Another D-day or additional disclosure – resolve to never second -guess myself again, but of course, I will. Because it’s a cycle.

    Rinse, repeat

    After the first or second time around, I could see this cycle clearly while I was in it. By the end, I could even see which stage I was in while I was in it. It was obvious how it was going to turn out. But I went back for repetition after repetition of the cycle. Why? Is it as easy and obvious as @RUNDMC said in another thread?
    So does this apply in my case? Was I a dreamer, trapped in my feelings and fairy tales, sitting passively waiting for him to change? The only part that I don’t immediately recognize is the “passively” part (definitions, blah, blah, blah), but the rest has the distinct smell of truth about it. Yes. Part of me SIMPLY COULD NOT believe that I had been so wrong about this man I thought I knew and the life and connection I thought we had. And having been so wrong had a lot of implications about my own powers of observation and judgment. Were those things fairy tales? Maybe. But call me gullible - I genuinely thought those things were possible between lovers. And through deception, he had led me to believe we were living them. So, yes – fairy tales. But, with all due respect to @RUNDMC (and, RUN, you rascal you, I DO think you’re right on about a hell of a lot and I admire the concision with which you dispense your opinions.), I think there was more than just this at play with me. When I look back on it, I see that I refused to give up on what I thought I had, and I had refused to accept that I could not change the situation, and yes, change him, through sheer force of will. Maybe I was just trying to force the “dream” into being? I don’t know. But anyway you slice it, heavy denial kept me from accepting that what I thought I had was actually an illusion, accepting what he actually was and that I could not change that, accepting that the whole thing was not going to be made to work out okay in the end just because I wanted it to. This is plain to me now, in retrospect, and all very logical. I now know that the man he actually IS is not any man I actually want. But I used denial to keep that hard truth behind the curtain. Accepting the man that I had meant that I would have to say goodbye to the mythical man I loved. There was a grieving process attached to all that, and make no mistake, I railed against it. But once I said goodbye to the mythical man, I was finally able to see the real man standing there, and he simply was not someone I loved. How could I? He was not even someone I knew. One of the most tragic things about this fucking King Lear of a situation is that it ended with my husband’s deepest fear, (that he would be found unacceptable to me), being realized. And all this after I had made, (without benefit of critically important facts) countless reassurances to him that I DID accept him. All the while, in his desperate gambit to avoid detection, he had never even given me the chance.
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2019
  3. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Yup. Stick with Strength & Light and that will happen to you a lot. In fact, it's also happened to me plenty on your journal.
     
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  4. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Kinda angry today. I spoke to a lawyer who informed me that, in the event of a divorce, there is a chance that I may end up paying my husband alimony. I think I will just wait him out and make him initiate. After all, I'm in no hurry - I have no immediate plans to even date, much less remarry. He, on the other hand, will want his freedom right away. It is inevitable that all the 16 year old underwear models with PhDs in rocket science that he imagines are out there just waiting for him to be single, will be descending on him soon.
     
  5. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Yup. Great stuff. I mentioned this to my husband and he said he doesn't even remember NOT having the addiction (he reckons about 50 years - pay attention, youngsters - don't let this happen to you), so returning to who he was before is a meaningless concept for him. But kind of a great opportunity, too - the process of deliberately choosing how and who you want to be and making it happen. Of course, we all have that ability at any time, but there is something powerful about a life-changing event/crisis/fresh start.
     
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  6. Strength And Light

    Strength And Light Fapstronaut

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    I have a vision of him not taking (pursuing?) alimony. He was gifted a wonderful, loving wife and he ultimately rejected that. Whatever mechanisms are in place for him to sabotage his marriage will likely sabotage his future comforts as well. Just a whim.
     
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  7. RUNDMC

    RUNDMC Fapstronaut

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    Did you keep evidence of your husband's illegal porn? This could help you in court.
     
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  8. Faceplanter

    Faceplanter Fapstronaut

    Yep, completely nailed it.....maybe not the 16 year old part for most of us, but that's the idea. And not just those rocket scientists either, lots of other types too, because porn says any age / shape / color is going to be up for sex with whomever is handy...just being there is all it takes!
     
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  9. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Yes - I'm well supplied in that area. I was meticulous with my documentation. I also have dated journal entries for all his disclosures. It does seem to me that these things might also be very useful in the pre-filing negotiation period. As of now, he does not know I have these things.
     
  10. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Woke up this morning dreaming of Sly Stone. It was the kind of dream where you sort of transition from sleep to consciousness while elements of the dream remain. When I woke, I was hearing Sly singing:
    "When you see me again
    I hope that you have been
    The kind of person you really are now"

    I was crying a little bit, thinking of my husband.
     
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  11. Strength And Light

    Strength And Light Fapstronaut

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    Just googled the rest of the lyrics to that song. Understandable why it's permeating up from your subconscious into your conscious. You are processing some very heavy emotions. We are here to listen, kind friend.
     
  12. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Went to a board meeting this afternoon. Finished now, but I had trouble concentrating the whole time I was there. Most days I am fine, but not all. Some days are like today - probably because of how I woke up this morning - just sad about the loss of this relationship. I was thinking back to the very beginning. My husband and I had a couple of experiences when we were getting to know each other (it was a long-distance thing at the beginning) that had a profound impact on me. After these experiences, I was convinced that I had found my soul-mate, a concept I hadn't dared to believe in until then. I had always been fairly cynical, but not in a debilitating way - just in a realistic way. Then he showed up and was the person for whom I never had to provide any explication - he just knew what I was talking about. He seemed to know exactly what I needed and when and I had a feeling toward him that I can only describe as a kind of deep "recognition". I just "got" him, and he me. I fell in love with him very fast and trusted him completely and immediately.

    The experiences happened when we had only known each other a few weeks and hadn't spent a lot of time together - mainly phone and email. The first one was a little game he came up with - "What's on your nightstand?" The idea was that he posed the question, then we each emailed our answer at a set time, without having seen the other's answer. I had a small stack on my nightstand, which included Ruskin's The Stones of Venice. When he sent his list, it included Ruskin's Fors Clavigera. Ummm. We both took this to be very significant. Okay, granted, very different subject matter between the two books, but come on. Two people with Ruskin on their nightstands at the same time definitely have some kind of connection, and I was blown away.

    The second incident was similar, except we were in the same room for this one. He had a project at work for which it made sense to use a file name that referred to classical music, but I knew nothing about it. He just out of the blue asked, "Hey, who's your favorite non-living classical composer?" I said, "Stravinsky". He got a stunned look on his face, then turned his laptop toward me to reveal that he had already named the file "Stravinsky". Turned out to be his favorite composer also.

    I don't know if I will ever be able to process the cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to reconcile these experiences with the other things I now know about him.
     
  13. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Thanks, S&L. Having a bad-ish day. Also, planning to devote some time tonight to reading your juicy posts from the past couple of days. I wanted to make sure I allowed for adequate time to process.
     
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  14. Strength And Light

    Strength And Light Fapstronaut

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    Juicy? Ha! I was thinking I've been kind of phoning it in, like when a tv sitcom goes on hiatus so they do one of those episodes where they're all sitting around the living room:
    "Remember when Billy missed the school bus and we had to steal a tandem bicycle to get him there?" (Flashback to scene of them stealing a tandem bicycle and peddling Billy to school).
    "Oh yeah, and remember when Mr. Roper caught us breaking into his apartment to steal the keys for his car so we could get our wigs back before we had our double date with the twin Swedish brothers?" (Flashback to scene of them getting caught breaking into Mr. Roper's apartment).
    "Man that was hilarious. Remember when Diane hit her head and thought Norm was a bugler breaking into the bar so she called the police and we had to break him out of jail?" (Flashback to them breaking Norm out of jail).

    This is fun but I think you get the point. I haven't really been phoning it in, but more so thinking about my upcoming 3-year mark on Sunday and reminiscing a bit.


    I was listening to an old episode a podcast with Pete Holmes. He was talking about how when two people first meet and start dating, they have just a few bits of information about the other person. They take these known "points" and have to fill in the rest on their own to form a complete picture of who they think they are dating. Almost never is the person a match to how your imagination, hope, desire and even rational mind sketched them in to be. Over time, the person they really are slowly overwrites the person you imagined them to be and you get a more realistic look at them. The beginning stage of love, the magical tingly era, might have a lot to do with all the stuff you've imagined them to be. This stage fades as your imagination is overwritten with a more true reality. That was the gist of his premise anyway.

    You have some incredibly wonderful qualities inside of you. When you matched some (somewhat) obscure passions I think it was only natural to infer he shared these wonderful qualities that these works of art touched within you. You sketched him in based on the info on hand. I still don't doubt that inside of him is a passionate, sensitive person with many fine qualities. But what you know now is that he also has the capacity to compartmentalize any and all of that to serve whatever internal issues he is protecting.

    Current doubts about your ability to process and reconcile are 100% understandable. There's decades of experiences to recalibrate, some of which are near and dear to your heart and you won't want to touch! I'm not sure in the end everything is a total loss. As is usually the case with grief, sadness does eventually evolve into gratitude for what has been lost. It won't be aching heart and heavy lifting forever. But if it is for now you are not doing anything wrong or poorly. You are doing an AMAZING job of handling all of this with compassion, empathy and grace.

    *Btw, I have no idea who Ruskin is and I'm not a total idiot (please don't burst my bubble), so I totally understand why it would be very elating to meet a suitor who shared that interest. Love interests aside, that's how we make friends too, right? Like when you see that someone else writes really well and reasons introspectively like you do...…(cough cough)…...;)
     
  15. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Yeah. I think this is pretty accurate in general. But I also think I may have been an exception. I used to tell everyone who would listen that it was as if the gods had taken everything I wanted, put it into one man, and delivered him to me. I loved him to the moon and back and thought he walked on water. I remained in awe of him. I wasn't oblivious to his shortcomings, but to me they seemed like adorable eccentricities or I simply let them slide because he was so wonderful in so many other ways. I guess I was stupid, but I really thought he was the smartest, funniest, kindest, most accomplished, most interesting man I'd ever met. I trusted him completely and respected him immensely until things began to go seriously wrong. He had been a master at hiding his addiction, but I think it eventually overwhelmed him - then it was one devastating disclosure and behavioral change after another. There is no doubt that I missed a lot of warning signs that would have been obvious to others because I adored him so much. I am spending a lot of time right now looking carefully at how this happened. I really want to know how I was so blind and what mechanisms were at play in my own mind.
    Yes. The biggest heartbreak of all. He seems unable to bring his thoughts and behaviors into alignment with his "true self". A tragedy.
    I actually think so, too.
    :)

    Thanks, my friend
     
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  16. Strength And Light

    Strength And Light Fapstronaut

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    Two things to take into account:
    1) All of the sexual-related addictions are rooted in intimacy issues. By intimacy I mean the sharing of the deepest and most vulnerable parts of the self with others, not just talking about sexual things. So the "closer" someone with these intimacy issues gets to someone, the further and deeper into addiction they will retreat. As a single man, he likely may not have even had noticeably compulsive behavior with PMO. He probably used PMO often but wasn't driven by "need" for it because he wasn't being challenged with intimacy. There was no vulnerability to desire escape from. As your relationship grew and you became closer and closer to him intimately, so then would his "need" to hide his true self grow, most likely because he believed (believes?) that his true self is defective, unlovable, unacceptable, inferior, etc... His real addiction is in hiding his aspects that he believes are fatal, his warts, shortcomings, mistakes, etc... But its human nature to desire to feel FULLY accepted. So by only ever allowing what he believes to be his more favorable aspects to be seen in the light of day, experienced by others and validated as acceptable, that still leaves a host of other parts of his psyche left still aching for validation. That aching for validation doesn't die when it's suffocated, it just ruptures eventually, continually bleeding out into really unhealthy areas where the illusion of validity exists without the challenge of true intimacy: anonymous sex. Porn = anonymous sex via mirror neurons in the brain that facilitate the user into feeling like they are the ones having the sex. "This woman accepts all sorts of terrible things from me, from the horrible person that I am. I feel accepted and validated during this brief time." But of course as soon as the PMO transaction ends, the bubble is burst. Still just an unacceptable, defective, inferior and unlovable person sitting alone in a room. Rinse, wash, repeat. My point here is that the addiction was likely not active in the early stages of your relationship. You weren't stupid.

    2) When your relationship started, there was no high-speed internet porn. There were no endless oceans of every genre and situation available at the literal click of a button. So whatever compulsions he had toward PMO until maybe 2006 were unable to gain the fuel that is available over the last 10+ years. The types of PMO benders that are experienced now have brain chemistry changes unlike anything likely experienced prior to streaming high-speed internet porn. He would have had to work at an adult dvd store where he could bring home cases of porn nightly in order to experience hours upon hours upon hours of dopamine engagement like we have now. Dopamine is the chemical for anticipation, not the chemical for pleasure. It's only the last decade or so that we've begun to experience the truest horrors of flooding the brain with the anticipation of excitement (not to be confused with actual excitement) for hours and hours on end with pornography. My point here again is that for quite some time in your relationship you weren't likely naively overlooking a problem of the magnitude that it's at now. Nobody was.
     
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  17. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Curse you, S&L. In my previous reply I failed to acknowledge your great sitcom riff, and for my sin I was awakened in the middle of the night last night thinking about it.

    It brought to mind a couple of other sitcom tropes, one of which crops up enough in my real life to have earned its own shorthand with me. This is the venerable "My Three Sons" (I'm 12 years older than you, so I was raised with a different set of sitcoms). It is the opposite of the "Memory Lane" that you described because it relies not upon the memories of the characters, but instead on the amnesia of both them and their viewers. The "My Three Sons" is when, on the previous week's episode, one of the brothers has a wildly successful business venture (in this case, the lemonade stand is classic) which is so profitable that it will definitely fund the college educations of all three boys, yet it is never again mentioned in subsequent episodes. You tune in the next week and the kid is asking to borrow the Dad's car, and you're thinking, "Wait. Don't you have your own Maserati now?"

    The other trope belongs to your "hiatus strategy" category. This is when everybody on the sitcom staff gets to take a vacation except for a couple of characters, who are forced by some arcane contractual obligation to go to some other sitcom for that week's episode. Like when Jed and Granny Clampett have to travel from Beverly Hills to the Shady Rest Motel in Petticoat Junction to visit their "cousin", Uncle Joe.

    Ahh. The midnight mind. You're right - it was fun. At least until my sleepy mind, where my husband and I were Gomez and Morticia Addams, oozed into my present reality, where it turned out we were just everybody else...
     
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  18. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    So I had a few issues last evening. Still haven’t recovered fully (might be kind of a red flag if I ever do?) – so this might be a bit of a rant. I was with my husband, traveling to fulfill a joint obligation, when he mentioned he would like to stop for a salty snack. In my recovery I have been emphasizing getting back to the healthy diet I used to be pretty strict about, so I wasn’t interested, but I had no objection to stopping for him. So I pulled into a fast food chain restaurant and we went in to order (no drive-thru). We walked up to the cash register where I was (figuratively) smacked right in the face with a framed cover from a magazine featuring an article about the restaurant. The magazine cover had nothing to do with the restaurant and featured a photo of an air-brushed young woman wearing high heeled shoes, skimpy panties, and a trench coat, which was secured by one button in such a way as to barely cover her breasts, with the rest of the coat somehow suspended in the air behind her. It’s hard to describe. Let’s just say everything about the coat and the woman defied physics in obvious ways. I stared at it, mesmerized, not believing what I was seeing. This was not Hooters or anything like it, but a standard fast food place like the kind of place you TAKE YOUR SON’S LITTLE LEAGUE TEAM OR YOUR DAUGHTER’S SOCCER TEAM AFTER A GAME. I could only think, “THIS is how it starts. Normalization of this shit is EXACTLY how it starts.” I thought of the boys on the Little League team who have just been told by this photo, in no uncertain terms, who the sex class is and that that class should happily and publically display themselves for their consumption. I thought of the little girls on the soccer team who have just been told, in no uncertain terms, that THIS is the standard of beauty and accomplishment that they should aspire to. Sure –some parents and coaches just told them that they played a good soccer game and were good sports, blah, blah, blah, but where’s the framed picture of that? Where’s the multi-billion dollar industry devoted to watching women be good sports or build skyscrapers or develop vaccines? (the “sexy scientist” porn trope of women wearing nothing but eyeglasses and lab coats notwithstanding) These girls aren’t stupid or blind. And both sets of kids have just been told it is terribly sexy for women to don ridiculous and physically debilitating get-ups in the service of male fantasies that come from where? Who even knows anymore who was the first person to imagine that high heeled shoes worn with one’s underwear was not silly, but sexually arousing? By now, this nonsensical thing is arousing only because we (starting as children) have been told it’s arousing and so on, and so on, and so on. It could just as easily have been decreed that wearing pineapples on one’s head while being forced to walk on a bed of hot coals was the sexiest thing ever. ALL this stuff seemingly shot through my brain in a nanosecond and I just lost it. I asked to see the manager, and told him (politely but firmly) how I felt about the picture and that it had cost him a customer. It was then that I felt the sting of what I call My Tears of Fury, so I told my husband that we needed to get out of there. I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Then my husband turned to the manager and muttered something like, “Yeah. I agree with her. It’s offensive.” Thanks husband. I’m grateful. Of course, it would have been ever-so-helpful if YOU would have been the one to speak up in the first place, since sadly, one man, using his cultural leverage and influence to publicly object to that photo would have had the impact of 100 hysterical women’s complaints. Maybe next time.
     
  19. Susannah

    Susannah Fapstronaut

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    Tonight I want to report on an interesting experience I had with my husband last night. Not sure if it is real progress or not, but it kind of feels like it is. We went out for dinner together – something we have now done three times in the months since I left. We used to never do it. Too difficult – it was torture for both of us. But now that the emotional dynamic is different….

    He wanted to ask my advice about a work problem he’s been having, so we decided to try it. He suggested a relatively “safe” place we had been many times before. He we got there and he asked to sit with his back to most of the restaurant – standard for him and for many SA’s. From where we were sitting there were only two booths that were visible to him. A young woman came to take out drink order and he did fine with that. No USDA (raking her body up and down with his eyes). It’s kind of strange how I feel about his ogling now. It used to destroy me every time. Now I go into “information gathering” mode and try to gather clues about the cycle. Don’t get me wrong – I am still mortified to be with him when he does this. It is embarrassing and no matter how many times I try to talk myself out of this, I still feel that somehow I am the one being judged, or more that I share the shame with him. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but somewhere buried in this journal, I wrote about reading news of serial killer trials, where the killer’s wife had procured victims for him. I’ve always been spellbound by the photos of those women – wondering what had happened to them so that they got to the point where they would do that. I can’t imagine that they felt much different than I did on my wedding day. What girl walks down the aisle thinking, “Now that I’ve married the man of my dreams, I can’t wait to kidnap some young girls for my true love’s evidence dungeon.”? Anyway, I somehow feel dirty by association with him when he is gross and offensive in public. “Yes world. Here I am. Married to and willing to be seen with someone who spends every moment in public scanning every woman that comes into his field of vision for the purpose of evaluating and ranking her based on her sexual utility to him.” Ick.



    So we ordered and he began to describe the work problem. Then about three or four minutes in, I saw it begin - all the telltale signs of the compulsion being activated. A couple had been seated in one of the booths in his line of vision. He started to get twitchy (yes – physically) and began to get confused while explaining the problem. He lost track of what he was saying several times and I knew it was over. He was fighting mightily. Our waitress came and he took an opportunity under cover of her visit to steal a glance at the woman in the booth. That glance is never enough – just knowing she was there would torture him for the remainder of our dinner. Completely unchecked, he would steal glances at her (in my experience) somewhere on the order of once every 5 seconds and give here a full USDA eye rake every 20 seconds or so. For however long we were there. Yes. Really. It was then that I felt something I’m not proud of rise up in me. It was as if he and I were in a battle and I was determined to keep my eyes locked onto his no matter what it took or how long I had to do it. I ate my dinner staring at him intently, never even looking down at my plate. I felt completely calm. He stared back. It was as if we both knew what was going on but neither would say it out loud. This went on for about 10 minutes, with him getting more and more undone. Finally I snapped out of it and felt the cruelty be replaced by compassion. I tried to imagine what the feeling of that compulsion must be like for him. The physical feeling in his body of being compelled to do something his higher mind didn’t want to do. The battle with his own eyes. So I said calmly, “I can see that you are really struggling. Don’t bother to deny it. Is there a way I can help you?” He leaned back and looked at me. His face got completely flat and he stared at my eyes for I’m sure at least 5 full minutes. And I stared back, waiting. Finally he spoke. “What is the matter with me? What is the matter with me?” His voice was so sad. I asked for his hand and held it. I looked at him and told him that I was there with him and that it was okay. I asked him to describe how he felt, if he could. He described the overwhelming compulsion to look at the woman in the booth and at the waitress who kept walking back and forth to serve her and her companion. He said he was almost panicked with the strong compulsion to look and felt like he was going to jump out of his skin, but was determined not to, because to do so would simply wear those grooves deeper. I suggested he close his eyes and try to sit with the feeling. I held his hand while he did this for about another 5 minutes. When he opened his eyes he said he wanted to leave and go to the car so he could cry. I gave him the keys and told him to go ahead and I would settle up and follow. When I got to the car he was crying. I held onto him for a while, then asked him how he felt. He said he felt an overwhelming feeling of being broken and despicable. I sensed it would be good to try to keep him from sliding into despair, so I pointed out what a huge breakthrough it was to actually be aware of the compulsive feelings while he was in them. I also pointed out that he had been able to relieve some of the tension by closing his eyes and meditating for a bit. My efforts didn’t seem to work very well and he seemed to stay in despair for the rest of the night. I drove him home and stayed a while. Several times he expressed gratitude to me and said I’d done a brilliant job of helping. That made me feel good. So I don’t know if all that will amount to anything or if he’s even “helpable”. There is a LOT to repair and heal in him. I like to think no one is beyond help, but I just don’t know…
     
  20. Strength And Light

    Strength And Light Fapstronaut

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    That’s one of the most interesting posts I’ve read on this site. His condition, your “treatment”, and his response to the treatment. This will be on my mind for a bit...
     
    hope4healing and Susannah like this.

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