I feel like my recovery is improving, but my relationship is struggling. What now?

Welcome to the Real Talk Recovery Podcast with the Therapy Brothers. We're brothers, we're therapist, and we know recovery. Bring your stories, your questions, your successes, with real recovery.

Hey, Tyler. How's it going? Great, man. How are you doing? Good. I'm doing excellent. You have a good weekend.

I had a great weekend. I actually got to come down and see you and the rest of the family and watch you take all of Dad's junk from his house and put it in your house.

You act like I'm a hoarder or something. I'm anything but like I'm all about get rid of the junk.

Except when it comes to literally like our listeners need to know this like we have we we have this like I guess you could call it like a pull-up bar that my dad bought for us like off of like KSL.com back then even though it was in case

I was sitting out in his backyard since I was probably 12 years old and I swear and since I was 12, I'm now in my mid 40s.

So in the last 30 plus years, there's probably been maybe 200 total pull-ups done on that bar.

Brandon just took it from my dad's backyard and put it in his backyard. Hey, are you folding or not a hoarder?

Are you folding a man for wanting to get ripped? I mean, I like to I like to report back Brandon in a week. How many pull-ups you do on that thing?

Hey, hey, when I when I show up to a family party around Christmas and shredded, you can watch out because you can say I told you so because that would be a good reason to get in shape.

My back is just going to be chiseled all from that pull-up bar.

All right, let's get into the topic. We got a great guest today. We got a really good guest today. We got Ben with us today.

Again, hey, Ben, if you want to just give us a back some background, tell us what's going on in your life, and then we'll get we'll get right into it.

Okay, sure. Like many other sex addicts, I was exposed to pornography pretty young developed masturbation habit and then that progressed to acting out with with other people and continued in my marriage.

And of course, continued to be a problem in my marriage. My wife knew about my pornography addiction for years. A lot of that's because her family is pretty familiar with pornography addiction.

About 10 years ago, I was in some pretty good quality compliance. As I look back on it, it wasn't recovery. It was some abstinence, maybe a little bit of sobriety, but mostly compliance.

And I look back on a lot of the feelings and emotions that I had at that time. And I was I thrived on resentment and just really fed a lot of resentment.

So fast forward to last. So actually in spring of 2020, my wife found some pornography on the computer. I'm in front of me about it. And I I copped to it being just a little bit as opposed to continuing for several years and denied the extent of incentive was just pornography.

And I wasn't going back to acting out with other partners when I was she requested a lie detector test. And I discovered ways to beat the lie detector test. And and so I was able to to continue looking back on it, you know, her perspective is that I was willing to do anything I could to stay in my addiction. And looking back on it, I was doing anything I could to try and survive.

It really is kind of how I looked at it. And then in February of 2021, she again discovered some pornography, confronted me about it, jumped right into denial, like I like I normally do.

And for the past two and a half years, I've been working out of town. I just got a job in town here locally, starting this month. Anyway, and so that's been a big strain on on our relationship and and all that of course. And so back in 2021, she discovered me again. I really, you know, I tried to deny and then I had this epiphany.

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