important first steps in healing from this personal crisis is telling your story. It begins with the crisis and how you’ve been lied to. Living with addiction means your truth is often skewed to fit the reality of the addict, regardless of whether you knew addiction existed or not. The purpose of this exercise is to validate what has happened by helping you tell your story. Narrating what happened and the impact it had on you becomes your truth of all that has occurred. It lays bare your voice; important, powerful, and freeing, since it is no one else’s truth but your own. You may have told no one the full story. Possibly you have had to share pieces of it so as to not bring more pain and embarrassment to yourself.
Narrating your story gives a beginning and an end to what has occurred. It reveals in a more concrete way all that you have gone through. The pieces of the story have been just that—pieces, scattered like a mosaic or puzzle without any shape or definition. Telling what happened becomes a way to make real perhaps what has not felt as real as now.
Writing down your story has many benefits, as it
Following are questions pertaining to the events leading up to and including how you learned that you were being lied to. The questions are designed to allow you to trace back to the beginning when you discovered the behaviors. Often a place to start is the day you learned something that irreparably altered what you had previously believed or thought. Usually this is considered the crisis event—a day like no other, for it was the catalytic moment that prompted you to face your partner’s behaviors in a way you never had before. For some, this event extends over a few days or weeks.
EXAMPLES
While driving home from a work trip, I got a call from my husband, but he wasn’t calling to talk. He had inadvertently phoned me, and as I listened, I heard him talking to another woman. Then I heard them going to a hotel room and eventually I listened to them having sex. Although before this time I feared he might have had an affair, it was this phone call that changed everything between us. It’s been two years and I still can’t stop thinking about what I heard that day.
It was a week before our tenth anniversary. It’s a date I will never forget. I don’t know what to call the day—an anniversary?
Right after Thanksgiving 2006, I noticed my husband was taking the dog for walks every evening, something he never did before. He would take his cell phone with him. So when he was asleep one night I checked his call log and called the number that he’d called while walking the dog. A woman answered and I hung up. I decided not to do anything until after the holidays. In January, I hired a detective to follow him on a trip to Washington and found he was having an affair with an escort. I confronted him with the facts and told him I had gone to see an attorney who recommended that I see a therapist.
EXAMPLES
I was visiting a friend who lived two hours from my home and I checked my email to find one from a woman telling me she was having an affair with my husband. I sat there in disbelief. I was stunned and then I got into his email account and found hundreds of emails from this woman and several others. I didn’t know what to do. My friend’s kids were eating breakfast and I couldn’t tell my friend what I just learned. I called my husband and told him I needed to see him at home and the tone of my voice must have scared him because he said he’d meet me there in two hours. I drove home and it was the longest drive of my life! To this day, I still have no idea how I got home. I was shaking and crying and nearly drove off the road.
My husband and I had been in couples’ therapy and I suspected my husband was having an affair. He denied it repeatedly. One day I signed in to check my email and he had left his email account open. I found emails from three different women. I printed out those emails. I now had facts to back up my suspicions.
