Last night

[25yearsmlc]

Kyrie,

You are getting a lot of advice. I know some of it is conflicting. Hard to piece all of this together.

I hope I can reduce some of your burden or clarify something for you. For instance, -the Porn- it's HIS issue, not yours.
Especially if you call it an "addiction", then it's really not Yours to fix or solve.
My dad was very well educated, always gainfully employed in a prestigious (but stressful) job, devoutly religious, and a highly functioning alcoholic.

My mother could not "make" him stop drinking.
My 8 siblings & I could not "make" him stop. His doctors' warnings could not "make" him stop or "wake him up" to HIS problem.

Only terminal cancer & death in 8 weeks, stopped that brilliant man from drinking.
Now, some 20 years later I realize that there are plenty of opinions about alcoholism, the role of genetics & the role of choice, but the only thing I KNOW

is that only my father (& God) could help him with HIS problem.

In other words, for now at least, I don't see anything for you to "do" about your h's porn.

From this thread, I see the options presented as you cutting him off physically, and or leaving the home (to "show him what divorce looks like/teach him a lesson"?),

or as Zeus said, accepting him as he is now
(& hoping things improve, with you GAL/Detaching).

Please learn from our mistakes!! My whole first year here, I felt strongly that my h ought to "feel the consequences of his actions" and I sure did not want to enable him to cake eat.

But my DB coach rocked my world with a very different perspective. At the moment, 2 things come to mind most:

She said 1) "yes to an extent, every WAS/MLC 'cake eats' for awhile.

That's b/c the LBSer is here trying to save the marriage, & the WAS/MLCer is not.
So, no, they do not have the same motivation as the LBSer.

AND

2) "it's Not the job of a spouse to 'teach the other spouse' a lesson or "show them the consequences of their choices. Life does that for them."

This ^^ was a hard one for me...

To be clear, she did NOT say to lie for him or cover for him or enable crappy behavior endlessly; she just made it clear that MY role was not as my h's judge, teacher, "spiritual guide" or punisher.

The DB journey for me was mostly a spiritual one, with a lot of self discovery.
To be completely open, I had to dig deep when Coach said all ^^this stuff bout "life teaching h".
After serious soul searching, I saw an unpleasant side to myself I'm not crazy about.

I had to admit that at least some of what I was saying about "showing h the consequences", was in actuality a cover for me, b/c I was angry, humiliated and very hurt.

A part of me wanted to punish my h. I used terms like "justice" and "fairness" as euphemisms for my desire for retribution, wanting him to feel pain - while telling myself that only with his "remorse" could I feel "safe" with him...B/c if he was in a lot of pain from his choices, I believed he'd be less likely to repeat the behavior...and there is a certain logic to that. But my motivations were not all pure,
(and definitely not working!)

Facing this side of me to work only on myself, when in pain, was was the hardest thing I've ever done.
But at least I knew some of what MY "work" was. For one thing, I changed my focus from wanting to "show h the consequences" to instead, giving my h something to miss. The happier our times together, the more fun the kids and I had, the more inner peace I felt/projected, the more positive images he'd have to miss later on...and the more good times the kids could look back on later, regardless of where the marriage headed.
I had plenty of work to do in my "sandbox" so I learned, eventually to stay out of h's sandbox.

He had HIS stuff to work on, and I had mine...does any of this resonate with you?

I really hope some of this helps you.

Do Keep on keeping on. IN TIME, this will get better, regardless of what your h does.