In the dream, I was driving on a highway laid out like silver thread between my home and the nearest big city. My husband was seated next to me, smiling, and I could feel the kids safely at home, laughing with their babysitter. It was just before sunset; the day's dying rays were golden on the water and the softly swaying dry grass as we approached the bridge.

My husband looked at me, and for a split second, I lost focus. I stopped looking at the road, and the car simply drifted serenely off the bridge and started plunging down, down before I knew we were in danger. We fell like Alice down the rabbit hole, falling for so long we seemed to hang suspended in the golden air. I felt like one often does feel in an accident: as if I were seeing everything in slow motion and if only my body would move as fast as my mind, I could do something to prevent the inevitable moment looming ahead.  But the water waited unyielding below us. And I knew we were going to die at the end of that long fall. I had killed both of us in that momentary flicker of attention. My children were going to grow up without parents.  I just hoped they would be asleep when the babysitter called and called the cell phones that would ring on without answer, wondering why we were so late.

I turned to Mark to say I was sorry for killing him; sorry that he was paying the price for my inattention. And he lookedsaidthought, "We all make mistakes, sometimes very bad ones." But he didn't blame me. He held out his hand and we sat, holding hands and falling, waiting for the impact that never came, as I woke with a start. I sat up, shivering, as the images flashed on my waking mind in the cold gray dawn, and I assigned the dream the moral: "I am feeling guilty for not paying enough attention, not being present enough, for my kids."

Irrational as I know it is, I have been terrified of driving that highway ever since. The dream was so vivid, that when I enter the stretch of road leading to the bridge I can see my dream self plunging off the side. If I hit an uneven stretch of pavement and the car jolts or swerves slightly, I feel my heart racing, my body taut with anxiety. I fear that at any minute, I might lose focus, lose control and lose everything. It only takes an instant to make a mistake from which there is no recovery.

I was driving that highway today, with my kids unusually occupied with drawing in the back seat, when I started to feel numb with panic thinking about the bridge. My kids' lives depended on me. Other drivers lives depended on me. And am I really to be trusted? My hand could slip on the steering wheel. Or jerk. Or freeze. What if I have a seizure? What if I fall asleep? What if I get a brain aneurysm? What if I suddenly become diabetic right here in the car and my blood sugar becomes unstable and I pass out? What if I panic so much I black out?

Of course, the only real problem was the panic, which was stubbornly refused to respond to either rational thought, meditation techniques or faith. I eyed the traffic, wondering where it might be safe to pull off and breathe, grumbling to myself, "I so need to talk to my doctor about anxiety meds. This is ridiculous. I can't function. What is really going on here? This isn't just about a stupid dream."

And my mind, as if relieved to have finally been pressed with a direct question, brought up an image of my destination: a park that formed a green oasis in the barren concrete, steel and glass of the city. We were meeting friends there, visiting from out of town. But eight years ago, on the day he hit bottom, my husband went on a different kind of visit there: a picnic to that park with one of his... What's the word for it? Lovers seems too intimate, mistresses too urbane, and acting out partners, too sterile. In any case, they met. The picnic was the appetizer, the foreplay, the prelude, the rising anticipation. Rolling the food on their tongues, then wiping their lips, packing the remains and walking, toward her house, her bed. I can see the way his hand slipped down the small of her back as she pulled him close under a tree for a kiss. Right there in the park. For anyone to see.

We were going to drive past the street to her old house on the way to the park. We were driving on the highway Mark had traveled, secretly, back and forth, from her house to our own. Was this panic -- over this highway, over loss, over lack of control, over mistakes from which there is no recovery -- not about the dream but a twisted response to past trauma? Was the dream, perhaps, not really about quite what I thought it was either? Those thoughts washed through me like water, like crystal clear liquid truth, taking the panic and the looming shadow of future annihilation away with them, leaving me staring at an old scar, still sometimes tender to the touch.

Just days before I discovered my husband Mark's sex addiction, we were shopping in Target, when we passed a young woman.  "Hi, Mark!" she chimed, smiling brightly.  Then she turned to her shopping companion, a man who was glowering at Mark, and said, "Jimmy, this is my friend Mark, you know, the one I've told you about.  I've been having such a great time with him lately!"  Then turning back to us, she introduced Jimmy as her boyfriend and chatted for a while before cheerfully parting with: "Well, it's been such fun to run into you here.  Bye, Mark!  See you tomorrow?"

"Um, yes," Mark replied, with much less enthusiasm than she showed.

I had no idea who this woman was, although she obviously knew Mark well enough, had been spending time with him lately and was planning on seeing him again tomorrow.  As she walked away, I whispered to Mark, "Who was that?"

"That's, um, Ashley."

"Who's Ashley?  I don't think you've ever mentioned her before."

"Really?  I haven't?  She, um, works at Starbucks."

"She seems to know you pretty well."

"Well, I go in there every day, and the servers get to know the regular customers.  It's good business.  You know, they learn what you like and they try to make you feel welcome, so you'll keep coming back.  That kind of thing."

And it was true that Mark was a regular at Starbucks.  He was out of work at the time, and I was pregnant and a stay—at—home mom to our two year old son, which made our home a less than perfect environment for concentrating on a job search.  So, each morning Mark would get up at about the time he would usually go to work, take his laptop and head to Starbucks where he would work on his résumé, send out job queries via e-mail and do research online.  This much I knew.  Apparently, along with the work finding a job, he spent time chatting with Ashley.

Still, as surprised and uncomfortable as I felt about this encounter, that was Mark — at least as I knew him then.  Of course, he would spend time chatting with folks at Starbucks; Mark was always sweet, charming and friendly.  And of course, having a nice regular customer like Mark would make Ashley's work easier and more pleasant.  I was a little crazy (as was Ashley's boyfriend) to feel suspicious about this, wasn't I?  Just more proof, I told myself, of my irrational and jealous mind, as I tried to put thoughts of Ashley out of my head.

And I might have been successful at forgetting her if it weren't for the fact that, days later, I found out about Mark's sex addiction and the whole picture changed.  I found out that Mark had Ashley's e-mail address and had been carrying on a flirtatious private correspondence even outside of business hours.  And Ashley wasn't the only one: Mark's Palm Pilot had a list of women he'd met during his mornings at Starbucks, each one with a physical description and a short summary of her interests, likes and dislikes.  He would use the notes to woo the women by showing how interested he was in the things that interested them, talking to one about the latest episode of CSI and another about jazz music.

Among the many demands I made of Mark in those early days after disclosure was one that he not visit any Starbucks ever again.  But since giving up his sexual compulsions turned out to be easier than giving up his tall mocha frappuccinos, we compromised on not visiting the Starbucks where Ashley worked again.

Tonight, Mark and I went out for coffee.  Mark headed for the Starbucks closest to our home, but I reminded him that it closes early, and suggested we go a bit further to a larger Starbucks that is open later.  As we were sitting there enjoying our gingerbread spiced beverages, I said, "I want to do some writing tonight, but I can't think of what to write."

"Write about Starbucks," he said.

I looked at my drink and the picture of the red velvet cupcake on the wall and couldn't think what I'd have to write about Starbucks.  It actually took a few minutes before it hit me.  Starbucks.  There was a time when I couldn't come anywhere near this place without being thrown into an attack of post-traumatic stress.  I couldn't walk in without wondering which of the baristas Mark would have slept with if he hadn't found recovery when he did.

"Oh," I said, minutes later, "I could write about Starbucks."

"That's what I said," said Mark.  "See!  I am your muse!"

"It's just that I forgot."

"You forgot?  And this was the Starbucks!"

"Hey, look how healed I am!" I said, and then joked, knowing I'd long ago let up on forcing Mark to boycott this particular store, "Wait.  This was the Starbucks?  Then you're not even supposed to be in here! I thought I told you never to come in here again!"

"But I'm here with you, because you wanted to come, baby," he laughed, "Besides we let go of all that years ago, remember?"

"Yes." I said, smiling, "I guess we did."

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.

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..."

This weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to hear a sex addict from my husband's recovery group speaking about his experiences. I know my husband's story, about as intimately as anyone else can; in a way, it's my story too. Mark read his First Step — the narrative of his life in his addiction — to me the night before he presented it to his 12 Step group, and it moved us both to tears. I've read the stories of other sex addicts in books and on blogs. I've had the chance to hear Patrick Carnes and other experts on sex addiction speak. But hearing someone else's story of sex addiction and recovery — live, with all the nuance that comes from facial expression and vocal inflection — was new to me.

I can't share the story here, as it's not mine to tell, but I did find myself wishing, as I listened, that everyone could hear — really hear, with minds and hearts open — a story like the one I heard. I wished that everyone could hear the pain and the shame and the compulsivity behind years of sexual encounters. I wished everyone could hear the remorse and regret for the pain caused. But most of all, I wished everyone could hear the gratitude, the joy and hope of recovery, the promise of change.

As my husband and I were driving home, he said, "I'm so glad that you got to be part of the kind of amazing sharing I'm privileged to witness every week." And I told him that I was so glad too. The power and beauty of the journey I heard was the kind of thing that almost made me wish everyone could go through the pain and shame of addiction to experience the gift of living a life so full of love and grace.