Let me touch on something I haven’t really talked about on
this blog yet.
My addiction.
Yes, I hate and love and hate that I can relate to Mr.
Wonderful and his sex addiction.
I mostly hate it.
And I mostly am so grateful for this knowledge.
Let me try to explain my bipolar emotions on the subject....
I can’t imagine how it would be to try to understand
addiction without having my own experience with it, with my eating
disorder. I have heard, on more than
many occasions, hurting wife’s plead with their husbands to “just stop”… “why
can’t you JUST STOP?”… “don’t you love me?
don’t you love our children? don’t you love our family more than you love pornography or sex or your
addiction?” “Yes, yes I do love you and
our children and our family more than I love my addiction!” the husband
explains. “Then why don’t you just
STOP?” cries the wife.
Well, lucky me (or is it unlucky me), I haven’t had to
completely start at the beginning with the concept of the power of
addiction. So, although I have heard my
own pleas at Mr. Wonderful to “just stop” I live in the reality that it isn’t
that easy.
If it was… I would have “just stopped” with my eating
disorder behaviors and thoughts years ago.
I have lived with the pain of people judging my struggles. I have lived with people pleading with me to
“just stop”… “if you love your family, if you loved your kids, you would stop
being so selfish and STOP… just eat, JUST EAT ALICE!”
These pleas, these words never rang truer and louder in my
head then when I was facing inpatient treatment with potentially months apart
from my little family. Believe me, no
one was harder on me than myself. “Oh
Alice,” I would cry, “just eat… you can avoid this whole situation if you just
eat… you are so selfish so unbelievably wrapped up in yourself, you are a bad
mother, a terrible wife, an incredibly indecent HUMAN BEING, just eat.”…but I
couldn’t, I was too far down the path to “just eat”.
Sounds ridiculous huh?
It’s okay, you can say it, I get it, it does sound ridiculous… but, I
just couldn’t eat.
So, I couldn’t think straight, I started randomly passing
out, my liver started failing.
And I had to leave my family. I could have died. I really had to leave my family, for 75 days.
And it was so painful and so awful that I rarely let my mind
go back to the day that I drove away with Mr. Wonderful. I drove away from my home, I drove away from
my children, leaving them lost and confused and too young to understand.
Oh, this brings back so much pain.
I’m going to take a time-out before proceeding with this
post and where I was hoping to go with it.
