This, by the way, is the point at which blogging experts say you shouldn't blog. You should always put your best stuff out there and dazzle the Internet multitudes. But I say... Um... Ah, whatever. I don't have it in me to come up with a dazzling response to that either. So, here, my friends, are your bullet points:

• I was working on a guest post for a blog on disability and spirituality that I think many of you will love: Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places. The post won't be up for a week or two. I'll post a link when it is, but do feel free to poke around and get to know Amy Julia in the meantime.
• I've been working on my 1st Step, in depth this time, which has consisted of writing up a history of my life and relationships. I've used a lot of blog material, and it's about (gulp) 50 pages long, which is awful and fabulous. Awful, because I need to edit it down to about 8 in order to present it to my 12 Step group and fabulous because I started this blog with the idea of writing a memoir about my marriage and I've found I have a really solid foundation for that. When I read it to my cosponsor, she and I both cried.
• I have been celebrating! My husband and I have 7 years in recovery, and since many of you know that discovery and recovery happened when I was very pregnant with my daughter, you can probably guess that we've been preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Janie's birth. We've also been celebrating a sobriety anniversary for my husband, who has 4 years since his last major slip. Yay!

I understand, very well, the fear and misunderstanding that surrounds addiction, and sex addiction in particular (why do you think I blog under a pseudonym?), but this kind of sensationalist coverage of recovery meetings is the worst way I can think of to address those fears and concerns. It would be like busting into a closed AA meeting to try to talk about drunk driving. After all, there really are (insert ominous drum roll) cars outside those meetings and (insert slow motion negative image) some folks convicted of drunk driving inside them, some of whom (insert scary music) slip in their recovery and show up drunk. Yep, folks. It's true.

As my husband and I always say, it's fine to worry about the sex addicts in the meetings. They're addicts. They've screwed up and done hurtful things to themselves and others. Sometimes (but not always) they've done illegal things, and in some small minority of those cases the things they did posed a danger to others. Their behavior is compulsive, and there's no cure, so they may well act out again. Of course, it's wise and healthy to maintain one's safety by exercising good boundaries. It's wise to ask questions and learn (although certainly not by busting into a 12 Step meeting and outing everyone). But if viewers really wanted something scary to worry about, they'd worry about the folks who aren't in those meetings and who aren't in recovery. Because active addiction, with no glimmer of recovery, is what's really scary.

My husband and I left the kids with a babysitter and went out on a date last night. Mark had a work crisis he wanted to deal with before leaving the office, so to save time, I decided to meet him there rather than waiting for him to meet me someplace else. When I do have to meet Mark at work, I tend to make sure it is after hours, when his coworkers are unlikely to be in the office. Visiting him at work always provokes anxiety in me, because he has a history of acting out in his sex addiction with coworkers, most recently by taking a female coworker out for a dinner date about a year ago.

I'm not ready to meet or interact with any of the women he works with, in spite of the fact that Mark says he has not been physically intimate with anyone there, even Candace, the woman he took out to dinner.

In my earlier days, I would have spent a huge amount of frantic energy trying to find out "the truth" about his relationship with each and every woman he came into contact with during the day. I would have tried to find evidence to conclusively prove or disprove his assertion that he did not have sex with Candace. I would have reviewed the 24/7 videos from the monitoring system and GPS tracking system I'd have had installed on his body (if such a thing existed and my codependent craziness had progressed along the path it was taking). I would have looked for some indication about whether or not I should feel hurt and whether or not I had a right to be upset.

But here's the thing I've found as I've worked on my own healing: It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what he actually did or didn't do. Even with conclusive proof that nothing more has happened than what I already know about, I would still feel hurt. I still wouldn't want to meet any of his female coworkers, because regardless of whether or not I should find them triggering and upsetting, I do. My feelings are real, regardless of the circumstances, and the past still haunts me. And that's what I have to deal with by continuing to work on myself.

Image credit: Photo by Lst1984 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

One evening four years ago, my husband headed out to attend one of his weekly Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. What was unusual about this particular meeting was that I had begged him not to go.

Those meetings help him. They help me. They saved our marriage. And that generally makes me a big fan of his nights out 12 stepping. However, the day before this meeting, I had undergone an abortion to end my pregnancy with what would have been our third child. Exhausted and depressed by everything that had happened in the last few days, I didn't want him to leave me for several hours to care for the kids and get them off to bed.

But Mark was adamant about going. He was still fairly early in recovery and simply didn't trust himself. If he gave himself permission to skip just one meeting, he believed he would use that to let himself justify skipping other meetings for other reasons. It felt too dangerous to him, like standing at a cliff's edge where one wrong step would send him plunging back into active addiction. He called my friend Judy and asked her to stay with me and help with the kids while he went out. And off he went.

I was devastated. As much as I love Judy and was happy to have her help and company, the person I wanted with me right then was the person twined up in my sorrow, the father of the child I decided not to have: my husband. When Mark was active in his addiction, our family often came second to his sexual acting out. And now that he was in recovery, it felt like our family still came second to this new 12 step love affair of his.

"For once -- just this one time," I thought, "why can't holding my hand when I really need you there be first on the list?" I knew this was an exaggeration. I knew Mark had been there for me, and put me ahead of himself many times in our marriage. I knew that was why I was still there working. So, I tried to breathe and remember the big picture greater good of his recovery, but it still hurt like hell. And I kept holding on to those festering resentments, never fully forgiving him for doing what he felt he needed to do that night.

Two years later, Mark came home between 9 and 10 p.m. on a meeting night, just as he always did. There wasn't anything special about that night to me, and I can't call it out in my memory. It was just part of the routine. Mark goes to meetings and gets home late a few nights a week. I feed the kids dinner, put them to bed and give him a kiss when he gets home. But that night, whichever it was, was different for Mark, because he didn't go to a meeting.

A woman he works with, who works for him, had broken up (again) with her on again off again boyfriend. So Mark asked her out on a date. Knowing that I wouldn't expect him home until later that night, he took her out to dinner and then drove her back to her apartment. He shared his slip with his group shortly afterwards, but it took him a year to get himself to a place where he could share it with me. And it's taken me a year, likewise, to share anything beyond the fact that, on the day he told me, I put myself to bed to watch the rain with a pint of gourmet ice cream for comfort and didn't get up until the next day.

It's hard, at times like that, not to take sex addiction personally. It's hard not to see those actions as separate rather than inextricably connected. It's hard not to rage and say, "You couldn't skip a meeting to be with me the day after we aborted our baby, but you could skip a meeting to take another woman out on a date?!" It's hard not to feel that those actions reflect on his love for me and for our family. It's hard to see those actions as symptoms of a disease.

I could have (I have) worked through relapses on other occasions. But to relapse on a meeting night was the greatest breech of trust of all, because in my desire to bury my anger and pain and resentment, I had elevated meetings to a level of sacredness. I had made meetings a sign that he valued our family and our relationship enough to work hard on himself and his problems. Those meetings were the talisman that I thought was keeping us all safe.

But addiction doesn't respect the sacred: not meetings or family heirlooms or pets or family or friends. It will destroy anything, sell anything, steal anything, lie to and about anything and anyone to feed its hunger. Those meetings keep it at bay, one day at a time, but nothing ever keeps us completely safe. And however it feels to me, I know in my mind (if not my heart) that skipping a meeting to go on a date doesn't mean he doesn't love me, it just means he's still an addict.

Addiction is a disease, a mental illness, a neurological disorder; it causes compulsive behavior and distorts an addict's perception of reality. It is not a moral failing, a personality trait, a lack of willpower, an inherent laziness or selfishness, a careless disregard for other people. Like most diseases, this knows no boundaries of race, religion, socio-economic class, moral character or personality type.

It doesn't strike "bad" people and leave "good" people untouched; the terms "good person" and "addict" are not mutually exclusive. People can be mean, lazy, selfish, egomaniacal, narcissistic assholes and addicts. Or they can also be kind, gentle, loving, hardworking, caring people and addicts. The nature of the disease and its progression causes addicts to lose themselves, so that loving, hardworking person may slowly fade away, just like someone afflicted with other neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's. Good people may struggle hard against the disease, fight for years, but if untreated, will be whipped into servitude, becoming slaves to the compulsions, caring and working only for the addiction. It's merciless. It's painful. It's debilitating.

It often helps me to think of addiction as a physical disease. The way I think of this disease, it is like living with a digestive disorder: something messy and smelly that leads to metaphorical vomit and feces all over your life. It is a degenerative disease for which there is no cure, and left untreated, it can lead to death. Treatment can control, and even stop the symptoms, but even with proper treatment, there is always the possibility that symptoms may reoccur. This condition must be monitored constantly by your partner, in conjunction with a group of specialists, and treatment must occur daily, occupying several hours each week for life. Depending on the type of treatment, it may cost thousands of dollars a year, or initially even thousands of dollars a month. Most insurance will not cover it. Dealing with the disease requires radical changes to lifestyle, habits and expectations for the patient and the entire family.

There's no controlling when or where it will strike. You may go for months or years without an episode. You may become complacent and forget about it. Stress exacerbates the disorder, so there's the constant threat of vomiting or loss of bowel control at your child's wedding or your big anniversary party or the first week of his new job or in front of your boss at an important event. It will ruin your furniture, your floors and some of your most prized possessions. It will embarrass you. It may cause friends, neighbors and family members to decline to spend time with your family. You may hide it from them to avoid losing them altogether, just as your partner hid it from you.

Addiction: it's dirty, it's messy, it's disgusting, it's painful. It can be treated, but not cured, and it's with you for life.

I'm going to leave you with that and come back tomorrow with more on why partners stick around. But for those of you who are not involved with addicts, who have a relationship with a normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill spouse or partner, ask yourselves, would you stay -- not with an addict, but with your present partner, if you discovered that person had the digestive disease I just described? Would you leave that vomiting fool or stick around? And why?

I'd love to hear some of you "normies" (um, normal people) share. So, leave me a comment with some thoughts, or the URL of a blog post if you decided to blog about it yourself. Addicts and codies can just tell me whether or not they feel like they have more than their share of metaphorical shit in life.

Perhaps you've found yourself up all night crying because a damaged loved one has been doing something crazy and stupid, and you've fallen down all twelve steps right to the basement of despair, and your eyes are swollen to puffy slits in your face, and you have a visitor coming to stay with you who ought not to be privy to the details of your pain or your loved one's insanity, and you think to yourself, "How am I going to fix my face and these slits for eyes that are a dead giveaway that I've been up all night crying?" I'll tell you how, my friends. Here's a little something I learned from Damsel in Distress: Preparation H isn't just for your hemorrhoids anymore. It takes down facial swelling like a dream.

Yes, I smeared hemorrhoid cream on my face, and those swollen eyes disappeared. I looked like a normal person and greeted my guest with a smile. And I thought I'd pass along this face saving (pun brutally intended) beauty tip to all you weepy codependents who may find yourself in similar need one day.