Abandon Him to Jesus
“You didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it, you can’t control it.” This is what the therapist told me when I went for a “couples weekend” at the treatment facility where my husband was spending 60 days. I had spent most of my marriage believing the opposite of this about my husband’s pornography addiction. If only I were skinnier, sexier, more fun in the bedroom he wouldn’t struggle OR If only I could create the right boundaries for him and provide the accountability he needed then I could control this addiction for him and then I would feel safe. But, when I learned that what I thought I had under control was so completely out of control (and always had been), I was forced to confront this hard but liberating truth: I can’t control T.’s sex addiction. I can’t cure it. It’s beyond me. He’s truly sick.
The first step in S-ANON states: We admitted we were powerless over sexaholism – that our lives had become unmanageable. Prior to his exposure (which I share here), I had seen only the very tip of the iceberg of T.’s addiction, but when I discovered the full scale of it became clear I was powerless.
I was shuffling around the house in the fog of shock on D-Day (the day true discovery began) trying to pack my stuff. He was there waiting to see me and the babies off. He and I weren’t really speaking for the most part. I couldn’t speak. He was nervously trying to figure out how to lock down his devices (as if he/we hadn’t already tried that). I don’t know if he was actually attempting to make me feel better by telling me this, but I remember stopping in the kitchen and looking him in the eye (which was terribly hard to do that day) and saying “You’re on your own now, you have to figure this out if you are going to get your life together, I am not going to babysit you.”
This was a decisive shift for me. I didn’t realize it as such at the time, but this was step one for me. It was letting go. It was freedom. It was taking the responsibility for his sobriety and recovery and putting it in his hands, where it belonged.
I was recently reading an account of a “defeated, frazzled wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn.” The woman was at an Al-Anon meeting reporting her woes once again to the group of how she “kept dragging him in before dawn so that the neighbors wouldn’t see him.” Finally an older woman came up to her one day after a meeting and said, “Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him.”
That’s it. Got to leave our addicts where Jesus “flang” them.
And I love what this woman’s sweet words remind us: we can trust them to Jesus. Or, as another recovery friend always said “Abandon him to Jesus.” I worried so much after I left that T. would become depressed and perhaps suicidal. But, I wouldn’t be sane, he probably wouldn’t be sober, and I doubt we’d be married if I had stuck around and tried to manage his recovery for him. That may work for a little while, but that system will break down. Instead, by divine mercy, I made a decision to turn him over to God and trust that if he found his rock bottom, then he would find the Rock of Ages there. And that was hope. He wasn’t truly alone. He didn’t need me to get sober. He needed something so much bigger than me.
