Your Sexually Addicted Spouse

by Barbara Steffens

  We’ve been married for over thirty years. I’ve always known my husband was a womanizer, but it was my second marriage, I had children to support and his business enabled us to live a very affluent lifestyle. Somehow it was easier to put up with his flirtations and stay. Now, after my youth is long gone, I’ve uncovered the extent of his behavior.

  I’ve discovered that he’s had affair after affair and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on those women. I’ve finally filed for divorce, but my attorney discovered that my husband conducted a lot of his business under the table, making it impossible to trace and locking me out of my share. So far my husband’s doing everything possible to make sure I never get a dime. I’m not even sure I can keep the house. I’m sixty-five, in poor health and I haven’t worked in years. Without a miracle, my future looks bleak and frightening.

  Though most people aren’t as selfish and uncaring as Irene’s husband, her story holds an important truth for all of us: Life holds no guarantees. It behooves us to take part in our family finances and to know that our futures are well planned for, regardless of what happens in our marriages.

  On A Personal Note: As you read Irene’s example, what thoughts or fears do you have about your financial security? What steps have you or CAN you take to begin the process of self-protection in your finances?

  Unique Reasons for Hurt Felt by Those in Faith-Based Communities

  Some partners in faith-based communities have told us that their spiritual beliefs and deep faith enable them to survive, even through the worst possible betrayal scenarios. One woman’s quite simple yet beautiful statement describes this well:“At times I think I can feel God hugging me,” she said softly into the phone as she shared her story. “Even though this is the most horrible trauma I’ve ever endured, my faith and my children are keeping me alive.”

  Her faith and sense of being loved and cared for by God represents thousands of other stories we have heard. Yet some of the teachings and beliefs in faith-based communities bring added expectations of spouses to be emotionally and physically faithful when, in fact, these partners are fallible human beings and battle with sex addiction, too. People in such relationships struggle to make sense of the clashes in their two most important and personal worlds.

  Spiritual Leadership, Submission and the Husband’s Authority in Marriage

  In some sects there are the oft-taught concepts that the husband has spiritual authority over his wife and she must submit to his leadership. These frequently cause a woman to surrender her total trust to his care. If and when a man betrays that trust sexually—and abuses the position of authority his wife has given him in her life—she encounters an additional betrayal and accompanying relational trauma.

  Sometimes a man will use his spiritual leadership position to deflect attention away from himself by hounding his wife for not reading her Bible enough, for wearing makeup or for not living a “spiritual” life. At times these behaviors flow from his own feelings of guilt, because he is living a double life and violating his own standards. Ultimately the woman realized a guilty conscience was behind her husband’s overbearing behavior, unkind words and volatile attitude, as her testimonial suggests.

  My husband ragged on me for spending money on anything extra, especially if it was for me. If I colored my hair, he made it about my lack of spirituality; if I had my nails done, same thing. Man, he even told me that taking my antidepressants proved I didn’t have enough faith in God. Now I know all that time [he was criticizing me and questioning my faith] he was using prostitutes! Go figure!

  Many Churches Fail to Respond With Care and Educated Understanding

  In our work, we have found the following experience is not uncommon in some faith-based communities. Penny had silently struggled alone for years, afraid to reach out for help, when we met her.

  Several years into my marriage, I was diagnosed with an STD. Though it shocked me, I already knew something was wrong, because my husband didn’t seem to want to be with me sexually. Following the diagnosis, I asked my husband if he had been with another woman. He lied and said, “No.”

  I was terrified of hearing something that would destroy my family, so I wasn’t disappointed when he offered no explanation for the STD. I just tried to put it out of my mind.

  Then, I accidentally found porn files on our home computer, and porn videos began to turn up when I did a deep clean of the house. With our five children in the home, I became nervous that they might stumble onto these things, too, and I knew that would devastate them.

  So I decided to turn to a religious leader for help. When I told him what I found and what I feared, he condemned me for suspecting my husband and not trusting God to take care of me and my family. With a raised voice he said, “Your husband is a leader in the church. How can you even think such things?”

  Now, years later, I still find new porn files and my husband still isn’t interested in me sexually. He really doesn’t even seem to like me very much! But I’m scared to reach out for help in our community again. I thought they would support me emotionally and spiritually and help me confront my husband when I tried years ago. I was shocked and devastated by the way I was treated back then. After so many pain-filled years, I don’t think I can endure that again.

  Penny’s failure to receive the help and support she sought and expected from her church added spiritual trauma to her life, in addition to the relational trauma inflicted by her husband’s attitude and behavior. Many people share Penny’s experience when their faith-based communities fail to recognize their spouses’ betrayals, provide emotional and spiritual support for their healing and/or help them confront their spouses’ addictions to provide an opportunity for change.

  Having a Sense of “Responsibility for His or Her Soul”

  Generally, many women and some men shine at nurturing others and taking care of loved ones’ needs. But this beautiful quality, rich in faith-based communities, can imprison a person in a cage of distorted thinking. When a partner feels so responsible for a sex addict’s soul that he or she continues to live with the sexual acting out, he or she overlooks many serious risks. The partner, in turn, fails to face the facts that accompany sexual addiction, both inside and outside the church. Let’s examine those facts and risks:• Risking health and life due to the very real danger of STDs since one cannot know a sex addict’s truth.

  • Risking the damage that living with ongoing trauma can do to one’s health.

  • Risking financial difficulties often created by the secrets of addiction.

  • Risking the children discovering their parent’s addiction, which we’ve seen devastate a child to the point of attempting suicide.

  • Risking the sex addict participating in more hazardous sexual behavior with the passage of time.

  Yet in spite of the risks, many men and women in faith-based communities experiencing partners’ sexual addiction often hold on to beliefs like those expressed by Sue:Life calls for sacrifice, doesn’t it? I have to make my husband’s soul my highest priority. Aren’t we supposed to die to self? I believe I need to continue to trust God to meet my emotional needs, because my husband refuses to meet them. And I trust God to protect me from sexually transmitted diseases. If He wants me rescued, He will rescue me. I plan to steer clear of any selfish motivation.

  However, after years of sifting through the ashes of burned-out lives and marriages, we’ve come to believe that, in all cases, confronting the addiction and requiring a plan for help provides the least selfish option available to the partner of a sex addict.

  It does not come without risk of great loss, which the addiction has created in our lives already. Yet the risk of confrontation places the highest value on each life represented in the family. It provides the shortest route to the highest possible outcome for everyone involved, if your spouse chooses to seek help.

  Easy? No. Nothing about living with sex addiction proves easy.

  On A Personal Note: What aspects of faith have helped yo
u? Where in your journey have people of faith helped or hurt you in their responses to your pain? Is there something you’d like to communicate to God? Take a moment and tell Him.

  Life Factors that can Influence Trauma Severity Length of Time Married

  Nearly every person to whom we’ve talked who has faced sexual addiction in a committed relationship has also experienced agonizing trauma. Yet the severity of trauma experienced can vary depending on certain factors in partners’ lives. We encounter these differences daily as we hear stories filled with pain.

  In her study, Barbara sought to determine how the length of time a woman had been married before her husband’s addiction was discovered affected her trauma symptoms. The results suggest that the longer the secret continues to be undisclosed and unaddressed, the greater the impact it has on the addict’s partner.

  One woman in the study had been married for twenty-five years before her husband’s sexual addiction was revealed and can no longer look at her wedding album, because now the pictures only represent “a lie” to her. In addition, she had begun to question everything about their marriage.

  Another woman married for many years discovered that while she recovered from having their first baby, her husband was on a trip acting out sexually. And even though the baby was a teen at the time of the study, she found it still hurt to look at his baby pictures, because they reminded her of her husband’s betrayal.

  The study results suggest that with the passage of time and the compiling of cherished memories, partners tend to feel they have more to lose at the discovery of addiction.

  Earlier Life Trauma

  Because earlier life trauma generally predicts the susceptibility and intensity of future trauma, Barbara also examined the trauma histories of the women in her study. And indeed she found that the number of traumatic events in the participants’ life histories heightened the trauma they experienced upon the discoveries of their husbands’ sexual addictions.

  We often see this in our work with partners as well. A young woman married only a few years describes horrific childhood abuse that has left painful emotional scars. It’s not surprising that the discovery of her husband’s addiction—even though they’ve only been married a few years—flooded her with fresh trauma. The result? She smashed all of her wedding memorabilia and threw them away and she beat his computer to bits with a hammer.

  Her childhood trauma includes a mean, unloving father who told her she was ugly and that she’d better get good grades, because no man would ever marry her! Old trauma becomes a magnet for fresh correlating pain.

  The Behaviors a Sex Addict Engages In

  The stories we hear in our work, as we have said earlier, indicate there is indeed a connection between the kinds of sexual behavior in which an addict engages and the partner’s trauma. While we find that even people whose spouses “only” use pornography and masturbation suffer trauma and often post-traumatic stress, trauma levels seem to increase in severity when the addict’s risks and behaviors are considered extremely deviant.

  Most partners suffer devastating and often crippling trauma, post-traumatic stress and symptoms of PTSD when their partners have engaged in sex with women, men or prostitutes, in group sex, in child pornography or in other lacivious behavior.

  Yvonne’s case presents one example.

  Yvonne is a young woman married only a few years and has had no previous trauma. She has beautiful childhood memories, holds a master’s degree that enables her to be financially independent and has extremely high self-esteem. Yet she often finds herself derailed by trauma symptoms, even though her husband consistently attends Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meetings and uses a sex addiction recovery program. He had shockingly disclosed that he’d always been more attracted to men than to women and that he chose homosexual pornography.

  The myriad heartbreaking stories bear out an important truth: neither people nor trauma fit neatly into studies or charts. Nonetheless, more research is needed to help us all better understand the trauma partners of sex addicts face and how we can best help ourselves heal.

  What We Believe this Means for Partners of Sex Addicts That Many People Don’t Understand the Impact on Partners

  Clearly, many people—even many counseling professionals—don’t understand or recognize the impact sex addiction has on partners. Along with the automatic co-addict labeling partners generally receive, other unfair labels and diagnoses get noted in their files.

  The theory of collusion provides one primary example. The professionals in two researches Barbara cited in her study noted their belief that many therapists wrongly see partners as “colluding” in the betrayal by ignoring it.5 But even when partners suspect something is amiss, ask questions, check computers, phone bills, credit card and bank statements—basically do everything they can short of hiring a private investigator—their mates simply lie. This leaves them with continued suspicions, but with no concrete evidence and thus no way to prove what they only fear.

  Does that mean they collude? In our experience the answer is rarely; they simply don’t know what else they can do to uncover what they fear may be the truth.

  That the Negative Impact on Partners is Enormous

  Barbara explains:While existing sex addiction literature acknowledges that discovering your partner is a sex addict produces a life crisis and a traumatic event, I wanted to look more closely at the hurt partners so that we could study and explore new methods to help them heal.

  Rather than just stating that women experience any number of emotional or behavioral symptoms following disclosure, I wanted to identify a specific type of symptomatic response and measure it.

  Because I repeatedly heard women describe disclosure in word pictures filled with violent imagery, I knew they must be experiencing trauma and even PTSD. I heard women say disclosure left them “shell-shocked,” “violated,” “totally disoriented,” “emotionally raped” and it was “like being stabbed repeatedly.” Such destructive descriptions generally accompany traumatic events.

  So I assessed the women in my study for symptoms consistent with a traumatic stress response or symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As we described in chapter 1, PTSD is a condition that often follows the survival of a traumatic life event—an event like a devastating earthquake, a rape or losing a loved one in a fire. Such events leave survivors with extreme levels of anxiety, hypervigilance and recurrent memories or flashbacks. They find themselves obsessing about what happened, and even small environmental reminders can “trigger” a “reliving it” response accompanied by such strong reactions that they feel as though it’s happening all over again. These symptoms are generally so strong they interfere with daily functioning, leaving a woman emotionally wrung-out and often unable to cope.

  I think the most startling outcome of my study was that 70 percent of the women met the symptomatic criteria for PTSD in response to the disclosure of sexual addiction. This is not to say that they have PTSD, but that the level of symptoms is consistent with those in someone exposed to a natural disaster or sexual assault who went on to develop PTSD as a result of that event. To me, that is significant information for the spouse and for those who seek to help him or her heal.

  That Healing is Hard Work

  Healing proves to be especially hard work for the partner who remains in the relationship even though the sex addict chooses not to embrace healing and growth.

  Even when a sex addict fully embraces the recovery and healing process, the other partner’s recovery journey may have many bumps, potholes and twists and turns. All of us continue to live in a sexually charged world filled with triggers that often stimulate flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive or obsessive thoughts in us. It can take time for these trauma symptoms to be calmed and for our sense of feeling secure in the world to return.

  To someone who has never experienced the relational trauma that results from the discovery that your most significant attachment bond cannot be trusted—that it is indeed d
angerous to your safety—these reactions may seem out of proportion, even bizarre.

  However, they replicate in millions of lives every year as new women and men discover their partners have betrayed them sexually.

  Another reason healing is frequently hard work is that pornography prevents true intimacy. Because the porn or other sex addictions a user has learned to substitute with the quick, easy fix such vices provide for the emotional and relational work, which true intimacy requires, the addiction blocks both a secure attachment bond and authentic intimacy.

  So even when a partner lets go of sexual addiction habits, building the ability to provide security and intimacy takes time. Moreover, if the addict has old emotional wounds that block true connection and intimacy with a partner, those wounds must be healed with the help of a professional before the sexual addict can hope to establish a long-term, intimate connection.

  Trauma’s Echoes

  These words and stories all reverberate with echoes from other traumatic life events encountered by people. Rather than view these partners as addicted and pathological, we believe that when we recognize their symptoms and behaviors as attempts to adapt to destructive information in their lives, we can help them more quickly gain what they desperately seek: renewed safety and the empowerment required to make decisions for their own lives and those of their children. Then healing can begin to happen.