Why Most Men Will Never Recover (And What That Actually Means)

“While the list should have earned them some credit, instead it was used as evidence for the prosecution.”

Why Most Men Will Never Recover From Porn Addiction (And What That Actually Means)

A woman with a big following in this space published a list recently. Here was her title:

6 UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS ABOUT WHY MOST MEN WILL NEVER RECOVER FROM PORN ADDICTION

Almost every word of it was true.

It's the conclusion she drew at the end that I can't let sit.

I follow this account on purpose. The education parts she shares is usually accurate, and I want to know exactly what women in this space are being told, so I can say the other thing.

Because two people can go through nearly identical traumas and come out on completely different sides of it.

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Before I go further, you should know who you're talking with.

I have years of complex trauma from betrayal in two marriages.

I have been through d-day after d-day.

I know what it is to be held while you sob by the person who caused it, and find out later he was still looking straight into your eyes and lying.

I know what it's like to have your history rewritten memory by memory, until moments that meant everything mean nothing.

To realize the person you thought you knew inside and out is a stranger.

To become a shape shifter, doing whatever it takes to keep the connection, at whatever cost to yourself, because you've lost yourself in it anyway and had no idea who you'd be without him.

I know the hypervigilance, the insomnia, and then the sleeping 12+ hours.

The not eating and then the overeating.

The relief that showed up in a glass or 4 at night.

The cycles of finally feeling close and hopeful, then getting yanked back into reality, because you're not actually safe.

I know what it is to lose your faith, because God never came and the story you thought was being written with your life turned out to be something else entirely.

And I know the isolation, because nobody understands how this much damage came from something people keep calling harmless.

The aloneness is the worst part of all of it. There were stretches where it felt like none of it was worth waking up for.

I share this all so you know... I get it.

One thing I want to be clear about before I go on: I do not believe every woman should stay.

I believe every woman should decide for themselves, from a grounded place, with real information, especially when other people's lives are affected.

What we do here is for the ones who want to give restoration a real chance, and who need the tools and the support to find out if it's even possible.

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Now, the post. Because it deserves to be talked about.

Her six reasons why most men will never recover, paraphrased:

1. It means dismantling a coping mechanism he's leaned on since he was a kid.Asking him to stop isn't asking him to break a habit. It's asking him to rewire a brain that has been shaped by this for decades.

2. It requires sustained discomfort for years.The number of men willing to actually sit in that is a fraction of the number who promise to.

3. It requires him to say out loud, to a therapist or to you, the things he did in private.Plenty of men would rather lose the relationship than be that exposed.

4. It often costs him his social identity.Friends, group chats, influences he's had for years.

5. It requires admitting there's a problem at all.When compartmentalizing has been a survival tool since childhood, putting the hidden life and the public one into the same room is brutal work.

6. There's no audience for it.Just quiet, boring, daily sobriety that nobody claps for, which is agony for a brain wired for instant reward.

Here's the thing. She's right. All six.

But I read that list and I don't see proof that our men aren't capable. I see the size of what we're asking them to do.

The men who set their sights on this anyway are not weak, and they are not worthless or disgusting. They are stepping into the arena of their own lives and taking on work most people would never volunteer for. They're doing it without the healthy influences or the wiring that would have set them up to succeed at it.

And the ones who are really in it are doing it because they want to love you well, not because they set out to fake it - though it may seem like it to you when he’s still struggling with how to do all of this.

While the list above should earn them some credit, instead it gets used as evidence for the prosecution.

So then the post ends with this:"And the woman who plans for the possibility that he won't change isn't pessimistic. She's the most strategic woman in the room."

Here's where I part ways with her.

Planning for the possibility that he won't change is not the problem. That's wisdom, and I'd tell any woman in this group to do it. What I take issue with is deciding the ending before he's had the chance to write it, and calling that strategy - and that’s the tone the post takes.

Hope and preparation are not opposites. You can keep your eyes wide open, be honest with yourself about what you're seeing, know you may need to break your own heart in the end, and still leave room for the possibility that he may become the man who was worth staying for.

The most strategic woman in the room is not the one who has already decided how it turns out. She's the one who listens to her heart, takes this one day at a time, and trusts herself to make the best decisions she can that day based on the information she currently has.

There's a saying: “Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right.”

Statistically, most people never lose the weight. Most people never build the business. Most people don't beat that diagnosis, and most people don't walk again after that kind of accident.

Those numbers are real and I'm not going to pretend they aren't.

But think about what happens in those rooms.

Nobody hands a woman starting chemo a list of six reasons her type usually doesn't respond.

Nobody sits at the foot of the hospital bed and reads out the percentage of people with that injury who never get out of the chair.

Not because the odds aren't true. Because everyone in that room understands that what you take in every day while you're fighting for something becomes part of how you fight for it.

That's my whole argument. Not that wanting it badly enough makes it happen. Plenty of people fight with everything in them and don't get the outcome, and that was never a failure of belief.

But when you are in a do or die stretch of your life, you do not want to be soaking in the stories of everyone who didn't make it. You want to know what's possible. You want people around you who have already done it. You want every cell in your body on the side of the version where this works.

And if you fought for your marriage and it ended anyway, nothing I just said means you did it wrong. I fought like hell for my first one and it still ended. Some of the strongest women I know are the ones who gave it everything and still had to go.

Some of you are with men who aren't interested in recovery at all. That is a specific kind of painful. For some of them it may be that they don't believe it's possible yet. For others, this hasn't cost them enough for them to believe it has to change. If that's your partner, your work right now is understanding what boundaries look like when they protect you and the life you deserve, without taking away his autonomy.

Some of you are with men who genuinely want to change and are making a mess of it. Lying, minimizing, rewriting your reality, while still trying. Or they started with real intentions and have quietly given up, because they had no idea it would be this hard and nobody ever showed them how.

And some of you are with men who are giving this everything they have. They've gotten the right help and they're doing the work, imperfectly, like everyone does. There are women in here who are jealous of you, and that still doesn't make your road easy, and there's still a real chance your marriage doesn't survive it.

For every single one of you, I want you to hear this: something being extremely difficult does not make it impossible.

Being at chapter one, where he's still in denial, does not mean he can't get to chapter twenty.

You not being able to imagine ever forgiving him, or ever feeling close to him again, does not mean you'll never get to feel that. It means it's going to be a lot of hard work. It's going to ask more of you both than you thought you had. And no, it isn't guaranteed.

The only guarantee is in not trying. And if that's the choice that's right for you, nobody here blames you.

But if you're going to try, and he's going to try, the most important next step is to get around people who have gone before you.

Surround yourself with the ones who will normalize success for you instead of failure.

So tell me where you are right now.

Whether he isn't interested, whether he's trying and making a mess of it, or whether he's giving it everything he has. Or maybe you don’t even know for sure. That’s okay too. Say it in the comments.

There is nothing you can put there that some woman in here hasn't been through, and I read every single one.