I’m so tired. So very, very tired. A part of me wants to just go to bed tonight and never wake up. The pain is agonizing and so exhausting. When will it ever end? Or will it? Tell me; will I carry this deep, “knife-through-my-soul” feeling with me until I die? If so, God, how can I bear it?
Action’s Countering Force
When faced with overwhelming fear, threat or loss—such as the loss of attachment, security and safety in your most intimate relationship—the long-term impact it will have on you hangs in part on whether or not you believe you can exert some control over your own life and the shape of your personal world. In other words, if you believe you hold some power over your own safety and destiny and act on that belief, you increase your chances for healing earlier.
Dr. van der Kolk reports that if one can stay “…focused on problem solving, on doing something, however small, about the situation—rather than concentrating on one’s distress—[it] reduces the chances of developing post-traumatic stress disorder.”4 Concurrently, David Baldwin, Ph.D., writes that “PTSD is also more likely if passive defenses, such as freezing or dissociation, are used—rather than active defenses such as fight or flight.”5
Unfortunately, when you are suddenly railroaded by a traumatic event, you rarely have the chance to choose whether or not to take action rather than freeze or dissociate. The overall impact of the event, plus your personal trauma history, more or less determines what your response will be in those moments. Yet information is power and it can only better equip you to face your own pain as a survivor, rather than a victim.
Principle 1: If I believe I hold enough power to do something about my situation and act on that belief, my efforts will help me survive and heal.
However, this action-oriented approach is easier when a trauma victim truly believes he or she has some power over the circumstances. Feeling helpless—or powerless—in the face of tragedy and loss creates a setup for PTSD. In a word, action—or empowerment—can help you escape PTSD in many circumstances. The opposite of action in this case is dissociation. Dr. van der Kolk explains: “…spacing out (dissociating) during a traumatic event often predicts the development of subsequent PTSD. The longer the traumatic experience lasts, the more likely the victim is to react by dissociating (separating those thoughts away from the rest of the mind). Once a person dissociates, he becomes incapable of goal-directed action [italics added]6.”
As Heather, a counseling professional, looked back on her experience with a sexually addicted husband and shared it with us, she clearly saw how her lack of belief in her power to induce change in her situation contributed to her own PTSD.
I remember how very early in the downward spiral of my marriage, we sought help from a counselor who worked with our health insurance plan. After having each of us share during that initial session, she gave me a homework assignment that I was to bring back the following week.
She said, “Heather, I want you to write a story. In it you are the main character. You are an eight-year-old girl and you have just moved to a new city and today is the first day at your new school. You are outside for your first recess and you’re wearing a red coat. It’s cold and you love that red coat. But two boys who are bullies begin to taunt you and soon they rip your coat right off you and threaten to hurt you the next time if you tattle on them.
“Now Heather, I want you to finish the story and bring it back next week. You are in a tough situation and faced with some difficult choices. How are you going to get your coat back without risking further harm and making more enemies?”
I’m embarrassed to say I never went back. “Why?” you might ask. I didn’t go back, because I couldn’t figure out how to get that coat back without making things worse! I felt just as stymied in the make-believe situation as I was in my marriage. I knew I couldn’t actually change those boys—or my husband—and I let that realization block my ability to find ways to help myself in a difficult situation. I had already dissociated from my personal power when it came to men, a by- product of another traumatic experience that happened decades earlier. While this wise counselor sought to empower me through a metaphor, I remained trapped in my feelings of helplessness and I failed to accept her offer. Sadly, many partners of sexual addicts exhibit similar behavior.
Principle 2: Taking action to help myself early in the situation can help me prevent PTSD.
The Power of Powerlessness
Unfortunately, many partners of sex addicts cannot find ways to change or escape their situations, especially if they still have young children at home and they can’t earn enough money to seek outside help and support themselves. Often, older partners, too, feel restrained from challenging sexual betrayal because their retirement, old age security and savings are so intertwined with their spouses’. Compounding the dilemma, many sex addicts feed their partners’ disempowering self-beliefs by maintaining economic control of household income and financial records.
Frequently, the addict also controls his or her joint support system; the addict tells family and friends stories that work in his or her favor, leaving the partner without the emotional and social support one needs, in addition to monetary challenges.
Circumstances like these present traps that many partners feel powerless to pry open under their own force. However, their powerlessness comes with a price: “The immediate effects of prolonged trauma…recur with each new wave of traumatic experience. The long-term effects include post-traumatic stress disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder and a variety of mental and physical illnesses.”7
These marital traps can bind a partner indefinitely and fuel a cycle of trauma—> powerlessness—> more trauma—> increased powerlessness as he or she falls victim to an ongoing sense of powerlessness. In the face of their own powerlessness, many partners choose “emotion-focused” change instead.
The Mistake of “Emotion-Focused” Change
Some partners of sex addicts believe they can ignore the circumstances that create their overwhelming pain and attempt to change their “…emotional state instead of the circumstances giving rise to it.”8 This method of dealing with—or rather not dealing with—trauma is called choosing an “emotion-focused” outlook. With such an outlook, we give up trying to do anything concrete and proactive about the negative consequences our spouses’ sexual betrayals produce in our marriages, our families and our lives and try instead to change the way we feel about their actions.
A few partners do this by having affairs of their own, believing that if they “level the playing field” they will no longer care or hurt when their spouses act out. Others simply determine to harden their hearts like stone so that no emotional pain can possibly take root there. This, they believe, will eliminate any pain their spouses’ behavior might inflict in the future.
However, this never returns our lives to health and balance and that lack of balance triggers further consequences to our health. We’re cautioned that, “Failing to reset their equilibrium after a traumatic experience, people are prone to develop the cluster of symptoms that we diagnose as PTSD.”9
Principle 3: Changing our feelings, rather than our unhealthy circumstances, fuels a sense of powerlessness that often leads to PTSD.
Neurochemical and Physiological Differences between Trauma and PTSD
Although a full discussion of what goes on in the brain and throughout the body in the face of trauma lies beyond the scope of this text, it remains important for us to catch a glimpse of the complex chemical responses trauma triggers, as well as the longer lasting threat the chemistry of PTSD thrusts into our lives. Only as we grasp and accept trauma’s truths can we think and act proactively on our own behalves in the face of ongoing trauma and respond in grace, true helpfulness and support when people we know or serve face the personal disaster and loss that comes with sexual betrayal. So let’s go one step further and attempt to understand the neurochemical and physiolgical ways PTSD differs from trauma.
Enter PTSD
While
living with trauma feels excruciating and can convolute your life, PTSD can shatter your ability to cope and compound your pain. “Those suffering from PTSD can have trouble functioning in their jobs or relationships. …Many people with PTSD repeatedly re-experience the ordeal in the form of flashback episodes, memories, nightmares, or frightening thoughts, especially when they are exposed to events or objects that remind them of the trauma [italics added],” the American Psychological Association Web site tells us.10 These events or objects are known as “triggers.” And because a trigger can cross your path suddenly and unexpectedly, PTSD can turn your world upside down without a moment’s notice, sometimes years after the original traumatizing event has slipped into the past.
Old triggers nearly cost Tanya a second chance at happiness years after relational betrayal ended her first marriage.
By the time I met my present husband, Matt, I had lived through several traumatic life experiences, including betrayal trauma. I carried the remnants of those old wounds into our early courtship. However, from the time we met over eighteen years ago, Matt has played a big role in my healing.
It all started one weekend early in our dating when I drove several hours to his house for a visit. When I arrived, I found a note he’d left me. It said he was sorry but he had forgotten he promised to help some friends move that morning. But the time he said he’d return wasn’t far off, so I thought, No problem, and I settled in.
But when that time came and went with no sign of him, I was suddenly overcome with a quickly-building, intense sense of panic.
Still, when he did arrive a short while later he seemed clearly happy to see me. However, by then I was shaking uncontrollably and my mind was racing with thoughts that were telling me how unsafe it was to trust him.
He was bewildered by my condition and couldn’t understand when I explained, “I have to get out of here! I can’t be in a relationship!”
Matt knew my history, but this was his first encounter with its impact in my life. Yet what he did at that moment couldn’t have been more powerful for me if he’d planned it. With a very gentle expression on his face, he looked into my eyes as though I was a friend he cared for deeply, a whole person. “Tanya,” he said, “you gave your former husband twelve years of your life! Are you going to give him the rest of it?”
Just as Tanya’s PTSD was triggered by reminders of her betrayal experience, a large percentage of partners of sexual addicts suffer the same symptoms. Tanya and Matt’s story has a happy ending, because she has worked hard to heal at every level of her being. But many partners aren’t so fortunate. Often their PTSD triggers are misunderstood and mislabeled, quickly categorized as codependency and their PTSD remains untreated.
Principle 4: Things that remind you of your trauma can trigger flashbacks, panic attacks and more, leaving you feeling powerless to control your behavior and manage your life.
Clearly, PTSD’s devastating grip can squeeze all hope of a normal life beyond the reach of its victims. But what internal and chemical changes account for the functional differences between trauma and PTSD?
The Chemistry Behind Indiscriminate Fight or Flight Responses
One difference involves cortisol levels. Studies have revealed that, unlike the high levels of cortisol seen in trauma cases, cortisol levels in people with PTSD are quite low.
Dr. van der Kolk explains:Studies over two decades have shown that people with PTSD develop abnormalities in the brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) that regulate arousal and attention… while acute stress normally activates the stress hormone cortisol, people with PTSD have relatively low levels of cortisol…. In people with PTSD, increased arousal accompanied by low cortisol levels provoke indiscriminate fight or flight reactions.
…The vulnerability of people with PTSD to overreact to emotional and sensory stimuli shows up in their behavior as increased impulsivity and anxiety.11
For partners who have suffered with their spouses’ sexual betrayals, this means that behaviors which might look and sound like codependency may indeed actually be generated by PTSD’s indiscriminate fight or flight reactions.
Principle 5: Your behaviors that may look and sound like codependency may actually be generated by PTSD’s indiscriminate fight or flight reactions.
On A Personal Note: Have you experienced the “fight or flight” reaction in response to your partner’s addiction and behaviors?
PTSD’s Impact on the Brain Can Skew Your Judgment
Another difference involves the prefrontal cortex. Daniel Sweeney, Ph.D., cautions that “…people with PTSD may experience a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for executive function). This interferes with their ability to measure and respond to threats.”12
This inability to measure and respond to threats with accuracy means our judgment about people, events and conversations can become skewed. And skewed judgment can create all kinds of trouble in our lives. No wonder we sometimes question our own realities and feel confused about what’s true and what’s not.
Principle 6: If your thoughts or actions seem out of sync with others whom you respect, it may be that your prefrontal lobe has been deactivated by PTSD and your judgment is skewed.
PTSD Interferes With One’s Ability to Self-Sooth
To make matters worse, the normal human ability to ground ourselves and return to emotional homeostasis when we feel upset becomes affected by PTSD. “For traumatized people who develop PTSD…this capacity to sooth oneself is compromised.”13 Without that ability, PTSD sufferers often exhibit anxiety, insomnia, racing thoughts and other symptoms that only add to their pain and inability to cope. In addition, they frequently turn to replacement soothers such as food, alcohol or other unhealthy or harmful behaviors to self-medicate PTSD’s tortuous emotional pain.
“Speechless Terror”
The high levels of neurochemical arousal that induce feelings of fear, anxiety, panic and terror wreak havoc on the important functioning of a region of the brain known as Broca’s area, the area we rely on to translate our feelings into words. One study suggests that “…when people with PTSD are reliving their trauma, they have great difficulty putting that experience into words.”14 They suffer what Dr. van der Kolk refers to as “speechless terror.”
This often exhibits in a partner’s inability to tell even a counselor or support group his or her true feelings, because he or she does not know. The partner may know he or she hurts; the partner may know he or she is angry, but the road to deeper emotions remains blocked by PTSD.
Principle 7: If you have difficulty articulating your story or your feelings, it does not mean you are being codependent, you are being difficult or you’re stupid. It likely means that the Broca’s area in your brain has been affected and non-talk-based therapy will probably prove more helpful to you.
Nature’s Just-As-If Response
Perhaps PTSD’s most humiliating and most misunderstood component comes with the boomerang-like effect of its “just-as-if response.” Dr. van der Kolk explains it this way:Confronted with an experience that includes elements of their original trauma, people with PTSD may react as if they were going through it again. Specifically, when enough of their sensations (such as being touched in a particular way, being exposed to certain smells, or seeing images that remind them of the earlier event) match imprints from the original trauma, these people activate biological systems that make them react as if they were being traumatized anew [italics added]. In short, they have conditioned psychophysiological and neuroendocrine responses to reminders of the trauma.15
When a partner of a sex addict has PTSD, just being in a situation that brings back the memories of the original betrayal can produce a response—such as panic, fleeing, weeping and often dissociation—just like the original event did. This helps explain why a reminder of your sexual betrayal, even a sexy movie scene or a beautiful person in your spouse’s presence, can trigger an old response that looks ludicrous to others, yet it remains outside your abi
lity to stop or control.
Dr. van der Kolk goes on to say:
The amygdala acts like a smoke detector to ascertain whether incoming sensory information spells a threat, and creates emotional memories in response to particular sensations, sounds, and images that it associated with threats to life and limb. When someone is exposed to stimuli that represents danger, signals calling for protection pass from the amygdala to the rest of the body. These emotionally labeled sensations are believed to be indelible, or at least extraordinarily difficult to extinguish. Once the amygdala is programmed to remember particular sounds, smells and bodily sensations as dangerous, a person is likely always to respond to those stimuli as a trigger for fight or flight reactions.16
Many partners of sexual addicts encounter this reality in their lives and when they do, the scene it creates can derail them at best, and at worst, it can leave them feeling totally humiliated and thrown back in time, caught up in their own traumas all over again. Rochelle shared such an event with us; one that she hopes never revisits her life.
Your Sexually Addicted Spouse Page 10