On A Personal Note: You have just read a lot of difficult and probably painful information and stories. You have also read some new ways of thinking about or responding to your pain. Take a moment and consider how you are feeling right now. Sad? Heard? Validated? Confused? Angry? Encouraged? Whatever you are expressing, we encourage you to feel it, express it and then find a way to share these feelings with someone you trust.
Chapter 4
How the Addiction and Trauma Models Differ in Helping You Heal
Many partners say they feel their world is shattered by sex addiction when they’re told they have a problem and need weekly treatment via a 12-step program for their issues.
Many partners of sex addicts we’ve worked with do not seem to harbor codependency or co-addict traits. Rather, they demonstrate healthy boundaries, a strong sense of self and intolerance for their spouses’ extracurricular sexual activities once they discover them. Wait a minute! they seem to say. My heart is broken and my life is a train wreck. Can’t you give me time and help to process my feelings and allow me to grieve over my losses instead of skipping ahead to my role in this chaos, assuming I’m to blame as well?
Many Partners Do Not Enable Once They Discover the Reality
Fran provides one strong example of a non-enabling partner. Her response to her discovery of her husband’s pornography addiction was to calmly draw a firm, clear boundary. She realized she needed space and time to gain greater emotional safety, to seek the whole truth, to think things through and to begin getting the help and support she needed to determine her long-term decisions and plans. Listen to the spirit with which she approached her situation as she shares her feelings: Amidst the shocking discovery of my husband’s compulsive pornography use, I recall feeling very sure of what I needed to see my husband do to not only get help for himself, but to help restore the sense of safety within our home. I told him that I needed to know that my home was free of sexual material. I could not control what he chose to do outside, but I could demand to live in a place that was clean from pornography. I made it very clear that if he chose to bring pornography into our home again, he would need to leave. I had the right and responsibility to our family to draw a firm line to help restore a healthy place for our daughters and for myself. Out of some place of strength I didn’t know I had, I also told him that I would be watching to see if he chose health and recovery for himself. I knew I could never be reason enough for him to choose health; he had to choose to do this for himself.
A Messy Exterior Does Not Equal Codependency
Though not all partners of sex addicts project such strength and clarity about their worth, in our experience, neither do all partners project codependency. We believe it can be extremely difficult for any professional to clearly assess a partner’s personal empowerment, because his or her post-traumatic stress can trigger such extreme responses that the person may appear to demonstrate codependency and erratic mental health. Such a person may look panicked, unkempt, hysterical, angry, depressed, impatient and even abrasive as he or she sees his or her marriage, dreams and life crumble, lost to a spouse’s sexual addiction.
Yet we have found that if we look under the surface presentation of a sex addict’s partner and seek to understand the motivation beneath his or her behavior, we can begin to more clearly understand where the person is coming from. Only then can we help her determine what he or she needs to feel safe again, empower him or her to act in his or her own best interest and help him or her begin to heal. Once this early “ER” treatment and the beginning steps of healing take place, we find that most partners are able to look at personal issues on which they need to work.
We’ll talk more about motivation later, but first let’s take a closer look at what the 12-step perspective offers partners of sex addicts for their healing journeys. We’ll examine its strengths, as well as those things we believe get overlooked in this model. Then we’ll discuss motivation in more detail. Lastly, we will ask the question: Can a partner of a sex addict benefit from using both the trauma model and the 12-step model as he or she seeks healing?
The Addiction/12-Step Approach to Treatment
The addiction model and the 12-step groups they prescribe—groups like S-Anon and COSA—do help many, many partners of sex addicts grow and learn to deal with their situations. This approach can enable partners to learn how to live with the addictions present in their marriages if they choose to stay with spouses who don’t want growth and change. It can also empower them to draw boundaries and remove themselves from the relationships if they opt for separations or divorces. In addition, it provides support from others on the same journey, as well as a pathway for personal growth. As we’ve said in earlier chapters, Marsha utilized this approach as one aspect in her own healing process.
Strengths of the Addiction/12-Step Approach
The 12-step approach provides much strength. We turned to the COSA Web site so we could utilize their own descriptions of all they have to offer.
The 12-Step Approach Provides a Community of Hope and Help From the COSA Web site:COSA offers hope. In COSA, we begin to experience relief from our isolation, in the safety of an anonymous gathering with others who share our stories. During every meeting—little by little—sanity, clarity and our own truth begin to emerge.1
The 12-Step Approach Provides a Well-Established, Broadly Available Community
Because this model has been in operation for much longer than other forms of healing for partners of sex addicts, groups can be easier to locate. The S-Anon Web site can be read in Dutch, English or Spanish, there is no cost for attending a 12-step group and a central Web site for each organization not only assists one in locating support groups, it also has newsletters, an online store to buy 12-step literature and CDs, information about retreats and conventions and COSA even has info about the tele-meetings they make available to men and women. In addition, S-Anon provides community outreach to make professionals, the media, institutions and the public aware of this resource via download-able posters and flyers, letters for newspapers, materials to public libraries and packets to professionals. COSA provides a letter to mental health professionals as well.
The 12 Steps Offers the Benefits that come from Working the 12 Steps in Our Lives From the COSA site:
Working the steps is the foundation of recovery in COSA; they are a set of spiritual practices COSA members use for personal growth and recovery; based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous....
COSA follows the 12 steps and 12 traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). These steps have helped COSA members become aware of their own codependent behaviors in relationships with friends, family members and partners. Admission to ourselves allows us to acknowledge our own patterns in addictions and sexual codependency.2
The 12-Step Approach Helps Us Change Us From the COSA Site:
In COSA, we learn that the only person we can change is ourselves….In defining our own sobriety, we make a list of those behaviors we engaged in that made us, and the situation, worse. We choose, one day and one situation at a time, not to engage in those behaviors.3
What We Believe Gets Overlooked in the 12-Step Approach
The Addiction Model’s Presumption of “Disease” in Partners of Sex Addicts
While we value and feel grateful for the wealth of help and resources S-Anon and COSA bring to partners of sex addicts, we believe the addiction model unfairly represents all partners as unhealthy people with their own diseases. Listen to that reality in the following excerpt from the COSA Web site:Whether we choose to call it sexual codependency or co-sex addiction, our problem is a serious and progressive disease—as harmful to us as sexual addiction is to the sex addict.4
The Addiction Model Reinforces Feelings of Powerlessness Over Our Own Lives
Trauma specialists recognize that if you are traumatized, your greatest needs include the need to feel safe again and the need to feel empowered to direct and manage your own life—to not feel afraid that the t
raumatic incident could occur again at any moment. These needs reflect the opposite of accepting your powerlessness over the chaos that produced your trauma, which is what we find in the 12-step approach, as the following excerpt reflects.
From the COSA site:
What brings us to COSA? Before recovery, we are unable to admit our powerlessness over compulsive sexual behavior; either someone else’s behavior, or our own obsession with the sex addict. We attempt to control, losing regard for our own well-being in the process. 5
The Addiction Model Misinterprets Your Trauma Symptoms as Codependency
As you’ve read the earlier chapters in this book, you’ve become aware of the types of behavior that could indicate you or someone you care about suffers from trauma, post-traumatic stress or PTSD. And you’ve probably begun to recognize how important accurate diagnoses and help becomes if you want to win over possible long-lasting effects of trauma in your life.
However, within the addiction/12-step model the thoughts and behaviors symptomatic of trauma are automatically labeled as indicators of a partner’s own disease. Note the evidence of misinterpretations found in the following excerpt from the COSA site:Lying, covering up, explaining away or ignoring compulsive sexual behaviors are some of the unhealthy ways we may cope. We stifle the inner voice telling us something is wrong. We accept promises like “it won’t happen again” many times over, and in effect, enable the addiction. With the denial of reality, our lives become increasingly unmanageable.
Our efforts to control escalate in an attempt to alleviate the strain. We tell ourselves that if only we could somehow change—for example, be more (or less) attractive, provocative, intelligent, competent—we could change another person’s sexual behavior.6
S-Anon states:
We tried every known method to control it. We lied and covered up, spied at doorways, listened to private conversations, checked up on the sexaholic’s whereabouts, read through journals and personal papers, begged, pleaded and threatened... No matter how we tried to struggle against it, deny it or minimize its effects, the failure of our efforts to cope with sexaholism brought us to the point of despair.7
While we recognize that such behavior can produce a disintegration of its own, we understand that it’s a partner’s desperate need for truth and efforts to prevent further pain that fuel searches for signs when changes in a spouse’s attitude and behavior cause fear that he or she is back into the sexual addiction.
The Importance of Knowing the Whole Truth
The addiction model not only labels a partner’s need to know the truth as a “disease,” but in doing so it also minimizes the urgency a trauma victim feels to prevent further pain. Partners of sex addicts need to know the truth; they need to know what the one they love has and has not done sexually. Until he or she deciphers the truth, a partner can’t know the loved one, what STDs he or she might be carrying or what activities he or she is forgiving when he or she is finally ready to forgive. Nor can the partner decide if he or she wants to leave the relationship or stay and try to rebuild the marriage if the other partner is willing to do the hard work that entails.
Partners Seek Truth, Not Control
Partners seek truth, not control, though many fail to understand this. A partner’s motivation for truth stems from the need to once again feel safe—to keep the environment safe to prevent further trauma and pain. Like a typhoon victim, he or she seeks higher, drier ground.
For that reason, some counselors and psychologists who specialize in sex addiction require the sex addicts they work with to take a lie detector test (polygraph test) in the beginning of treatment.8 Some require follow-up polygraphs as well. These helpful professionals know from experience that addicts struggle with truth; they find it much easier to deceive, or at least omit certain elements of their stories, in their efforts to hold their lives together. These sex addiction professionals also know that healing cannot begin until everyone is operating from a foundation of truth.
But the use of polygraphs remains controversial in many people’s minds. Yet even though they cannot be deemed 100 percent fail-safe, police departments and prison systems continue to use them, because they provide the best technology available to decipher fact from fiction. As for partners of sex addicts, the polygraphs can play a huge role in establishing a foundation of truth on which to begin to build a new marriage based on honesty and a slow-growing sense of trust. A polygraph test—and the knowledge there will be more tests in the future—turned Annette’s story into one of hope and new beginnings. Annette shares:When sex addiction erupted in my marriage a second time, I was devastated that I was being dragged through it again. To try to save our marriage we spent three days in an intensive, which meant just the two of us in all-day-long therapy with a therapist who specializes in sex addiction. A polygraph test for my husband was a part of the deal. What we gained from the three days was amazing, but what I personally got from the polygraph turned my world around. Before the test I was very depressed, I cried a lot, I felt mad at the way things had turned out and I isolated myself, which is not like me at all. I didn’t even answer the phone. But after the polygraph and the intensive, my depression lifted. I knew I had learned the whole truth because of the test; all the dark things were now in the light and my husband had nothing more to hide. It felt freeing for him to tell. Knowing what was real and what wasn’t freed me to start over again, because I knew what he was saying to me was the truth. What he said now had merit in my mind—it could be believed. And that gave me a lot of strength and hope. And there are follow-up polygraphs coming in future sessions we scheduled with our therapist. Just knowing they are out there on the calendar has released me from the feeling that I need to try to control his recovery in order to protect my children and myself from a third round of his addiction. It seems to be helping my husband, too, because he’s taking more responsibility for building in the safeguards that protect his recovery.
Annette would probably tell you that attempting to control the addict in order to gain safety never worked for her, that it always fails. Partners need new methods. In addition, they need help from others. On these principles, the trauma model and the addiction/12-step model agree. But when a partner reaches out for help, will he or she find true empathy and understanding for the trauma and loss that was experienced? Or will he or she quickly be labeled “as sick as the sex addict” and considered to be a co-addict?
One sure way to gain an accurate perspective on a partner’s true condition comes by examining motivation. Simply listening with an empathic heart and a sincere desire to recognize true motivation can boil it all down to basics and provide clarity in our confusion, whether we are doing a self-examination or seeking to understand a client.
On A Personal Note: As you read about the differences between codependency and trauma, what are your thoughts? Does the term “codependency” describe your behaviors or do you identify with the idea of safety-seeking behaviors? Do both instances make sense to you?
Recognizing and Understanding a Partner’s Motivation
Motives drive us to take certain actions in life; they form the reasons we do the things we do. Thus, motivation presents a good place to start when we feel confused about co-addiction and codependency. Here is some advice we believe invaluable when used as a tool for self-evaluation. Ask yourself: Is your motivation to boost your power over others or is it to seek the safety you need in an unsafe situation to prevent further trauma and pain?
Why We Believe it’s Important to Re-Frame a Partner’s Reactions as Trauma
It Acknowledges the Partner’s Symptoms as Predictable Reactions to Traumatic Stress
Even months into the healing process, trauma can continue to create difficulties for a partner struggling to heal and regain emotional footing. Myra still felt its effects fourteen months after learning about her husband’s sexual addiction:I’ve been thinking about my reaction yesterday. I don’t know much about PTSD, but I feel like this anxiety reaction could
be because of my trauma. I still feel unsettled this morning. I feel sick to my stomach and very nervous, kind of shaky inside. My husband hasn’t done or said anything today that should be upsetting. In fact, he’s been loving and considerate. Even when he told me he had been tested for STDs it didn’t upset me, yet I can’t shake these feelings. I feel like such a flake. I just want to feel normal again. My disorganization is driving me nuts. I need to pull myself together and get some order inside me. To others I appear together, but inside I feel like I’m losing it!
It Validates the Partner’s Pain
Unless those helping partners recognize and validate a partner’s deepest pain, a partner can never truly heal. Yet once he or she receives the gifts of empathy and validation from those who seek to help, the door to healing slowly begins to open.
It Encourages the Partner to Share His or Her Story in Safe Settings and a Guided Format to Ease the Pain
The trauma model honors the retelling of the partner’s story in various ways to externalize the problem and let go of the pain. Seen through a trauma lens, a partner’s story becomes the thread woven through several stages of healing and trauma recovery.
It Places the Responsibility for the Addiction on the Sex Addict, Not on the Partner
The trauma approach does not blame the victim, but empowers him or her. And once a partner tastes his or her own empowerment, she can feel as strong as if she was backed by an army.
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