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I put this under health, because I thought putting it under personal growth presumed an answer that for some of us might not be correct, and putting it under mental health didn’t acknowledge the physical aspects of how our challenges affect the rest of our bodies.
We’ve been at this now for several years. Some of us for a good chunk of that time, and others who joined as recently as last week. The long timers often demonstrate the gradual movement through the healing process and all the decisions that can mean. Some of us still struggle with some aspects of healing, and others bring new issues and insights as the “second wave” of partners begins to emerge. Am I getting the idea that some of the newer members seem to have grasped things more quickly than I did? Yes, I am.
So what does support mean at all the different stages, from all the different contexts, for all the different circumstances we share together?
I know I have sought your loving and encouraging words when I fell down the rabbit hole and couldn’t get out by myself.
I have wanted your insights, even when they challenged my perspective.
I have wanted your experiences so that I didn’t feel so alone in mine.
Some days your irreverent humour has saved me from giving up altogether.
I used your recommended resources and shared links.
I wanted to know what you know, and what you learned, and even how you learned it.
When something good happened to me I wanted you to be happy for me and with me.
I wanted you to call a spade a spade and help me be more honest with myself.That’s a start. What does support mean for you?
I thank God for this board. When I go through my down times, I read the struggles that all of you went through and some are still going through and I count my blessings that I was only with him for 8 months. I loved and grieve for the man I thought I knew, but thankful in a selfish way that he is no longer here to do further harm to me. I’ve poured over numerous threads in this forum to gain more insight into this “disorder” and truly found a wealth of information to keep my darker emotions in check.
What I am also amazed at is all the warm, intelligent, funny and feisty women you all are! I mean this sincerely. Thank you all for your stories, believe you me, it has made a difference in someones life.
I needed support which to me meant knowledge. I needed to hear what all of you already knew. It made me feel less crazy. I needed to question. I am by nature a logical creature ( I have my illogical moments). I needed to challenge the conventional wisdom. I also needed support as my heart was breaking and my dreams were shattered all over the place and I had no way to pick up the pieces. I needed understanding and a good ole pity party dose of sympathy. I needed to know that my inability to do the simplest tasks did not mean I was crazy. I needed to know that he was lying.
I have found all of that here. I guess I needed the proverbial “soft place to land”.
i find strength getting to know all of you. even though it’s only words on a screen, your spirits come through. and beautiful people are literally what get me through many days.
seeing your bravery. i find comfort knowing i’m not the only one in such incredible pain. even though i wish none of us were in pain.
hearing different opinions and experiences, keeps me in check. hearing the crazy shit – even though it makes me cry sometimes – stops me from being in denial.
encouraging words are like gold to me.
knowing what it is like for others at all different stages, and all across the continent. its fucking beautiful terrible.
sometimes one of you will put in to words what i have been feeling, there will be a validating aha moment. and i feel less alone, less crazy.
expressing what i’m thinking, writing it, having it witnessed, means i can release some of the terror, the despair.
I agree with Bev and would add:
As I’m coming to the place of acceptance that my marriage, specifically, isn’t going to have a happy ending, I’ve wrestled mightily.
I see myself out of the water, on the beach, which is accepting with sadness and heartache what will never be.
But, in the midst of that acceptance, the sun reflects on a buoy in the distance. That buoy is hope and it diverts my resolve in the direction of that buoy and turns me inside out.
Hearing TRUTH spoken from sisters who’ve lived this (some who are out and others who are still in) helps me focus on what is real…what I MUST accept. That is priceless counsel to me that can only come from women who recognize what hope keeps blinding me from and are willing to lovingly turn my head back in the right direction.
My gratitude for the willingness of you ladies to invest your time and knowledge into my battle with acceptance, is beyond measure. That you call a ‘spade a spade’ and a ‘duck a duck’ speaks truth into my life that propels me forward into the pursuit of a healthy life that isn’t muddled with lies, betrayal, disrespect, and unspoken contempt.
Priceless. Truly priceless.
Support, for me, whether it’s here, a therapist, or family, is acceptance of where I’m at. You can’t rush the healing process or base it on the progress of others. We are all different, with unique experiences, histories, personal views, understandings, and also levels of trauma/PTSD. We also have different views about addiction vs not addiction.
Support also means taking the impact on my life seriously – which can be hard for others who have never been through such a mind-blowing tragedy, with immense loss, overwhelming betrayal, debilitating PTSD symptoms, and searing pain.
I have had to fight against a tidal wave to prove the devastation and impact on me. It’s been exhausting, invalidating, retraumatizing. My mind is trying yo get around the magnitude of what has happened to me, but then I have to deal with people minimizing it and acting like I’m pathetic, over-reacting, slow to “move on”, hurting myself, making things too complex, accused of being “too caring” or “codependent” simply because I’ve been: confused, felt frozen, grieving, lost, truly struggling with keeping my head above the water. Every week under the high stress of it all I feel like I’m in survival mode treading water. I want to scream to the world from a mountain “Excuse me if it’s fucking hard and if simply getting through each day is my number one focus”. A lot of us have had to face more hard shit than the majority of people do in 6 lifetimes. It’s been an avalanche.
I could go on about lack of true support – all the above has mostly been from former therapists, his family, but then also at times from my own support system at home. It’s made me realize support is not a given. You can’t expect or rely on it, even when you’ve had the most unimaginable and horrific thing happen. When you do truly find it though it is to be cherished and treasured.
In the darkest times, if I can, I’ve learned I need to be my own support. No one is going to ever fully understand, know, or believe what I’ve been through, but myself and God. At the end of the day, I need to be here for myself.
I thank Barbara Steffens too — her work has been my rock. The high dose of validation every partner needs, early in the ‘educating’ process, to get through this.
Support for me was
– a group that acknowledged my pain. took it seriously and cared
– a group that had similar experiences and could relate.
– a group that could give insight, and real living time- of what life is like in being a partner of SA
– responsiveness, caring, funny replies. And also honest, direct, no matter what my dilemma- weren’t afraid to tell me how it was. — I needed to hear it.
–a group willing to support my healing journey, even when I took wrong turn.
I agree with so much everyone has said.
One thing that I really needed was a connection to other people that get it and have lived it. That has been invaluable to me as I sort through what is real and what was gaslighting, deal with the PTSD, and learn to trust myself and my instincts again. I needed a place where I didn’t have to educate or convince anyone about what I was going through. The collective experience of the women here is something that you can’t find in books and you won’t get from a therapist.
That was one thing I really needed from a support group.
As a newbie, I have found the encouragement, understanding and acceptance at SOS invaluable. I have benefitted tremendously from the experiences of longer-term members (often hard won). Because you have so freely shared your wisdom and knowledge, I have learned so much about the games SAHs play (forewarned is forearmed) and the layers of deception they build. I have been able to develop strategies to keep myself and my son safe while I work through the immense changes in my life.
In a world which downplays men’s bad behaviour, it has been comforting for me to find a group that truly understands the hurt and devastation resulting from the discovery that I am married to a sex addict.
Thank you all!
When the first bomb hit, he convinced me it was all my fault. I shrank in half. I got us into therapy and promised to find a way to be better. I tried so hard that he had to throw new stuff at me, with blame. Every time I was devastated all over again. After 2 months of this I found the term sex addiction online, and eventually mtsa, which led me here.
When I got here (I think the site was pretty new) I could not believe there were other women out there like me! I did not want to hear what you had to say! I wanted you to tell me this was fixable, and give me the instructions on how. Damn it!
I wanted to defend him to you. I wanted to tell you I was married to a great guy and I need to find him again. I was ok with letting this be all my fault (like my husband said) and changing what ever I could to make it better.
I needed you to tell me what I had to change.It was so hard to listen to what you had to say to me. I came to rely on your instincts before mine. Putting my crap out there and letting people tell me which end was up was hard. And turns out, I had a lot of crap. I was a fricken basket case. And he was really mean when he wasn’t able to control me. With out this site I would have fallen right back into my blissless, gaslit world.
Slowly and kindly you pointed out to me how wrong my world was. How really messed up mr perfect was and ultimately that I deserved better.
I have an immense amount of gratitude for the support I have received here. Every piece of advice helped me move forward. Even when it made me mad.So I guess for me support was having total strangers be in my corner, completely honest, no matter how hard it was to deliver.
I hope I can get to the point of helping others instead of being so needy.
Heidi
Heidi, you have helped me so much.
For me, the support of this site has been irreplaceable. it’s having a place i can come when my day or my mind feel unmanageable and out of control. when the pain or confusion are overtaking me. when i get stuck in my head. i come here and read, and learn and gain insights. i always walk away with something – wisdom from another sister, validation that my experience is not abnormal, affirmation that i am not alone, honesty about the complexity of this journey, concrete tools and resources that i need for my own healing, and daily reminders that it’s still possible to find humor and joy in this madness. sisters, your support also helps me not to live in my own inadequately constructed and sometimes false reality, looking for easy solutions and the fastest way out of my own pain. Thank you.sharing with all these amazing women here has been a very unique experience for me, I had never shared anything like this with anyone ever,,,,
this whole experience has been almost like out of body experience , it would have been impossible to wrap my head around the weirdness of the situation and understand the extent of the madness of this STBXH if it was not for the validation I had recieved hereI hope that I would meet all of you one day in person
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