The Partner Becomes Responsible for Setting Boundaries if Choosing to Stay in the Relationship
A part of healing in the trauma model involves increasing the partner’s sense of personal power or choice, so he or she can exercise his or her own choice and control in important areas of life. We seek to find the areas where the partner is not powerless and build on those to empower him or her to make further changes.
It Provides Diagnostic Understanding for Partners with Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is a condition that follows repeated attempts to affect change in one’s life without adequate power and support to produce the needed change. Learned helplessness often becomes evident in abuse victims—people stay in destructive relationships, simply because over time they’ve come to believe they are helpless or powerless to make change, so they give up on trying.
Living with repeated, long-term sexual addiction can produce this effect, especially in those who have lived with abuse during childhood or in previous relationships. Yet when a counselor, minister or doctor recognizes this as a side effect of his client’s trauma rather than of a disease, change and renewed personal empowerment becomes possible.
The Trauma Model Seeks to Connect the Partner to a Support System for Healing
Both the trauma model and the 12-step model recommend support through connection with others who understand your pain as the cornerstone healing. None of us can do it alone.
Is 12-Step Recovery Work a Good Adjunct in Your Healing Journey?
Let’s let Carol answer that question for us. After several years in her 12-step group for partners of sex addicts (which she remains active in), Carol joined one of Marsha’s Partner’s Healing Journey telephone support groups. Before long, it became apparent that her years of hard 12-step work and growth had transformed her life. Here Carol shares a part of her story:By the year 2000, my marriage had grown so bad that it felt horrible. I consoled myself by thinking, At least he isn’t having an affair. But simultaneously I knew my frustration and unhappiness was fueling impatience and shortness with the kids, and I didn’t like it. That’s when I decided to get help for my own issues. I shared with safe friends—some of whom had lived through their own marital problems. As I listened to their experiences, I began to realize that something must be going on with my husband. So I prayed for truth.
At that time, my husband and I had a mutual e-mail account. One day, I saw some odd emails from other men in the inbox and I decided to check them out. It was then I discovered he was involved in unknown activities of a possible homosexual nature.
Again I prayed, this time asking for clarity as I waited. Three months later my husband admitted to me that he believed himself to be a sex addict. I was numb. I was in a fog. I struggled with horrible anxiety. I did crazy things like forgetting appointments for the kids; my mind was just overloaded with pain and pressure from the fear and uncertainty about my family and future. The anxiety was so bad that in the afternoons I had to take brisk walks before picking the kids up from school so I could be the mom I needed to be for them.
Fortunately, I had a neighbor who got me started in a 12-step recovery group. It was there that I first began to realize my father was a sex addict as well. I came to see that I grew up in a sex addict’s home and now I was married to one, too! During that time I began to feel rage about all of it. I also became aware of my codependency.
The group educated me about all of this, and it gave me tools to do something about what I needed to fix in myself. I got a sponsor and, with her help, I worked the 12 steps, which enabled me to begin tackling my character defects. I learned about detachment, I utilized the slogans and I had the support of the other women in my group. There I learned an important lesson: If you are hit by a truck driven by a drunk, you don’t lie in the road waiting for the truck or its drunk driver to help you. You know you need the help of others if you want to heal. And so it is when we live with a sex addict: We need to make sure we get the resources to help us heal, no matter what the addict does or does not do.
Yet with the wealth of tools, skills and health I had gained—and continue to gain—from my 12-step codependency recovery group and friends, healing the deep pain and trauma of my shattered dreams came from the work I’ve done with my gifted counselor. I’m so grateful that she understands sex addiction and its impact on me and my life. She understands that I get triggered, because I’m in an intimate relationship with a man who often does not consider my needs. Where some in 12-step circles would say that if I’m triggered I need to “step up my program,” she recognizes that the triggers are not my fault. Rather, they are a by-product of the trauma of being in an intimate relationship with a man whose sex addiction has deeply wounded me and, at times, continues to wound me.
If a woman looks messy it doesn’t always mean she’s a co-addict. Instead, it usually means she would benefit from work with a counselor who understands her trauma and anger; one who can help her deal with the pain, in addition to having a sponsor if she’s already working the 12 steps.
We agree with Carol: If a partner looks messy, it does not always mean he or she is a co-addict. In nearly every case we discover a traumatized partner in desperate need of help under the messy exterior. And without that help, far too many partners develop long-term trauma complications and untreated trauma eats away at their emotional and physical health. We’ll examine the health aspects of trauma in the next chapter.
Self-Check: You’ve read a lot of information about trauma and a need for safety as a motivator or drive for your behaviors. Take a look at the following list of behaviors. Which behaviors do you find yourself engaging in? Are you looking to feel safer, or are you trying to control the addict? Place a check under “safety” or “control” to identify your motivation/reason for the behavior. (You may have some, all or none of these behaviors.)
Behavior Motivation (what am I seeking)
Safety Control
1. Checking (Internet, wallet, cell phone, etc.)
2. Calling partner frequently
3. Angry outbursts
4. Obsessing about the addict’s behaviors
5. Avoiding sexual intimacy
6. Keeping secrets about the addiction
7. Trying to forget about the problem
8. Threatening to leave (or did leave)
9. Participating in the addict’s behaviors
10. Changing my appearance
11. Giving up things I enjoy doing
12. Shutting down emotionally or physically
Chapter 5
Trauma Impacts on Every Level: Potential Physical and Mental Health Side Effects of Trauma
Toni tells her story, vividly describing the shock and pain of discovering her husband’s sexual addiction:It all began one Saturday in July, one month before our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary. I walked into the den and there on top of the shredder were instructions for deleting our computer history. When I asked my husband about this, he mumbled, “I don’t know.” But within a few minutes he suddenly blurted out: “I like to look at naked women!”
Though his face showed anger—or maybe it was frustration—I don’t remember if he said any other words. My mind had gone numb and everything became a blur when I heard the words “naked women.” I was in total shock. This was not the man I knew. He showed no remorse or compassion at how his news affected me.
During the next three months, my husband told me he looked at pornography on the Internet and watched pornographic movies while I was away. Instead of giving me a full confession at one sitting, he revealed bits and pieces of the truth, dribbling it out over time. And each time he told me more details, it felt like he was stabbing me in the heart with a knife, plunging it in again and again. I begged him to stop leaking the disclosures out slowly, but he didn’t seem to care how it impacted me. At times the pain was indescribable and I could hardly breathe. I spiraled into a deep pit of depression and I couldn’t stop crying.
To make ma
tters worse, I was unexpectedly laid off my job. My boss said it wasn’t personal—but it was very personal to me. It felt like a slap in my face. Between my husband’s revelations and my job loss, some days I found it difficult to even get out of bed. My life as I knew it was shattered and I had no idea what to do or how to start over.
My emotions bounced all over. At times I was angry. I didn’t want to know anything about sex addiction; this was not supposed to be a part of my life! Even though it was my husband’s problem, it had changed my world forever! At other times, I was so consumed with sadness, because my heart had been so broken that I thought I was going to die. The pain was so intense and deep, but I always woke up in the morning. I hurt so bad that I didn’t think I’d ever smile or laugh again.
Over the next several weekends, my husband made more disclosures. One in particular blasted me into an even deeper depression and brought a new flood of tears. He confessed that for the last thirteen years he had only fantasized about and masturbated to the thought of one person: a lovely young woman who is one of my closest relatives; someone whom I love like the daughter I never had. I learned that for thirteen years he had been raping her in his mind, and some of these fantasies happened while she was a guest in our home!
Within a few days, my lower back and sciatic nerve began to hurt. I had herniated four disks and experienced two agonizing days eight months earlier, but why was the pain suddenly back? Each day the pain grew increasingly intense as I felt the muscles in my back tighten up more and more. We were scheduled to fly to Texas for a marital intensive with a sex addiction specialist. As our departure date drew closer, I could hardly sit or walk; how could I possibly fly?
I made an appointment with the doctor who was treating my back. I told him I hadn’t done anything to re-injure my back; I also told him what had happened to my marriage. He examined me then gently said, “Toni, it’s the marital stress that is causing your terrible pain.” He gave me prescriptions for pain medication and a muscle relaxer then said, “Your pain will go away eventually.”
Somehow, I made it to Texas and through three days of intense therapy—including my husband’s complete disclosure, followed by a polygraph test—and back again without dying. I felt certain that once our trip was over my pain would go away, because those three days changed our lives and gave me hope for our marriage as I saw and heard my husband take responsibility for his choices and his behavior. However, the pain only continued to get worse. Soon I couldn’t sit for even a few minutes, because the white-hot pain from my sciatic nerve radiated across my buttocks and down my leg with such intensity.
It’s been two months now since the trip to Texas and even with lots of medication, there have been many days when I could find no relief. But lately, little by little, I’m beginning to experience days when my pain level stays in the low range and the pills I need to take are few.
During this time, the pain’s pattern has become clear to both of us: it obviously parallels the relational cycles in our marriage. As we do better, my body seems to be able to relax little by little and I’m beginning to hope that one day before too long I’ll be free to try to rebuild and live my life again. I know it won’t be easy and it won’t happen all at once, but for today I feel a little hope.
Toni’s story echoes the realization behind the famous words of microbiologist Rene Dubois, a French-American Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote, “What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the disease of the body.” Even before Dubois’s time—nearly 100 years ago—Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon realized that when confronted by a threat, including emotional threats, the body responds by increasing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and breathing rate.
Increasingly, science and medicine have come to see that the mind and body function as a single unit. Breakthrough research illuminates formerly unknown truths of human anatomy including the theory that such “traumas may temporarily or permanently alter not only people’s capacity to cope, their perception of threat, and their concept of themselves and the world, but their very biology.”1
We now know that the body’s response to stress and trauma involves hormones and inflammatory chemicals which can foster everything from headaches to heart attacks, particularly in chronically traumatic lives. These medical realities can wreak havoc on both the physical and mental well-being of partners of sex addicts when their circumstances don’t change or when they develop PTSD.
The risks these realities pose to the quality of our lives deserve our focused attention and well-thought out action, not only as individuals experiencing them in the present, but also as friends, family members and mental health professionals who will likely confront an opportunity to help someone else through the pain that comes with sexual betrayal. Learning how to respond proactively in the face of deception can mean the difference between a life filled with emotional and physical pain or one invested with good health and the joy of being alive.
Trauma, PTSD and Your Brain
To begin to understand the emotional and physical ramifications sex addiction can launch in a partner’s life, we first need to understand the physiology and neurochemistry of trauma and what it does to our bodies, including our brains. Only then can we begin to learn how to care for ourselves and others in betrayal’s dark shadow.
Fear Activates the Amygdala
Let’s discuss the amygdala as we examine how trauma affects the brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure just one inch in length that sits a few inches from either ear, has long been known to play a major role in a person’s mental and emotional state. Only in recent years has science begun to uncover what really takes place in the amygdala when we experience stress, fear and trauma, and why humans can prove impotent to counter the automatic responses launched by our brains as they commandeer systems throughout our bodies.
Fear activates the amygdala, propelling signals throughout the body long before the rational mind can begin to grasp what’s taking place. In fact, research shows that your alerted amygdala can get the word out to every region of your anatomy in microseconds.
As the amygdala goes into overdrive, it sends messages to the hypothalamus, which in turn signals the pituitary and adrenal glands to flood the bloodstream with epinephrine—better known as adrenaline—as well as norepinephrine and coritisol. These stress hormones take charge in commando-like fashion, sending orders throughout the body and shutting down non-emergency systems, including digestion and immunity. Simultaneously, “The amygdala tells the rest of the brain, ‘Hey, whatever happened, make a strong memory of it’,” says James McGaugh, a neurobiologist quoted in Geoffrey Cowley’s Newsweek article. 2
As everyone who has ever lived through the discovery of their partner’s sexual betrayal knows, our brains do indeed make indelible memories of the traumatic events; events that, for some, continue to replay like old home movies, even after they tire of the scenes that run and rerun in the theaters of their minds. Wanda, a young wife struggling against that pain, emailed in the dark hours of a difficult night saying:I’m having a terrible night. I can’t stop crying. The movies in my head keep portraying what he’s done and the deep pain from his betrayal won’t quit. It’s all so relentless. Please tell me I won’t hurt like this forever.
Where Does Stress End and Trauma Begin?
We’ve all felt the panic of stress as chemicals dump into our systems and anxiety overwhelms us. But does that equal trauma? No, there are understandable differences between stress and trauma. Trauma generally hits you suddenly, like an avalanche. It leaves you feeling powerless, helpless and paralyzed. The effect is longer lasting and, like that avalanche, it buries you, robbing you of life functions. You lose your ability to think, to plan, to cope, even as you’re forced to attempt to figure out how to survive. Trauma clinician and researcher Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., tells us, “The critical difference between a stressful but normal event and trauma is a feeling of helplessness to change the outcome….As long as people can ima
gine having some control over what is happening to them, they usually can keep their wits about them.”3 An excerpt from Marsha’s journal, written during the years when sex addiction slowly deteriorated her marriage, reflects the important distinction between everyday stress and trauma that Dr. van der Kolk explains.
A part of me feels disconnected from my body—as if my thoughts have become a separate observer of what is unfolding in the unspoken space between us, something so everywhere it silently fills every cubic inch of our home. A silence so heavy that at times it’s almost physically painful, like breathing air with too little oxygen.
Life is getting harder and harder. I can feel myself dying and letting go. It’s more than I can bear—the pain, the loneliness, the never knowing what will happen in the next moment, the hot then cold, the love then hate, the closeness then abandonment.
I’m sinking and can’t seem to save myself. I feel flat, directionless and without zeal for anything or anyone. I’m sure the DSM IV would say that I am depressed, although I don’t feel the blackness of death sucking me into its swirling vortex, a sucking that generally accompanies my depression. I guess I’ve given up…on life, on him for sure, on dreams and plans, hope and a future.
There is no point in breathing right now; no point in waking up in the morning. No energy to get out of bed, to hurry through the morning ritual of preparation to face the world and run out into my day and move through it with plans and goals. It’s as if I’m in a stupor and can’t determine how to make my mind and body work together.
I remind myself of the main character in the movie The Pianist. During the destruction of Warsaw, which looked like a-hell-on-earth place and experience, he sometimes stumbled from blown building to blown building, starving, sick, lonely, with no real direction, except survival, remembering only that he was trying to somehow stay alive, often while cannon fire was blowing apart the walls and ceilings around him. Like him, I am often discombobulated, lost, without direction. And it’s so unlike me. I’m usually so goal-oriented and able to accomplish what I need and want over enough time to make it happen. Now, all the parts of me are at war with their own members, and I feel so many conflicted feelings at one time.
Your Sexually Addicted Spouse Page 9