In my bedroom, buried in a pile of papers is a questionnaire labeled "The Marriage Expectation Inventory." Each question is answered in neatly printed block letters in purple ink. After nearly a decade and a half, the ink has started to bleed through the pages and on the reverse of each page are the blurry ghosts of letters in a screaming fuchsia.

On the line beneath "What is the greatest weakness you bring to your marriage?" I've printed, "Jealousy/insecurity," which is an interesting answer given what happened in our marriage in the years after I completed the questionnaire. At the time, I wouldn't allow myself to admit that I wasn't comfortable with my husband's behavior toward women, so I thought there must be something wrong with me for being uncomfortable about it. I wasn't worried that he might find himself involved with another woman because, oh, say, he was looking to get involved with other women, but because I was lacking in the confidence necessary to fully believe the fantasy that he wouldn't.

This weekend we were out at the park with our kids when a woman approached us and complimented Janie's curls, a compliment we hear, oh, roughly, once a minute every time Janie walks anywhere outside our home. Janie whispered "thank you" while looking at her toes and then ran off to play. Mark and I sat down on a bench and a few minutes later the same woman came over, sat down next to Mark and began chatting.

The odd thing was, unlike most moms at the park, she didn't chat about her children. She chatted briefly about her own physical attractiveness and her availability for a relationship. Then, a few awkward moments later, she left.

A decade ago, Mark would have had her number at the end of the conversation or would have given her his. She would be one of his new friends, someone to keep in flirtatious contact with and maybe have an affair with. And I would have gone home furiously angry at him and hating her, but most of all mad at myself for being so insecure that I couldn't trust the husband who clearly loved me. I would have tried to keep all that in until it exploded out at Mark. We would have fought about it. He would have assured me he loved me and it was just my jealous mind playing tricks on me.

This time around, I thought of that questionnaire and laughed. That woman's conversation crossed some invisible line of intimacy and it made both Mark and me uncomfortable. I can identify the exact words and the exact moments that brought up those feelings of discomfort for me. I can talk to my husband about it without contemptuously berating him for any part in it. And I can recognize that it's not helpful to dismiss my feelings as the delusions of an insanely jealous or insecure mind. But then again, it never was.

A few days ago, a columnist I generally like wrote a satirical piece on sex addiction rehab (one I won't link to here, due to its triggering nature). He's a liberal columnist, so the comments were populated with lots of LOLs and virtual eye rolling at the concept of sex addiction as a creation of the religious right: people who are uptight about and don't know how to enjoy sex. There was lots of mocking of the "higher power" concept, lots of atheists sneering at the superstitious nonsense that is God.

Of course, the conservative flip side of the "sex addiction is a joke" coin is to sneer at therapists: people who are forever trying to write off weakness and lack of willpower as "diseases" in order to bilk people out of money.  Either way, treatment for sex addiction is seen as misguided and useless: so called "sex addicts" either "just" need to loosen up and learn to accept and enjoy their sexuality or "just" need to have more willpower and moral fortitude.

And either way, as someone married to a sex addict, it can be both hurtful and maddening to feel the world is ringed around us in a circle, pointing and laughing, saying that we've been duped when, for the first time, we feel we're seeing clearly. It's one of those things that is likely to draw me back into that crazy place I used to occupy: where, like a six-year-old, I yell "NO!" at someone else's "Yes!" only to have them yell "Yes!" back at me in an endless cycle; where I feel panicked and crazy, as if someone's telling me the sky is red when I see it's blue; where I spend my time and energy fruitlessly trying to convince someone else that they're wrong so that I can feel right again.

I wanted (desperately) to pull out my credentials and yell into the comments section, "Mark and I weren't some crazy, uptight religious fanatics who just couldn't embrace our sexuality!  And I'm not some uptight, frigid wife who can't please her man!  I was a really good atheist who really loves sex!"  As if the columnist, or any of the commenters, would read that and suddenly say, "Oh, some random stranger on the Internet says that wasn't her experience. Now I've totally changed my view on sex addiction!" rather than, "I bet she actually sucks in bed and her husband is an asshole."

Deep breath.  Step 1.  I am powerless over other people.  I am powerless to change their perceptions of me.  And trying to do so anyway makes my life unmanageable.  Followed by Step 2.  Help from that much maligned higher power.

I didn't leave the comment.  I stopped reading, made the column disappear in a flash of electrons with the click of my mouse and I did something I never used to do before.  I prayed.  "God, let me see the world through your eyes.  Let me not be threatened by people whose experiences are different.  When I mock others, I am usually scared and hurting.  In every place that this columnist and his readers are scared and hurting too, open their hearts to love and peace.  Help me on my journey, and help all of them follow the path they need to, so that we can find love and understanding for each other."

In the past, I wouldn't have prayed because my God is not a separate being who controls the world, but I've found that prayer isn't (as I used to think) some useless, crazy, superstitious ritual predicated on achieving results with the help of a supernatural power.  Prayer is a tool I use to ground myself, open my own heart and let go of my own pain, fear and anger.  Prayer is a way of connecting to my higher power, my better nature, my Buddha nature, the God part inside me.  Prayer is a way of feeling love and compassion and connection to others, rather than distance and anger and fear and resentment.  When I pray for someone who requests my prayers, it connects us, and lifts us both up.  When I pray (quietly, secretly) for someone who doesn't request it, it helps me love and forgive.  I've learned that even if prayer never produces any tangible results in the world, it's not useless -- not to me -- because the purpose isn't to change the world to get what I want, it's to help me be in line with and at peace with what is.

I started keeping a journal semi-regularly when I was in middle school.  My very earliest journal entries are a thrilling roller coaster ride through the life of a suburban tween: from the heartbreaking lows of the cancellation of my favorite TV show to the giddy highs of eating raviolis from a can for lunch.  But by high school, my journal had become my closest confidant, not because I had any terrible secrets, but because the secrets I did have became so tiresome to the friends who had to hear them again and again.

I've never smoked, never done drugs and never drank a drop of alcohol in high school (and not much even beyond that).  But I did grow up to marry a sex addict, which means I had my obsessions and I had my own drug of choice: other people.  Like most schoolgirls, I had crushes, but unlike most schoolgirls, my crushes were epic fantasies that rocked me to sleep at night and sustained me moment to moment during my days.  They were the refuge I'd escape to when loneliness or stress or fear crept too close.  They were the rock I'd cling to in an unstable world.  One day my true love, my knight in shining armor, was going to catch me as I fell, swoop me up and save me, make everything perfect.  And until that day, I'd block out the dirty imperfections of this world by drifting off into the next in my mind.

My journal didn't care how many times I described the way that boy's hair fell across my math book when he leaned back or the precise shade of his eyes in the sunlight outside.  And unlike my friends, who grew bored with the unflagging nature (or perhaps just vaguely uncomfortable with the intensity) of my interests, my journal was quite happy to watch me carefully craft each intricate detail of those moments, happy to sit quietly receptive as I painted the same scene over and over from a thousand different angles, and happy to replay all of it for reuse in future fantasies.

And replay it I did.  For years I would go back and touch those pages, softly, like a lover and live that thrill again: here he taps my shoulder, there brushes my hand as he borrows a pencil.  Then in the moment that never came, yet always sustained me, he falls down on his knees and begs me never to leave, and he never leaves, never hurts me, but makes me (finally, impossibly) whole.

Now I see something different in those pages: the sling that gently cradled an unseen brokenness and held it safe for a time, the coma that protected the injured patient who could not have coped with consciousness.  And I'm grateful, both for the service those pages rendered and for the fact that I've healed enough not to be in danger without them.

A few years ago, I was visiting my friend Ellie and was a guest in her house for the first time in my life.  I had just taken a shower and was standing in her bathroom, a wet towel in my hand, at a loss for what to do.  Should I hang the towel on the rack?  Sling it over the shower?  Hang it on the bar inside the shower door?  And should I fold it in half or lay it out flat?  Maybe I should fold it in thirds?  Should I throw it in the laundry room?  Or maybe there was some other way of handling towels that I wasn't even aware of...  These seem like small things, but they deeply concerned me.  What was the right way to take care of a wet towel?

Oh, sure.  I knew what I would do at home.  But I also eat in front of the TV, chewing with my mouth open and resting my bare feet on the coffee table, at home.  And that, my friends, is certainly not the "right" way to eat.  I was pretty sure that there was a way to hang the towel that would signal that I was raised by wolves and would bring shame to my entire family.  My parents would be greatly disappointed in me, knowing they had told me a million times how to hang a towel, and now, at this critical moment, I had completely forgotten all they taught me about how people ought to do things.

I was going to be judged and found wanting.  I was going to be unmasked for what I was: crude and thoughtless.  Ellie was going to walk into that bathroom, see that towel hung up in some clearly, horribly, offensively wrong manner and was going to think I didn't love her enough to take care of her towels properly.  I'd never be invited back.  Our friendship would grow distant.  All over this towel!  And even if — through a sheer luck, — I passed this towel test, I was probably going to use the wrong fork at dinner.  Or put my elbows on the table.  Or forget to make my bed in the morning (I don't make mine daily at home).  Or make the bed the wrong way.  Or put my foot square in my mouth over something.

There went my brain, dashing off down those rutted, well worn tracks.  I'd seen people in my life cut down and cut out for things like the way they hang their wet towels, and I'd been cut down and cut out for similar things enough in past relationships that such questions and worries had become a matter of habit.  Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten it into my head that there was a right way to do everything, and everything must be done that way, perfectly.  If not, what followed was judgment, shame, humiliation, rejection and abandonment.  Those thoughts were so routine, I never even noticed them.  But this time, standing there in Ellie's bathroom, with a little bit of recovery behind me, I finally caught myself on that race to Crazytown and laughed out loud.  For crying out loud, it's a wet towel!  And everything is going to be ok, no matter how I hang it up.

So, I hung up the towel, left the bathroom and joined Ellie for breakfast.

I shared in a meeting recently about my fear around my husband's business trips and how that fear is a reminder to me to connect with my Higher Power. After the meeting a newcomer asked me what I'm going to do now: I mean, he's going on a business trip soon, right? So what do you do now? Check his phone records? How can you make sure he's not acting out in his addiction?

Of course, I had already said what I was going to do: recognize, accept and take responsibility for my own emotions, pray and meditate, work my program, let go. However, as I watched this woman's brow cloud with genuine befuddlement as I repeated this, I remembered how hopelessly inadequate that answer seemed to me in the frantic struggle of those early days. There I was, standing in the wreckage of the-life-I-thought-I-had thinking, "What the hell just happened? And how am I going to rebuild this?" And the "answer" didn't even register as a solution at all. I'd think, "Ok, ok, I know you said something about some useless, flaky spiritual stuff and keep coming back. Blah blah blah. But what do I DO?"

It was as if my home had just been leveled by a natural disaster. Pray? Sit around meditating? That's not any kind of an answer at all. What was that going to do? I knew what I needed to feel better again; I needed my house back or rather a better house, one that wouldn't fall down again. I couldn't envision a world where my happiness was not dependent on that house. And to get that house back, I had to do something: get on the phone with the insurance company, get the Red Cross and the National Guards in, interview contractors, analyze where the structure had failed and build reinforcements to ensure this could never happen again. All the spiritual mumbo jumbo in the world wasn't going to help with that, and there wasn't any God out there who was going to make a new house magically appear with the wave of an invisible hand.

Likewise, when I first started recovery, I simply couldn't yet envision a world in which the answer to my problems didn't involve having an husband who never acted out again. As long as I could make sure he would never act out in his addiction again, everything would be ok, right? And I could achieve that by somehow doing things the "right" way. In pre-recovery that meant being sexy and passionate and sweet and smart and just generally amazing and perfect enough to fully satisfy him. And when that didn't work, I moved into early recovery, where it meant somehow learning to do this recovery thing (whatever it was) right enough.

And oh, was it annoying when people told me the answer was God, as if God were the ultimate addict to please. I'd tried that game before, the one where God held the key to my happiness but wouldn't give it to me until I did everything perfectly according to some arbitrary and unspoken set of rules. But God hadn't given up the key any more than any of the other people in my life had. That's what made me lose faith in the first place. And now I was supposed to believe things were going to be different? Ha! Those 12 Steppers were deluded! Give up trying to control my husband and try to control God into controlling him instead? I thought to myself, "No, I think I'll stick with controlling him myself rather than handing that over to some non-existent magical being, thanks."

It took years to see that all the flaky spiritual stuff wasn't about changing the world and the people around me to make it all more comfortable for me; it was learning how to be comfortable in the world as it is. My God wasn't going to rebuild the metaphorical house of my life or make sure it would never fall down again; my God was going to help me let go of the pain of losing the house and be ok whatever happened around it in the future. My God doesn't control the things I can't; my God helps me let go of the need to control them in the first place.

Each week we read the promises of our 12 Step program, and my favorite is: "We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." And I realized, when I saw myself reflected in that look of pain and confusion in a newcomer's face, that I didn't used to know what to do when I was filled with fear at Mark's actions, but I do now, even if it doesn't seem much like doing anything at all. When Mark gets on that plane, I'm going to try to stay connected with my Higher Power: not so that he doesn't act out or so that I can find out about it if he does, but so that, whatever he does or doesn't do, I can stay present and centered in my own life.

I was one of only five people on the planet who didn't own a copy of Thriller, largely because I like to be contrary; it allows me to feel superior and rebel against alcoholic absolutism by being absolute in a different direction. But because I grew up in the 80's, I couldn't escape knowing every song on the album whether I owned it or not. (And then secretly singing them to myself when there was no one around to see me being anything less than contemptuous of their choices.)

When Michael Jackson's skin whitened and his nose became skeletal, when he was accused of child molestation and and sued for debt, when there were reports that he bought the Elephant Man's bones, when he nicknamed his son Blanket and built an amusement park in his back yard, when the tabloids dubbed him Wacko Jacko, I liked to tell people "I told you so. I always thought there was something wrong with him." As if that were really the reason I pretended to disdain him when he was at the height of his popularity and continued to mock him as his untreated mental illness* played out on a global stage.

But my relationship with Michael Jackson (as with so many people in and out of my life) has changed as my relationship to myself in recovery has changed. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock in order to feel clever and healthy, I started to see a someone who was aching enough inside to have visibly mutilated (or paid his plastic surgeons to mutilate) his body. I saw a talented man who lived imprisoned in his own deep pain, a man who self medicated through fantasy in many of the same ways I had myself. As I came to better understand my own love of Peter Pan and the fantasy of Disney and my own desire to escape into some fantasy childhood, I suspected I better understood his too. And I used to, in my own way, pray for him. I thought about how hard it must be for someone so insulated from the world by money and fame to finally reach a point low enough to break through denial and bring desperation for change, and I would hope that he would finally lose enough to get help.

When I learned of Michael Jackson's death, I felt the same sadness I felt at the death of my father-in-law: the grief that he died without ever finding relief, redemption or recovery (in its broadest sense) in this life. But I am grateful, as I see my own progress mirrored in my changing perceptions of him, that I can finally crank up "Thriller" and spin a bit in his honor.

When I found out about my husband's sexual addiction, it felt like my emotional landscape faded from bright vivid color to monochrome shades of black and grey. I had three primary emotional settings: fear, anger (shading into full on rage) and heartbreaking sadness. And I'd display these by alternating between screaming, crying and sitting mute and paralyzed. My early experiences with 12 Step meetings were with partners of sex addicts who were in much the same state I was. There was a lot of anger and hurt in that musty little church room, and it was hard, as I slowly shed my own anger and hurt to see other people still hurting.

Of course, it would be nice to say that I felt for them and my sympathy for their pain tore at me. But that's not true at all. Everyone seemed to piss me off, and I was just oozing resentments. I went from being angry and frustrated at my husband to wanting to fix everyone else in the room. Why couldn't they just get over it already? It was so infuriating to listen to them go on about their awful partners without ever seeing how awful they were being. Clearly, they were doing recovery wrong.

So I stopped going. For about four years.

In the six months since I've returned to meetings, I've noticed that there's been a change: that triggered feeling I used to have has slipped away. Now, maybe these new meetings are healthier than my old ones — the format and philosophy of this group are certainly a much better fit for me — but I know that's not the whole story. After all, the newcomers who walk in almost always present that same bleak emotional landscape that I did: fear, anger, crushing sadness — they cry, they rage at the addict in their lives, they live in terror of the next blow the future may bring — but instead of feeling frustrated, I feel present, able to sympathize and empathize without getting swept away by my emotions. I'm able to remember those bleak days, without fearing that rich colors of my own world will fade away again.

I'm recognizing that the break I took, while I did it for a lot of negative reasons, did turn out to be a healthy one. When my own raw places were just starting to heal, going to meetings full of so much hurt and rage felt like ripping the scab off my wounds. I was too close to those hurts myself to be able to look back on them with anything approaching serenity. Now that those wounds have had time to heal, I find I'm much better able to accept others where they are rather than needing everyone else to feel better so that I can escape my own pain.

"Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?" Mark asked the other day, "You said, 'I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!'"

"Really? I said that?!"

"Yes, you did."

"That's completely insane, and exactly like something I would say," I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of my youth, the one that hadn't worked for me, the one with the one-size-fits-all "right" answer for everyone, the one I felt I had been burned and betrayed and disrespected by even more than my husband. God didn't seem like a path to recovery and healing, God seemed like a wedge that could force us apart. I remember looking desperately for some non-12-Step recovery programs, something we could attend without having to bring God into our lives.

I knew that the church and I weren't getting back together, so I was terrified that if Mark's path did lead him there, he was going to leave me, looking like a fool for having tried to work on our marriage. I had a fabulous fear scenario mapped out in my mind where he would join a big church community and ask me to join him, knowing I would say no, in the same way he used to ask me to go out with him on nights he knew I was busy and to cover up the fact that he had already scheduled a rendezvous with someone else. He would spend his Sundays away from me and have horrible affairs with women in the church until he eventually left me for some codependent Christian woman who was really into Christian sex addicts. Then his whole church would piously mock me and say I deserved to have my marriage fall apart for being such a heathen and it wouldn't have happened if I had worked harder and done better to join the right religion. Yep, the mention of the word "God" (of all things) would have my vivid, fear-based imagination straight at affairs, abandonment and widespread mockery in seconds flat.

At the time, I couldn't envision a world where we could have different spiritual beliefs and still respect each other. So to counteract this, in those first months of recovery, I alternately threatened to divorce him if he found the wrong kind of God and then dragged him off in a panic to meditation centers and temples, hoping I could get him to latch onto some other religion, hoping I could convert him before he got a chance to try to convert me.

The meditation centers never did stick for Mark, although they did (as I suspected they would) for me. Six years into this journey, I've found that those fears never played out. Mark and I don't seem to have exactly the same vision of God or the same ways of connecting, but we do respect each other's spiritual beliefs, and we've each seen the healing that our respective spiritual paths have brought us. I've slowly reclaimed the word God for myself and lost the fear that used to haunt it. I can laugh at the idea that I was so scared of that dreaded three-letter word that I would rather have run away from my marriage than endured it. And I can laugh with joy when Mark says "God is good" right out loud, in the middle of a tense moment, and I find it delicious and intimate and healing.

It was raining the night I first kissed my husband. The wind was hissing and howling through the bare branches of the trees, rattling the last of the dead leaves still clinging to their posts. Before we kissed, we twined our hands together and watched our arms weave against each other like snakes, mahogany and golden. And when at last, softly, lip met lip, I wanted to rush out into the wind and rain and throw my arms out and laugh wildly or scream at the sky, like Ophelia drowning or Lear going mad in the storm. I couldn't resist him, nor he me, and the intensity of the pleasure in that kiss rode the edge of being blinding pain. It was the kind of high that addicts seek to return to and sustain forever, that I, in my own issues around love and romance and sex, have always wanted to return to again and again with Mark.

Last night, the kids were asleep and after a long busy week, Mark and I finally had a moment alone together. We were lying in bed and he twined his hand into mine, a sweet prelude, just like that night we first kissed. Only this time the contrast -- between what magic I thought we had back then and all the craziness of addiction and fantasy and delusion and denial that overlaid it and everything else since -- was too much for me. I burst into tears and Mark said, "Whoa, you're sad. What's the matter?"

I fumbled to explain where that gesture, so reminiscent of an earlier time, had taken me and said, "You know, people who are just starting recovery sometimes ask me if it ever stops hurting. And I tell them it does, mostly. But I say that sometimes it comes back, just not as strong. This is one of those times. It's better, but the pain's still there. Sometimes I just miss that fantasy, that irresistible passion. I miss the person I used to be, when sex didn't seem so complicated."

I put my head on Mark's chest and he stroked my hair and shoulder while I lay there feeling angry and disgusted at myself for being so caught up in the past and in the unknown that I couldn't enjoy an intimate moment right here in the present. I worried that Mark would be angry at me and level the charges at me that I'd heard others had leveled at them (and that I'd even leveled at others myself): that I was "freaking out," being "neurotic" and "overly emotional," being a stereotypical woman "too uptight" to have sex. I mean, geez, why didn't I just say I had a headache while I was at it? I imagined he wanted me to "get over it" so that he could get his needs met without having to deal with my troublesome and annoying emotions. And I thought about a conversation I had with a friend who said healing from the violation and trauma of being in a relationship with a sex addict has similarities to healing from the violation and trauma of rape, and I tried (without much success) to be forgiving of myself for still struggling sometimes, even six years after disclosure.

Then Mark interrupted my thoughts as he ran his hand over my shoulder, sighed happily and said, "I love you, and I'm so glad to be here with you!" I looked up at his face, and he was beaming. "God is good!" he said, almost laughing with happiness. What? No sex and he, the sex addict, was still happy? To be here with me? Wow. I snuggled in close and kissed him, and then I started laughing. "You know," I said, "just a minute ago, I was missing that irresistible passion and addictive inability to say no. I was thinking it was the sexiest thing in the world and I was never going to be able to get moments like that back. Now, a minute later, I'm seeing the ability to say no as such a gift, and I don't have to get back there, because recovery is looking pretty darn sexy on you..."

Like many people, I walked into my first 12 Step meeting never expecting to wind up there, with no clue what to expect other than what Hollywood had taught me (which I soon learned was nothing accurate). The meetings I first started attending were for friends and family members of sex addicts, and they were tiny, just four or five women sitting in a circle in a church meeting room. After lengthy, scripted readings (those fifteen to twenty minutes certainly never make it into the movies), there would be time for "sharing."

Because our group was small, sharing was less structured than in larger groups. Anyone who wanted to speak would simply pipe up, "Hi, my name is..." followed by her name, and would talk, uninterrupted, until she was done or a timer beeped to signal her few minutes were up, whichever came first. Then there would generally be a long silence. I don't know what everyone else was doing during that time, whether they were thinking about what to say or taking in what had been said, but I know what I was doing: feeling breathless under the oppressive weight of the silence and struggling to figure out how I could break it. The silence was like an invisible telephone call from some 12 Step collection agency; the imaginary phone would ring and ring for an hour while I tried to ignore it, "Come on, pick me up! Come on, talk! If you don't, this is just going to go on forever." Wasn't someone going to pick that dang thing up? Did it have to be me?

And then there were the rules against crosstalk (which are rarely obeyed in dramatized 12 Step meetings because they make things so, well, undramatic) making the whole situation even more challenging. I couldn't open a conversation with the person who just spoke. I couldn't ask questions or give advice. I had to come up with something to say about emme/em (of all things). And to this whole room of strangers, sitting there without a word, thinking who knows what about me.

I gradually became more comfortable speaking up, and I even grew to like and appreciate the rules against crosstalk, but the silence, for a much longer time, continued to feel awkward and tense, something it was someone's job to fix. It's only recently that I've noticed how little I hear that invisible phone ringing for me now and how I've started to see those silences differently: as spaces that just are, like natural pauses between breaths. And while I'll still check in with myself to see whether or not there's anything I want to say, it will usually be just that: a quick check in, not a desperate scramble for words. If I find I don't have anything to share, I'll try to use my time wisely and join in the silence.