It felt like our progression had stopped. It felt like we had nowhere to go. It was so heavy and so exhausting to even think about how to dig ourselves out of this hole. It's fear that this is going to happen again. That paralyzes us. You feel like your whole world is crashing down around you. It's just intense pain, intense heartache. It's just kind of a general feeling of unease, and just knowing that I've heard what marriage is supposed to feel like, and this isn't it.

There can be overwhelming feelings of confusion, of anger. The person might find themselves lashing out when that might be something that she doesn't typically do. There can be a sense of disorientation, sleep difficulties, sleep disturbances. Oftentimes the person might experience nightmares. She might experience intrusive images or thoughts, almost obsessive thoughts, thinking about her spouse's problem. And oftentimes the person can think, "What's happening to me? This isn't who I am. I feel like I'm going crazy." Just a lot of really overwhelming feelings. I didn't think I would ever be happy again. I thought that if we stayed married, that we would just be one of those fake couples, pretending to be happy on the outside and just being miserable on the inside. I didn't see how I could trust him or anything ever again. One of the things for a person with an addiction and a person who has been afflicted or traumatized is, sometimes we think we've lost our options, that we don't--that we can't choose. We get to choose. It's very OK to consider options and to really lay down the line for this relationship to work. It was comforting to me to have kind of rules set so my whole life wasn't chaos. I wish I would have known about boundaries nine years ago, because those were really comforting to kind of almost protect my heart. And so we want her to be able to have the confidence to, you know, talk about what she needs and to talk about how afraid she is and to ask for help and support and to be able to set healthy boundaries and say, "I expect these things to happen in this relationship. These are deal breakers for me." And so if she can be that straightforward about it and that confident that she is worthy of receiving that kind of protection and those boundaries, then things get so much better.