How to Survive Sexual Betrayal

Why do most spouses and partners react to the discovery of sexual addiction with such a sense of total devastation?  Sexual betrayal is an emotional blow that can be harder to deal with than anything, even death.

Most therapists who deal with partners of sex addicts now see the partner as experiencing severe trauma and PTSD symptoms, at least in the initial period post-discovery.  This suggests a theoretical framework that can help us understand the partner’s recovery  process as it proceeds.

The usual tools for dealing with hardship seem to fail us

Our usual arsenal of tools for transcending heartbreak and loss seems to break down in the face of the discovery of sexually addictive behavior in a loved one. For example:

We try:

Practicing detachment by reminding ourselves that the betrayal is not about us, and going to support groups and 12-step meetings, letting go of comparing ourselves to the addict’s other sexual interest.  But detachment seems to keep slipping through our fingers and we feel a mix of strong emotions.

We try:

Educating ourselves about the disease by reading and learning about the roots of sex addiction in the early childhood attachment issues, by learning that sexual addiction is not a deliberate attempt to hurt us.  But still feelings of anger and blame seem to hang around forever.

We try:

Meditation, prayer or other spiritual practice to help us realize that we did not cause the problem and we cannot cure it, and to let go of outcomes.  This will work perfectly for some things; the job we didn’t get, the flooding in the basement, but in sex addiction disclosure there is something so totally unacceptable that we want to tighten our grip.

All of the above tools are very important in a partner’s recovery  and should be practiced even when their efficacy seems limited. But why is sexual addiction so much harder to deal with?

Some reasons why sexual betrayal is different

Here are some factors that “up the ante” in sexual betrayal.

  • The personal closeness you have to the person who has been deceiving you, the person you saw as your support system
  • The abandonment  by the most important person in your life (death is easier to accept because it is something that can’t be helped)
  • The blow to your sense of reality

The last of these, the way sexual betrayal messes with your reality, is one of the most powerful factors.  Sexual addiction is often so extreme and so out of character that it calls into question all your assumptions about “normal” life.

Surviving sexual betrayal as a grief process

I tend to think of surviving sexual betrayal as a grief process because I think it is the most useful way to look at it.  I believe that seeing it this way will give you permission to take better care of yourself and to make allowances for your own healing.

  • Grief is a process that follows its own course.  It is also a process that is very different for different people depending on your own personal make up.
  • Sexual betrayal is a loss and therefore must be grieved.  It is a loss of the relationship that you thought you had and produces the same pain and abandonment as other losses.
  • Recovery from sexual betrayal seems to follow the familiar stages of grief.

The initial stage of denial often takes the form of believing the addict’s false promises or trying to set up a quick cure.  In other words, the belief that things could be patched up and go back to “normal” is a form of denial.

The bargaining, anger and depression stages of grief are also clearly identifiable.  For example, self blame, feeling that you somehow failed, is a form of bargaining.  It allows you to hold onto a feeling that you can control the situation.

The grief process is one that must be allowed to occur.  Feelings must be experienced and emotions expelled in order to move through the process.  There is no way to make it pleasant, but it will eventually lead to acceptance and a new and better relationship life.

Discovery of Sex Addiction in a Partner: What to Do First

When you first discover sexually compulsive behavior in a partner, it may be hard to think straight.  Nevertheless, you are in a position of being a “first responder” in a crisis situation that seems to require action of some sort.

You are the “interventionist” for the moment

Very often a spouse or partner of a sex addict is alone in confronting the situation.  An alcoholic or drug addict may have half a dozen friends or family members who are fed up enough that they will band together for a professionally led group intervention to try to get the person to accept help.  Sex addiction is a less public problem and the partner who discovers the secret life of the addict might not have anyone to open up to.

But as a partner of a sex addict, you may be a crucial person in determining whether the addict gets treatment.  What you do or don’t do will have significant effects.  How and in what way should you try to have an impact?  What will you need to know to act effectively? Here are some of the major things to consider.

1.     Confront the sexual behaviors.

It is important for partners and spouses to ask the hard questions.  If you don’t take the issue seriously the sex addict may try to placate you with promises or minimize the problem.  What has the addict been doing? How often?  For how long?  It is not necessary to know all the gory details about specific behaviors.  What matters is to begin to be honest.

2.     Choices to make and choices not to make

You do not have to make a choice about whether to leave the relationship in the middle of the discovery crisis.  But assuming you might stick it out, you do have to make a decision to take the necessary next steps.  Don’t get caught up in definitions of addiction.  The label is not what matters.  What matters is taking action to get help.

3.     Expect some distorted thinking and a mix of strong emotions

The addict at first will be prone to some amount of denial and may not be thinking too clearly.  He or she may react to overwhelming guilt with strong emotions and even anger and accusations.  Don’t be derailed.

4.    You have more power than you think: use it

The partner of a sex addict has a great deal of leverage in the crisis-discovery period.  Most addicts will agree to get help if their partner insists on it, even if they don’t quite understand that they have an addiction.  It is important to know that you may have more influence than the therapist in getting the addict to make the initial commitment to treatment.

5.     Find a sex addiction specialist

Initiate contact with a sex addiction therapist and go in together for an assessment if possible.  Don’t plan on continuing in couple therapy at this point.  Sex addiction is not about issues between you as a couple.  There will be time to deal with that later.  The goal is to get the addict into the proper level of individual treatment for his or her sexually compulsive behavior.

6.     Get help for yourself

It is important that you find a sex addiction therapist who also works with partners and spouses and get individual counseling.  You will also begin to educate yourself about sex addiction and recovery.  This is a time to rely on trusted friends and family for help and support. Your addict partner cannot be your major support system and you must rely on other people as difficult as that may be.

It will only be after both partners have had the appropriate treatment and support over a period of six months to a year that they can then begin to re-evaluate and work on their relationship together.  The initial period is one in which each partner will separately work on their problems.  If you as a spouse or partner have taken a stand and helped make this happen then you will have done the best that you could do.

Are We Responsible For Our Sexuality?

The two recent articles, “Head case puzzle” (7/15/2012) by Robert M.  Sapolsky (a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University) and “Do pedophiles deserve sympathy?” (6/21/2012) by James Cantor ( of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto) point the way toward what will undoubtedly become an increasingly well understood science of the way in which brain wiring, injuries to the nervous system both before and after birth, childhood factors affecting brain development and genetics are all interwoven in such a way as to produce a human being who is predisposed to particular sexual acts.

But for those who want to see sex addicts and/or sex offenders as responsible for making the right choices no matter how they are wired, Sapolsky’s Op-Ed piece in the L.A. Times is a shot across the bow.

As Sapolsky points out, “Self-discipline, impulse control, gratification postponement and emotional regulation are all just as much products of biology as anything else that emanates from the brain.  The same types of evidence that allowed us to understand the role for biology in such things as abnormal sexual urges have also demonstrated a role for biology in giving in to those urges.”

Where are we with understanding sexual compulsion?

Some sex offenders and sex addicts seem to have wiring that is so messed up that they are incapable of ever gaining any connection with or empathy for another human being.  And yet we used to claim that people with “character disorders” such as borderline personality disorder were incurable too. But we now know that these “disorders of the self” as they are sometimes called are most often related to neurophysiological  issues that may be a result of early trauma and attachment issues and that they can be treated with a great deal of success.

So is sexual compulsion a disability permanently etched in the brain?

At present I believe we operate on the basis of a kind of implicitly understood continuum of biological permanence, which goes something like this:

sexual orientation  –  paraphilia  –  arousal template  – trauma reaction

In this continuum sexual orientation (gay, straight etc.) is accepted by most if not all people as hard wired in the brain if not the genome.   At the most fluid end of the scale, a trauma reaction or behavior that is in reaction to (or a repetition of) specific traumatic experiences which are often quite amenable to change through treatment.

The middle two categories are where the sex offenders and sex addicts are usually located.  Pedophilia, attraction to children, is a paraphilia like other types of sexual fixations.   It is the object of sexual attraction that is the most or only really sexually arousing person or thing.  These are seen as learned rather than innate for the most part but have been viewed as resistant to treatment.

“Arousal template” is the word used in most sex addiction therapy to refer to the sexual preferences such as dominance and submission, voyeurism and so on, which are the result of childhood experiences, early trauma and conditioning.  They are closer to trauma reactions in that with proper treatment they can be worked through and in many cases the person’s sexual behavior can come to be more “normal.”

If there is a neurophysiologically identifiable cause of the problem, we tend to see the person as less responsible for their behavior regardless of how effectively it can be treated.  Actually, the question should be not how much or little people have control over a given behavior, but how far we have come in being able to treat it.  The question of responsibility is one that the legal and philosophical systems rely on but ultimately it has little to do with the scientific reality of the prospects for treatment and recovery.

How Can a Sex Addict Regain Trust?

Even after a sex addict has admitted the problem and has gone into treatment for sexually addictive behaviors like serial affairs, excessive porn use, or compulsive cybersex (to name just a few), it is normal for spouses and partners to feel hurt, angry and suspicious.  Even after the addict has been sexually “sober” for a period of months, the spouse will usually be justifiably mistrustful.

They see the sex addict going to therapy and support groups; they hear the addict saying all the right things and yet they feel that there is not enough evidence of real change; they are afraid it’s all a sham.

After working with many recovering sex addicts and their partners, I feel that there are four key elements to regaining trust:

Continue reading

Porn And Sexism: Men Are Speaking Out

Men are tackling some tough sexual issues.  Issues like  male sexuality and sex addiction.  For decades there have been men who were for gender equality, against violence and against sex role injustice.  But now men’s liberation seems to be showing strength in the sexualarena.  There are currently a number of male-run websites exploring the myths around “male supremacist sexuality,” and taking a hard look at porn addiction as well.

In what follows I’ll give a few examples of what I’ve recently come across where male-run websites are challenging what they see as an outdated idea of male sexuality based on objectification and domination.

  •   From the website xyonline.net – title: “Men, Masculinities and Gender Politics”

“Porn makes sexism sexy: it makes domination, hierarchy, violence and hate feel like sex.  Sexism is eroticized.  Pornography is also one of the main enforcers of homophobia.”

Continue reading

Dating a Sex Addict: Do’s and Don’ts

Let’s assume you are a very intuitive person.  Let’s say you are a woman who has just found out her boyfriend is frequently watching internet porn, having online sexual encounters, or engaging in other sexual activities in a secretive or compulsive way.

You have already got a pretty good idea that there’s something not OK about it.  Maybe he wants you to act out a particular fantasy scenario or engage in a 3-way or some other act that may not be in your comfort zone.  You say “no” and he keeps pushing you; maybe he even gets irritated.

The following are common sense ideas based on my own experience in working with sex addicts and their partners.

Don’ts

  • Don’t ignore your intuition.  Your intuition is that little faint voice inside you that tells you something doesn’t feel right.  It is way too easy to ignore that little voice especially in new dating situation when you don’t have all the “information.”  Your intuition has a lot of information, so trust it.
  • Don’t let yourself be talked out of what you are feeling.  If you say that you think there’s a problem and your boyfriend denies it and tries to brush it off you should continue to notice the signs of addiction.  And, if you are dealing with a sex addict, promises to change are worth next to nothing.
  • Don’t blame yourself for someone else’s compulsive sexual behavior.  Even if the person tries to blame you and say you are lacking sexually or some other way,  you cannot and should not accept a guilt trip
  • Don’t “manage” his illness.  Many sex addicts will disclose their behavior but not take responsibility for it.  They may let you be their coach, therapist or policeman.  This never works for either of you and is at bottom a way of dodging the issue.

Do’s

  • Do set boundaries that work for you.  This means deciding what you are really comfortable with.  It also means being clear about what you want and don’t want, expressing it and continuing to stick to it over time.
  • Do continue to observe and put the pieces together.  Ask a lot of questions, particularly about his relationship history and what he is looking for in a relationship.  You are not being paranoid, just prudent.
  • Do take a critical look at his behavior.  Hold onto the idea that no matter how sexually exciting you find the relationship, there are other very important ways to evaluate a potential boyfriend besides sexual magnetism.
  • Do demand that the person get help.  This is something he must do based on his own motivation but you may be important enough to him to provide that initial thrust. This means that if you take a stand you have to be ready to walk.  “Get help or I’m out of here,” is often what an addict needs to give him the impetus to get some help.

Obviously these are just a few observations and not the whole story.  There are many important aspects to how to conduct a dating relationship in present day society.  And there are many different viewpoints out there as to what is “normal” and what is sexually addictive or problematic so that it is easy to feel confused in an actual dating situation.

Please leave a comment and share your experience and wisdom on this topic!

Is Porn Addiction the “New Normal?

Judging by the statistics, internet pornography addiction is at least becoming the norm if not the normal.  One question that arises is how we as a society should respond to this phenomenon and why.

23 million porn addicts in the U.S., and that’s just the adults

The article “Pornography: ‘Everybody’s Watching it, Statistics Say” states that 30 percent of all web traffic is porn and that porn sites attract the greatest volume of web traffic.

According to the article “Internet Pornography Statistics”

“A total of 40 million U.S. adults regularly visit pornography websites.  Ten percent of adults admit to an internet sexual addiction (my italics) and 20 percent of men say they access pornography at work.”

Continue reading

Virtual Infidelity: Online “Affairs” and How They Affect Intimate Relationships

Online relationships are becoming a part of our social reality in the digital age.  We get acquainted with someone on the Internet and establish an emotional connection.  We communicate often and sometimes extremely openly with that person and we can come to feel a special closeness to them.

Sometimes we know the person in real life and sometimes we don’t.  Perhaps they are a business acquaintance who lives in another city and whom we see in person only rarely and then only fleetingly.  Or maybe they are an old flame who suddenly surfaces online, and old fantasies get reignited.  We may not run to meet them in person but we can convince ourselves that it is a good idea to keep up the connection through social media and emails.

 Normal online relationships vs. virtual affairs

A spouse or partner cannot meet every emotional need that we have.  Most people have healthy friendships with people outside their primary relationship or marriage.  Sometimes these are people with a common interest, or old friends who share our sense of humor.  Sometimes these people are trusted confidants and we feel very connected to them even if we only communicate with them online.  Spouses, partners, boyfriends and girlfriends need to allow each other to have separate parts of their lives in order not to become swallowed up and stifled in a relationship.

The dark side of virtual or “special” friendships outside of a relationship depends on how they are conducted, and consequently their meaning for and impact on the primary relationship.  An online relationship can be perfectly fine or it can be a form of infidelity and even a destructive betrayal whether or not there is any overt sexual content being exchanged online.  For people with a history of intimacy issues or sexually addictive behaviors these kinds of virtual or emotional connections pose special risks.

Even in its most seemingly innocent form where the “special friend” is not in a sexually relevant category (by relevant I mean opposite sex for straights, same sex for gays and lesbians) the special friend can still be a form of disloyalty.  A good example is the straight married guy with a friend who is like the little bad demon sitting on his shoulder, urging him to forget about what his wife wants and just do what guys do.  In this case the choice of the “friend” is in itself a threat to the relationship.  Whether the spouse knows about it or not, the friend often exists to drive a wedge into the couple and undermine the trust and closeness that form the foundation of the marriage.

Connecting online with someone of sexual interest can be a form of sexual betrayal even when there is no actual or even virtual sex involved.  The partner who invests a lot of himself online in a special friend who is exciting and sexually attractive is taking part of himself out of the relationship in a way that undermines the intimacy of the couple.

For sex addicts and recovering sex addicts, the online connection can represent the re-emergence of an old acting out pattern in a watered down form.  The excuse that “she tracked me down!” or “how could I know she would post a photo like that on Facebook?” or “I have to deal with her because she’s a ‘business connection,’” are just ways of dodging the fact that the addict wants to find a way to avoid their relationship and engage in an experience that is more of a “high.”

Problems to look for in an online relationship

1.    It relates to an old pattern of sexually addictive behavior

When the person who is spending a lot of time connecting with a special someone on the internet is a practicing or recovering sex addict or has a history of serial seductions and infidelities then the “special” online relationship – no matter what the logical reason for it – is often a step down a slippery slope back into old destructive behaviors.  This is true even if the partner knows everything about it.

2.    It is done in secret

Privacy is one thing.  Secrecy is something else.  The very fact of concealing the existence of the online relationship from a partner strongly suggests that it is a form of emotional betrayal.  Whether consciously or not, a person may be falling into a “double life” in order to assuage loneliness, act out anger at their partner or simply avoid dealing with getting close or committed.  This is in some ways the worst kind of betrayal because it prevents working through the problems in the primary relationship and building a stronger connection.

3.    There is no accountability

When one partner wants to pursue an online relationship and will not talk openly about why and what it means it is often because they are afraid that what they are doing is illegitimate in some way.   If on the other hand the person is willing to discuss it, have their partner learn about the online friend, seek out trusted advisors and even let their spouse or partner meet the friend then the betrayal issue will probably go away of its own accord.

Getting stuck in cyberspace

By their very nature, relationships that exist only online are not real and intimate in the same sense as relationships that exist in person.  No matter how many jokes or videos you share online, and even if you engage in a variety of high tech cybersexual activities, you will never go to the supermarket together or take care of each other when you are sick. Online relationships that make one partner partially missing in action have the potential to prevent couples from growing together.  While there may be real reasons why the partners are better off going their separate ways, the online virtual affair will only stand in the way of their making a good faith effort to find out.

Are All Sex Addicts Narcissists?

In some circles “narcissistic sex addict” has become redundant.  It almost sounds like a double put-down, and yet many sex addicts exhibit narcissistic personality traits. Often they are self-centered, ignore others’ needs and feel they should have special privileges.

Narcissism is on a continuum

At the mild end, there are narcissistic personality traits, the folks who seem a little overly impressed with themselves and who like being the center of attention.   At the extreme end, “narcissistic personality disorder” borders on the sociopathic.  These are the folks who barely know anyone else exists and couldn’t care less.  Somewhere in between are the people with what I call a “narcissistic defense system,” who are using a façade of power and self-importance to cover up deeper feelings of insecurity and low self worth.

Narcissism and sex addiction

A narcissistic defense is a brittle façade which covers feelings of being unlovable and unworthy.  This narcissistic “false self” is so common in sex addicts because they feel so deeply inadequate that they have a long-standing habit of avoiding intimacy.  Instead of getting close and trusting someone, the sex addict is essentially emotionally alone, choosing non-intimate sexual encounters instead.  Many sex addicts become progressively more isolated as their addiction progresses in what is called “relational regression,” even as they present a false picture of their own power and competence to the outside world.

Will Sex Addiction Treatment Cure Narcissism?

To a great extent, yes.  Sex addiction treatment involves a great deal of self-examination with an emphasis on learning honesty, integrity and the capacity to trust both self and others.  The same skills that help the addict recover from addiction are the skills that allow the addict to begin to behave in a more authentic and vulnerable way.  These newly learned abilities go a long way toward eliminating the need to put up a narcissistic defense.  As the sex addict gains an ability to see and accept him/herself more realistically, they will in turn be able to behave in a more trustworthy way and to connect on a deeper level with their fellow human beings.

Spill-Over: A sex addict may have a brush with child molestation

The current typologies:

As it stands there are a number of ways to categorize people whose sexual fantasies or sexual behaviors relate to children.  Each category has its own particular characteristics and these categories become especially significant in the legal arena although they also relate significantly to approaches to prevention and treatment.  There are child molesters who are deemed predatory, fixated pedophiles, those seen as more intractable and more difficult to treat.  There are incestuous child molesters, those who molest a particular child whom they are emotionally close to rather than lying in wait for or grooming children at large and who are seen as less dangerous to society and easier to contain.  There are also of course those who are sexually sociopathic, who have a number of sexually exploitive behaviors and are likely to engage in molestation of a child simply because the opportunity presents itself.  Recently there is a distinction made between people who view child pornography because they are predatory pedophiles and people whose pornography addiction escalates into an interest in child pornography or in child molestation that wasn’t there before.  This spreading out or escalating phenomenon may happen more readily in adolescents whose sexuality, as well as their overall cognitive development, is less well formed.  Probably for this same reason, the recent data suggest that treatment outcomes are better for adolescents who have committed a sexual assault against a child.

The “maverick” molestation

In my work treating sex addicts I have seen a number of patients whose “arousal template,” meaning the well established set of sexual fantasy scenarios that drive their addictive sexual behaviors, have nothing to do with children but who nevertheless have at some point either touched a child inappropriately or had the thought or fantasy of acting out with a child or under-age youth.  In these cases the encounter with a child or adolescent is not part of a pattern.  Also it does not represent an “escalation” of their sex addiction.  On the contrary, the addict may find themselves interacting sexually with a child or contemplating it, only to be shaken by the fact that they have done or contemplated doing such a thing.  They may follow through in the moment and then realize afterward that they have crossed a line that they will never allow themselves to cross again.  Or they may recognize in themselves the impulse to act out with a child in a particular situation and be so taken aback that they never again allow themselves to be in a situation in which that behavior poses a risk.

I can hear you saying “Yes but how can you believe them?  What if they are actually bound to continue the offending behavior but they are keeping it a secret?”  That is a possibility, but if you know the patient well enough and over the period of their recovery from sexual addiction then you know with some certainty that it was a one shot deal.  Such an addict will not stop being an addict and will likely continue their preferred behavior such as anonymous online sexual hook-ups, engaging prostitutes, sexual chat rooms or internet pornography and never have another brush with child molestation.  They may even continue their other offending behaviors such as exhibitionism or voyeurism but never act out against a child.  It is simply not their preferred behavior and they are thus able to veer away from it.

What causes this spill over?

But although they have a distinct arousal template for their compulsive sexual behavior and although they do that behavior or that set of behaviors over and over, and although they may increase the frequency, the riskiness or the bizarreness of the behaviors, they are not destined to become child sexual abusers.  I believe that this phenomenon, if it is a phenomenon, of the random act with a child, represents the fact that:

  • Many sex addicts view the world through sex colored glasses.  As I like to put it, “they could sexualize a ham sandwich.”

 

  • Many sex addicts grow up in families or living situations in which there are extremely poor boundaries.

 

  • Poor boundaries do not always represent covert incest

All sex addicts I have known are liable to see any and every situation through a sexual filter.  They project their own preoccupation with sex onto the world at large and react from their own need to put sexuality first.  But that is not enough to explain the spill over phenomenon.  I think that those addicts who are particularly prone to have a one-time sexual brush with child molestation are those who were raised in families or situations in which there were very poor boundaries.  By this I mean situations in which there was a lack of appropriate generational boundaries and a lack of personal boundaries, e.g. sleeping in the same room with teen aged children or in which male and female children and teens were thrown together in sleeping or living arrangements without privacy.  Usually these are situations in which the parents or caregivers had a poor sense of appropriate boundaries themselves but are not engaging in covert molestation.  In these cases, there is likely no history of actual molestation of the addict as a child.  It there were it would raise the red flag of possible child sexual abuse pattern.

I believe the spill over phenomenon is a byproduct of sexual addiction caused by an extreme lack of an appropriate sense of boundaries beginning in childhood.  If this is the case and if it is fully understood then I believe it helps to allay the fears of the patient and therapist alike.  Whatever other challenges the sex addict faces, the behavior or fantasy of acting out with a child may truly be an atypical event for some addicts, one they can walk away from and one that may not signal a larger problem relating to children.

What are your thoughts on this topic?  Post a comment now!