Shattered Dreams

It showed up in the mailbox one day, along with the regular bills and letters.

The envelope made it look like just another piece of junk mail, but inside was a four-color glossy brochure advertising phone sex.

Susan (not her real name) found the mailing offensive. With two small children at home, she wanted to ensure that nothing like that found its way into her house again.

Assuming the company had gotten her husband’s address through the purchase of another business’s mailing list, Susan called the company’s customer service line and asked that it be removed from the mailing list.

The customer service representative politely informed Susan that there must be some mistake: Its mailing list consisted exclusively of current, paying customers.

That was when Susan’s world began to unravel.

With an ache in the pit of her stomach, Susan dug out the statements of her husband ’s business credit cards, filed separately from the family’s accounts. The same company’s name appeared on the statements — not once, but many times.

When she confronted Wayne (not his real name), he initially denied any involvement with pornography. Gradually, though, the truth began to come out.

“At first he told me it was a one-time thing. Then it was: ‘I just made some phone calls out of curiosity.’ Every time we talked, there was more,” said Susan. “It was sickening. I felt so gross, so betrayed.”

It turned out that the mailing represented just the tip of the iceberg. There had been phone sex, yes, but also trips to adult video stores, mail-order items, and massage parlor visits.

“I had this feeling of: ‘Who am I married to?’ All of a sudden, I didn’t know who my husband was anymore. I wanted explanations, but I didn’t feel like I could trust anything that came out of his mouth,” she said.

Susan felt like her world had been turned completely upside-down. She hesitated to discuss the matter with family or friends, so humiliated was she by her husband ’s activities.

She ended up calling the priest that had married them. He was able to provide her with both objectivity and some practical help. After talking over the situation, Susan acknowledged that even though she was deeply hurt by Wayne ’s betrayal, she still desperately wanted to try to work things out with him.

The couple began intensive counseling — together and individually. Wayne attended a 12-Step group to address his addiction. In the course of that counseling, Susan discovered that her husband ’s addiction was even worse than she knew.

“I think he honestly believed his individual choices and actions only affected him, ” said Susan. “It was like he thought that part of his life was encapsulated and didn’t hurt anyone else. I think that’s the nature of the addiction: You learn to separate a person’s dignity from them and view them as an object. Once you cross that line, it’s a hard road back to respecting people again.”

“In one counseling session, Wayne disclosed that once when I was . . . in labor with our child, he left the hospital and went to an adult video store — and then came back,” Susan added. “That just killed me. That’s when I knew how far gone he really was with his addiction.

“He was so far gone with his addiction, he wasn’t really there even when he was present.”

The cost of Wayne’s dependency was financial as well. He ran up thousands upon thousands of dollars in credit card debt, financing his addiction.

That debt, added to the cost of counseling, recovery efforts, etc., led Susan and Wayne to start over in a smaller house, with Wayne at a new job — one that didn’t require the same amount of travel and time away from his family as his previous job.

In the meantime, though, the couple’s trust in each other was shattered, their sense of intimacy lost.

“I was so angry with him because he exposed me to all of this garbage — stuff that I never knew, and never wanted to know, went on,” said Susan. “I had a beautiful family and was blessed to be home with my kids. We had what I had previously thought was a good marriage, and I was angry he brought all this into our family. ”

The couple spent another three years trying to work things out, to heal their marriage and ultimately rebuild trust in each other. In the end, almost as if to add insult to injury, Wayne had an affair. The weight of the betrayal was too much for the already fragile marriage, and the couple divorced.

Nearly 10 years later, Susan and the children still suffer the fallout of Wayne’s addiction.

To this day, the children are unaware of Wayne’s addiction. But they have more than once noticed and remarked upon the subtle lack of respect their father exhibits toward women — even his current wife and his own daughters.

Susan, on the other hand, finds it difficult to imagine herself trusting someone enough to be able to marry again.

“This whole ordeal has left me a more cynical and distrusting person, because I have questioned myself and my judgment so often about how I could have missed all of this, ” said Susan. “Looking back, there were all sorts of red flags. But when you’re married to someone you trust and love, you’re not looking for red flags.”

Susan agreed to tell her story in the hopes that someone else might learn from her experience.

“This kind of addiction can be so easily hidden because it’s kept in secrecy,” she said. “There are no bruises like with physical abuse; you don’t show up to work with liquor on your breath like with alcoholism.

“I think Wayne really thought he wasn’t hurting anyone with his addiction, because there were no outward, obvious signs. But it deeply hurts spouses and families and leaves permanent scars that can ’t be erased.”

Unfortunately, Susan’s story is just one of many. Though an addiction to pornography can start from simple curiosity or inadvertent exposure, it can often lead quickly to addictions toxic to a marriage and family life.

“I would estimate this is an issue facing 25 percent of all couples who come in for marital counseling with us, ” said Mary Vorsten, director of counseling at Catholic Community Services.

Her staff of 52 counselors provides services at 11 separate sites around the archdiocese, she said. And at each of those sites, counselors have seen individuals seeking help for pornography addictions.

It often takes less time for pornography to do damage to individuals and families than one might think.

Research shows that it only takes six hours of soft-core pornography viewing to subtly alter a person ’s attitudes toward a variety of sexual activity. After that length of time, for example, participants report devaluing monogamy, marital commitment and child rearing; see infidelity as less of a problem; and are less likely to see rape and sexual harassment as problematic.

Jacki Corrigan, archdiocesan consultant for the office of family life, sees those outcomes as particularly disturbing in light of the effect it has on one ’s relationships.

“With pornography, all you’re seeing is the body as something to be used. You’re stripping the individual of their dignity as a God-created person,” said Corrigan.

Viewing pornography leads a person to view others as objects for their own personal gain. That is diametrically opposed to the way God calls us to live, said Corrigan.

“God created us with such dignity — mind, body and soul. You don’t see any of that with pornography,” she said. “He gave us such a gift in our sexuality that can only realize its deepest joy in the heart of marriage and family life. ”

Though pornography can have devastating effects on marriage and family life, there is hope. Many families find healing and reconciliation through counseling, forgiveness and the sacraments (to be discussed in greater detail throughout this series).

Susan found that her experience, though painful, caused her to rely on her faith more heavily. She turned to prayer in times of suffering and found strength to continue on for her children. She hopes other families will not have to endure the same trials her family has undergone.

“If you’re going down that road, stop and get help,” Susan advised. “Stop if you even have the slightest inclination to look at pornography, even if you think it ’s just natural curiosity. It’s not real; it’s just like playing with fire — it’s not worth the risk.”