Hi I am Carrie. My exhusand is an SO. I am also in recovery for sex addiction(mine was more about affairs) and I may be starting a company to help friends and families of sex offenders but in doing so it's bringing up all of the undealt with feelings I have towards my ex-husband. I felt like I stuck by his side to the best of my ability. He perpetrated on two children from his last marriage and went to prison. That was in New Orleans and because of Hurricane Katrina I had to relocate to Florida. I had nothing. He left me with nothing as I was the breadwinner. Hurricane Katrina devastated me but not as much as losing my husband and having no support. I fell into an extremely deep depression and then met another man who I would end up living with for the majority of time my husband was in prison. It wasn't that I didn't love my husband, I just didn't know how to cope. He got out of prison and ironically I found him a halfway house not even realizing it was in Florida. I was still with this other man who is more like a husband (but also a horrific alcoholic and bipolar) than my actual husband. My husband tried to pursue me and get me to leave my partner and I wanted to but I had been in that relationship and so entangled with his addiction and financially entangled that it took a little bit of time for me to be able to be free. By that time my husband with already so angry that I didn't drop everything when he came home from prison to be with him that he started to create a second life. He started attending a church where nobody knew about his past. He threatened that I couldn't go to this church when I knew that we needed God to heal our marriage. I did anything and everything I could to try to get my husband back but ultimately he was lying, acting out with me sexually and ultimately cut me off and I believed married this other woman from that church. I don't know if she knows about the extent of his past but I've always walked around wounded that he left me. That I wasn't worth fighting for and that our marriage wasn't worth fighting for. I got that he is still sick. From all of my education I know that sex offenses are typically born out of trauma and are symptoms of the greater problem. I'm really angry because I went through so much to support him, except him and love him for exactly who he was. But rather than face who he was and be with me he decided to create an alternate personality almost and make sure that he had nothing to do with me. I think a lot of it has to do with the woman that he left me for. I had a friend of mine that contacted her to tell her that he was still involved with me and sleeping with me. That we were still seeing our couples therapist and she sent me some kind of message saying that I was a gaslighter. Meaning that I was lying about all of it. I told her she could feel free to contact our couples therapist and he would inform her that my husband and I were still being sexually active. But after that incident occurred I never heard from my ex-husband again. I still use the term husband and ex-husband interchangeably because on some level I'm still having a hard time accepting that it's over. I was head over heels in love with this man and no one can teach you how to deal with and cope with the fact somebody you love molested to little kids, the deal with prison, housing, employment and the various other challenges. We certainly didn't go through those in our premarital counseling course. I have great guilt over cheating on him and not knowing how to deal with the fact that he went to prison because we were actually on a lunch break the day of his hearing and he signed and they took him away. He didn't discuss with me doing a plea bargain he just took it and left. my idea to start a support network came from the fact that I had been going through all of the above but there was no one to talk to and no one who could relate. being the ex wife of a convicted sex offender who did a heinous crime and in the end left me is a massive wound that I carry around perhaps more than I realized.  I'm one of those people that believes marriage is forever and even if there's been infidelity you work through that. I mean I worked through the fact that he left and went to prison for 5 years. I have to deal with the fact that I'm 45 years old in the ten years I spent trying to get him back have more than likely cost me the ability to have my own child naturally.  I don't know if anybody else has been through this stuff but thank you for listening.