Some Good Decisions and Some Bad Decisions

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I was watching the story line for a psychological thriller in which a wife finds out about an entire double life her husband is leading, and she tries to put together the pieces and understand how she got herself in this situation. It didn't feel like my real life. I felt so alone. Surely other people were not experiencing this kind of pain. I was wrong about this, unfortunately, but knowing there were other people in my situation opened my eyes to a whole community of support.

Having a recovery group, finding a therapist, and confiding in a few trusted friends were all decisions that helped me to remain sane in an insane time. Seeing a doctor to get tested for STDs, although humiliating, was so important. These decisions to reach out for help were what kept me from completely losing it in the first few months after D-Day. I also reached out to the priest at my Church and found that the encounter only made the wound deeper. For a while, I harbored anger and resentment towards not only him but the entire Church. It took me a long time to realize that, like me, he had no idea how to respond to my story.

I also made some decisions that, knowing what I know now, I would not ever have made. The first is that I allowed Husband to move back in after only being gone a few weeks after D-Day. I don't think I truly realized what it meant to have an addiction, and I know I didn't realize how much I enabled his behavior. I told him he had to sleep on the couch, but before I knew it, we were back to our same old routine.

I was so easily swayed in the months following D-Day, and my confusion about the situation made my judgment blurry. My brain would just simply 'forget' that he was an addict. Although he'd known he was an addict for years, I had just discovered it. I found myself going back to my old way of interacting with him and stopping mid-conversation with a feeling that was like a punch to my gut...oh right, he's an addict, a liar, a manipulator. My Husband, the man with whom I have a child, the man I committed myself to in front of God and family, my best friend, is not who I thought he was.