Your Sexually Addicted Spouse

by Barbara Steffens

  Sadly, when a partner “fails to follow” professional advice or symptoms drag on, ricocheting emotions and behaviors only reinforce the belief that he or she portrays the unhealthy co-addict condition.

  However, we believe that while one is suffering from trauma symptoms, the hurt person will likely find it impossible to control thoughts, feelings and relational interactions as prescribed in codependency and 12-step literature unless that person receives help to heal from the trauma first, or at least simultaneously. We interpret the hurt partner’s inability not as further evidence of codependency, but instead as likely being natural human reaction to relational trauma.

  Complicating life further, the trauma may still be taking place in the person’s life, because the other partner’s addictive behavior continues. Or the addicted partner may continue to disclose new information about past (or current) addictive events as the person recalls them or gains the courage to share with the partner. Elena talks often about the pain that reality has caused her.

  It’s been four years since my husband told me about his addiction. At first it was so hard, but I found a wonderful counselor for the two of us to work with and in time I began to heal.

  But just as I would be starting to make progress, my husband would disclose he’d acted out sexually again, and my pain would start all over again—right back at the beginning. That cycle has happened several times and it’s going on again right now. I feel like a basket case.

  I love my husband so much and I know he really loves me, but I don’t know how much longer I can do this. It’s gotten to where if he grows quiet or doesn’t share his thoughts and feelings for a while, my imagination goes crazy. I end up right back on the merry-go-round of internal pain without knowing for sure if I have a reason to be there! I hate it!

  As we listen to women and men share their experiences and feelings, we hear them use words and phrases that paint vivid pictures of reverberating emotions that endure throughout their lives. These pictures and emotions replicate those of people who’ve survived traumatic events.

  Partners’ intense feelings of terror, anxiety, helplessness and hopelessness in coping with their painful situations mirror those of people who have survived violence, assault and other kinds of psychological traumas. Nothing prepares a person for this surprise in life: not a stable childhood, not a good education, not adequate training—not even a breadth of life experience can prepare the hurt partner for the intense pain encountered when this addiction surfaces in a marriage.

  Maria, an ER surgeon, describes the sense of utter hopelessness she felt at times as she and her husband plodded through their healing experience.

  I’m a very emotional person and I need to talk about what I’m feeling. If there’s a problem or a wall between us, I need my husband to engage with me, to talk it through until we work it out.

  But for several months he didn’t seem to be able to meet that need for me. I might spend fifteen minutes describing my feelings and end by asking him to share his, but he’d sit there like a stuffed animal staring back at me! He said he didn’t like talking about this all the time.

  There were times I saw myself going to the kitchen, pulling a butcher knife out of the cutlery drawer and using it to gut myself. That’s how bad the pain felt. I just wanted it to stop, and my husband didn’t seem to be able to help with that need back then.

  I was still experiencing severe PTSD symptoms six months after I learned about the problem. There were moments of total hopelessness, even after six months of knowing. Nothing in my fifty years of life prepared me for those tumultuous times in our lives.

  Partners describe intense emotional and even physical responses to the discovery that the people they love act out sexually, whatever form it takes. Many partners of sexual addicts demonstrate such intense and enduring responses that they meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, just as Maria described.

  Some women and men have told each of us that discovering their partners’ sexual addictions proved more devastating to them than hearing their doctors say, “I’m sorry, but you have cancer.”

  Kelly, a trained psychotherapist, shares the traumatic impact her husband’s addiction had on her compared to the impact of battling incurable ovarian cancer.

  At the time I unexpectedly discovered my husband was acting out sexually, I had been diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer for three years. I’d been through four major surgeries, one cancer recurrence and two cycles of intense chemotherapy. I had spent three years giving my attention to healing my body so that I could live long enough to be at my sons’ high school graduations. It was painful and difficult work.

  My immediate reaction to the discovery of his infidelities was the loss of physical control of my body—I fell to the floor, numb and breathless. I could not believe that my life had come to this place after fighting so hard to survive my cancer a few more years. After two days spent trembling in bed, unable to eat or sleep, I realized I needed to contact my oncologist. He wanted to see me immediately. There was a deep concern that the stress would trigger another recurrence, not to mention the possibility that my husband might have given my already compromised immune system a sexually transmitted disease.

  I couldn’t bring myself to schedule an appointment. My entire being was in complete shock. I spent the next days/weeks trembling on the floor in my darkened closet, moaning. I wasn’t able to swallow or eat. From a distance, I watched myself live the life of a wounded animal.

  There was no part of my cancer journey, even hearing I’d likely not live five years, to compare to the pain of my husband’s betrayal. Gradually, cancer seemed to be the way out of the pain. I couldn’t see how I’d have any energy to give to healing a marriage so damaged while healing from cancer. I looked forward to the release of death.

  Partners’ Descriptions of Their Betrayal Experiences

  If a listener has the ability to empathize with another’s pain, hearing partners of sex addicts describe their pain upon discovering their spouses’ sex addiction actually hurts. We could fill thousands of pages with partners’ words alone, but we share only a few here. Read them out loud and as you do, listen to what you hear.• It left me shell-shocked.

  • I threw up, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and cried constantly. I felt horror, anger, rage, terror, fury at God.

  • I loved my husband and I wanted his comfort, yet he was the source of my searing pain.

  • I frequently had disturbing dreams and nightmares.

  • I couldn’t read; nothing made sense. I totally lost my ability to concentrate. I got lost a lot.

  • My initial reaction was to shake uncontrollably. I’ve had this reaction before to someone’s death. It was a death.

  • It’s hanging upside down, trying to right myself. It’s being stabbed in the back and trying to find solid ground under the slippery pool of my own blood...most of the time it’s lying in a shallow grave as a part of me dies.

  • It was like someone ransacking my house and I was left with all the pieces. • I’m cycling through emotions like crazy. This is worse than when my mother was killed in a car accident.

  • I never felt so betrayed in my life.

  • It was devastating; traumatic.

  When women and men talk about what they felt and experienced during their partners’ disclosures (or the discoveries they made of spouses’ secret lives), they often say they felt assaulted by the information they heard or saw. In their own words, hurt partners describe life-changing, world-shattering events in their lives.

  Events of such magnitude are normally considered traumatic.

  On A Personal Note: What do you think about when you read the list of partners’ betrayal experiences? With which feelings or experiences do you most identify?

  Chapter 2

  A Study in Contrasts: Is it Co-Addiction or is it Trauma?

  Thank you, God, for this meeting and for this amazing group of women who breathe new life into me every Monday night, I thought
as I entered the church basement where we held our weekly support group meetings. I felt thankful I had survived another difficult week and made it back for this special time with sisters on the same journey.

  Some evil monster continued to slowly devour my personal world, one bite at a time. Monday nights had become my emotional and spiritual blood transfusions. This was the “hospital” I returned to every seven days as I watched and felt my marriage, my ministry—my life—slowly bleed to death. I seemed helpless to save them, in spite of the fact that thousands of others were asking us to help save theirs.

  “My name is Marsha and I’m a co-addict to a sex addict,” I began, after steeping in what I heard others share long enough to have gained the emotional strength to take a turn. Those words always left a bad taste in my mouth when I said them, but this was a 12-step meeting for partners of sex addicts and these were the rules. And I was, after all, the partner of a sex addict.

  From around the large circle, thirty women’s heads turned my way, most of their eyes filled with their own pain and sadness. Though my position with the organization kept me from being completely vulnerable in what I shared, I drew sustenance from the love, the “sisterhood” and the courage and strength modeled by these beautiful women who fought and worked so hard to save their marriages, often in vain.

  However, it was the readings we repeated every week that provided the greatest nourishment to my aching, weary heart. They had grown familiar and offered a prayer-like mantra: an anchor in the tumultuous sea of chaos and confusion that my life had become. Plus, according to 12-step literature, they also offered a yardstick of sorts—a measurement of “health” if one is married to a sex addict. Hearing them every week helped to “reset” my pain-clouded thinking.

  Tonight, our meeting was using step 1 as the foundation for our sharing. “I am powerless over sexaholism and the sex addict, and my life has become unmanageable,” I began. By repeating step 1 out loud, it helped me remain focused on my “stuff,” not his, though the excruciating pain I felt had marred my perspective and self-awareness. But even in the fog of my pain, it was the 12-step process that enabled and empowered me to maintain the slippery level of detachment I intermittently grasped.

  Even then, during the design phase of our ministry, I was keenly aware that the 12-step process didn’t provide everything these hurting women needed. It didn’t provide everything I needed during my draining, slow bleed. But what would? What could? I wondered.

  I had searched repeatedly and still hadn’t found anything better for partners of sex addicts during the months—and often years—of maintenance that follow the stages after early grieving and healing. So I felt deeply grateful for the strength I gained from our weekly 12-step process.

  Yet in spite of all its value and benefits, it was the 12-step model that birthed the widely held view that partners of sex addicts suffer from their own disease—the disease of co-addiction.

  THE CO-ADDICTION PERSPECTIVE

  Let’s begin our examination of the co-addiction perspective by first examining the addiction model itself.

  Addiction Model

  The world in general—particularly families and partners of alcoholics and addicts of every variety—owe much to the 12-step movement. For untold millions, it has provided the only consistent road map to freedom from addictive, destructive self-indulgences and behaviors for those who’ve worked its program into their lives.

  Lois Wilson, the wife of Bill Wilson—one of the two founders of AA—first recognized addiction’s impact on spouses. Each week, as men struggling with alcoholism gathered in her home, Lois remained out of the way in another room so she wouldn’t disturb their meeting. Then one day she noticed that other wives were doing the same thing outside her home as they waited for their husbands in their cars.

  Lois seized the opportunity to talk to them and soon recognized that other wives felt the same ricocheting emotions she felt. It wasn’t long until she had transformed their weekly waiting into a support group that gathered in her kitchen, the birthplace of Al-Anon, the now global organization for family and friends of alcoholics. Lois had accidentally struck upon two truths: Alcoholism and addictions of all kinds do impact family and even friends, and family and friends need support for how it impacts them.1

  And from that sprang the 12-step community’s belief that addiction is a “family disease.” Certainly, we agree that addiction of any kind affects the addict’s partner and other family members.

  The Birth of the Co-Addict Label

  When early mental health and addiction specialists began to recognize the problem of compulsive and destructive sexual behavior in people’s lives, they naturally turned to the model that had provided the only broadly helpful road map for society’s other destructive habits: the addiction model. From that model, they coined the term “sex addict.”

  However, the 12-step sex addiction model takes it one step further: not only are partners of sex addicts affected, those partners are also addicted. They are addicted to the sex addict. In his early writings, author Patrick Carnes stated that our personal histories and personality characteristics are “mirror images” of the addicts themselves. 2

  Hence, we bear the label “co-addicts” in this model, even though this perspective is only applied to partners of sex addicts. Partners of alcoholics, drug addicts and gamblers are labeled only as codependents. They are not labeled co-addicts.

  The current operative sex addiction model uses a sort of a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with a partner’s strong emotional reactions to learning that the spouse he or she loves seeks sexual gratification outside of the marriage. If he or she has no traumatic and dysfunctional past, that’s beside the point. The person loves a sex addict, so he or she is a co-addict.3

  In Back from Betrayal, Jennifer Schneider, MD, a psychiatrist who is also the former partner of a sex addict, wrote:Although it is tempting for the co-addict to feel like a victim and to cast all the blame on her straying spouse, the fact is that her choice of partner is no accident. The co-addict’s core beliefs do not begin when she marries an addict, and the men she selects tend to follow a pattern….The seeds of the future co-addict can be found in her family of origin.4

  Never mind that the partner feels betrayed and that in his or her mind the other partner has broken his or her wedding vows; the partner is encouraged to stop focusing on and trying to control the sexually addicted spouse and to work his or her own 12-step recovery program to control codependency—his or her co-addiction. As the partner does, so he or she is told, the sexually addicted spouse’s behavior will no longer affect his or her peace.

  While many writers and professionals in the sex addiction treatment community recognize that this kind of a person is catapulted into crisis and they respond as they would following any crisis in a client’s life, they simultaneously work to encourage their clients to enter their own 12-step recovery programs for their own disease—their co-addiction to their partners and their partners’ sex addictions.

  The partner is told there is no cure for his or her disease or for the sex addict’s, and the best he or she can hope for is remission.

  Remission, as with cancer, is achieved when there are no longer any relapses. Therefore, to achieve and maintain remission, he or she must attend meetings and work within the confines of the 12-step program, possibly for the rest of his or her life.

  Additionally, the partner learns that the spouse’s sex addiction is not about him or her. However, the partner also learns that his or her disease contributes to the continuation or deepening of the sexually addicted partner’s disease and that attempts to “fix” the other partner are symptoms of co-addiction disease. The partner can demonstrate growth by detaching from the addict to reduce the obsession with the afflicted’s life and behavior.

  Generally, the partner hears that trauma experienced early on in life contributes to his or her distress; because the addict’s sexual betrayal triggers old emotional wounds, which, of
course, it does, if there is an earlier trauma history. Fresh trauma of any kind nearly always hooks old trauma, even when we’ve done great recovery work. Just as a formerly broken bone will remain susceptible to future breaks and arthritis, so, too, will an old trauma wound leave emotional vulnerability.

  On A Personal Note: Do you have earlier life trauma that your partner’s addiction has hooked? If so, how has it complicated your healing?

  Two Heat-Seeking Missiles Theory

  Partners receive the label of “co-addict” automatically, simply because they love sex addicts. It does not matter that many partners knew nothing of the other person’s addiction prior to making a commitment. Nor does it matter that the partner may not have seen recognizable signs of the addiction’s existence. The theory holds that partners develop co-addicted traits and characteristics over time due to the fact that they are in relationships with addicts.

  Like “two heat-seeking missiles, these two sick people found each other,” a partner is told, evidence that he or she is just as sick as the sex addict, because he or she married the addict in the first place. A partner’s co-addicted beliefs and behaviors, he or she learns, include:• Neglecting his or her own needs • Attempting to control the addict’s behaviors

  • Holding the same core beliefs as the sex addict, including the beliefs that his or her most important need is sex and that if people really knew him or her they wouldn’t love him or her

  Early sex addict researchers also recognized that partners of sex addicts experience intense emotional pain in response to the sexual betrayal they feel and that partners often react with emotionally-driven behaviors they find difficult to control or heal. In an attempt to understand and help these men and women, researchers questioned them about their feelings and reactions and studied and recorded what they heard and observed. And from those recorded observations grew a list of common emotions and behaviors broadly experienced in partners’ lives.