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| Image credit: Photo by Falcifer on Flickr |
When my husband started recovery around sex addiction and I started working on my own codependency, we didn't share our struggles with our extended family, but we did share with quite a few close and trusted friends. And I shared with people in an online group I was part of, and with people at meetings. And I started my (pseudonymous) blog and shared there. Yeah, let's talk about sex addiction, baby!
But our problems with debt? Oh, now that's shameful stuff. The same close friends we shared with and cried to about our marriage problems haven't heard much at all about money. I've made passing mention of money problems in my writing on my own blog, but for the most part, I've focused on our work around Mark's sex addiction. Our abuse of credit has been a sick secret between the two of us, something that sat as a sickening lump in our stomachs.
A little over a year ago, I hit my codependency bottom around debting. Mark and I were in massive (tens of thousands of dollars of) credit card debt. Each month we were spending far more than we took in, and we were running out of credit fast. I have a friend who says that in America, "having no money" really means "having no credit," and it's true. For years we had been able to float on credit; I felt uncomfortable about it, but I couldn't see what to do. I cut back as much as I could, I took on what jobs I could, but I couldn't do enough, and especially not alone. I saw a time looming ahead when the credit would run out, and that pending wave just rushed nearer and grew larger, no matter how much controlling or denying or ignoring I did. I couldn't see how we were going to stem the bleeding, let alone pay back the debt. Over and over I said to Mark, "We're really in financial trouble," but he didn't seem to hear me, and he certainly didn't do what I wanted: CHANGE! NOW! And help me do it too. (I'm not codependent. Shut up!)
So, one day I stopped. I handed him the bills and the checkbook and the Internet passwords to our accounts, and said, "I can't do this anymore. You figure it out. Nothing is going to get paid not the mortgage, not the phone bill, not the water, not the electricity, not the credit cards nothing is going to happen anymore until you make it happen." And it was when he tried to pay the bills when he saw for himself how much more was going out than coming in, how much we were paying in interest alone every month, how close we were to really having no more money left that he started attending Debtor's Anonymous meetings, and cutting back on spending, and talking to creditors and lawyers, and looking for solutions.
We are in a much better place now than we used to be. We haven't yet lost the house and I haven't yet had to go back to work full time, but the stress and shame around the debt and the fear of losing our home have been at times more intense than the stress and shame of sex addiction and the fear of losing our marriage. Money is this thing that smart people like us should know how to manage responsibly. Sex can get out of hand, but spending? So, here I am, pouring the intimate details of my marriage out to the Internet, but my bank account. Shh! Don't ask about that. It's shameful.
This post originally published at The Second Road on August 8, 2008.
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