Smjsome1 - I may have missed this, but what is the 'group' you are going to? Is it led or facilitated by a therapist?
Regarding your recovery journey - it will be hard, there's no easy way around it; but if it were easy, you wouldn't get out of it what you need to get out of it to move forward. My timeline is a bit different. I started therapy and 12-step group work, geez.... almost 25 years ago. I vividly remember going in, sitting down, and telling the therapist I came from the perfect family. It took months to realize how screwed up I was, and I began the deconstruction of my life as I knew it and had to start making heads or tails of what my FOO was really like. It was daunting. Fortunately, we lived 1000+ miles from any of them, so we were able to control gatherings/get togethers. FWIW, my H, to a certain degree, did run a little bit of interference for me in those times. He came from such a family of chaos, that anything that wasn't chaos (like my family), seemed like a walk in the park to him. I have horrible stories to tell from my childhood that only a few select people on this earth will ever hear, and it took me probably a couple of years before I could tell my therapist about them. As a teen, I began drinking early (15) and smoking pot (16) and thought I was having a ball. I was just trying to numb my feelings. So when I met H, who also liked to party, it seemed like we were the perfect fit. He had high career aspirations, and I just wanted a family, so to a certain extent, we did meet each other's needs. But once our kids began to hit school age, I knew there was something terribly wrong with us - he was so distant and I needed more parenting and partner support. He couldn't give it, so my therapist helped me learn how to get it in other places (meaningful friendships and support groups).
There were months where I was going to therapy 2-3 times a week as I began to really unpack my FOO issues; I had so much shame, and carried so much anxiety. That was the first time I ended up taking Xanax for an extended period, under the direction of a psychiatrist, while we tried to find an anti-depressant that would aleve the anxiety. When my crisis finally passed, I was just able, on my own time frame, to wean off of the Xanax because truthfully, I'd just wake up and more and more of each day would go by and I'd realize I wasn't feeling anxious. It probably took me 6-8 weeks to eventually get off of it. But it probably saved my life - I'm 5'5", and my weight dropped down to 100 lbs. because I wasn't eating enough. I think a lot of people thought I had anorexia, but I didn't. I just had no appetite and my stomach was upset all the time. I finally landed on a medium-sized dose of Zoloft that kept things in check for almost 15 years, while I also still carried around a very small amount of Xanax to use as needed, which was very rarely.
About 15 years ago I was so content with my recovery and so grateful for the 12-step group leading me to a true spirituality (as opposed to how I'd been raised Roman Catholic with so much guilt and shame), that I decided I wanted to go back to school to become a chaplain, so I worked on my master's degree in a Protestant denomination, and ended up working several years as a hospice chaplain, and loved my work. I had great self-confidence, was grateful for my spirituality, and my kids were off to college. So personally, I had found some peace and serenity - my parents died in the early 2000s, and I didn't cry at either funeral. I was just so emotionally detached from them (although I was at their bedsides when they died - it was just such a superficial relationship for many years).
I was doing so well in my life, although H and I were basically roommates - he continued to refuse any suggestion that he needed any therapy; it was in 2007 that I found out about his first affair, but it was already over, so we attempted to repair things - he'd show up for appointments, but wasn't engaged in the therapeutic process with me. My kids were out of college, and health care was changing so much that I decided to quit my job for a while, have some much needed time for myself to pursue things I couldn't while working and raising a family. I had cut back my therapy to once every 2-4 weeks, just as a sort of check-in. While working in hospice, I felt it was a professional responsibility to hold myself accountable for things that would come up in my work with patients, with my therapist, but we spent several years just sort of checking in.
In fact, things were going so well after I quit my job, I decided maybe it was time to see if I could cut back on my Zoloft - that was the first bad health care decision I made that led to the beginning of my spiral down. Anxiety returned as bad as it had been earlier in my therapeutic process, and I had some physicians that were neglecting other things, like an overactive thyroid and prescribing too many hormones. No matter what we did for two years, I could not pull out of the abyss. Fairly quickly, I was back on Xanax again, because the weight loss returned. This time (2011-2012) I lost about 30 lbs. (I had more than put back on what I lost during the first crisis) - we tried so many medications, and nothing worked. Xanax kept be functioning just to the point where I could make therapy appointments (back to 2-3 times a week), but my life just sort of stopped. Because I had been such an active person, this led to a deep depression, and that's when I dealt with an inpatient treatment program, then eventually hospitalization for ECT. Funny thing... when I did the inpatient treatment program (Menninger Clinic), they didn't spend any time going back and looking at childhood trauma. Their gig is CBT and DBT. They seemed to base their success of me on whether they could get me off the Xanax, which they did, but it only lasted a couple of months. But while I was there, one of the psychiatrists told me she thought I had developed this anxiety and depression because I was trying to get back at H for his affair five years earlier. I absolutely didn't believe it, and was very angry for their suggesting I was so vindictive. That's probably why it didn't take long for me to need the Xanax after I was discharged. One important thing they did recommend at discharge, was that we get into some serious marital counseling, and not just an occasional 'H shows up with me to my therapist'. They also recommended a psychotherapy group, which I joined upon discharge, and did up until about six weeks ago when I decided the focus of my recovery needed to change, and the group was an additional night out, and was not focused on partners of sex addicts.
I remember when I finally got about 90% disclosure from H in September 2017, thinking, if Menninger thinks my anxiety and depression back in 2011-2013 was my getting back at my husband for one affair, how the hell was I going to respond to finding out about three more affairs between 2015-2017? For the first few months the anger directed my emotions, and I thought it was really odd that I wasn't needing much Xanax. It was the adrenaline. I was sleeping sometimes just 3-4 hours a night, and wide awake the next day... no napping. But over time, I couldn't sustain it, and the anxiety creeped back in, and I started needing Xanax from time to time. Like most, I lost more weight again (funny how, every time I lose weight in a crisis, I can always tell how I'm getting better again, because I start to put the weight back on!). In the ensuing year, with more disclosures until he finally admitted to the sex addiction in early March, losing two brothers who died 12 days apart in February, my own health scare with the genetic mutation discovery a month ago, and now our plans to relocate, my Xanax use is back up to almost a mg. a day (.50 of that is taken at bedtime, though). My psychiatrist has seen me use Xanax in times of crisis and be able to take myself off it when I no longer needed it (both times, she never told me I had to wean off it... I just did); in fact, yesterday when I met my trauma therapist, I asked her if she'd seen responsible use of benzos from other trauma patients, and see them wean themselves off it when the time was right, and she replied, "Absolutely... all the time; there are plenty of people who use benzos responsibly, and this is a time you need to have compassion for yourself and use it as needed."
Why have I shared all of this with you? Because I hate to see you start using something... you described 'an extra tiny pill', because if you're not meant to be happy, you should at least feel good. You are going through trauma - please, please, please see a qualified psychiatrist who understands trauma, and what it does to your body. There are skilled and competent psychiatrists out there who will help you through this so you're not having to self-medicate yourself. If you choose to go the pot route, at least, do it under the care of someone who will help you get your medical card (in our state you can get a card if you have PTSD). I think there is a place for medical marijuana, but when you have PTSD, it should be done under the supervision of a health care provider, even if you live in a state where you don't need that for a prescription. Some people have pointed out to me when we move to CA, I won't need a card; but I wouldn't dare start using medical or recreational marijuana unless one of my physicians knew what I was doing and know about the PTSD.
There's no shame in asking for medical help with what you're going through. And it hurts me to read that you don't think you're meant to be happy. Because even I believe the most egregious people in the world deserve to be happy, if they've done their therapeutic work and are genuinely striving to better themselves. I carry so much shame from my mom in particular due to my being born with a cleft lip/palate - I didn't realize it as a kid, but when I finally got around to doing some serious childhood trauma work back in November, it became so obvious to me... how did I miss it over all those years of therapy? Well, because I wasn't ready to see it. But now I do, and I will spend some time trying to make peace with it. It's painful, painful stuff, but in the end, if you work through it, you will be so much more happier and have such richer life experiences if you do the work. But doing the work means you have to ask for help, in whatever healthy form it comes in. One of the more serious things I'm thinking about doing when we move (it would be a BIG, BIG step for me), is to go one month make-up free. Because of how sensitive I am about my appearance, I rarely go out of the house without makeup; my personal trainer, who I've known for 7 years, has never seen me without makeup. I know it's because I want to distract from my cleft lip (which, actually, I've been told by many physicians that I had excellent plastic surgery done as a baby - they can hardly tell unless I tell them first about my defects). But I need to get to a place where I don't care what people think about how I look. H tells me I'm beautiful now, even on days when I am just staying home and don't have on any makeup. So here I will be, in a new community, wanting to impress people, and I'll have to do it based on who I am, and not how I look... that will be incredibly challenging for me.
I hope this didn't come across as lecturing. Hey, in my first couple of years of therapy (as I fought every ounce of denial in me that my childhood was screwed up), I was known to show up drunk for my therapy sessions from time to time... sometimes at 11AM! So I get it, it's all consuming, so overwhelming. But self-medicating didn't work for me. I eventually felt so much shame about it, I told my therapist, and that ended that. As miserable as I am right now, with how my life has unfolded in the last year, I'd give this any old day than how my life would have turned out had I chosen not to engage in serious therapeutic work.
