The Scab was Ripped Off

I had another post scheduled for today, but I wanted to pour my heart out this morning about our weekend instead.

The breakdown really started on Thursday.

We are participating in a 10-day virtual summit on breaking free from a pornography addiction, and the speakers (all Christians) are full of experience and wisdom and hope. There are sessions geared toward the strugglers and sessions geared toward the spouses. It’s genuinely a hope-filled summit full of encouragement and practical advice.

But.

It has brought up so many emotions and touched on so many points that we have felt like we’ve needed to talk through, some of them again and some of them for the first time.

And it has felt like the little scab that had started to form was ripped off.

We spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in intense conversations about lust, triggers, the realities of his betrayal, my insecurities, and just how badly this all hurts.

I had another panic attack.

We got into a fight.

There was a lot of weeping and misunderstanding and pain.

And then finally on Saturday night, we had a breakthrough. We shared from our hearts, each listening patiently and responding out of empathy and love. He simply held me while I wept, and he wept, too.

Grief is cyclical, so we knew that healing would be messy and non-linear, that we’ll take one step forward and a few steps back. Nothing he was doing changed, but I think hearing other wives of porn addicts talk about their experiences brought it all back up and it felt like I just discovered him last week.

It all feels raw and new again. I’m back to questioning his desire for me, the types of things he looked at, why I wasn’t good enough for him, why our vows meant so very little to him. I’m back to wanting to cover up, which is so frustrating because we’ve worked so hard to get to a place of acceptance of each other’s nakedness.

But here’s the difference this time: we’ve spent the last two months talking honestly without holding back, so even though I put up some walls Thursday and Friday and he struggled to know how to get past them, it didn’t take us as long. We got back to a place of honesty and vulnerability again quickly.

And then last night, even though there was more crying, we had another amazing breakthrough conversation in which we shared more things from Before. We uncovered more truth and we connected even more, once again crying and mourning over what has been lost.

Recovery is HARD work. It doesn’t just happen. There are days when I am so exhausted by the emotional toll it takes to walk through all of this, I question how we’ll ever heal. And he admitted a strong temptation to push all of the pain and emotions down, but he knows that’s what got us here so he resists.

Some days are just so heavy. We still have hope, because God is in the business of redemption, but we’re just feeling the weight of it all right now.

So pray for us. Pray that we wouldn’t run away from or push down the pain, that we would feel it, process it, and turn it over to Jesus. Pray that our conversations would be full of grace and love. Pray that we would empathize with one another and understand the trauma we’ve each endured. Pray that we would experience deep, lasting joy even in the midst of the pain. Pray that we would entrust this entire journey to our Father in Heaven who loves us more than we could imagine.

Much love,
C.