Image credit: Photo by Meredith Farmer on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Recently, I have been meeting a lot of women who have just discovered that their partners are sex addicts. They reach out to me looking for experience and advice in the midst o their despair, and I find myself feeling strangely awkward. I simply don't know what to say, in spite of the fact that I have been in that dark and lonely territory where they now find themselves.

I feel like a veteran of the Vietnam war, who witnessed unspeakable horrors and came home, forever changed, with a new view of war: the kind of person who went into the army for the glory of God and country and came home to lead protests. I feel I was someone who saw friends die or lose limbs, yet came home physically whole. Lucky and changed, that's me. And now I'm in front of recruits in basic training, heading to Iraq. There they are, like I was years before: angry, scared, passionate, eager to take on the enemy and win the war. And I know they're looking for some path to get from where they are to where I am, safe at home again. Yet I can't tell them how to: some of them are going to get through and some are not, some are going to be changed and some may keep fighting the same battle forever.

So, what do I say? Do I tell them it's not like they think? Or will their experiences be vastly different? Will they come home from a tour of duty with medals to cheer the war on to victory, where I came home from mine looking for the path to truce? Or will they come home bitterly defeated and spoiling for another fight? Or will they come home at all? Do I hold out false hope to the hundreds who will fall on the battlefield by standing on two legs and telling them I somehow managed to walk out of the firestorm physically unscathed when so many others didn't? Am I being false to myself or untrue to them by saying, "Yes, I remember how much I wanted to kill the North Vietnamese," when my experiences there brought me to see how pointless that killing was?

What would I have wanted to hear back then? What would I have been able to listen to? They have to, each of them, go through this experience for themselves, yet is there anything my experience can show them? Do I salute them and bravely wish them well? Do I rally them to battle? Or do I simply pray and weep with a mixture of sorrow and gratitude for where they are and where I used to be?