Bringing the SO in on the recovery

If you're asking: do I tell my wife or not? A large majority of people on NoFap will advise you to do the right thing / the hard thing and tell your wife. (the few people that don't advise it .. they are the PA's who are too afraid to fess up / too afraid their wives might leave them if they knew the truth about them / etc.)

So the real question: is WHEN do you tell your wife? That is a good question .. and there isn't a single answer that is right for everyone. I think that most PA's don't start real recovery until they hit some sort of rock bottom -- maybe fear of hitting rock bottom works for some?!?

If you are able to truly hit [virtual] rock bottom .. and begin to read about porn addiction / admit that you are a porn addict (it took me 5.5 months after DDay to admit that!) / go through the transformative feeling of powerless'ness against your addiction / and start to learn and apply the concepts surrounding recovery from PA ... maybe you can start to turn your life around and then tell your wife.

But, you might start down that path / have a relapse / your wife founds out / and then you've hit the real rock bottom.

So who knows.

In the end though, if you want a true, pure marriage for the rest of your life .. you will have to tell your wife.

..

I'm glad you found NoFap. This community is a great resource for you -- you will find lots of help and support and links to resources, articles, YouTube videos. Read, Read, READ all you can .. educate yourself about PA. Start a journal and write in it daily. Find an accountability partner. It is a long journey .. recovering from years of porn addiction...it will NOT be easy. But you can do it. Keep coming back to NoFap for support. Glad you are here.

 

@godofdeath

You have an opportunity that the majority of PA's here on NoFap no longer have. You have admitted to yourself that you have a problem and need help. Not only that but you have the opportunity to be honest with your SO and bring this to her honestly instead of her finding out not only about all the PM but also about all the lies.

If you read a bit of what SO's have to say one of the biggest causes of the betrayal trauma is all the lies.
I did not give my SO any options. She caught me several times and each time I made some kind of excuse just piled on the lies. About a year ago she told me that she felt like porn is the same as cheating. She told me that she considered it having an affair. I told her I didn't have a problem and I would stop. That again was a lie. My intention was to stop P but I had not admitted addiction and took no steps to help myself. She caught me again about 6 months ago and that was my rock bottom. My wife is now pregnant with our fourth child and going through betrayal trauma. She has told me that she feels trapped in her situation and is waiting to have the baby before making any kind of decision.
My SO is incredible and is actually being very supportive of my recovery. I honestly feel that had I been honest with her when I had the chance she would still be just as supportive and would not be going through as much betrayal trauma.

I urge any PA who has the opportunity to bring the addiction to their SO to do so before the opportunity is gone. The bottom line is, this is not your choice to make. It is hers. By not telling her all you are doing is taking her choices away. There is no good excuse to continue to hide this if you really want to have an honest and healthy marriage. Perhaps being honest about the PMO will start healing in other parts of your relationship as well.
And if she decides to leave and end the marriage? That is her decision to make. I took my SO's choices away from her. I wish I could go back and poor my heart out to her before she found out on her own.

I wish you luck and hope things work out.

 

My husband is on his third phone because I broke the other 2 from finding porn again (this was early on in discoveries) and his new phone the s9 Samsung galaxy is unbreakable trust me - I threw it across the room nothing happened to it, I slam dunked the phone, it flew out of it's case and still not a scratch.

But as a wife who has experienced many lies, it's the lies that will break your marriage. Also I am a type A person as well. I have stuck by my husbands side for the past 2 years.. I think pinning it on her personality type is just a way to try to justify not telling her or assuming she won't be supportive. I am prone to anger and anxiety because of the betrayal trauma my husband caused with his porn addiction. Before I found out about the addiction I was fine (I had my own issues like my anorexia I was dealing with but it never related to my husband and I handled myself with it, with his support). Ever since all the lies, that is when my anxiety and anger came about because of the Constant Betrayal. Why lie? Why not own up and tell me so we can get you help, that was my thought process. Yeah, I was hurt, but what I really wanted was for my husband to get the right help.

Btw I am 24, we met at 21, I married him knowing he was an addict. Give your wife some credit. If I am a 24-year-old, only a year into the marriage (3 years in the relationship) and I can handle it with my type A personality, my PTSD from my sexual trauma's, my anorexia (which my husbands PA made so much worse), I think your wife can stay by your side. I think she will be pissed, she might leave for a couple days, but once cooled off will come back.

Give honesty a chance.

 

We in the SO forum talked about this a while back. Here's a link to my experience...

https://www.nofap.com/forum/index.p...-back-my-sos-trust.164095/page-2#post-1396938

... But have a read of the entire thread, lots of wise voices and good experiences.

But to sum it all up - be completely honest and do it all in one go. Don't drag it out over a period of weeks.

 

I absolutely disagree with this. There are many issues that take place within a marrige that both people are equally responsible for. No, his addiction is not her fault but I don't think he was putting any blame on her for that at all. He was saying there are other problems going on that they are both responsible for. Everything that goes wrong in a marriage is not automatically the man's fault just because. And just because there is a PMO addiction does not automatically mean that is the root cause of the relationship breakdown.

 

CSAT is a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist.

 

I can give you my experience in coming out to my wife about a year ago. When I told her about my PA and masturbation issues, her first reaction was shock, followed by anger. I had been lying to her and doing so for a very long time. She had made her feelings on P well known in the past, and I was ignoring them for my own means.

There were days that followed where we didn't talk much to each other. We'd put in a good show for the kids, but would clam up as soon as they went to bed. Physical contact of any kind was forced st best and always quite awkward. We had to rebuild the trust that was lost, and that was going to take some time.

As time passed (and that first 30-45 days was the worst of our 10 years of marriage), trust became built up again. Part of our recovery plan was to have her become an AP of sorts for me - I would tell her when I would feel the urges and she'd help me get through it. When I relapsed, I would tell her about it quickly. Our relationship grew more spiritually in this time as well. We started to pray together more often; we made a habit of going to daily mass (we're Catholic) when the opportunity arose.

About 5 months after my initial revelation, we found out we were pregnant with our 4th child. We were so happy, but I was apprehensive because I knew that chastity would be hard to maintain in pregnancy. My wife got me through it with minimal damage. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but you do have to go through some considerable darkness to get there.

One word of advice, do a small amount of planning around revealing your PA to her. My revelation was more or less blurted out in the middle of a fight 20 minutes before we left for work. After festering all day, the conversation was all the worse when it resumed later that night. You don't need to make a big production, but give enough time for everything to be processed properly to have a real conversation.