Journal Entry: June 20, 2014

I received a call yesterday from The Director of the Institute in Los Angeles that specializes in sex addiction treatment. I have met him once before, at my first trauma intensive appointment last month in Los Angeles. He’s a pretty entertaining and charismatic guy, when he wants to be. He will be running the 9-day Intensive Program my husband is attending. Blue Eyes leaves today and I am not allowed to see him during the entire nine days. Counting today, his travel day, that will be a total of ten days, no physical contact. Eight or nine days away from home is so reminiscent of the amount of time he spent out of town on a few of his business trips with the OW. My anxiety level is high. My son is out of town. I will be heading down to Los Angeles for additional treatment, but I don’t leave until Sunday. This means I will be home alone all weekend. Normally, no problem. But these days… big problem. I am scared and already feeling lonely. Such a strange feeling that I am already missing the perpetrator of my trauma, worried about him being gone, when for months what I wished for most days was for him to disappear. The phone call with The Director is part of the preparation for the Intensive Treatment Program. He has scheduled approximately 40 minutes of information gathering about my husband, from my point of view. The phone call actually lasted for 70 minutes. We talked generally about Blue Eyes and about his “proclivities.” The Director has met and worked with Blue Eyes already for his evaluation and assessment done earlier this month, but he wants my opinions, my impressions. He wants to know what I know. It is probable and even highly likely that there are things about my husband that he knows, that I do not even know. The therapists like to say they are protecting me by not allowing Blue Eyes to divulge further damaging information or disclosures, they all worry about my cutting, but I have begged Blue Eyes not to hold out on me. These people do not run our lives. I want to know the truth. I am fine. I am not going to harm myself. Just tell me the truth. I need the truth. Anyway, we talk about what kind of sex my husband and I have, what my husband likes. What do I know about his acting out behaviors of the past. Do I know anything about the women (I know a lot). Do I know how old they were. Sort of, I guess, mainly just what my husband has told me. Do I know if he ever acted out with underage girls. Certainly not to my knowledge. The last acting out partner was eight years OLDER than Blue Eyes!!! I explained to The Director how disturbed I was by the woman my husband had chosen to have a relationship with for eight years. I frankly did not understand it. She is not someone my husband would look at or touch in his “real life.” The Director told me a story about a patient of his. A young, attractive, wealthy attorney who is a sex addict. The man hired prostitutes and had numerous one night stands and picked up women in bars and generally had sex with anyone and everyone he could coax, coerce, or pay to have sex with him, but due to his addiction, he was unable to maintain any kind of relationship with a woman. One day he was so out of control and so desperate, that the guy left his fancy office in the middle of the day in his $4000 suit and went down to Hollywood and paid a crack whore $50 to give him a blow job. She had sores all over her face. As The Director said to me, that is sex addiction. Um, okay. Sounds like that guy was temporarily out of control and desperate. My husband chose this crazy woman over and over again. Plotted and planned and even used me to book the trips. I would rather that he had been completely out of control, and therefore caught in the act, even picked up by the police, versus receiving such a horrible and demeaning phone call from a woman who thinks my husband is in love with her. Anyway… at one point The Director admitted he really likes Blue Eyes, but that he was here to do his job and that job was to dig deep into my husband’s childhood, expose his demons, leave him raw and ready to accept the truth about himself in order to change and recover. He actually preferred if my husband and I had no contact at all, not even phone calls. Well, this was just not going to work for me. As much as I would like to say c’est la vie, sure, whatever. I knew I would have panic attacks and stress and anxiety if I went cold turkey from being with my husband almost 24/7 and in a state of trauma, to no contact. If I had really wanted that, I would have walked away months ago. I wanted check-ins throughout the day. I wanted to make sure he was okay. I did not even know where he was going to be. He was going to a celebrity’s retreat in this resort town about 90 minutes from LA, a friend of The Director. What? No. This is crazy. We are just regular people, and I need to speak to my husband every day. Finally The Director agreed to three check-in phone calls with me a day, in the morning before treatment, during lunch break, and a short call at night once he was back at his room. But they needed to be brief. Check-ins, to make sure we were both okay. Lengthy conversations were forbidden. The men in the treatment program were actually not allowed to stay at the house where they were receiving treatment. They all had to find alternative arrangements. The only hotel in town with vacancy was a very expensive spa resort, so we actually booked him a studio apartment on airbnb for a very reasonable price. It would not be up to the standards my husband was used to, but it would be adequate. The Director was trying to set rules that would need to be followed even when he was not in contact with the addicts, once they left treatment for the day, they needed to stay engaged in the process. I get it. This whole thing is scary to me. I wish he was going to a lock down facility.

The intensive would normally be held at the Institute’s headquarters in Los Angeles, with the attendees staying at surrounding hotels. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, they were unable to hold the seminar at their offices. They ended up moving it fairly last minute to the resort town north of Los Angeles. All the turmoil was causing quite a bit of unnecessary additional trauma for everyone involved. They lost a number of attendees in the process. My husband was still set on going. I was heading to Los Angeles for my treatment, so I would not be that far away from him. I am planning on spending the second weekend of this ordeal at the fancy spa hotel in the resort town he is in. We will meet up there on the last day, Sunday, and head to our favorite hotel in Santa Barbara. Something to look forward to.

To keep my mind occupied today, I ended up planning lunch with my friend D, and dinner with my parents. I dropped Blue Eyes off at the airport this morning. It was really, really difficult saying Good-bye. I didn’t want to. When I left the airport, I suddenly became anxious. As I passed the exit on the freeway near the airport that leads to the neighborhood of the other woman, I hoped, and prayed, that this would not be the weekend she decided to physically show up in my life, at my house, or whatever. And then, I could not think of anything else. I became obsessed that she was following me. I could feel her following me. I know now it was in my mind, but it seemed so real at the time. I drove quickly home and made sure all the doors and windows were locked. And then I sat in my house, alone and lonely, waiting for D to pick me up for lunch. Sometimes I cannot believe how much my life has changed, how much I have changed.