Z Fly Y Curl X Post

So, on this most super of sabbaths, a veritable homage to the excess of our culture, I am feeling a little less than superb.  Nothing particular, just the ongoing challenge of sussing out my course as I try to take one step in front of the next.  Today's whimsy is surrounding compulsion version addiction.  My wife, who's opinion I respect, has been pushing me not so subtly into some type of 12-step program surrounding my infidelity.  She is having a great deal of struggle with the issue, of course, but as well how I could have done what I've done without some sort of addiction to it.  Her great fear is that I am going to "relapse" and go all wiggy like that again.  I certainly understand her feelings, and very much her fear.  She has said, how can you go from doing all that at 3000mph to suddenly doing nothing?  I guess, and it is how I've explained it to her, that it wasn't a pleasurable thing, it was never about sex, it was something else, something more compulsive.  

I knew what I was doing wasn't real and wasn't right, but I wouldn't stop myself.  It was pain I enjoyed.  It was horror that gave me solace.  It was a relief to feel a known pain, ahead of the new pain I was feeling.  It was comfortable to have such messed up and destructive and horrific things in my life to re-center and make me feel whole, or at least the whole I used to feel before I got so overrun.  

I am not afraid, if I am honest, that I might be an addict and I would admit it in a second, if I felt it in my heart of hearts.  But being a cutter, and I don't miss cutting myself.  I don't miss the pain, the guilt, the agony I was living and reliving.  Every person I was with was a victim of sexual abuse, physical abuse and had serious mental health issues.  I found them, just as they were looking for me.  I relived the traumas of growing up in a home with abuse, with a violently mentally ill mother, with mentally ill siblings who were sexually, emotionally and physically abused...  I relived all of that, cause I never dealt with it.  I was compelled, by that silly subconscious thingy to live out and re-live out what I'd never dealt with.  I don't see the addict in there, but I might be wrong.