The kids had needs and so did I. I needed to feel safe in my house again. So many lies had been told; I felt like I was raped in my own home. Something in me made me need my parents to help me clean up so I could feel safe again. They came, because they love me, but they simply couldn’t handle the situation. They left after a few days. However, I am blessed; my brother came in their place. He became a source of safety, strength and support; the rock I needed to get me through that difficult time.
Katherine’s loss of safety and need for support when she learned the truth holds true for all partners of sex addicts to whom we’ve talked or we’ve studied. Betrayal trauma shakes the foundations of our beliefs about our safety in our marriages and it dissolves our assumptions about trusting our spouses.
“Trauma is a separation from safety,” says Dr. Norman Wright.1 Another expert, David Baldwin, adds that “Trauma creates overwhelming fear and leaves in its wake a feeling that the world is not a safe place. Many practitioners…thus believe that recovery begins with establishing a safe place, a situation within which the survivor can feel some sense of safety and predictability.” 2 Daniel Sweeney, a professor at George Fox Unviersity’s School of Education, says, “Safety may, in fact, be the crucial factor in treating traumatized clients. Trauma victims don’t just feel psychologically unsafe, but also neurobiologically [unsafe].”3
Experts agree that a need for safety is universal among those who suffer trauma’s pain and loss. We’ll go into ways to regain safety a little later, but first let’s take a look at healing from betrayal trauma as a whole.
Caveats in Healing from Betrayal Trauma
The journey toward healing can vary in length. Some partners heal in months; for others, it takes years. Like the routes you travel on any trip in life, detours may suddenly appear in your path, potholes may make the going rough and inclement weather—both in relationships and life circumstances—may make your journey more uncomfortable or even dangerous.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is this: The trip is never linear.
Because the pain comes in cycles, often propelled by your triggers, very few partners can avoid traveling delays or double-backs. Just recently, one woman said through heartbreaking sobs, “As you write, be sure to tell them trauma cycles and recycles. I thought I was beyond this, but the pain is back and it’s unbearable today!”
In spite of the meandering detours that healing often takes, here we can only accommodate a linear representation of the journey. For that reason, as well as to provide you with a guide, we’ve chosen to incorporate the healing process into a map. We do this because:• It’s helpful to see the big picture.
• We will become familiar with the steps that will eventually lead you from the wrenching initial discovery that your partner has betrayed your trust.
• We can then discover the final peace and joy found in integration and transformation of your loss and pain.
Refer back to our map when you lose sight of the pathway that leads to your healing.
Remember, you’re not alone; we, and many millions of others, are your companions on this journey. Seek out and find these partners of sex addicts—in your town, online, on the phone, through a local counselor—and gain their support as you pursue your own healing.
Pathway to Healing, Empowerment and Transformation Following Sexual Betrayal Trauma
Stages of Healing Resources and Techniques for Stages of Healing
• Initial Discovery and Crises • Find initial support immediately
• Re-establish safety
• Consider controlled, supportive environments for disclosure; consider including polygraph testing
• Get tested for sexually transmitted diseases
• Practice good self-care
• Find/Build Good Support System • Family and/or friends if “safe”
• Re-establish Safety (continued) • Clergy if “safe”
• Counselor (sex addiction and trauma specialist, if possible)
• “Partners of Sex Addicts” support groups
• Doctor’s or psychiatrist’s help if you’re struggling with depression or anxiety
• If you feel suicidal, seek help immediately
• Create the Boundaries You Need to Feel Safe in Your Home Again • Do you need sexual boundaries with your partner?
• Do you need a temporary separation from your partner: inhome or geographically?
• What other boundaries do you need?
• Practice Good Self-Care in Each Area • Mental/emotional self-care
• Physical self-care
• Spiritual self-care
• Create Boundaries Between Yourself and the Trauma • Use self-care to build a boundary from the pain
• Learn and utilize self-soothing techniques
• Eliminate cognitive distortions
• Eliminate negative self-talk
• Use healthy self-talk
• Counter Dissociation if it is a Problem • Use grounding techniques to stay present
• Use healthy self-talk to counter cognitive distortion that can lead to dissociation
• Use your impersonal energy to access your strength and stay in the present
• Begin Emotional Processing and Grieving • Recognize and process your feelings
• Acknowledge and grieve your losses and the consequences they produced in your life
• For some, face and adapt to separation or divorce
• Alter your attachment to what you’ve lost by letting it go and saying goodbye
• Develop resiliency
• Use Grieving and Processing Methods to Help Heal • Externalize the problem by sharing your story
• Renegotiate the trauma with a counselor’s help
• Consider nature-based healing or expressive therapy such as art or music therapy if talk therapy doesn’t meet your needs
• Use Grieving and Processing Methods to Help Heal (continued) • Consider body therapies if talk therapy fails to bring healing and /or when trauma manifests in physical symptoms
• Consider EMDR if talk therapy fails to bring healing and/or when trauma manifests in physical symptoms
• Continue Emotional Processing • You will know when the pain has lost its power and you are free to let it go and move on
• Develop Personal Empowerment • Continue and expand healthy boundaries
• Develop solid grounding
• Strengthen your self-awareness
• Strengthen your impersonal energy/executive awareness
• Develop healthy communication skills
• Develop healthy conflict management skills
• Reframe yourself as a survivor rather than a victim
• Integration and Transformation Resulting in Post-Traumatic Growth • Integrate the trauma into your larger life story
• Consider forgiveness
• Find new hope by transforming the pain into a positive life purpose
The Starting Point: Find Support Immediately
Partners of sex addicts, like all “…wounded people heal in relationships….Growth, repair, maturity and faith development are all intimately tied to relationships. People do need people to achieve wholeness in a fractured world.”4 No one can deal with this particular heartache without the hope, comfort and support that only safe people can provide for our unique form of pain.
If you’re blessed with healthy family members and friends, support can come from relationships that already exist in your life. In ideal cases, these people can provide the empathy, help and encouragement you need to deal with the immediate pain and disruption, as well as the ongoing rebuilding process that healing requires. However, in many cases, they cannot.
Certainly, many counselors are equipped to help you deal with this blow, though again, some aren’t. We’ll look at each potential source of support and discuss possible methods you can use to predetermine their abilities “to be there” for you. Befo
re we do, we want to tell you about one additional resource that you might otherwise overlook, simply because awareness of this specialty may be outside of your life experience.
On A Personal Note: Think of possible support people. What friends or family members have demonstrated their abilities to love you and support you in the past?
If you can’t think of anyone to call on, then consider what you want in a person on whom you could rely. What behaviors and traits would show you that a person can support you through this trauma?
Consider a Specialized Counselor Who Can Provide a Directed, Supportive Environment for the Addict’s Disclosure
An important beginning step for your healing comes with hearing your partner’s planned sexual disclosure. The disclosure is a set aside time during which the sex addict discloses his or her sexual activity outside of marriage or a committed relationship. Disclosure can be a painful event, particularly for the partner. We encourage you to use a counselor trained in helping individuals and couples impacted by sex addiction for this critical event.
Typically, in a planned disclosure the sex addict shares the revelations of sexual acting out in its entirety. This disclosure can shred your dreams and slice and dice your soul. Many partners need a break from their normal routines following disclosure. On the other hand, some partners feel relief, because they finally know the truth.
In some cases, hearing about an addict’s sexual behavior can take hours. To help you process and manage the information you may hear, we recommend you plan and prepare in advance for your own self-care during and after the appointment. From personal and professional experience, we know that preparation and self-care will better equip you to face this critical and often painful event.• If you have children, pre-arrange for their care for the day and evening when the disclosure takes place so you can focus on yourself and your needs. Knowing they are well cared for allows you to focus on what you need.
• Consider pre-arranging additional time by yourself with the counselor after the disclosure. Most partners feel a need to process what is heard or read during the disclosure.
• Consider pre-arranging spending the night with a supportive friend, family member or at a hotel. This will give you time away from your partner to process and grieve.
• Predetermine—to the best of your ability—how much and what kind of details about the sex addict’s sexual activities you want and need to hear. We encourage you to use your counselor’s wisdom and experience to help you identify what you feel you need to hear in a disclosure. Does it need to include everything? Most partners begin by stating, “I need to know it all and I need it right now!” But they overlook the potential emotional consequences of such hazardous detailed information. Barbara often reminds clients that there is no cleanser for our minds. Once the information has entered, it is there to stay.
Your counselor can help you determine your need and motivation for the specifics in your desire to learn. Different people have different needs. Give it deep thought and consideration, then know that whatever your need, its okay. Disclosure is in large part for your benefit, so do what you must to experience the good that finally hearing the truth can produce. One friend, a psychologist, knew herself well enough to know that without specific details she would ruminate about the possible secrets she hadn’t heard and she wasn’t sorry she asked for and got all the details she needed.
We believe partners need complete disclosure, but we find that most heal more easily without full details. Most of us want and need to know such details as when did the initial acting out begin? At what point did different behaviors enter into the acting out pattern? What behaviors did the addict participate in? Did the acting out include others? Did it involve children in any way? Did it include any same-sex pornography or interaction? If the addict divulges sex with others, we believe you would likely benefit from asking if you know any of these sexual partners personally. If you do, you’ll probably want new boundaries to prevent contact with those people.
For most of us, little benefit comes from knowing details such as locations of acting out, positions used, descriptions of behavior, words used, etc. These little details tend to graphically and painfully stamp our memories with indelible X-rated pictures. They can poison our feelings about places we frequent, adding new complications to our lives, especially if moving to another place is not an option.
Once you determine the questions you need to ask during disclosure, your therapist can help you think your queries through and prepare to ask them in ways that will help you. Together, you can monitor how you might feel during the disclosure process and when to call for time-outs if you need them. Remember, the disclosure is in large part for you, so use good self-care and set the pace to meet your own needs.
Additionally, we suggest that because of the frequency with which sexual addicts lie and/or cover up the truth, if possible, you choose a therapist for disclosure who also incorporates a polygraph test in the process.
Consider Including a Polygraph Test in Disclosure
As we discussed in an earlier chapter, using polygraph tests in the treatment of sex addiction remains a controversial topic. Nonetheless, we’ve seen their use produce remarkable breakthroughs for the spouse, for the addict, for the marriage or for all three, depending on the factors in individual cases. We’ve turned to Dr. Milton Magness, one expert who uses polygraphs regularly in his work with sex addicts and asked him to share his perspective with us:The idea of having a polygraph examination following a disclosure may bring hope to the spouses of sexual addicts, because they realize that with its use they can finally believe they have gotten the whole truth and not have to imagine and worry about what else in which their partners may be involved. Without a polygraph exam, the partner has no assurance that he or she is hearing the complete truth.
Another way to look at polygraph exams is to see them as the verification necessary to insure that true recovery is taking place. In drug treatment, a urinalysis (UA) is done at the beginning of treatment and then randomly throughout treatment and in aftercare. It is common knowledge that drug treatment programs would be completely ineffective without some way of verifying that the person being treated was free of drugs. Polygraph exams provide that necessary verification for persons in recovery from compulsive sexual behavior.
Sexual addicts lie to their partners, their therapists and themselves. In a research project I conducted a few years ago of sexual addicts and whether they were truthful about their acting-out behavior, I received a number of responses from sexual addicts who said they had not even been honest with their therapists about their acting-out behaviors.
After catching a sexual addict in a lie—especially repeated lies—the spouse or partner is left to wonder how to know if he or she is ever truthful. This doubt undermines every aspect of their relationship, creating such insecurity that wives or husbands may wonder, “Is s/he being honest with me?”
A disclosure that is less than 100 percent honest is not a disclosure but a deception. Partial disclosures only succeed in traumatizing the partner. Polygraphs help get to the truth. Without this procedure, I am convinced that many sexual addicts would never be able to tell the complete truth. And unless the hidden truth and accompanying shame are disclosed, the sexual addict may never be able to get free from his or her entrenched pattern of compulsive sexual behavior.”5
Be Tested for STDs Even If You Don’t Think It’s Necessary For many partners, one of the most difficult and humiliating aspects of discovering their spouses’ addictions comes with trips to their doctors for sexually transmitted disease testing. Yet this test proves mandatory to protect yourself from one of the cruelest potential outcomes of a spouse’s sexual addiction. A great many partners we hear from and work with end up with herpes, genital warts and other sexually transmitted diseases. Occasionally, a partner develops more complicated and risky sexually transmitted diseases because of a sex addict’s lascivious behaviors.
Some partners confiden
tly tell us in reference to them not needing STD tests, “My spouse swears he or she did not have sex with other people; it was limited to pornography.” However, we know there are no guarantees when it comes to sexual addiction. Disclosure usually trickles out over time and those lost in the addiction lie rather than risk losing everything.
Protect yourself. Your partner has lied to you about his or her behavior by keeping it secret, and this pattern of lies leaves you at risk. Believing what you cannot prove about an addict can be dangerous at best and deadly in the extreme. We urge you to take this step of precaution and to ask your partner to do the same.
Re-Establish Your Safety
Trauma leaves in its wake a loss of safety on every level. In order to heal, we must find ways to re-establish our sense of safety, because without it we remain “on edge” and hypervigilant. Only safety can help us counteract that hypervigilance. “To move through the trauma,” says trauma specialist Peter Levine, “we need quietness, safety and protection similar to that offered the bird in the gentle warmth of the child’s hands.”6 Trauma of any kind “…may cause us to question strongly held beliefs—about our safety, how much control we have over our life and how predictable the world really is.”7
Nowhere is your need for safety more profound than within the walls of your own home. And nowhere does safety present such complications; after all, you share your life and space with your spouse and your need to feel safe within that protective space is essential. So regaining your sense of safety at home must become one of your highest priorities.
We talk more about ways to build safety in your life later in this chapter and the next. Begin now to ask yourself, “What do I need to feel safe in my home again?”
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