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| Photo credit: Image by Donna62 on Flickr |
During my time in S-Anon, I met a woman named Sue.** Sue began attending 12 Step after discovering that her husband, Mike, was a sex addict and had spent their twenty years of marriage enmeshed in a double life that included porn, strip clubs and prostitution.
Sue was angry about Mike's betrayal and the thousands of dollars he was spending every year on his addiction and the lies he told about himself. But more than that, she was exploding with anger at the lies he'd told her about herself, and that (worse) she'd believed. Mike had spent years berating her, judging her, blaming her, convincing her she was crazy, making her feel unworthy of love and affection, and by the time that Sue found her way to a 12 Step group for partners of sex addicts, she was bitter and aching from a lifetime of verbal and emotional abuse, both from Mike and her family of origin. With the relationship damaged beyond repair, Sue and Mike divorced.
Sue would spend her S-Anon shares focusing not on her own recovery, but venting about what a horrible person Mike was and detailing the many ways in which he'd selfishly hurt her. And she generalized her experiences with her husband to her understanding of all addicts, who were, in her mind, uniformly manipulative, controlling, self-centered, narcissistic, cold and emotionally distant. In spite of the fact that she had divorced Mike, she was still obsessed, not only with what he had done, but what he was currently doing: from what he was saying about her to who he was seeing.
The one source of joy and strength in her life was her relationship with God and her church. While she had been disappointed in her church community and her pastor for feeling that she should have been able to forgive Mike, stand by him and keep her marriage together, her faith and love of God transcended these hurts.
For me, Sue was like a human incarnation of those painful yoga poses, the ones that make you want to vomit, the ones you really need to work on, the ones that have something to teach you. She made me deeply uncomfortable; I was often frustrated or annoyed, and sometimes flat out angry. My experiences and relationships -- with my family of origin, my husband, the church and God -- were all vastly different from hers. Yet when I tried to share, again and again her bitter anger shut me down.
I couldn't share that I passionately loved my husband, that he was a good and caring man with a problem; Sue would tell me that he was bad and abusive and I was too deluded and weak to see it or leave. I couldn't share that I had different religious and moral beliefs, or was struggling with the concept of a higher power; Sue would say, "God is there for us whether we want Him to be or not, and one day you will come back to God and the church. It's the only way you can heal."
Her anger at her husband (and by extension mine) and her patronizing insistence that I'd come around, away from my own spiritual beliefs to find a real God, her God, grated on me, yet I'd be drawn back to her again and again. I couldn't seem to pull myself out of a relationship with her.
I was talking to Sue few months ago, and she began speculating yet again about my eventual return to the church. And I thought, "For crying out loud, woman! Jesus and I broke up. We signed the divorce papers. We're done. This relationship has been damaged beyond repair! I've got a new boyfriend, and Jesus and I are not getting back together!" And then it hit me: my relationship with a cold and abusive church is like Sue's with her cold and abusive husband, and my relationship with my loving but flawed husband is like Sue's with her loving but flawed church.
Like Sue, I am working through that toxic anger, although mine is directed not at my husband, but at the church. I am not looking to reconcile with the church, any more than Sue is looking to reconcile with her husband. But I am working, through the God of my own understanding, to find forgiveness and be able, not just to divorce the church, but to stop obsessing about what it is saying about me and who it is seeing now and how it verbally abused me and made me feel unloved when we were together.
* Actually, I'm a big fan of Jesus, but the title does capture the gist of things and is catchier than "the church is my ex" or "Christianity is my ex", so I ran with it.
** Sue is a composite of many of the stories I've heard from spouses of addicts over the years, including my own ,and none of the experiences I've attributed to Sue are unique to any one woman I've met. The narrative just worked better using a single person.
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