What Love Asks of Me: The Story of My Marriage and Loving Confrontation
When Sex Addiction Was Part of Our Marriage
My husband’s sex addiction was not simply one problem among many in our marriage. Addiction brought secrecy and deception into our relationship, affected our ability to live in reality together, and caused harm that could not be resolved simply by improving the way we communicated or related to one another. I desperately wanted my husband to be free, not only because I wanted our marriage to heal, but because I loved him. I could see what the addiction was doing to his life, to our marriage, and to our family, and I wanted something better for all of us.
For a long time, that desire led me to focus heavily on what I could do differently. If I could become the right kind of wife, perhaps I could help my husband become the man I knew he could be. I worked hard at becoming more understanding, accepting, attractive, available, respectful, and encouraging. I tried to create more peace in our home, give him space, react less out of fear, and become healthier myself. I wanted to understand what I was contributing to the unhealthy patterns between us and what I could change on my side of the relationship.
Some of those things were genuinely good and reflected growth I truly needed, particularly as I began to recognize the ways fear and my own wounds had shaped my responses. Becoming healthier meant learning to be more grounded, letting go of my attempts to control what was never mine to control, and allowing another adult the freedom and responsibility to make his own choices. None of that growth has been wasted.
Yet something was profoundly wrong with the premise underneath my efforts. Without fully realizing it, I had begun to carry far too much responsibility for what happened next. If I could respond differently enough, love well enough, become healthy enough, or somehow discover the right balance of acceptance, respect, boundaries, encouragement, and surrender, perhaps my husband would choose honesty and recovery and become the kind of husband who adored me. Perhaps our marriage would finally become what I believed it could be.
Part of what made this so difficult to untangle was that there was truth mixed into the premise. Spouses affect one another profoundly, and I do not believe the answer is to pretend that our choices have no effect on the people we love. My growth could change the environment of our marriage. It could change the patterns I participated in and the ways I responded to my husband. It could make room for healthier possibilities between us. The problem comes when influence quietly becomes responsibility. In those early years after reading books like The Empowered Wife by Laura Doyle, I began to believe that if I could find the right way to show up, I might be able to produce in my husband something that actually depended upon his own choices. What my growth could not do was cross the boundary of his free will, and it is a shame so many resources imply single-person effort can heal a marriage where deceptive sexuality is present.
During the year we spent with the church that was preparing to send our family to Cambodia, my husband told me he was doing well. I believed him. I encouraged him and celebrated what I thought God was doing in his life. I stopped asking about the pornography and turned my focus on raising my family and supporting our move to Cambodia. I had no way of knowing that reality was not as it seemed. Sadly, I agreed to my husband’s decision to relocate overseas trusting his word without knowing he was actually deeply ensnared in the addiction. This il–informed decision led to a series of catastrophic events, chronic illness, and the betrayal of the churches who had sent us to serve.
That experience would eventually become important to the way I understand trust. I could choose to be trusting, supportive, encouraging, and respectful, but none of those things could make the information I was receiving true. My willingness to believe the best about my husband could not create honesty where honesty was absent. It could also lead to harm not only to me but also to my children, our ministry, and the wonderful people who supported us.
There was a moment when the difference between loving my husband’s potential and responding to the reality in front of me became painfully concrete. My husband had become deeply depressed as his addiction progressed as all addictions do, and his acting out became increasingly risky. Eventually, he went away to Thailand for counseling, while I remained home in our village caring for our children.
While he was gone, one of our children experienced a life-threatening event that also placed some of our other children in danger. In the aftermath, a dear friend sat across the table from me and said something I was nowhere near ready to hear: “This never would have happened if you hadn’t married a sex addict.”
Her words cut me to the heart. At the time, they felt almost unbearably cruel, because I loved my husband and still carried so much hope for the man I believed he could become. Looking back, however, I understand something in those words that I could not understand then. She was forcing me to look at a reality I kept trying to love my way around. Addiction was already creating consequences for our whole family regardless of how I showed up in the relationship. I could become healthier, more loving, more respectful, less reactive, and more grounded, but none of those changes could make his addiction harmless. My hope for his potential could not erase the reality of what his choices were already doing to the people we loved.
Even after this event, I continued to believe that my choices could somehow compensate for choices that were not mine to make. I was deeply focused on being a really good wife and mother—loving well, creating a peaceful home, being supportive and encouraging, forgiving, hoping, and continuing to work on myself. Somewhere underneath all of that was still the hope that if I could become healthy enough and love well enough, I might help create a different outcome for my husband and our family.
Accepting this truth was extraordinarily difficult for me precisely because what I wanted for my husband was good, and the literature I had read affirmed the premise. I so wanted to see him free from addiction and living honestly rather than within the deception that addiction required, and I longed for healing from the wounds it had created in him, in our marriage, and in our family. I wanted our children to experience something healthier, our marriage to be restored, and, most of all, for my husband to experience the fullness of the man God had created him to be. There was nothing wrong with hoping and praying for those things or allowing those hopes to shape the way I loved him.
What I eventually had to relinquish was the belief that if I could just figure out what I needed to do differently, I could somehow bring those things about. I also had to relinquish the idea that his behaviors did not necessitate loving confrontation from me.
That realization began changing the question I was asking. Instead of continually asking, What can I do that will finally make this better?, I had to confront something much more difficult:
What if love is not a technique for producing the outcome I want?
If I could not make my husband choose freedom, then loving him could no longer be measured primarily by whether my love produced change in him. I needed to understand what it meant to genuinely will his good while respecting his freedom, to tell the truth without believing I was responsible for his response to it, and eventually to surrender an outcome I desperately wanted without surrendering the truth itself.
That would completely change what love asked of me.
When Being a Better Wife Becomes a Strategy
This is part of why teachings like Laura Doyle’s can feel so compelling, although many of the underlying ideas did not feel particularly new to me. In fact, I began to recognize familiar themes from fundamentalist Protestant circles and, in more extreme forms, in groups such as the FLDS, some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and other high-control religious groups. The traditions and circumstances were not completely identical, but I recognized a familiar emphasis on the tremendous influence a woman’s behavior, femininity as defined by these groups, respect, submission, sexuality, emotional restraint, or ability to create peace could have on her husband and the condition of her marriage.
As I learned more about cults and high-control religious groups, however, I began to look at some of these ideas differently. I started to wonder whether the beliefs I had embraced about my influence as a wife were not only failing to help my husband or protect my family, but might actually be harming them. If I continued believing that becoming a better wife could help produce not only a healthier husband, but a husband who adored me and the kind of marriage I deeply longed for, what might I tolerate while waiting for that transformation? What consequences of his addiction might I absorb? What realities might I minimize because I remained focused on his potential, the marriage I believed was possible, and what I could do differently to help us get there?
Those were difficult questions for me because some of the practices themselves overlapped with things I genuinely needed to learn. I did need to stop carrying responsibility for another adult, take better care of myself, recognize what belonged to me and what did not, and become less consumed with trying to manage the outcome of my marriage. There was real wisdom in some of those ideas, and I do not want to dismiss that simply because I have come to disagree with other parts of the framework.
What became more complicated for me was what happened as I actually tried to live these principles. In some ways, they seemed to work. We had less conflict, and our marriage did feel more peaceful. Yet beneath that apparent peace, there was repeated evidence of chronic infidelity. The reduction in conflict had not meant that the underlying problems in our marriage were being resolved.
At the same time, my physical health began to deteriorate. I developed autoimmune problems and eventually began fainting without warning. My doctor told me that my body was under too much stress. The fainting spells terrified my children, and watching their fear was painful enough, but perhaps even more painful was experiencing my husband's indifference as my health declined. I had worked so hard to become more peaceful, respectful, accepting, and responsible for myself, yet the reality of our marriage was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the idea that these changes were creating something healthier. I had not yet learned how much addiction impacts an individual’s ability to think beyond themselves or have empathy.
That forced me to begin asking questions I had not wanted to ask. Was less conflict actually evidence that our marriage was becoming healthier, or had I simply become better at living peacefully alongside realities that should have disturbed the peace? If chronic infidelity could continue while our marriage appeared calmer, then perhaps the absence of conflict was not the measure of relational health I had assumed it was.
My declining health made that question impossible for me to keep entirely theoretical. My body was telling a story that the relative quiet in our marriage did not. Something was profoundly wrong, regardless of how carefully I showed up in the relationship.
Slowly, I began to understand that becoming healthier could not mean learning to remain peaceful enough that another person's destructive choices no longer created conflict. My growth mattered, and I still needed to take responsibility for what genuinely belonged to me, but I also needed to become willing to respond honestly to what was happening around me. Peace that depends upon one person becoming increasingly capable of tolerating what is harming her is not the same thing as healing.
The Catholic Vision Gave Me Something More Demanding
All of this was unfolding during a much larger spiritual journey that would eventually lead me Home to the Catholic Church. As I became Catholic and began learning what the Church actually taught about marriage, love, freedom, suffering, and the dignity and responsibility of each spouse, I encountered a very different vision of marriage from the one I had carried for so many years.
The Catholic vision did not ask me to care less about my husband or to give up hope for our marriage. If anything, it gave those desires greater depth. I began to understand that loving my husband meant genuinely willing his good, even when what was good for him might make him unhappy with me. Marriage called me to help my husband toward holiness, and helping him toward holiness was very different from believing that my behavior could produce a desire for holiness in him.
I also began to understand that marriage did not erase the freedom or moral responsibility of either spouse. My husband remained responsible before God for his choices, just as I remained responsible for mine. I could love him, pray for him, encourage him, speak truth to him, and create opportunities for him to choose something better, but I could not make that choice on his behalf.
Slowly, that began changing the question I was asking. Instead of asking primarily how I could become the kind of wife who might inspire my husband to change, I began asking something much more demanding:
What does love require of me when I cannot control what the person I love will choose?
Love Wills the Good
One of the most important things I began to understand was that loving my husband meant willing his good, and his good was not always the same thing as his comfort, his happiness with me, or even the immediate preservation of peace between us. Sometimes those things could coexist beautifully, but addiction had created circumstances in which they came into direct conflict.
This was a profound shift for me. For years, so much of my energy had gone toward creating a peaceful home, being a good wife, preserving connection, and trying to make our marriage a place where my husband might want to become healthier. Now I was beginning to ask whether love might sometimes require me to do things that made our relationship considerably less comfortable in the short term because they placed a higher value on truth, freedom, and the genuine good of everyone involved.
What I had not yet understood was that, in trying so hard to create peace and become the kind of wife who might inspire change, I had also been making it easier for the addiction to remain comfortable. I had thought I was creating the conditions in which my husband might become healthier. Looking back, I can see that I was often absorbing the discomfort and consequences that belonged to his choices, while he remained relatively protected from them. The very things I hoped might help him change were maing it easier for him not to.
Years later, I would find language for this in the work of Dr. Barbara Steffens. Her words captured something I had learned through painful experience:
“After years of sifting through the ashes of burned out lives and marriages, we’ve come to believe that in ALL cases confronting the addiction and requiring a plan for help provides the least selfish option available to the partner of a sex addict. It does not come without risk of great loss which the ADDICTION has created in our lives already, yet the risk of confrontation places the HIGHEST value on EACH life represented in the family. It provides the SHORTEST route to the HIGHEST possible outcome for everyone involved if your spouse chooses to seek help.”
Those last words have become especially important to me: if your spouse chooses to seek help.
There it was again—the distinction I had struggled for years to understand. I could confront what was happening, require honesty, establish conditions for what I was willing to continue participating in, make help available, invite other people into the truth of what was happening, and create opportunities for recovery. I could do all of those things precisely because I loved my husband and wanted his good, while still recognizing that what he chose to do with those opportunities belonged to him. I praise God for the work of people like Dr. Barbara Steffens and Marsha Means. God has used them in so many families like mine to offer a way toward healing and freedom for parents and children alike.
Loving confrontation, however, did not guarantee that he would respond by becoming healthier, nor did it guarantee that our marriage would survive. In some ways, that made confrontation far more frightening than trying harder to be the kind of wife he would adore. I had to become willing to risk his displeasure, his anger, his withdrawal, and eventually even the outcome of the marriage itself, while trusting that telling the truth and allowing him to encounter the consequences of his own choices could still be acts of love.
I was beginning to understand that love does not ask, “What can I do that is most likely to get the response I want?” Love asks, “What genuinely wills the good of this person and of everyone entrusted to my care?”
Those are not always the same question.
The Gift of Pain
One of the hardest things for me to accept was that pain could sometimes accomplish something my love could not. For so many years, my instinct had been to soften the consequences of my husband’s choices, preserve connection, and keep our family functioning. When someone you love is already struggling, allowing him to experience more pain can feel like the opposite of compassion.
Over time, however, I began to see that there was a difference between causing someone pain and allowing him to experience the pain his own choices had created. When I continually stepped between my husband and those consequences—by affirming his potential as though it were his present reality, acting as though our relationship was healthier than it actually was, or continuing to provide the benefits of a healthy relationship when one did not exist—I was not protecting him from something harmful; I was protecting the addiction from the very reality that might have challenged it.
One of the clearest examples of this came when we finally saw a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT). He was the one who gave my husband the label sex addict, and that label was incredibly helpful for us both. There was something almost startling about having someone outside our marriage name plainly what we had been living with for years. Suddenly, this was not simply a collection of struggles, bad choices, marital problems, or something that might improve if I could find a better way to love my husband. It had a name.
That name did not condemn my husband or erase his potential. In many ways, it did the opposite. It gave us a truthful starting place from which real change could become possible. In this case, accepting the truth did not preserve the life we had built. It required us to change it.
Dealing honestly with where he actually was meant recognizing that the life we were living as missionaries was no longer sustainable. We needed to return to the United States and get more help. That was enormously disruptive for our family, but reality was beginning to require something different from us. We could no longer organize our lives primarily around who we hoped my husband would become; we had to begin making decisions based on where he actually was. And, despite the things I had read in The Empowered Wife, I was the healthiest person to make this decision., not because I was better than he was but rather because I had been daily consuming the Word while he had been consuming pornography. Through tears and deeply learning my beloved Jesus who had never forsaken me, I left my beloved adopted country and the only home my children had know trusting that the Lord had bigger plans for our family.
This changed the way I understood consequences. I did not need to manufacture them, punish my husband, or make his life miserable in the hope that suffering would force him to change. The consequences were already there. Addiction had damaged trust, affected our family, wounded our relationship, and changed what was possible between us. My task was not to create pain but to stop absorbing the pain God meant to use to heal my husband.
There was something deeply humbling about this because even consequences could become another strategy if I was not careful. I could not allow pain while secretly believing that this would finally be the thing that made him change. The point was not to exchange one technique for another—to stop being the accommodating wife because perhaps boundaries would work better. His response still belonged to him.
Instead, I began to understand what I have come to think of as the gift of pain: the willingness to let reality tell the truth. Sometimes pain tells us that something precious has been damaged. Sometimes it reveals that the way we are living cannot continue without tremendous cost. Sometimes it creates an opportunity to confront what comfort has allowed us to avoid. Whether someone uses that opportunity to change remains his choice.
This was particularly difficult for me as a Christian because compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and sacrificial love matter deeply to me. I have had to learn that none of those virtues required me to interfere with reality or pretend it doesn’t exist simply because I know who God made my husband to be.
Forgiveness does not require the immediate restoration of trust.
Mercy does not require the removal of every consequence.
The marital bond does not require silence in the face of abuse.
Sacrificial love does not mean sacrificing truth, safety, or the well-being of our children so that my husband would be spared the pain created by his own choices.
Sometimes the most loving thing a wife can do is to refuse to stand between someone they love and the truth or ignore the elephant of abusive or problematic sexual behavior in the room.
My Boundary Around Full Disclosure
Perhaps nowhere did this become more concrete for me than around therapeutic full disclosure. By this point, I had spent years living with discoveries, partial truths, and the uncertainty that comes from never knowing whether what I knew was actually the whole story. Eventually, I reached a place where I knew I could no longer continue in a relationship without truth.
Therapeutic full disclosure became a hard-line boundary for me. I was not willing to continue our relationship without it.
That distinction mattered. I could not force my husband to disclose. I could not make him tell the truth, participate honestly in the process, or choose the kind of recovery that would make genuine intimacy possible. Those choices belonged to him. What belonged to me was deciding what I could participate in when those things were absent.
For much of my marriage, I had struggled to understand how I could respect my husband's freedom while also responding honestly to choices that profoundly affected me. Boundaries eventually helped me understand that these were not competing values. His freedom did not require the surrender of mine. He was free to decide whether he would participate in full disclosure, and I was free to decide that I would not continue in a relationship built upon ongoing secrecy and deception.
This was very different from trying to create an outcome through my behavior. The boundary was not, If I make the consequences serious enough, perhaps he will finally disclose. It was, Whether or not you disclose belongs to you. Whether or not I remain in a relationship without disclosure belongs to me.
That difference was enormous.
I still desperately hoped he would choose disclosure. I wanted truth to create the possibility of genuine healing between us. I wanted recovery, reconciliation, and restoration. My boundary did not require me to stop wanting any of those things. It required me to make my own decisions based on the truth that existed in the present, rather than on the outcome I was still hoping for.
For the first time, I was learning that I could deeply desire a particular outcome without attempting to manufacture it. I could place an opportunity for truth in front of my husband and leave him genuinely free to choose what he would do with it.
And I could be safe, loving, and confronting at the same time.
Truth Does Not Create the Reality It Reveals
Another lesson took me much longer to understand: telling the truth about what was happening in our marriage did not create the reality I was naming. For years, I had placed enormous value on peace, and because conflict often followed when difficult realities were brought into the open, it was easy to believe that speaking about them was somehow contributing to the problem.
One morning, I woke up early and got on the computer to do some meal planning before I exercised. My husband was working on his master’s degree and attending a class online. As I walked past him, I inadvertently saw something on his screen that I wished I had not seen.
I did not confront him in the moment. I waited until later, when things were quiet and the children were happily playing, and I asked him if he was willing to tell me whether he had been acting out during his class that morning. His response was immediate. He accused me of being angry and mean and told me that I was disrespecting him.
Something shifted for me in that moment. I had approached him quietly. I had waited until we had privacy. I had not attacked him or called him names. I was not attempting to control him. I had simply asked a truthful question about something I had actually seen. For the first time, I could recognize that what he was calling my disrespect or control might actually be his own discomfort and guilt at being confronted with what he had done.
It was also the first time I recognized the abusive pattern of DARVO—Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Instead of remaining with the question of his behavior, the focus had suddenly shifted to mine, and I had become the person accused of doing harm. This pattern functions to give the person using it the upper hand in the conversation, shifting attention away from accountability and protecting them from having to fully encounter the consequences of their own actions.
Suddenly, clarity streamed into my being. How many times this same pattern had played out throughout our relationship? Again and again. I had entered conversations trying to address something that was hurting me or our family and walked away examining myself instead. I had spent years wondering whether I was too angry, too demanding, too critical, too emotional, or simply not respectful enough, all the while believing that perhaps I was the real problem. Seeing the pattern for what it was began to change that.
Eventually, I began to see how backwards my understanding of conflict had sometimes become. If deception existed in our marriage, naming the deception did not create it. If addiction was harming our family, confronting the addiction did not create the harm. If trust had been shattered, acknowledging that rupture was not what shattered the trust.
Truth can create discomfort, but it does not create the reality that makes the truth uncomfortable.
This distinction became particularly important as I learned to confront more directly. Loving confrontation sometimes resulted in anger, withdrawal, defensiveness, or greater conflict between us. Earlier in my marriage, those reactions might have sent me searching immediately for what I had done wrong or how I could restore the peace. Over time, I became more capable of asking a different question: Was the conflict happening because I had acted without love, or was conflict simply what happened when something that had been allowed to remain hidden or unchallenged was finally brought into the light?
Of course, telling the truth did not give me permission to say anything I wanted in any way I wanted. I was still responsible for my words, my motives, my tone, and my willingness to examine myself honestly. Loving confrontation required me to become more responsible for those things, not less. What it did not require was assuming responsibility for another person’s reaction simply because the truth I spoke was painful for him to hear.
This changed my understanding of peace as well. I began to recognize that the absence of conflict was not necessarily evidence of peace, particularly when maintaining that absence required someone to remain silent about what was actually happening. Sometimes conflict is not evidence that love has failed. Sometimes it is evidence that reality has finally entered the relationship.
Learning to Love Through Confrontation
Eventually, all of these lessons began coming together in a way I had not expected. For years, I had associated loving my husband primarily with the ways I could support, encourage, forgive, accept, and create peace around him. Those things still mattered to me, but I was beginning to understand that there was another expression of love I had greatly underestimated: loving confrontation.
Loving confrontation was not the opposite of respect. It was not punishment, retaliation, or an attempt to force my husband to become the person I wanted him to be. It was the willingness to bring reality into the relationship and allow it to remain there, even when doing so created discomfort. It meant naming what was harmful, refusing to participate in deception, establishing boundaries when they were necessary, and allowing consequences to remain connected to the choices that created them.
Most importantly, loving confrontation was rooted in the conviction that my husband's good mattered more than whether he was pleased with me. If addiction was destroying something in him and harming our family, then keeping him comfortable with me could not be the highest expression of my love. Sometimes love had to be willing to risk the relationship as it currently existed in order to stop cooperating with what was destroying the people within it.
This was radically different from trying to control him. Control attempted to determine his choice. Loving confrontation placed a choice in front of him and allowed it to truly belong to him. I could say what was true. I could establish what I would and would not participate in. I could allow the natural consequences of his choices to remain his. I could make help available. I could invite other people into the truth. What happened next remained outside my control.
In fact, loving confrontation opened our marriage to the broader Christian community in ways my previous approach never had. When so much remained private within our marriage, other people could not respond to what they did not know. Once the truth became visible, more people could pray for my husband specifically, reach out to him, speak truth to him, support recovery, and offer him opportunities to choose freedom. Confrontation did not narrow his choices.
It gave him more opportunities to seek freedom than he had ever had before.
This helped me understand something important about respect as well. Respecting my husband's freedom did not mean leaving him alone with his addiction or helping life continue smoothly around it. I could believe in his dignity enough to trust him with reality. I could allow him to encounter truth, support, consequences, and opportunities for recovery without deciding for him what he would do with any of them. I could trust that God as He used me “like iron sharpening iron.”
There was risk in this kind of love.
My husband could reject the truth.
He could resent the boundary.
He could refuse the help.
He could choose the addiction.
Loving confrontation offered no guarantee that he would respond in the way I desperately hoped he would. That was precisely what separated it from another technique for changing my husband.
Loving confrontation was not something I did because I knew it would work. I did it because I increasingly believed it was what love required of me.
I could not choose freedom for my husband, but I could stop helping addiction remain comfortable enough that he did not have to choose. I could tell the truth, allow reality to remain visible, surround him with every reasonable opportunity for help, and then respect him enough to leave his response in his own hands.
For me, that became one of the deepest expressions of love I had ever offered my husband, by the grace of God.
When Recovery Really Did Change Our Marriage
I do not want to tell this story in a way that suggests loving confrontation, boundaries, and bringing addiction into the light only brought pain into our marriage. For a time, we experienced something very different. We finally began following evidence-based protocols for individual and relational recovery., embracing the Catholic ideology of faith and reason. My husband began doing the recovery work that belonged to him, including participating in the therapeutic full disclosure I had required, while I began doing my own recovery work. Together, we also began the work of healing our relationship. For perhaps the first time, we were no longer simply trying harder to make our marriage work. We each had individual work that belonged to us, and we had relational work that required both of us.
And it made a difference.
My husband became more open with me and more willing to let me into what was happening inside of him, but one of the most striking changes was simply how much happier he became. He was more productive, more fulfilled, and more engaged with his life. Recovery was not merely taking something away from him; as he became freer from addiction, I watched him become more fully himself.
The discomfort showing up in the “right way” which had almost destroyed me was a consequence that when transferred to my husband had the opposite effect: transformation!
My own recovery plus the clarity of reality was changing me too, giving me greater capacity to show up in healthier and more grounded ways. Yet relational recovery did not depend upon my becoming so regulated or peaceful that my husband never had to encounter my pain. Betrayal trauma carried real anger and grief, and part of his recovery was learning how to remain present with those emotions, hear the impact his choices had had on me, and respond with increasing empathy rather than requiring me to make my pain easier for him to tolerate. He was no longer interested in a "happy" wife; he was interested in deeply knowing every part of me.
Check out this synopsis of why some marital advice can actually enable addiction
I will never forget the day he looked at me and said, “I really did abuse you.” There was something profoundly healing about hearing him name the reality of what I had experienced without minimizing it, defending himself, or turning the conversation back toward what I had done wrong. Loving confrontation had not destroyed his capacity for empathy; it had helped create the conditions in which this kind of ownership became possible. He could acknowledge the harm he had caused without going into shame.
There was also a justice component to his recovery. Healing was not only about feeling remorseful or becoming more emotionally connected; it included amends and reparation, taking responsibility for harms that could not simply be erased by an apology. This allowed forgiveness, empathy, accountability, and justice to exist together rather than forcing us to choose between them.
Looking back, I can also see something about loving confrontation that neither of us could fully understand while he was deeply caught in addiction. To my husband, my confrontation often felt as though I were confronting him. He experienced my questions, boundaries, and insistence on reality as criticism, disrespect, or even shame. From inside the addiction, it was extraordinarily difficult for him to separate an attack on his dignity from a confrontation of something that was harming him and everyone he loved.
We both needed to stop minimizing, accommodating, or protecting not only the addiction itself, but the constellation of behaviors that surrounded it—including deception, entitlement, manipulation, and abuse in order for reality to take hold.
That changed something for both of us. Loving confrontation no longer had to mean me against him. We could finally stand together against real enemy: the addiction. I did not have to work so hard to hold together two competing versions of our marriage—what I hoped was true and what the evidence around me kept telling me was true. Truth gave us the opportunity to repair together and begin building something based on what was actually happening rather than what either of us needed to believe.
By the time our ninth child was born, that change felt especially significant. I remember holding her shortly after her birth, looking at my husband, and saying, “Our first baby as a recovered couple.”
There was so much contained in those words. We could recognize what addiction had taken from the earlier years of our marriage and from the experiences surrounding the births of our other children, while also recognizing what recovery had given us. Her birth represented something new. We were not pretending the past had not happened; we were finally able to look at it together from the same side.
That season taught me something I never want to lose when I talk about addiction or loving confrontation: Recovery can bring real change to a person, a marriage, and a family. I saw greater openness, empathy, happiness, fulfillment, and connection in my husband, and I experienced the difference that truth and genuine recovery could make between us. The hope I had carried for so many years had not been foolish. There really was something beautiful on the other side of secrecy when he chose to pursue it.
Perhaps that is also why what came later was so painful.
After our last child’s birth, a change in my husband's work gave him much more time alone on a computer, and pornography use eventually returned. This time, however, I was no longer comparing the reality of addiction only with what I hoped our marriage could someday become.
I had lived with him in recovery. I knew the difference.
As his acting out deepened, so did consequences that reached far beyond him. Eventually, I found pornography left open on one of our children's school Kindles. Over time, entitlement and abusive behavior increased. He lost a job after viewing pornography at work. Secret smoking returned, and one of our children became burdened with keeping that secret. The addiction was once again reaching into the lives of our children, our financial security, and the basic safety and stability of our family.
This time, I could no longer believe that loving him meant compensating for those realities by becoming a better wife or even just focusing on “my own paper.”. I had already seen what happened when he chose recovery. I had also seen what happened when he moved away from it. The difference between those two realities could not be explained by how well I was performing my role in the marriage.
Recovery had given me tremendous hope, but it had also taught me one of the hardest truths I would ever have to accept: I could support my husband's recovery, encourage it, make room for it, celebrate it, and deeply enjoy the man he became while pursuing it, but I could not keep him recovered.
When the Children Were Being Harmed Too
I had spent years absorbing consequences that belonged to my husband, but now I was facing something even harder and something that had actually been occurring all along without my notice: the children were being harmed.
My efforts to carry so much of the impact myself had never been enough to shield them from what the addiction was doing to our family.
As the addiction and the behaviors surrounding it intensified, my husband became increasingly unable to manage his distress and shame around the children. He was repeatedly unkind to them, and at times he became physically violent.
This is one of the realities that the work of Dr. Ken Adams has helped bring into greater focus for me. Children in families affected by sexual addiction are often far more aware of what is happening than adults realize, and the effects can extend far beyond whether a child directly witnesses sexual behavior. They live inside the secrecy, instability, emotional climate, and relational consequences addiction creates.
I could not make decisions only about what I was personally willing to endure. I was responsible for responding to what was happening to my children too.
When Separation Became Necessary
Eventually, loving confrontation required something I had desperately hoped it never would:
Separation.
Sometimes loving a person means refusing to participate any longer in the conditions that allow addiction and abuse to continue harming everyone around them. This was certainly the case for us.
Separation did not mean that I stopped loving my husband. It did not mean I stopped hoping for his recovery or praying for restoration. It meant that the reality we were living in had reached a point where continuing to share a home was no longer compatible with the safety and well-being of our children.
I could not choose recovery for him. I could not make him become safe. I could not force him to face what addiction and abuse were doing to our family.
What I could do was stop requiring our children and myself to remain inside those conditions while I waited to see what he would choose.
Behaviors escalated significantly during the separation. Interestingly, my husband shared that despite efforts to resurrect resentment toward me for either being happy (something that previously made him feel shame) or through my refusal to stay nonconfrontational, he was now keenly aware that he was the cause of his own unhappiness and choices. He truly had everything he needed to recover, including the recognition of the incredible grip the addiction has on him thanks to my loving confrontation.
Eventually, he chose to make unsafe choices that led to our civil divorce.
What Loving Confrontation Produced
It would be easy to tell this story only in terms of what loving confrontation cost us. There were enormous losses, and naming what happened does not erase them.
But loving confrontation also gives my children and me something addiction never could: the opportunity to live in reality, to heal, and.
There is more room for joy now. There is more room for healing because we have named the problem, named the impact, and brought what was hidden into the light. We can make decisions based on what is actually true rather than continually organizing our lives around secrecy, instability, or the hope that reality will somehow become different if we accommodate it long enough.
Loving confrontation gives my children a village of support. What was once hidden within our family can now be surrounded by people who know what has happened, who can support them, pray for them, speak truth into their lives, and help them heal.
It also gives me something I had spent years trying unsuccessfully to create through other means: peace within myself. I am increasingly able to live internally in the same reality I live externally. That is almost the exact opposite of what addiction had done to me and of what addiction continues to do to my husband.
Living in truth also helps me make the best and most informed decisions I can for my children. I do not have to make those decisions from partial information, minimize what has happened in order to preserve an appearance of peace, or pretend that hope requires me to ignore what I know.
Loving confrontation gives us the greatest possible opportunity to live in true intimacy—with one another, with God, and with the Church.
My husband was given real opportunities to choose that same life, and those opportunities still remain, all because of the grace of God through loving confrontation.
Perhaps this is where the story of the prodigal son has become most meaningful to me. The father did not deny what had happened or pretend that his son's choices had not carried him far from home. He let his son go with only his part of the inheritance, protected from the foolish choices he was making. Yet he remained a father who loved him, and when his son finally turned toward home, he was watching for him.
This is what love asks of me now: to stand on my doorstep—the doorstep of Christ, my Bridegroom's Home—just as the father of the prodigal son stood waiting, looking for my husband safely from afar.
What a celebration we will have if he comes Home.
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