To let go does not mean to stop caring;
It means I can’t do it for someone else.
To let go is not to cut myself off;
It’s the realization that I can’t control another.
To let go is not to enable,
But to allow learning from natural consequences.
To let go is not to try to change or blame another;
It’s to make the most of myself.
To let go is not to care for,
But to care about.
To let go is not to judge,
But to allow another to be a human being.
To let go is to not be in the middle, arranging all the outcomes,
But to allow others to affect their own destinies.
To let go is not to be protective;
It’s to permit another to face reality.
To let go is not to deny,
But to accept.
To let go is not to nag, scold or argue,
But instead to search out my own shortcomings and correct
them.
To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires,
But to take each day as it comes, and cherish myself in it.
To let go is not to criticize and regulate anybody,
But to try to become what I dream I can be.
To let go is to not regret the past,
But to grow and live for the future.
To let go is to fear less and love more.5
Detachment, and the work and growth it allows, helps eliminate old patterns and unhealthy cycles of reaction in a relationship with a sex addict. These patterns sometimes develop in our marriages as a result of the instability, confusion and pain trauma brought to our lives. Detachment helps us replace those painful dynamics and feelings with peace, balance and eventually joy in our own recovery and healing, no matter what choices the addict makes.
What about reconciliation? How does that happen?
“Reconciliation,” writes Virginia Todd Holeman in her book, Reconcilable Differences, “is the active commitment to the restoration of love and trustworthiness by both injured party and transgressor so that their relationship may be transformed.”6 Reconciliation takes action and commitment. It is based on a decision to seek reconciliation, followed by behaviors and attitudes that enable restoration.
Holeman’s definition holds yet another key: reconciliation requires something from both parties. One person cannot reconcile; both are needed for its accomplishment. However, after both parties choose reconciliation as their goal and commit to its efforts, the betrayer or offender must take the critical first steps: he or she must seek forgiveness, demonstrate change and practice trustworthiness. Clearly, such honorable efforts require a true change of heart and behavior.
These heart-level changes include true remorse for the wrong that has been done and empathy for the wounded party. Empathy requires the offender to see his or her actions—and their consequences—through the eyes and experiences of the wounded party. The offender demonstrates that he or she “gets it”; the offender comprehends at some level the sorrow the sexual betrayal caused in his or her partner. Without these elements, reconciliation remains impossible.
Reconciliation does not end with a change of heart. A changed heart remains invisible until evidenced by changed actions. Behavioral changes that build toward reconciliation include consistent and predictable actions, actions that match words spoken and minimize surprises by announcing change in advance. These changes build trust when they are consistent over time.
We discussed rebuilding trust earlier. It is impossible to fully reconcile a broken vow without rebuilding shattered trust. While total trust may never be restored in the relationship, there must be the ability to trust the motivation and heart of the offender. For this to occur, the wounded party must see heart-level change over time. As we say in most counseling sessions, “Believe behaviors, not words.”
So how much time does the re-establishment of trust require? As long as it takes. Months, rather than days or weeks. Perhaps a year. And often longer. Ideally, after the offender begins repair attempts by taking responsibility for his/her actions and then demonstrating that change, the offended party responds with compassion and empathy for the offender and begins the work forgiveness requires.
Most couples benefit from the help of a professional counselor as they work toward reconciliation. A counselor can help the couple communicate about the very emotional topics and experiences connected to the betrayal wounds, while providing a safe place for these conversations to occur. Counseling also provides a level of accountability for the couple. Most people work harder when someone witnesses and tracks their actions and when they must pay someone to help them. Counseling is an important and valuable investment as you seek reconciliation.
Along with counseling, couples heal and progress better when surrounded by a supportive community, whether that be family, friends or perhaps members of a recovery fellowship. Healthy community promotes healthy relationships.
But even with good support, reconciliation is difficult work; work that takes the commitment and diligence of both parties. Neither party can accomplish this task alone.
What role does the addict’s childhood play in his or her addiction?
Different counseling and addiction professionals may offer different answers to this important question. But we believe that nearly all addicts have experienced at least some area of hurt or wounding in childhood that contribute to their addictive behaviors.
Certainly, childhood neglect or abuse can contribute to the development of sex addiction. Neglect is the withholding of something that a child needs to develop or to remain emotionally and physically safe. Abuse is doing something to a child that interferes with safety and development. Think of neglect as a lack of something and abuse as too much of something.
Interestingly, one doesn’t have to be the direct recipient of abuse or neglect to experience its damaging impact. Just growing up in a home where these elements are present can severely impact a child’s normal development.
Some children receive all the food, shelter and other physical things they need (they are physically cared for) but do not receive the nurture and affirmation children need to develop into emotionally healthy adults. This kind of neglect is emotional abandonment. Children who are emotionally abandoned have parents who do not bond well with them or caregivers who are inconsistent in how they emotionally interact with these children. A caregiver can be physically present, but not emotionally available to the child.
Some kids grow up in situations where they are expected to take on adult roles and, in some situations, to even parent their parents, which add burdens of responsibility they’re not yet ready to bear.
Emotional neglect and abandonment can leave children feeling empty inside or unable to form healthy relationships as adults since they have little experience with honest, open relationships while growing up.
Abuse can take several forms: physical, emotional or sexual, but any kind of abuse can negatively affect a child’s development. Physical abuse is commonly seen as doing things to the child’s body that can cause injury. Emotional abuse involves doing things that attack the child’s emotional well-being and sense of self. Sexual abuse is any sexual activity on or with a child. This can include direct contact or indirect activities like exposure to pornography or other graphic sexual materials or activities. Some children are sexually abused through coarse sexual talk and the actions of those around them.
Any form of abuse can increase a child’s vulnerability to the development of addictions, including sexual addiction, but sexual abuse in particular can increase a child’s later tendency to move toward sexual addiction. Children who are sexually abused learn while still young that attention and affirmation comes from sexual activity, even though their sexual abuse most likely felt bad or painful and left them feeling great shame.
Sexual abuse creates extreme confusion in children. Their per
petrators may be people they know and trust. This can leave a child thinking thoughts such as, This can’t be a bad thing if this person (friend, family member, neighbor, church leader, etc) acts friendly most of the time; therefore, this must be okay.
Or children may feel responsible for the behavior and respond with thoughts like, There must be a reason they are treating me this way. Sexual abuse can also feel good as children’s bodies respond physically to sexual stimulation. If the abuse creates sensations of physical or emotional pleasure, children can experience a great deal of confusion and shame. Sexual abuse encumbers children with powerful traumatic experiences.
Such early trauma injures children’s development and may lead to post-traumatic stress. Out of this trauma, PTSD symptoms may develop. As children develop, they seek activities that help them cope with their trauma and shame. For many sexual abuse victims, sexual activity becomes the activity of choice, even while still quite young.
Sexual fantasy is powerful. At this vulnerable time in their lives, abused children who didn’t receive what they needed to learn to bond or relate in healthy ways now discover that sexual activities work to remove their pain and to take their minds off of their loneliness. As they soothe and stimulate themselves, new sexual addicts are born and sexual activity ultimately takes the place of healthy interactions and intimacy with others who can meet their deepest emotional needs.
Abuse and neglect are not the only conditions that can contribute to later addiction. Other childhood situations that can affect development include anything that brings about inconsistent caregiving. Such situations can result from a caregiver’s intentional acts or they can result from situations and conditions beyond the caregiver’s control.
Divorce, a family member’s addiction, mental or physical illness in a family member, extended separations from caregivers or parents who are too overly involved in their own lives to adequately provide for the child’s nurture can all contribute to pain and confusion. Situations such as these fall outside a child’s ability to effectively cope and leave holes in the foundation of love and nurture a child needs to grow up with a fully developed self.
Healing and completing these developmental tasks requires the help of a trained therapist, especially when sexual addiction or compulsion is present. We have found that addressing these deep wounds is key to effective recovery.
Does 12-step sexual addiction recovery help deal with the addiction?
We believe that 12-step recovery can play an important part in dealing with sexual addiction, along with the other necessary work required to address and heal early childhood wounds. The structure and fellowship involved in 12-step groups can provide a place for addicts to feel heard, understood and safe as they learn about themselves and try out new behaviors. These groups provide education about addiction and what it takes to gain freedom, while providing support for new coping behaviors. 12-step groups reduce the isolation sex addicts feel and provide a level of accountability as sex addicts seek to discontinue the addictive behaviors.
Not all sex addicts attend 12-step groups. Some addicts find similar support through other kinds of groups or fellowships. Safe fellowship with other members stands out as the most important element a group of any kind can offer a sex addict. If a group fails to function in a safe way, as we discussed when we described safe groups for you, such a group offers no value for the hard work an addict must do.
In our experience, a group alone cannot offer the level of support and treatment most sex addicts need to heal. We see individual therapy as the primary means of discovering and addressing the underlying wounds that led to the addiction in the first place. Groups, whether 12-step or others, can then support the addict’s growth and the character change needed for sex addiction recovery.
What about the childhood issues of the partner of a sex addict?
Most people grow up with some form of hurt or wounding from their childhoods and most accumulate fresh wounds along the trail of life. For some of us, those wounds are minimal, for others, profound. In either case, when we learn about our partners’ addictions, our earlier histories of hurt or harm are suddenly tapped into. For those of us who have not yet done the work required to resolve old issues, the discovery of our partners’ sexual addictions can increase old pain as we take in the new.
Not only do you feel the anger, rage, hurt, confusion and betrayal from what your spouse did, you may also re-experience a measure of pain from previous betrayals, abuses or assaults. This re-experiencing dynamic can make it difficult to determine exactly what you’re responding to at any one moment.
As we said earlier in this book, fresh trauma nearly always taps into old trauma. Even if we’ve formerly dealt with old wounds in therapy, they can resurface now like an ankle formerly weakened by a serious break. We find that most partners we work with will need to talk about such past wounds as they heal from their current trauma and betrayal.
Past abuse, especially sexual abuse or assault of any kind, can become particularly tender when we experience sexual betrayal at the hands of our partners. Any pain or negative energy around former wounds simply mean we need to pay attention, process it and drain any residual ancient pain. If you find this happening to you, we encourage you to find a therapist or other helping professional to help you deal with both your current betrayal and the residual pain and loss from prior wounds.
Also, we want to note that those with prior trauma are at increased risk for developing PTSD—another reason why partners can benefit enormously from individual counseling.
I’m a person of faith but now I feel like God doesn’t care or he wouldn’t have let this happen. What can you tell me that might help me make sense of all this pain in my life?
For people of faith, this may be one of life’s most difficult questions. How do you make sense of something that hurts so much, especially when it makes no sense at all to you? Devoid of reality, sex addiction makes no rational sense, either. Nor does it make sense relationally. So surely it can’t make sense spiritually!
Yet we believe it does. From our perspective, the sex addict attempts to fill spiritual needs with physical pleasure. Some say addiction is mankind’s attempt to meet God-sized needs outside of God’s provision for their fulfillment. To us, that part makes sense.
But why does God who is supposed to be loving and able to protect allow this kind of pain to enter your life? Why didn’t He protect you or intervene? Why did He allow you to marry this person who promised so much commitment but inflicted so much pain? Surely He knew this was going to happen! These questions bear striking resemblance to others that all people from the beginning of time have asked as they’ve journeyed through life: Why does a supposedly loving God allow pain and suffering in the world? Why do children die? Why doesn’t He protect us?
We know nothing we say here can bring an end to your questioning and that isn’t our purpose. Rather, we encourage you to keep on asking God your toughest questions! Converse with him as you struggle to find the answers you need. Barbara encourages her clients of faith to write letters or “Psalms” to God and to pour out their pain and questions as they do. This provides another way to “externalize” our pain and to get those strong feelings out of our heads and onto paper. Do this exercise on a regular basis and down the road, you will have a written history of your journey and of God’s presence in it.
Talk to pastors or priests. Read books that discuss the role of suffering in our lives. Pursue resolution, acceptance and peace until you can call them your own. In our own lives, Barbara and I have had to wrestle with the issues ourselves until we finally arrived at some answers:Sexual betrayal is not God’s desire or will; of that we feel certain. But like a loving parent, He gave us the capacity to make our own choices, even if they fall outside of His will. In the case of your partner’s addiction, the one you love chose to exercise that will and it led to addiction and eventually to the destructive consequences in his or her life and your own.
Now whe
re is God in all this? Of course, we don’t have the ultimate answer to that difficult question, but we suspect He played a role in exposing your partner’s addiction in order to protect you from further consequences. Perhaps He played a role in helping you find this book. We know He led us to write it. He might be in the people he has placed around you to help you get through this time. He is definitely there for you to run to with your hurt and to give you comfort. And He is there to love, give grace, support, heal and give hope as you recover and heal.
We’ve learned over the course of life that God doesn’t waste anything, even this. We’ve watched as He’s taken our pain and turned it into passion and purpose, using it to strengthen us and to bring hope to others. He didn’t cause it, but He absolutely will use it if we allow Him into the pain and the process of healing our hearts and transforming the loss into new passion and purpose.
What should we or shouldn’t we tell the children?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this difficult question. Each of us must come to our answers on our own as we consider our children’s ages, abilities to understand and our own situations and timing in our lives. Disclosing Secrets by Jennifer Schneider and Debra Corely7 is one excellent resource to use as you struggle to find the right answer for your family. Schneider and Corely interviewed children of sex addicts and report their responses, then provide tips for a variety of types of disclosure.
Realize that your children already know that something is going on between their parents—they just may not know exactly what it is! They may have all sorts of wild ideas they’ve arrived at as they’ve tried to evaluate the risk to their parent’s marriage and the continuity of the family they depend on for stability in their lives. Hearing from you that “Yes, indeed there are problems” serves to validate the children’s perceptions so they know they aren’t crazy, and it models to them that families can talk about difficult topics. That alone is a gift they can take into their futures; one that can help them work their ways through life.
Your Sexually Addicted Spouse Page 24