The funny thing is that there is a new kind of shame rising up in me. It's so stupid! I can't believe I'm writing about it, let alone thinking it. Here is where I suppose I need some back story.
*************************
When I was a adolescent and teenager, I suffered. I knew that I was different from most of the kids around me. My life was not normal. I tended to ignore it. I didn't talk about it. I didn't think about it. I just tried my very best to pretend it wasn't true. I would hang out with friends and practice my flute and spend the night in the theater....because on stage I was someone different...I wasn't me....I wasn't different. I was everything the playwright wanted me to be. I wore costumes and blurted out scripted words. Even though most of the world fears public speaking more than death, I felt like the stage was a sanctuary...it made me feel safe.
After leaving for college and in the earlier years of my marriage, I began to really struggle with my childhood. I think that raising children will do that to you. They are constant triggers. They do things you did and want things you wanted. As a parent, you are forced to face choices that your parent's made and either give in to the impulse to mimic them or indulge in the idea that you think you can be better than them.
That's quite a crisis of self...to put oneself above one's parents. In order to come to that conclusion, you have to come to terms with the idea that they should have done better....that maybe you would have been better off if they had been different. And that's when your paradigm starts to shift.
For me, it was actively recognizing some things that I had always known....that many people had an advantage over me in college and dating and life. That any progress I have made in my short life and limited experience had nothing to do with my parents or my upbringing. So where did it come from? When you don't like yourself very much, it's really difficult to give yourself credit for that sort of thing.
I also had to recognize that if the things that I was willing to change could have been done differently than my parents had done them, perhaps the things that I wasn't willing to change could have been done differently as well. You grow up with all these ideas bouncing around in your head, things you've learned and things you've heard. And many of the most prominent mantras are the ones repeated throughout your youth by your parents. Some of them are simple to modify. My mother hated a lot of people that I went to school and church with. She gossiped about them and insulted them. She was wrong. They are good people. That was an easy thing to change. Things about why my brother had been sent to foster care were harder to change.
I kind of went through an "early life crisis." I was starting to remember parts of my life that I really wanted to forget. I started to see my parents in a new and less kindly light. And I started to see parts of them (that I didn't much) like in myself. I was depressed and angry. And in the middle of it, I had a miscarriage, and an enabling but somewhat angry and depressed friend.
I had pretty much come out of the funk by the time my grandmother had died. Although I had never spoken with my parents about it, the "crisis" had created a lot of distance between me and them. But I had come to terms with the new me...I was more confident and more prepared to make my own decisions without holding grudges over what choices they had made in the past. And I can't say that it was easy to be there and to be suddenly forced to face how different I was from the rest of my family (like staying home to babysit while the rest of the adults went out to the bar to get drunk after my grandmother's funeral)....it was okay. I came home relatively unbothered.
When my father passed away about 18 months later, it was a very different experience. The death of my father was a bit of a liberation for my brothers and at least one of my sisters. The guilt to try to mend the gaps in our relationship was gone. He was gone. It was over. The story was finished and in the most final way possible, the conflict was resolved.
I desperately wanted to spend the evening around the campfire with my brother's and sister that night before my father's funeral, but my son was nervous in the new place and was having difficulty falling asleep without me. But I had moments and snippets. And I asked my mother for my father's journal. And I started to learn that my memories and my relationship with my father were such a small part of the story.
My brothers finally felt free to talk without fear of repercussions. And they told stories and answered questions I can only barely begin to describe. For every spanking with a board or a belt that I endured, they had suffered whippings and punches. I was slapped in the back of the head so hard that I blacked out, but my brother had had his knee crushed with a steel-toed boot. I learned to make pads out of toilet paper, but he learned how to steal food and stoke a fire when he was banished to his uninsulated room during the freezing cold Minnesota winter nights. I had been yelled and at and threatened....but on him....they had followed through. For every reason I had to be resentful and angry with my parents, my brother had a 5 reasons that would exonerate him if he had shot my father in his sleep. I lived through a sad, difficult, emotionally deprived, mildly abusive childhood in a hoarder household with an all but absent father and a severely depressed mother....my brother had been drug through Hell....and he had barely...literally *barely* escaped with his life.
And I felt shame. I felt completely invalidated. How could I complain about an intense argument when my father kicked me out of the house when I was 15 when disagreements between my father and brother had resulted in fist fights in the back yard.
*************************
And that's how I feel now. I've been reading this book, and it's so helpful. But I read these stories about women whose husbands have had sex with other women or other men....who have visited prostitutes and paid for pornography....who have frequented sex shops and strip clubs....who have maxed out credit cards and lost jobs....and I feel shame...because how dare I pretend to have the same emotions as them when my husband confessed his occasional pornography abuse which at it's worse seems to be a once per week issue. When compared to hard-core pornography, prostitutes, and orgies, women who have dealt with STDs and public humiliations and physical abuse....how does my pain measure up? Do I deserve to feel pain?
Our bishop has attended a number of training meetings on pornography addiction and abuse. He says he doesn't think that my husband is an addict, but rather an abuser. And he says that is a good thing. I can't find a lot of information on the subject...but what I have found, I don't know if I'm grateful for that or not. Addiction in my mind seems more justifiable...it's something that can't be helped. Abuse seems like a habit...and habits can be changed. I'm grateful for that, as an abuser, the likelihood of permanent change is significantly increased with less chance for negative side effects as he works toward that change. But I'm not particularly grateful to know that each and every act was accompanied by small and individual choices.
*************************
When I look back on the past few years...the things we've talked about before he confessed to me...it is a little infuriating. I remember reading a quote a long time ago from President Hinckley. I can't find the quote now...I just remember reading it and discussing it with my husband. It read something along the lines of, "Those who attend the temple regularly will have no problems with pornography." In a talk I was able to track down, Dallin H Oaks quoted a letter he had been sent. It said, "an endowed priesthood bearer’s fall into pornography never occurs during periods of regular worship in the temple; it happens when he has become casual in his temple worship." Same thought, right?
Anyway, my husband and I had discussed this quote or thought a number of times for various reasons. Often we had discussed it in terms of "why is the temple important?" Sometimes, we discussed it in terms of "How can I become more spiritual and strengthen my testimony?" Either way, with each discussion, my husband would express a desire to attend the temple more frequently. I was always supportive of this. We always discussed different ways we could fit it into his schedule or into both of ours. It just never seemed to pan out. On one occasion, he made the excuse that he needed to replace items in his temple bag, so I bought those items for him. On another occasion, he said he needed a less obvious temple bag so that he could attend the temple before work and bring it with him to the office without drawing a lot of attention. So he went out and bought an temple bag. He still never attended.
It's easy to be angry when he says that he has repented so many times in the past and that he knows that God has forgiven him and that he tried really hard to quit on his own...but I look back on the things that happened, the conversations that we've had...and he wasn't willing to do the work!!!
With an addiction, you need counselling and therapy and a support group to get "clean." But he isn't an addict, and I often wonder if he had just done simple things that we had always talked about...maybe he *could* have quit his habit if he had really wanted to.
It's so easy to get angry...to place blame and to judge. It's easy to say that this is something that I would never do...and it's true. I would never do this. I would never defile him and our marriage in this way. In another talk by President Hinckley, he quotes a letter of a WoPA where she says, in response to her husband's plea for forgiveness:
"Don’t you know what you have done?’ … I told him I had brought a pure heart into our marriage, kept it pure during that marriage, and intended to keep it pure ever after. Why could he not do the same for me?"Sometimes, that is exactly how I feel....and it is those feelings that fuel the anger. I know I am not perfect. I know that I have a multitude of things to work on both physically and spiritually....but this is our relationship....our marriage...the one thing that I saved just for him. Why was it so much to expect the same?
In one of our conversations, I told him that I had never had sex with anyone but him...not before we were married and not after. He said, "I guess I just assumed sometimes that you had but I didn't want to say anything." It was so hurtful. Firstly, that he would just assume that I lied. Secondly, that he assumed that I was capable of and had committed that kind of egregious sin. And third, that he was okay with both of those things. How different we are! How little value he place on my virtue! How little respect and trust he had for me, personally! I haven't had the courage or the opportunity to broach this topic with him. I'm not sure that I want to. I don't want to have to deal with it. I don't want to know any more things that I can't unknow.
*************************
The truth is, I think part of my shame would be assuaged if he were an addict rather than an abuser. Perhaps I would feel more justified in my emotions. Perhaps I would feel more validated in my anger and frustration and fear.
It's such a lonely thing, sin. I can't talk to anyone because of how horrible and shameful it is....but I also feel like I can't talk to anyone because it's not as bad as it could be.
This is what Satan wants...he wants "all men to be miserable like unto himself." This sin makes me miserable. Even when I'm figuring out how to not be miserable, it makes me miserable again. Will I ever be able to fully pull myself out of this cycle? Will our relationship ever be whole again?
There are triggers all around me. Sunday is a trigger. Does he have an interview with the Bishop on Sunday? Will there be others there who will ask questions as he stands in the hallway waiting for his turn? What will he say? Is this the week that I am supposed to go, too? What should I do with the kids? Can I get a sitter? On a Sunday?? And if I did, what would I tell them? What reason could I give for needing a babysitter on a Sunday afternoon? And suddenly I am miserable again. Suddenly I am feeling the pain and the futility of it all, all over again!
I am desperate for relief. I am desperate to put this all behind us...to never have to think or type or say the words "pornography" or "masturbation" ever again! This morning, I woke up when the alarm went off and I was exhausted. There are no other options. There are no ways around this storm except to plow through it. I just wish that I could be the driver...I wish that I could be in control. I wish that I could at least stand at the helm and give directions! But I can't...I'm stuck riding it out in the cargo hold. I have no power. I have no control. I have nothing but to give my will to God and pray that He will protect me and keep me. Am I worthy of being saved? Am I important enough to be guarded? I don't know...but I need to hope. That's all that I have left.
No comments:
Post a Comment