I think I'm a sex addict

[myotherface]

I know my message will mean a pile on of people saying nasty things to me. But I deserve so it here it goes. Been with dh for 13 years, three young kids. I've had mental health problems since my teens, been through every possible eating disorder and get really severe depressive episodes.

I've been really unhappy in our marriage for years. On paper it's all perfect. Both in our dream jobs plus earning good money, kids happy and healthy, we share housework and childcare 50/50, have great sex life etc. But dh can be really nasty and sarcastic to me and dd on regular basis. It's been so bad that I've tried to leave multiple times. Last time was just before lockdown. I really thought I was going to do it this time. But as always he talked and cried and talked and cried and begged until I felt unable to leave. I sank into depression and didn't know how to cope. Normally I'd just get depressed or binge eat, or go on extreme diets or burn myself in places where kids would never notice. This time I turned to Internet and started having sex with men who were total strangers and not even attractive to me. At first it was horrible and I almost passed out each time. Then it became addictive. The attention, the sex with a new person..

A few days ago we had an argument about whether we should split up or not. I said yes, hubby no. For some reason I decided to tell him I've been sleeping around. He said he forgives me. He says it's not my fault but my mental health's. He's saying he's not angry but just wants me to get better.

I feel awful. For the right reasons and for totally the wrong reasons too. He's being lovely. I obviously am a bad person and don't deserve him. How can he forgive me when I've hurt him so badly? And what about the children.. What kind of a mum does this? And then at the same time I feel like I can't stop. I know I have to but I feel such desperate urge to go back and continue it. I feel like I can't survive without it. I can't see anything enjoyable in this life and those moments were the only moments I felt something. I think I'd rather end my life but can't do it to the children. I know that would be the end of their chances for a normal life with good mental health. I have no idea what to do. I'm already in therapy, working hard. I know I'm a totally evil person with a rotting soul and have to stop. But if I do I feel like I'm going to be a living dead for the rest of my life.

Now there.. Feel free to lynch me. I definitely deserve it.

The only thing you deserve is love and help .You're not well .Have you talked to you're GP recently ?

Just wanted to send a hug and . I hope nobody lynches you because it's brave of you to post about this. Hopefully somebody knowledgeable will be along soon.

Sending a hug. You are suffering and need help. Being honest with yourself is the first part. Have you looked at the sexaholics anonymous website? There is a sexual addiction test on there that you can look at, and lots of support of you feel it would be appropriate. Good luck xx

www.sauk.org/

You are NOT an evil person with a rotting soul, at ALL. Nothing in your post would make that true or would make anyone think that.

I would continue with the therapy. If it's not the right therapist for you then change it. Considering your history of SH, it seems that this is another way of harming yourself. Good luck OP I hope you come out the other side

Thank you so much everyone. I was genuinely expecting people to say I'm a bad person for cheating on my husband. And I feel I'd deserve this. It has been a mixture of 50% using is as self harm and 50% trying to feel something and to desperately want anyone to find me attractive when I feel so worthless and ugly. Needless to say it hasn't helped. I feel better for that couple of hours I'm with someone or when I'm messaging with people but then worse any other time. I know I need to stop but even just not having messaged with any of these men since dh found out has been torture. I feel so agitated and don't know how to calm myself down. I'm managing to cope okay at work for moments but then that horrible agitation is back. Feeling like I can't sit still, like I want to pull my own hair out. Obviously making it worse that I know dh is suffering too and I don't even know what I feel about him.

My therapist is amazing though and therapy is going really well. I 100% trust him and he feels I'm making steady progress despite things being still pretty bad. I called the gp yesterday. She was really inappropriate and laughed about some of my really dysfunctional behaviours. And she doesn't even know about the multiple affairs. But she said she'd write to the cmht consultant I was under last year and I'm hoping she'll think of something new to do medication wise at least.

I'm so grateful for all the kindness from all of you.

It's somehow showing an old username instead of mine. Just not to confuse..

Nobody should make any nasty comments either about you, or what you have done until they have walked a mile in your shoes.

I don't have the knowledge about mental health issues to recommend any potential courses of actions, but I do wish you all the very best and hope that you can live your best life and be at peace with yourself.

You are not an evil person, you are an unwell person.

You've clearly been having a shitty time since way before lockdown and whilst using sex as a coping mechanism in this way isn't healthy, feeling the way you do about giving it up is entirely understandable. It's been the pinprick of light through a shitstorm of dark clouds and of course letting that go is painful, but you obviously know deep down that's what you need to do.

You've already taken massive steps by contacting your GP and MH team and being honest with your H. I really hope you get the support you need and deserve going forward and manage to make a happier life for yourself

I am not qualified to help you, but l can send flowers on here 🌸 and if l could I would send them to you in real life too. Searching for something is not wrong. Sex is not wrong.

Thank you everyone. I still do think I am a despicable person and should have been able to choose a different way of coping. Most of the men I've slept with were married. They were all serial cheats and had done it before. Most of them were sleezy and disgusting and some of them physically hurt me. Some of them were the kind of people I genuinely feel so sad that someone is married to a person like that. A couple of them seemed like lovely people and I imagine lovely women at home and feel awful for what I've been a part of.

I've not been even messaging with anyone for four days now. I feel such desparate urge to go back and continue. Counting down the days to therapy. Just trying to focus on the children and do everything I can to make my husband feel less pain. It all feels like a nightmare.

Please do not feel guilty in any way for what may have gone on in the lives of the men with whom you have had sex. You forced none of them at gunpoint to have sex; they were willing participants, and it always takes two to tango.

As you rightly state, most of them will be serial cheaters. Any adverse consequences of their having sex with you are very much their responsibility and not yours, so do not burden yourself with guilt.

Concentrate of fixing your own health - feeling guilty about their cheating is not going to help in that regard.

myotherface I wonder if it would help if you imagined reading a post similar to yours but it was from someone else ?

You wouldn't think they were despicable I'm sure .You would understand and your heart would go out to them ( as mine does to you ) .

The fact that you judge yourself so harshly is because you have morals and great awareness of other people and their needs . These are kind ,lovely qualities .

Hang on in there sweetheart ,post here if it helps . You are doing really well ,though I'm sure it doesn't feel like it from where you are .

andhugs .

No judgment here from me. I have been in the same situation. I don't even know how many men I slept with when I was with my ex. It was MANY and it came from a deep sense of needing to be loved - even though what I was getting wasn't in any way love, it was connection.
As humans we need connection. There was an interesting article in a newspaper I was reading yesterday about sex-dolls. The manufacturer was saying that the most important aspect of the doll were the eyes as what the men using them wanted, more than anything, was connection.

Your sexual needs come from this. I have no doubt. Sure I am probably simplifying, but this must be a big factor.
The thing which I realised at the end for me was, that each time I had sex with someone, I felt like a little bit of me had been scraped away. I did really start to feel like butter spread too thinly on bread. It was only then, that I was aware of that feeling, that the real unease came and I was able to stop. It was slow and I still made mistakes, but I realised that it made me feel bad in a very visceral way.

Take any damage to your family out of the equation and concentrate on yourself for the time being. You need to feel whole and connected and your physical addiction's actually just a pretend way to connect and feel whole. It is temporary. It is a truism that we need to love ourselves to love others. But it is what it is.

I am sure you will slowly work through all this with your therapist. I have never seen a therapist, but I certainly should. Go easy on yourself. No more beating yourself up. break down your walls and then start building yourself back up again brick by brick into a shape that you can love. You deserve that. You are NOT a bad person. You are a person in pain.

@xpc316e thank you for your support and kindness. And you're right. I work helping a lot of vulnerable people who have taken very variable paths in their lives. I would never judge them for a similar situation. I have also not mentioned that what led to this was years of emotional abuse. I don't think he ever did it purposefully to control and hurt me. But now that he's worked hard for a couple of years and the abuse has stopped it's difficult to know what to think. It's almost like I have no right to leave now that he is behaving like the perfect husband. Love has gone though and so has trust. I would never be able to risk emotional intimacy with him again and so I turn to other people.

@Alonelonelyloner your message actually made me cry. I felt like I must be the only woman doing something like this. It was such a relief to hear that it's not the case. And you don't sound like a horrible person, quite the opposite. And the fact that you've moved on gives me hope too.

I have been messaging with a new man again today. I managed some days with huge effort and agitation and cracked today. It's making me feel so guilty. And in a strange way I almost wish I hadn't told dh so that I could have just continued it without any problem. Now it feels so much complicated. Having told him makes me feel like it should be a new start where I stop this. I feel completely unable to. I've been looking into joining sex addicts anonymous groups but feel like it would just be another place where it would be tempting to try to seduce someone. So hard to know what to do. Only two more days until the next therapy session.

myotherface, if you have been emotionally abused in the past then it is no surprise that any love you had for your husband has been killed off. The fact that he currently behaves well towards you in no way means that either he deserves to now be loved by you, or that you are in any way wrong for not loving him.

Once the love, trust, and respect have gone it is incredibly difficult to regrow them. If those feelings died as a result of abuse, then it would be impossible for me to rebuild and move on. I could forgive something like an affair, but not an prolonged campaign of psychological abuse.

I write as someone who was a victim of coercion over many years. I got out and despite promises that she had changed, I knew that I could never go back and love my former wife again. It was a case of once bitten, twice shy. Revisiting the past is very rarely a success.

Once a coal fire has gone out, you have to let it cool down, rake out the ashes, and build a new one from scratch. I reckon relationships are pretty much the same.

You were not to blame for the abuse, you are not to blame for not loving your abuser, and we all deserve a chance to be loved.

Sorry, it was @peridito who said the kind words about bout trying to talk to myself like I would to someone else. I work helping people who have often been through all kinds of things and sometimes done things to cope that many wouldn't. I would never judge them for a minute. I'mrreally strugglingto be kind to myself though.II'm telling myselfi should practice what I preach with kindness to ourselves but even that seems to come from a harsh and critical place.

@xpc316e I'm not definite it was emotional abuse but it sure felt like it. Being at home with three little ones, no family or friends anywhere near and suffering from postnatal depression. Then having dh always coming home angry, making mean jokes about how my cooking was disgusting, saying I couldn't even wipe my own are, be trusted to look after the kids, couldn't even apply for a job without him sorting it out for me (because he didn't agree with my way of writing emails and being chaotic with paperwork), asking if I'd been sitting on my fat arse (I was skinny and struggling with body image thinking I was fat) all day.. The list would go on. He once pushed me out of door when I was heavily pregnant because I was in his way. He's never done anything since then but then our dd grew and he just moved onto shoving her out of the way and being mean to her. The change came when I threatened to leave and showed him some diary entries of what he's said and done. He was finally horrified of how he's behaved and has hugely changed. There's been no more shoving or nastiness etc. He has the occasional slip up with dd but he feels all parents get tired and grouchy and that I'm too harsh on him. But I suppose even reading all that myself is not that difficult to see why I can't love him anymore and why I'm seeking love and connection elsewhere. I wish I was strong enough to leave but I'm not. He keeps saying it would mess the kids up so badly that I can't do it. He feels I'm too critical of him and jump on every mistake he makes with the kids. I probably do. But can anyone blame me for protecting dd when he's been so horrible to her. At some point he also got me to stay by saying if I worried so much about how he was with her how could I leave him and then let her spend days with him without me there. I know he sounds like a monster here and he isn't. He's a totally devoted dad who adores his children and spends all his time with them. But he is also a very damaged man and certainly not the person I want to spend my life with.

myotherface, thanks for fleshing out the details. I think if you perceive what happened as emotional abuse, then emotional abuse it must have been. Don't let anyone minimise what you went through.

I spent years thinking that I was never going to be strong enough to leave my former marriage. I knew that I could never extricate myself from her control and I many times though about driving into a bridge support on the A14 in order to stop my misery. Through years of conditioning I knew that I could no longer do anything to control what happened. She was the one with the power; she had complete control over my life. I was useless - or so I thought.

One day I came home from my job and simply told her it was over. I do not know where the strength to do that came from, but somehow it was there when I really needed it to be.

Despite all her predictions that I would come running back to her, I never felt that was even remotely possible. I flourished on my own, my self-belief returned, and my life was once again under my control.

I believe that you too are able to leave and strike out on your own. I am not the kind of person who prays, but I will be sending positive thoughts your way in the hope that the strength will one day magically surface from somewhere deep within you. Until then, just keep hanging in there. The strength may not rise to the surface today, but it will happen one day.

As you rightly state, most of them will be serial cheaters

Like the OP

It sounds like manic behaviour - have you had a mental health diagnosis? I would see a different GP and keep going with therapy.

Thanks @xpc316e. I really hope your well wishing will reach here. I've had another conversation with dh about divorce. He said he would rather kill himself than not see the kids every single day. He also again repeated that it would totally mess up the kids and that he wouldn't cope since he hasn't got any friends and I'm the only person he has. So I'm well and truly stuck. I've started sleeping with a colleague now. At least he's single but he's clearly also totally messed up and a serious player. I have no idea how else to cope with this.

@BubblyBarbara Yes, like me. I know I'm a serial cheater. I also know I've just stopped having morals and that it's questionable how good a person I am. If it makes you feel better being nasty about it then be my guest. I certainly deserve it.

@f83mx I'm not manic in the slightest but actually quite depressed. Some days are better than others but on the bad days I can barely move. I'm not elated, have a very negative opinion of myself, have no energy nor motivation or interest towards anything apart from these affairs. Even they are beginning to feel boring, pointless and like I'm not interested or have the energy. But don't know how to stop either. I'm normally very sociable but have become very isolative. Basically I'm pretty much the opposite of manic.

myotherface, oh dear, I am so sorry to read that he is trapping you with guilt. The fact that he apparently has no friends is not your problem. You cannot allow him to ruin your existence for the reason that leaving him will ruin his life. He is incredibly selfish by expecting you to sacrifice your life for his convenience. His unwillingness to allow you to be free to go will eventually result in your leaving. You may not go now, but you will go at some stage. Your husband is using psychological bullying tactics to make you stay. He is a coward who will not face up to reality.

His 'love' for the children is also being used to make you feel guilty. Trust me on this, he will manage without seeing his children every day. He will not kill himself, but he is willing to slowly snub out the joy from your life by making it impossible for you to leave. The children themselves will undoubtedly be damaged by being forced to live in a home in which one person is effectively imprisoned in a dysfunctional relationship. They would be far better off living with one, happy, well-adjusted parent than they will be if they are living in a home in which you are denied the ability to run your life as you wish.

Sleeping with your colleague is an understandable reaction when you are being treated in such a controlling manner. The more you tell us about your situation, the more doomed your marriage looks to me.

Be strong.

You're right @xpc316e. My relationship is doomed and has been for years. I always thought myself a strong person but somehow I can't get myself to leave. I spend most of my days trying to think of a way out. I can't think I could leave without causing huge disruption to the kids and a life where they are constantly moving between two homes. The worst thing is that I'm doubting my own thoughts now and don't know what's what. Are the kids an excuse and the truth is I'm just scared? I'm still fairly young, in my thirties. I've wasted 13 years of my life with this man. I don't want to be in this situation still in my forties. Thanks for your support!!

Why would anyone lynch you lovely
I used to be very sexually incontinent
I think it was self esteem
Focus on your MH first and foremost
Then think about the unhappy and rather abusive sounding relationship

And you are not responsible for your husband
He is NOT your responsibility
You are responsible for yourself and your kids