Updated/still thinking about next steps

[kyrie]

I don't know about that Trumpet. Gosh, I like you, I don't mean to be so disagreeable. But you don't know how it would've played out.

There was a study on addiction that busted a lot of myths. It had to do with the old test with the rat locked in a cage with two bottles of water, one normal, one laced with cocaine. The rat quickly got addicted to the cocaine-water and that was all he drank, eventually ODing. The conclusion was the cocaine was so addictive that people will kill themselves for it. Then another study was done, and this time the rat wasn't in a 'cage', but a rat paradise. There were hamster wheels, mazes of tubes to run through, things to chew, and other rats. And of course the two bottles of water. In this 'cage' the rat tried the cocaine water a few times, then left it alone, and never got 'addicted'.

The point is that addiction doesn't happen with a well rounded support system. It happens in a void. People that are homeless, jobless, don't have friends or family...they have no social structure set up to meet any of their needs. It is easy to want to medicate. Whereas in general people that are being fulfilled don't have the same desire to grasp onto garbage.

It's a little chicken and the egg as addiction can also cost you that support structure...my conclusion is NOT that addiction isn't in any way real, or anything like that. But unhealthy habits play a role in meeting our needs or medicating against the pain of not having our needs met. Part of recovery needs to be about recreating that support structure, not just straight abstinence. Because abstinence with perpetual pain of denial won't last. The support structure must be built as well. This is why in DBing GAL is so important. You are rebuilding your support structure to overcome the dependence on your old M.

So...had your W stayed with you, accepted your problems, and time passed, could you two have eventually pieced together a working marriage? And if so, is it at least possible that at some point you'd find yourself grateful for what she was contributing, and desiring to contribute more yourself, and realizing that porn wasn't helping something that was giving you more purpose and support and connection than a screen? I think it's possible. And it's possible that the use would've just diminished, that it would literally have gone from a compulsion to a casual usage, there are people that socially drink after all, like the majority of the population. Not sure. But to conclude that W had to leave you for you to quit porn, I can't be on board with that.

It's too close to the logic people use, that it's been proven that people that get divorced are happier five years later. That's true, but it's a false truth, because I'd bet my bottom dollar that people that remain in a miserable marriage are ALSO happy five years later. It's not the divorce that brings happiness. It's the road people walk that take them out of that pit.

My beliefs, and the beliefs this site are based on, suggest that it's not necessary to destroy a lifelong partnership and a family to find growth and change. I am sick and tired of our culture equating a 'first marriage' as a 'larva stage' of life, like you get married, have kids, start a family, then get divorced and grow from it like a snake shedding it's skin. That is complete bullcrap, it is the devil, it is the worst social problem in our country that people buy that garbage. That the point of a marriage is to be with each other through those changes and through that growth, or that lack of growth, for in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, until death we part.

Sorry Zues, humans are not rats. Porn works the dopamine/reward centers in the brain in remarkable ways.
He's shut himself off from support structures, family, most everyone. And he knows it. Yet he yearns for community, family, desperately. He looks to me for much, if not all of that. I can't possibly meet all those needs, but I can serve to meet some important, top level ones. That's a lot of pressure. DBing has always felt like backing off...and he hurt whenever I'd give him wide-berth space. That's another area of confusion for me.

And your last paragraph Zues - it makes me want to cheer for you and shout, "O that everyone would feel that way!!"