too weak, two week

I’m trying something new in the endless battle of the bulge. I’m doing the RPM class at the gym (a.k.a. “Spin,” or “really painful bike riding, set to music“  in most other gyms). I’d say it’s as easy as riding a bike, but that might give one the impression this is not a difficult effort.

I have never sweat so much in my life.

I almost blacked out the first morning.

My legs were sore for almost a week.

Sounds like fun, huh?

As I began this new brand of torture, I also started looking at changing my approach to food. I’ve been watching very carefully what I do during the day, keeping fat content and other stuff at bay, while trying to kick in the protein and other good stuff.

As I was thinking this morning about what to get to take me through the week at work, I had a troubling thought:

I will put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into what I eat, how food is prepared, portion size, etc., and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But why is it so much harder for me to bring that same intensity to bear on what is my biggest problem? Why is it that I can focus for a year and a half on busting my gut, but I have trouble maintaining my focus on holiness and righteous living for more than two weeks at a time?

Don’t misuderstand – I’m not going back to old patterns of behavior every two weeks; instead, I find that I am intently focused on taking all the right steps, calling people, being highly involved in others’ lives…all for brief periods. Then I retreat again, back into my coccoon, back to the safety of not having to deal with real people.

It perplexes me. I see what I need to do, and I can talk a good game – but there are times when my heart just isn’t really in it.

I know that a muscle builds endurance through being torn and rebuilt. Strength doesn’t come from light work. As Benjamin Disreali said, “No pain, no gain. No gain, no brain.” Most people leave off the last half of that quote. I’ve been able to retrain my brain regarding exercise. I know what will likely happen if I don’t work out, and I know that losing the weight of a sack of concrete has made my days much less painful.

I also know that there are similar benefits and risks in not getting “fit” spiritually. The obvious problem is that the risks are less tangible.

So what do I do to make the risks more real? How do I reach a point where I take to heart what my head already knows, that I don’t want to cross the finish line in the back of the pack?  I really want to hear, “Well done – good job” at the finish line, not “Well, I guess you made it.“

Perhaps I’ve forgotten one of the mantras of recovery – one day at a time. Thinking ahead is not a bad thing – but maybe I need to establish a pattern of single days – one that lasts longer than two weeks – before I start getting concerned about the long term.

blaming the past or understanding it?

I remember years ago, when I was still in denial that my life was out of control, shaking my head when I heard someone talk about how their childhood had some impact on the bad choices they were making as an adult. “Yeh, it’s always easier to blame our parents than take responsibility, isn’t it?”, I thought.

What I’ve come to believe in the intervening years is that the events of our earlier years does indeed shape our thinking, our values, and our beliefs about ourselves and others.

The child who is told that they are useless, a mistake, that the people who brought them into the world wish they had never been born – is it really surprising that they would either be hopeless or be extremely driven to prove long-departed tormentors incorrect?

The child who is never reprimanded, never corrected, never taught to consider others – is it surprising when this person turns out to be corrupt, criminal, incorrigible?

Okay, so there are extreme cases; but what about ‘normal’ people with average childhoods?

I would argue (as many do) that virtually everyone carries some wounds from their youth. The wound may not cut as deep for me as it does for someone else, but they are there nonetheless.

My dad never abused me. He was a “model father” of the 1960’s variety. He worked hard and provided well. He didn’t smoke or drink, was highly involved in church, saved for rainy days, and could spend a long day making corporate management decisions and come home and change the brakes on the family roadster.

He was also absent a lot during the years I was looking to him for guidance on becoming a man.

I see; it’s all his fault you strayed so far.

Hardly. My fault, my choices. During my teen years, I was figuring out a lot of things on my own, things some other kids learned from their dads earlier. I’m not blaming him – I’m saying that where I went to learn wasn’t the right classroom for the subject of being a Christian man.

Perhaps an analogy would help. My grandmother played the violin. Somewhere in her early adult life, she broke her left arm. I’m not clear on the circumstances, but for whatever reason, she never went to the doctor. The arm set, badly. It would affect one of the great joys in her life until she quit playing somewhere in her 70s. But the fact that it hindered her disturbed her less than the thought of the pain that would be involved in re-breaking the bone to set it correctly.

To me, that typifies why a lot of people don’t address the issues from their youth that so clearly affect where they are today.

It isn’t blame-shifting to recognize that the past has an influence on where we are today.

It is blame-shifting to say, “It’s all someone else’s fault,” but that’s a different animal than I’m talking about.

I’m trying to dig into my past a little more, trying to understand what I missed that may have helped set me up for the bad choices I’ve since made. There’s some pain in that. But I believe the music will be sweeter in the end.

table for one?

Christian writers talk of the hole in our hearts that only God can fill. I agree with the thought behind that, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today.

I believe there is also, somewhere in the seat of our emotion and thoughts, a seat that is reserved for one other human being. It is a place that is reserved for the relationship that will come as close as I will ever see to heaven here on earth. It is the seat reserved for my wife.

When I was single, I let a lot of people try out that seat. I let too many try out that seat, and I forgot (or never realized) what that seat was about. As a result, it became easy to move people in and out of that position. The seat became a little less important as I pushed people into the seat, then unceremoniously pulled it out from beneath them when it suited me.

In my addiction, I let people who were never even prospects rest in that spot, at least temporarily.

• A dancer at a “gentlemen’s club” (there’s a misnomer if ever there was one) in Memphis held the seat for about three hours
• Women in movies I saw at an “adult” theater (major misnomer #2) sat there for five or ten minute intervals
• I seated strangers who wanted anonymous encounters for short periods of time

Rather than that seat being a place of privilege, I turned it into the seat by the door others used while waiting for a better table.

Eventually, I began to recognize that I was cheapening something that should have been very special. Eventually, my heart was so tired of the endless flow of other broken souls that it cried, “enough!”

The sad thing is, somewhere in that flow I met the proper occupant for that seat. She is my wife, and is the one for whom that spot was reserved, long before I knew the seat existed. The problem is that I still hadn’t figured out that the chair wasn’t big enough for two or three, so I kept pushing her out to make room for others. Since I was married, I had to be more discreet. I had to make my seating arrangements a secret. I couldn’t let anyone know that the seat was still in play. This led to more dishonesty, and the secrecy joined with a growing desire for more and wilder experiences.

That was a recipe for disaster.

I can easily enough write about how God spoke to me in that time, how He brought me to a place where I could begin to see what I was doing for what it was. I can tell you how He brought some key people into my life who would show me grace, but not be enablers.

But I want to focus for a second on how occupancy of that seat is still challenged.

• The mall is not a good place for me. There are the obvious things – the lingerie shops and others with tantalizing pictures that invite mental undressing, the sea of women dressed in clothes that (20 years ago) would have been worn by “professionals” plying their trade (street girls, if that wasn’t clear enough) – and there are the not-so-obvious things. Noise and crowds get to me. Maybe it’s because I am actively blocking so much of what is around me that it wears me down. It is at least in part a paranoia because I like to have a good picture of what’s going on around me, but I also know that I can’t start looking without seeing something that will kick off a painful cycle within me.
• Church can be a problem. I’m glad that I go to a church where no one expects me to wear a suit and tie, but there are Sundays (usually spring and summer) when I can’t look around without seeing more shoulder, or even an occasional tight belly, that distracts me from the focus of the service.

I recognize that the problem still lies in me. I doubt one of the women at the church got dressed that morning thinking, “Wonder how many guys will get turned on by this number?” I suspect that might be exactly the thought of some of the women at the mall, but that may be projection on my part.

Wherever I go there I am.

I have to be very wary about where I focus my eyes. I have to remember that God is about my heart, not my hands. If I go the rest of my life without acting out physically, that’s great – but Jesus says that if I lust after somone, I’ve committed adultery in my heart. That’s harsh, but I believe it.

Surely you don’t think it is the same thing to look a little as it is to take actioin on it?!?

Not my call – I just kinda go with what Jesus said.

And when I feel my heart starting to tip the chair, pulling it out from under the rightful occupant, I have a decision to make; is the little adrenaline rush of what is unknown, forbidden, considered in secret worth the cost to my relationship with my wife? As I get to know her better and better, the answer comes more easily as “No.” That isn’t to say there aren’t challenges – they come often, and they threaten the place I have given her; but for me, the choice has to be to keep that seat a sacred place. I want her to be in that seat, until the day one of us isn’t sitting anymore.

let’s be honest

Honesty is critical to recovery. I know a lot of people in recovery programs don’t like absolutes. We live in a world that is not fond of absolutes.

But the power of addiction is strongest in the shadows – which leads me to the conviction that being dishonest, with myself and others, is likely to lead to a relapse (at best).

There are a few different types of discussions I believe are important for my recovery. Each has a different purpose, a different audience, and different timing; but each requires honesty or it becomes useless.

First, there is telling my story. This is usually what happens in Step 5 of the 12, confessing our faults. In the context of a 12-step program, this will often be a discussion with one’s sponsor. My sponsor and I went to a local monastery and spent a long day with me talking, crying, and walking through my full story.

When I told my story, I had to remember that the point was not to talk about what a victim I was, but to own up to where I had missed the mark. I needed to take responsibility for my own choices.

I think that confession allowed me to be honest with myself, which was at least as important as being honest with anyone else. It also gave me a chance to process some of the stuff that had happened in a more coherent view than anything I had done in private confession through prayer, and gave me a broader view. Patterns began to emerge. For the first time, I saw that there were certain events or feelings that often preceeded my acting out. I later learned these are called “triggers.”

Eventually, it was time for another conversation – a disclosure to my wife. The focus in a disclosure is different. This is not the encyclopedaic recitation of the full list of wrongs that was in my story; this was a specific disclosure of the behaviors which had impacted our relationship, whether she knew the impact or not, and regardless of whether they happened before or after the wedding. It was more general in the sense that she didn’t need (or want) to know the gory details, more pointed in terms of recognition of impact.

My wife has since said that there were two things she saw in my disclosure that were key to our continued marriage: I was broken by my errors, and I was complete in my revelation.

Wait a minute – you just wrote ‘complete in revelation’ just after writing ‘more general.’ What?

By complete, I mean that there was no general area of acting out, no range of activity, that felt incomplete. I gave her general areas or activities (“I visited adult bookstores for anonymous encounters”), and let her ask whatever details she wanted to hear. That’s not to say she liked my answers. I just decided that if there was pain involved, it would be more merciful for both of us to get it out and over with at once instead of continuing to poke and prod at it. If the marriage was going to fail, it was going to fail quickly. By her ( and God’s) grace, that was not the outcome.

I think trying to do a complete disclosure with her without the filter of the prior confession would have been disastrous. Had I gone to the level of detail my confession required, I suspect there would have been a steeper path to our climb. For example, listing specific locations and specific actions might have spurred her imagination, making our relationship that more challenging. I know a guy who bought a new mattress, then a new bed, then remodeled the bedroom, then bought a new house because he dwelt in the details of where his affairs took place.

Again, wherever my wife asked for details, I provided them. There is a world of difference between paving a path for renewal in your relationship and giving her material to question how she compares to someone else, and your words in a disclosure make all the difference.

The final conversation I think is critical is my testimony. OK, technically that’s a monologue, not a conversation. There is healing power in sharing my story. There is a renewed reminder of where I was, and why I would not want to be there again. There is the hope that someone who hears the story might see something of himself, and get some help.  There is hope, in spite of that part of me that sought fulfillment in so many wrong ways.

I share that testimony when I can. Not every setting is appropriate, but I have found very few cases where the story shared creates discomfort or disconnecton with others. Maybe I’m more cautious in sharing than some. I certainly don’t get on the train in the afternoon and say, “MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE?”

I’m not a masochist.

I am a human, flawed, fallen, devious in many ways; but I am also being healed, and I am a child of the King. If I am honest, that’s my identity: a prince, so named by the King whom I didn’t want to serve. That’s a far cry from where I was, not that long ago.

if you only knew…

The movie Sneakers featured a decryption device which could break any code. One needed only the secret passphrase to gain access to the secrets of the world, and the phrase was “Too Many Secrets.“

Secrets can be a good thing, when it comes to birthday parties or roses ordered but not yet delivered; but secrets in a relationship are often deadly.

A phrase my wife used when we first became more serious in our relationship was, “if you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.” Of course, if she had known more about me back then, who knows how things would have developed…but the point is, we kept each other in the dark. We feared each others’ rejection and alienation.

I know that, as I became more aware of her issues, I felt that those issues were of little importance relative to the relationship we were building. They would certainly affect us, sometimes dramatically, but none were “deal-breakers.”

I wonder if she has felt the same way about my issues.

What I find now is that the more I am honest about my struggles, the more she respects me. Oh, true enough, it might be different if I was still cruising and acting out…but my honesty about the difficulty of remaining ’sober’ has only drawn us closer.

It is also important to say that I would not expect a person of lower caliber than my wife to be able to accept the darkness in my story. Since those things were/are a part of me (though not the definition of who I really am) , I would be stupid to pursue a relationship with her if she couldn’t handle my past.

I know several men who are ’single again’ because their spouses were not able to see through the history into the present tense of the person before them. I also know a lot of men who continued to act out, regularly,  after divulging the truth; that doesn’t usually work out so well either.

Secrets make it easier to keep secrets. New secrets. Dark secrets.

Honesty begets honesty. Harsh, brutal honesty.

I believe pain is always easier with a clear conscience.

fill ‘er up, please

This weekend I had a very pleasant reminder of a crucial concept: when your tank gets low, it is important what you use to fill it up.

My wife and I have been on competitive schedules, meaning that we seem to have been saying “hi” and “bye” more than anything else, for about the last month. My kids? Well, I had some time with them here and there, but it hasn’t really been what I would call “quality” time. It has generally been at times when I was so worn down I had trouble being patient, and was not very accommodating to their wants and needs.

I have let a project at work take priority over my family. As the son of a certified workaholic, that’s a big no-no.

My wife had a her women’s group over at the house Saturday, so I used the time to full advantage. I took the kids to a nature center where we could walk through the woods, talk, be together, and not have any “busy” time. We stopped to look at bugs, talked about what beetles and vultures do in the grand scheme of things, watched a beaver wash his face…in short, we did nothing urgent, but everything important.

Saturday evening my beloved and I had an actual date. We went to see Fireproof – which deserves multiple blog entries unto itself. We weren’t rushed, and just had a great evening.

To top it off, after church Sunday we (spouse included this time) went to a park along the Chattahoochee (Atlanta’s idea of a river) and had a picnic. The weather was perfect, the river was gorgeous…and again, we did nothing urgent.

Chattahoochee River, Jones Bridge park

Today, I feel like my tank is pretty full.

There is still a discarded water heater laying in the back yard, and it needs to go to the dump. There is still a dead tree laying down back there, waiting for me and a chainsaw to dispose of it. My van’s heater is still unpredictable. My project at work is still unmanageable.

But I am refreshed, renewed, and ready to face today.

I haven’t felt that way for a month.

Or two.

judgement, or sympathy?

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:18 that we should flee fornication. Every sin we do is outside the body, except for sexual sin. In that, we sin against our own body (my wording).

I recognize that fornication has become a punchline in our society (thank you, Church Lady), but the point is that the Bible makes a distinction about sexual sin. Interesting to note, though, that the distinction is that we are hurting ourselves directly with sexual activity outside the Plan.

I think the church misses something here.

Sexual sin receives “special” treatment from churches as if Paul ended this section of his letter with an exhortation to immediately castrate the vile offender; what Paul does say is to explain that the body is a temple, and the offender is violating the temple.

By the way, this is not an attempt to justify anything. Sexual activity outside of marriage has mental, spiritual, and (sometimes) physical consequences; that should never be dismissed or trivialized. Even the person who seeks solace in self-gratification is cheapening the value of what is supposed to happen with one other person in an image of the spiritual connection between us and God.

So how does your church body react to a woman who comes into a service, wearing no ring and obviously pregnant? Men have the advantage here – we can be totally promiscuous, and there will be no outward sign unless we contract some horrendous disease. But it is sad to me to see how people with strong faith backgrounds generally react to a disclosure of sexual errors.

A close friend carried the weight of a relationship that included an abortion around for years, living in fear of the reaction she would get if her closest friends ever found out.

When she chose to disclose, I would say the reaction lent credence to her fears.

When I have disclosed my history to people who I believed were spiritually mature and knew me well enough to know where my heart is now, I have been disappointed. The two guys I thought would be the best prospects for accountability responded predictably – one was dismissive that I had a problem, the other withdrew to the safety of surface-level interaction.

I am fortunate that I have an accountability relationship with a couple of guys who don’t let me off the hook. They understand that there is a difference between the thing that I was and the man I am becoming. If I drop the ball (present tense), they don’t just dismiss it – they force me to face it. But they do not judge me as something less because of my sordid history (past tense), because they understand grace.

So the Church Lady was an accurate caricature, unfortunately, of the way many in the church respond to sexual brokenness.  There is a place for judgment, no question. Christ judged those who knew the Law the best; but He had compassion and mercy for those who were ignorant and repentant.

We should learn from that.

married…and dating

I had a date Monday night. My Monday night group was having a big social dinner, and I was overdue for a date. But it was not with my wife. More on that in a moment.

In many cultures in the world, men have rites of passage where the adolescent boy is invited into the circle of men. He is welcomed at their fire, at their table at the pub, to take part in their rituals.

We don’t have anything quite like that here. There isn’t really any point at which we say to a boy, “You are now a man.” I’ve heard some suggest that the first drivers’ license/car keys is a substitute, but that isn’t uniquely manly.

I have a couple of men with whom I meet regularly for accountability. I suppose I could, someday, invite my son to join us for those breakfasts…but that doesn’t quite do the job either.

And so I took my son out on a date Monday night.

Does the word “date” make you uncomfortable in this context? If you consider a date to be something you do to get a “happy ending,” I can understand; but I’m defining a “date” as a social engagement to improve the relationship between two people.

He’s only three, so the level of interaction is somewhat different than when my wife and I go out.

I took him to a restaurant that sits in an old train station – he’s nuts about trains – and then to a bookstore where they have a train table set up and several of the Thomas the Tank Engine toys outand usable.

It was an evening about him.

It was my way of saying, “I know I correct you a lot – too much for your age. I want you to know that I love you, I love to be with you, and you are great just as you are.” He really is great. He is smart, he is goofy, he sees everything through eyes of wonder. I could learn a few things from him.

Three years old. Obviously not yet time to take him out to hunt wild boar in the moonlight with spears yet. But it is the right time to start spending some serious one-on-one time, establishing a pattern so I don’t look back somewhere down the road and say, “Why didn’t I take more time with him?“

Maybe if I spend the time now investing in the relationship, he won’t be as likely to quickly divest himself of me when he reaches his teen years.

And maybe, if I am consistent, he will someday have memories of a dad who took the time for him, and who held him in higher regard than the other stuff in his life.

cause and defect

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose; but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

There’s a thin line between recognizing the effect of past events and blaming them. When I started my journey, I didn’t want to consider the possibility that some of my outcomes were rooted in beliefs, that they might be anything deeper than a surface behavior.

Surface behaviors can generally be dealt with by practice. ‘Stop picking your nose‘ may be more effective than counseling sessions for a three-year-old, for example. At three, the child is just being childish. They put fingers into anything where they will fit, and they put things in their nose. Nose-picking is pretty much an inevitability, but it can be stopped before it becomes habitual.

Acting like a pubescent teenager as one rounds forty is also childish. Unfortunately, it fails the ‘acting your age‘ test.

We expect, to some degree, for teenagers to have raging hormones and uncontrolled eyes; but these are not considered positive qualities in a middle-aged man.

So how do we explain it when a man who is ‘old enough to know better‘ acts to the contrary?

Midlife crisis, right?

He’s figured out that there are likely fewer miles in front of his horse than behind it. Some sociologists say the man has a natural desire to procreate and build a legacy through many children. Knowing he probably won’t be around for their adult years, he seeks out a mother-to-be who is younger, likely more fertile, more in the prime years for child-bearing.

How much you wanna bet those sociologists are a bunch of guys in their mid-forties looking for an excuse for how they feel about their graduate assistants?

That oh-so-scientific theory of mid-life behavior does a great job of providing an excuse. Heck, the way I heard it explained, it made me want to go find a coed so I could proudly support the theory. But the more I thought about it, the more that felt like an excuse rather than an explanation.

In my life, I recognize that there were factors that helped to shape me. These factors didn’t make me defective; they just exposed a yearning in me that had to be fulfilled. Some of the factors:

• We moved frequently, too frequently, when I was young; I have no idea what a ‘lifelong friend‘ would be like.
• I was encouraged to be oh-so-nice to everyone, to the point that I just took it when I was beat up on quite regularly in elementary school.
• Dad worked long hours, and would often drop off his briefcase just to pick up his Bible and head to church.
• We continued to go to churches even when they exhibited the most toxic behavior (side note – my dad was a bit of a crusader; he always thought he could help people get their heads on straight in church wars, but usually ended up being pushed out).
• I learned to try to get people to laugh when things were tense. I didn’t understand that tension and friction can sometimes lead to the best of resolutions.

None of these things drove me to my addictions. At worst, they were (forgive me, Roger Waters) another brick in the wall. When I look back on those things now, I recognize the way those items and others helped to shape me, and influenced my thinking. For example, the thing of being oh-so-nice…I got along with almost everyone, except for the guys who used me as a tackling dummy after school. But not only was I not prepared to defend myself, I was actually discouraged from doing anything about it. ‘Turn the other cheek‘ was drilled into me as my defense. And instead of that building a sense of humility in me, it built rage.

With my kids, I’m teaching them not to just take it. As soon as they are old enough, we’re putting them in martial arts classes. And as they get older, firearms training. They are also being taught a balanced view of their own worth, so they know that they deserve a basic level of respect from others, and need to show others that repect as well.

Was my rage a cause of my acting out? Not sure. There was often rage in my acting out. I never felt like such a rebel as during those dark moments.

Was my rage justified? For a while, probably. It was wrong for Brad and his henchmen to practice flying kicks into my back as I tried to walk away.

But that was a long time ago. There is a point where it is my choice as to whether I will let that rage control me and influence my actions, or if I will release it to God and ask Him to heal me.

Wrongs done to me do not justify wrongs done by me. I am an adult now. Carrying rage from my fifth-grade year, and letting it influence my behavior, is about as appropriate and attractive as sitting in team meetings at work and picking my nose.

coming clean

A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all,  when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. – Oscar Wilde

I’ve rejoined a group that was very instrumental in helping me find my sanity a few years back. This time around I am going to be moving into a role of servant-leadership, hopefully helping others find their sanity as well.

As we went around the room last week introducing ourselves, there were several in the group who mentioned that they were married, and several had already had a session with their spouse ’spilling the beans’ on the hidden stuff in their hearts and lives.

Lest my next thoughts be misunderstood, let me say that this is a crucial conversation which (I believe) must happen, rather like re-breaking a bone that fractured and then set incorrectly from lack of proper care. However, there are good and bad ways to have that conversation.

The temptation for many addicts is to get a case of ‘verbal diarrhea‘ and pour out all of their stuff in one cleansing eruption. This feels emotionally satisfying for the teller; ‘there, that’s done’.

But this probably is more about you than it is about your spouse or significant other, and even less about the two of you.

In my 12-Step program, I had my confessional with my sponsor. It is probably best to start with someone other than your spouse, preferably someone who already knows a little about you and understands the nature of addiction.

By the way, I keep using the term ’spouse.’ Being single doesn’t release you from the need to do this. One of the things that keeps people in the power of the sickness is the secrecy. ‘If I keep my darkness in the dark,‘ one might think, ‘I won’t be rejected, more lonely…‘, or whatever. But giving a voice to the part of you that really does want to be free gives that part of you more strength. It doesn’t stop your knee-jerk reaction to your triggers, but it helps you start to build resistance. If you have no one in your life who is your partner in life, then you will need, eventually, to tell someone who is close enough to know the you you want people to see, not the you who acts out.

In the group I first attended, there were maybe a dozen guys that did some form of confession to their wives the wrong way. I don’t have any great body of research to draw from here, but I can tell you that most of those marriages were over within a year. Those who took a measured approach, not blurting everything out as soon as they were either caught or dinged by their conscious, had a marital survival rate above 50%.

That may not sound very encouraging. But bear in mind that the truth has a nasty habit of coming out, one way or another.

So if I were writing The Rules of Self-Disclosure, they would look something like this:

Law #1: Thou shalt go to someone you trust in clergy or a solid counselor to start the process. If their response is to beat you with a wet noodle, or a verbal dressing-down, consider going to someone else. They should neither condone nor condemn. If you are having this conversation, you are likely doing enough self-condemnation.

Law #2: Thou shalt tell your spouse or significant other that you would like for the two of you to have a talk with said clergy person/counselor. The timing should not be a month ahead, nor should it be at the last minute, but with enough time for your partner to steel themselves a little bit for something that will be tough to hear. The purpose in letting your partner know there will be another party present is that nobody brings a pastor along to announce they’ve found someone else, etc.

The delay between the notification and the meeting will seem an eternity, but please don’t start down the road to disclosure when it is just the two of you.

Law #3: Thou shalt let the clergy person/counselor guide the discussion. They are trained in tough conversations; you aren’t. Make no mistake; this conversation will not be easy, and there is no way to make your partner feel like this isn’t a personal attack on them. In addictions that involve either porn or interaction with other people, your partner will feel betrayed. And they won’t be incorrect. That will hurt.

Law #4: Thou shalt make no demands of your partner. Let me use my experience here, rather than impersonal pronouns. My wife seemed to take the whole thing fairly well when we had our talk. Truth is, she was in shock. She had known about my issues before we got married, but I had convinced her that her suspicions were her own paranoia, and I was ripping the mask off of my lies – several years of lies at that point.

I’m not sure how, beyond the grace of God, but we made it through those next few very tense months. After our initial conversation, I had to let her process things quite a bit. If I had been defensive during this period, I suspect I would be writing from an efficiency apartment or my mom’s basement at this point; but I took her moods and doubts and questions as they came. She had every right to question me, and denying that would have made her think that I was still hiding something. Oh, that reminds me…

Law #5: Thou shalt put everything on the table at once. Your partner may not need or want the gory details of when and with whom, but she might. A good approach is to start in general categories (“I’ve visited adult bookstores since we were married, even in the past few months“), and then get more particular if she asks.
Starting with things that would get my blog marked as ‘inappropriate’ may make you feel better, but it won’t help her process what you’re throwing out there.

Law #6: Remember that you are not in charge of the outcomes. This goes somewhat with #4 above, but it goes further than that. If you are fortunate, you may be sleeping on the couch for a while. But you may find yourself knocking on your best bud’s door asking for his couch for a while.

Depending on what you did, you may find yourself in jail.

But trying to manage the outcomes will nearly guarantee failure. Do what you can to make sure the initial disclosure doesn’t end in violence. But don’t expect your partner to say, “Aw, that’s okay punkin’” and invite you to continue your marital bliss anytime soon.

As I said in an earlier post, this may sound discouraging – please don’t let that stop you from doing the right thing. Your sin will find you out, they say; I’d rather have some input on the finding out.

So here I sit, three years after the toughest conversation of my life. I’m still married to the same woman (by God’s grace), and my children adore me. What my wife and I have learned is a level of honesty I never thought I would find. It isn’t always pretty, but it is always real. I used to think reality was overrated; now I understand that fantasy is overrated – reality is very cool.