Journal Portion 1

It has been a week since I found the pornography on my computer and it has been a very difficult week.  It is really hard to write about my feelings right now, but I have decided it will be a healthy outlet for dealing with the pain.  I also hope that it will help me clarify my thoughts and feelings as one step of the process of trying to re-build my life and know where to go from here.

All of my dreams and visions for the future of my life have been crushed.  It is difficult to portray the complexity of my emotions.  I am so conflicted.  I never thought that I would be faced with a decision of whether to stay married or not.  I am such a fiercely loyal person.  Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought I would be faced with this reality.

One thing I can say is that I have felt the strength of the Lord in all of this.  He is so aware of our individual needs.  I have so much faith in the healing power of the Atonement.  I have so much hope for my future amidst my devastation and despair.

There have been so many layers of emotion this week.  There have also been layers and layers of issues to think about and try to resolve in my head.  I feel exhausted and sick.  Through all the difficulties, I have learned so much about myself as a person.  I am encouraged by this because I have recognized my own strength.  The Lord will always bless us so much when we desire righteousness.  I feel so grateful for my wonderful parents and their support in this and I hurt so much for their pain.

Sometimes I want to talk about my feelings so much, and sometimes I am just quiet and reflective.  It is always helpful to take my thoughts to my parents, but it is especially difficult now that they know because they are now going through their own grieving process.

It is very hard to sit down and process the feelings of this week on-paper all at once.  Its truly just a lot to deal with.  My hope is that I can write daily so that I will only have to try to synthesize the feelings for one day at a time.  I know that it is likely that I won't have the strength to do this on some days, but I hope to do it as much as I can.

I guess to start I could just re-count the events of the week and try to document the feelings in my heart and mind.  Last week, I had the flu and I was very sick.  On Sunday, I was still very sick and I wasn't able to make it to church.  My husband admitted that he used this as an excuse not to go go church either.  I had recognized for several months that the spiritual part of my husband was absent, in fact, quite dead.  At the time I didn't recognize the full degree of this or why it was, but it was a frustration and a concern to me.  We stopped holding Family Home Evening together, I knew he was not reading the scriptures, and he prayed only when I asked him to pray.  Even then, I could tell he was just saying words.  When we went to church, he seemed to have mentally "checked-out" and he never wanted to talk about his thoughts about the gospel.  When he did, it seemed very superficial.  

This has been incredibly hard for me because the gospel is such an important thing to me and I have always loved to discuss and live it.  Although I can see that all of these things were manifestations of my husband's choices, at the time I didn't see clearly how sinful his life was.  He did a very good job of hiding it from me-which completely scares me.  During this time I had determined that maybe he was just not as spiritually mature as I had hoped he was and thought that was just one areas of our marriage that we would have to work on.  I craved spiritual intimacy though and I felt a void in our otherwise very happy marriage.  

I regret that I too became more casual in my own spiritual life.  I wished that we would hold Family Home Evening, but I did not fight my husband about it.  I could tell that it wasn't a priority for him and I just submitted to that.  I found myself so busy and stressed that I sometimes wasn't taking time for meaningful prayer and scripture study.  In fact, when 2009 came, my New Years Resolution was to have more meaningful prayer and to devote a time to read the scriptures or a talk each day.  I certainly remained virtuous in my life and did not let any major sin into my life, but I recognize now that for awhile I became too casual with such important things.  I know better and I am grateful for the reminder of how important these commandments are.  

Anyway, on Sunday, my husband stayed home from church, but still went to our dinner group (we have it with a few of our close friends each week) without me.  When I opened my computer, I was caught off-guard when I saw a file on my desktop that was obviously pornographic in nature.  I then opened the "trash" on my computer and found numerous other files.  They had been opened Friday night around ten p.m.  On Friday night, I was very sick.  I had wanted to get better so that I could focus my time Saturday on school.  I had taken a warm bath, medicine, and my husband tucked me in bed.  It kills me to think that while I was so sick, my husband left me alone and stayed in the front room to look at pornography.  It upsets me because any time that my husband has ever been sick, I have done everything to make him feel better.  I have nurtured him and stayed with him constantly.  He did not come to bed until the early hours of the morning, which was upsetting to me.  He told me he had fallen asleep on the couch.

I was very upset when I found so much pornography on my computer all from that night.  And those were just the files that he downloaded and forgot to delete.  Of course, I wanted to give my husband the benefit of the doubt and I did not jump to any conclusions.  I called him and told him to come home.  After all, I was sick and he had been gone for hours.  When I called him, he had been playing games with our friends.  Unfortunately, I could not immediately confront him because when he came home, two of our friends came over to check on me and visit me since I had been sick.  As soon as they left, I turned off the show we had been watching and told my husband that I needed to talk to him.  

At this point in my journal, I decided that I would need to write more later because there was a CES Fireside that I wanted to listen to.  

My First Entry

It hasn't been very long since I found out about my husband's pornography addiction.  In fact, it was only about two and a half weeks ago.  Unfortunately it feels like its been a lot longer than that.  The battle has been very real.  We were married in the Salt Lake LDS temple last year and have not even reached our first wedding anniversary.  Especially as a newlywed, this is a difficult thing to deal with.  Prophets and apostles are definitely accurate when they have warned that pornography will cause "sweet relationships to sour and marriages to wither."  Before we were married, I felt prompted to ask my husband if he had ever had a problem with pornography.  It was after a Priesthood session where the topic had been addressed.  He lied to me and said that he had never had a problem with it.  I have quickly learned that with any addiction, dishonesty seems fairly inherent.  I have struggled with the fact that he has looked at pornography, but I struggle more with the layers of deception and lies.  It is difficult to know that my husband has been living two lives and tried so hard to keep me from knowing the truth. 

After I discovered the pornography, I was flooded with a large range of emotions-predominantly shock, disbelief, sorrow, anger, and even physical pain and sickness.  I decided to write in a notebook each day to help me deal with my feelings.  Each time that I have written, I have felt a lot more clarity, but sometimes it is difficult to find the strength to write about all of the things that my mind is forced to process at this time.  I've also found that my hand really hurts from all of the writing!  I had considered keeping a journal on my computer, just as a document, since I can type a lot faster than I can write.  And then, as I searched the internet for resources that would be helpful to me, I came across a few blogs written by people who were also dealing with the pornography addictions of loved ones.  It was a huge help to me to be able to read their struggles and emotions.  Finally, someone who knew exactly how I was feeling.  Because of this, I have decided to keep this anonymous blog online.  It will help me to process my emotions through writing and I will be satisfied if it helps even just one other person.  Because of how important the writing process has been to me, my posts will likely be fairly lengthy sometimes.  

I will probably spend my next few posts copying directly from the journal that I have written during the last few weeks.  Then, hopefully I can record my current feelings frequently.  Before I record my specific feelings that I have already put in my notebook, I will convey a brief overview of the last few weeks.

I caught the pornography on my computer on a Sunday night and as soon as my husband and I were alone that evening, I confronted him about the files that I had found.  He lied to me and tried to pretend that the files had been accidentally downloaded because he thought they were something else.  Due to the graphic nature of the file names, I knew this could not have been the case.  He continued to lie to me and I remained very calm.  I told him that I wanted to believe him but that his story simply did not make any sense.  Shortly after, he admitted to me that he had struggled with problems with pornography since high school.  He told me that it had started again about a month ago.  

The next day we met with his father briefly.  I guess his whole family knew about his pornography problems.  During our meeting, my husband confessed that it had not just been the past month that he had been viewing pornography.  He had been looking at it again for almost six months (over half of our marriage).  After we met with his father, we met with our Bishop.  He spoke with us kindly and told us that we should look for professional help.  Later that evening, we decided that we would go together to my parents because they live within about an hour and tell them in-person about his problem.  We decided to do this because I knew I wouldn't be able to talk to very many people, but I would need to at least be able to go to my parents.  Furthermore, my parents would be able to tell that something was wrong and we didn't want them to worry.  My husband agreed that it was a good idea to include them in the process.  Since then, I have met with a trusted professor (I am still a college student) who is a marriage and family therapist.  I trusted her with the situation and she referred me to a personal counselor, a therapist who worked with pornography issues, and a program for couples dealing with pornography issues.  The counselor that she referred me to didn't have any openings for weeks, so my first meeting with her will be tomorrow.  I think it will be helpful for me to have a professional to speak with openly about my feelings.  My husband and I have also met with the therapist who works with pornography issues weekly, and have contacted the leaders of the program for couples.  The program starts in two weeks and we are planning on attending it.  That's a brief recap of the situation and how we are handling it.  My next posts will be portions of my journal from the last few weeks.