A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (11 page)

As much as you can, put yourself in your partner’s shoes and compassionately hear her response, and you will be able to lay the groundwork for the rebuilding of her trust.

Many men have reported that because their partner’s response is difficult to bear, they have intense urges to engage in their familiar sexually compulsive behaviors. It can be helpful to find ways to get the support that your partner might not be able to provide. You may need someone to help you with your urges to fight back, run away, or act out. And you may want to receive recognition for your efforts. This would be the time to speak with a good friend, counselor, support group, trusted family member, or your pastor.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Reassurances for her:

1. You are not responsible for your partner’s sexually addictive behaviors. His choices about how he deals with his irritations and stimulations are his alone, as are yours.

2. Your partner’s sexually addictive actions are not an indication that he does not love you. Your relationship is not hopeless or doomed because your partner has a problem with sexual compulsivity.

3. You are not weak or damaged because you want to stay with your partner and rebuild your relationship.

4. You don’t have to force yourself to trust your partner right now. It is normal to feel angry, upset, and mistrusting.

5. You don’t need to go through this time alone. Reach out to friends, family, and other support systems.

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Reassurances for him:

1. Being a sex addict does not mean you are a failure.

2. You can stop acting out sexually. Once you do that, your relationship has a chance to survive, change, and become more intimate and fulfilling.

3. Having an issue with sexual compulsivity does not mean you do not love your partner. It does mean you have an issue with intimacy.

4. You may not know how to stop your sexually addictive behaviors, but you can commit to finding a way to stop them and to building intimacy with your partner.

5. You don’t need to go through this time alone. Reach out to friends, family, and other support systems.

Looking Forward

In
Chapter 5
, which opens Part 2, we begin by looking at reestablishing trust as a first step. Other chapters in Part 2 explore areas that are typically roadblocks to healing and creating deeper intimacy, understanding the toxic cycle of shame and blame, and working with strong feelings and emotions. Learning to work with strong emotions not only helps you develop deeper intimacy, it also helps you develop the necessary capacity to work with addictive urges.

PART TWO

REBUILDING YOUR RELATIONSHIP

CHAPTER 5

Re-Establishing Trust on the Road to Forgiveness

You’ve survived the initial storm. You’ve lived through the shock of revelation. Internet porn, pornographic videos, prostitutes, sexually intriguing chatting online or in e-mails, or sexually explicit text messages have intruded upon your intimate sexual relationship, or an affair or a series of affairs has been revealed. The problem is no longer hidden. Both partners have probably experienced moments of surprising relief from starkly viewing the truth of the problem. The secret is finally out.

Just as in any disaster, after the destruction, there comes a time when you have assessed the nature of the damage and may have determined you will attempt to rebuild. But how do you begin? This is an important moment. It’s valuable to pause and acknowledge the strength of character required to get this far.

If you are the one who has been betrayed, you have borne humiliation and the shattering of illusion. You have discovered that what you thought existed actually does not exist. The love and/or the relationship that you thought you had is not what you believed it was. It may be helpful to know that many couples have been able to find their way through the shock of the revelation and have been able to rebuild trust and strengthen their relationships.

What’s Left?

Initially, you may not be able to see or articulate exactly why, but you have enough certainty in your connection with your partner that you have chosen to begin the process of rebuilding. You recognize that the connection you have can be painful and challenging, but you have a desire or internal imperative to find a way to repair and rebuild what has been broken.

What Is Trust?

Wanting to trust and wanting to be trusted is a natural part of being human. At a core level, each of us just wants to love and be loved; trust is part of that process. The state of being able to trust (or not) is developed early in our relationships with the adults who were caring for us—generally our mothers and fathers, usually primarily our mothers. At a young age, as we begin to differentiate and move away from the safety of our parents’ direct sphere and then safely return, we begin to build internal trust structures. We begin to determine that we can trust ourselves in the world.

These trusting structures are internally strengthened in those moments when we as children have a frightening or maddening (or otherwise uncomfortable) experience and are able to bring that experience back to the safety of our adult caregiver and be comforted, validated, and accepted. In the moment of experiencing the uncomfortable impulse, we see that we are still safe. We understand that we are uncomfortable, but we are still okay. We start to build the internal structure that can contain the discomfort.

To the extent that we were not able to build trust structures in our formative years, our intimate relationships become the place where we have the greatest difficulties with trust. Often, we project our fear or lack of trust onto our partner. Both partners often share this lack of capacity to trust.

Joe and Maggie

Joe lives in the heartland of the country with his wife Maggie and their three kids. He has been masturbating to porn since he was twelve. It started with the Sears catalog, and then he found his father’s stash of
Playboy
magazines. His parents were both alcoholics. He learned early on that he couldn’t trust them; he never knew what he would find when he came home from school. He did not get trust structures in place when he was growing up.

Consequently, as his sexuality was budding, he didn’t trust that he could count on a live woman to be there for him, but he could count on images. And now, the women he can rely on to be there for him are those constantly available images on his computer screen. All he has to do is turn on his computer.

Ironically, Joe’s wife would actually like to have sex with him, but it is difficult for him to ask for sex. He does not trust that if she says no he will have the strength to bear that momentary rejection. He gave up on that kind of trust so long ago.

This lack of trust is not something that was immediately apparent to Joe. As he began to look at where he had trust and where he did not, he began to see how difficult it was for him to trust, or to allow the feeling of safety with another.

Trusting Yourself

We all understand that after trust has been broken in a relationship, it naturally needs to be rebuilt. Paradoxically, trust not only needs to be restored in the relationship between the two partners, it also needs to be repaired internally by each partner. If you are the one who has been acting in an untrustworthy way, it will be difficult for you to believe that you can trust yourself. And because you don’t trust yourself, it will be difficult for you to trust anyone else. It is very common for the partner who has been acting out sexually to discover how he does not trust his mate.

Lack of internal trust is a fundamental cornerstone of addictive behavior—it keeps you in the grip of your coping strategy. It allows the shame part of the addictive cycle to grab you. Finding ways to put your sexually compulsive behavior on hold is not only step one in rebuilding trust with your partner, it is also step one in rebuilding trust in yourself. And rebuilding trust in yourself helps you control your compulsive impulses. In learning how to tolerate your negative feelings, you build the internal structure that allows you to see that you may feel extremely uncomfortable in a given moment, but you are still okay. When you begin to know that you can survive the painful impulses you are having, then the grip that the sexually addictive coping strategy has on you is loosened.

Broken Trust

One of the spokes on the wheel of sexual addiction is shame. Shame leads to the desire to cover up, and covering up leads to lying—outright false statements, and lies of omission. Such lies are one of the most troubling parts of the addictive behavior for the partner of an addict.

If you are sexually compulsive, you may recognize by now that the sexually addictive behaviors that objectify women—behaviors such as using porn excessively, flirting inappropriately, going to adult entertainment locations or websites, engaging in affairs—are hurtful to your partner. They prevent you from engaging intimately. These behaviors quite obviously break the bonds of intimacy. They damage the relationship and impair trust. But we often hear from partners that the factor that is the hardest to reconcile, the hardest to forgive, is the lying.

Let’s put this in perspective. As human animals, a part of how we naturally navigate in our world is through what we experience as normalcy, as regularity. We get out of bed in the morning and know that the sky will be up, the ground will be down, our eyes will be our eye color, our hair (if we have any) will be our hair color. When shocking events occur that are out of our expectations, we become destabilized. Our brains need time to reorder and reintegrate the new information.

If a man is having an affair, is cruising for prostitutes, or is spending late hours at work masturbating to porn, some people believe that his partner somehow intuitively knows. We have not experienced that to be true. Quite often, the partner of a sex addict does not know anything about the nature of her partner’s activities. However, she generally does suspect that something is off. Generally, she has questioned her partner about a suspicion and he has lied in response to her query. She senses something to be true (“things are not quite right”) and the person she trusts, her intimate partner, is telling her that her senses are wrong (“things are fine”) when really she is not wrong. This is destabilizing. She begins to question her perception of reality. When she finally does begin to see the truth of her suspicions, not only has her ability to trust her partner been damaged, her capacity to trust her own sense of reality has been impaired.

Often, someone in the grip of addiction can, in a given moment, so fervently believe his own lies that the deceitful fabrication can actually register as truth to his partner. It is important for both partners to understand and hold compassion for the destabilizing that has occurred because of the lies. The bottom line here is that if you have been lying to your partner, you have rocked her sense of reality. If your partner has been lying to you, your sense of reality has been distorted. Distorted reality can make you feel kind of crazy. Recovering from that takes time. It begins with simply admitting to what has been done and hearing the admission. The admission then needs to be followed by telling the truth again and again and again—in what we call an “undefended” way. In
Chapter 8
, we discuss more fully the process of undefended honesty.

Megan and Steve

Megan and Steve met in their mid-forties, and both felt they had finally found the person who really understood them. In the beginning of their marriage, they felt deep love, connection, and passion for each other. They both reported that early in their marriage their sex life was passionate and satisfying.

Steve had inherited his family’s property, so Megan and Steve lived in Steve’s childhood home. After they had been married for about four years and Steve bought a new computer, Megan began to notice that they were having sex less and less often, and that Steve was spending a lot of time with his new computer. He was staying up late to play video games for four to five hours most nights. But Steve didn’t want to talk about the video games. To Megan this was uncharacteristic and suspicious. Megan decided to check the computer to find out what was so engaging to her husband. You have probably guessed the rest of the story.

Steve was visiting porn websites—websites with content that was shocking to Megan. She hadn’t even imagined that portrayals of sex with such young girls existed. So she decided to see if she could find more evidence about what Steve had been doing. She looked in the closets of Steve’s family house that had not been cleaned out for over twenty years, and discovered boxes and boxes of porn videos and magazines.

Initially, when she confronted Steve with her discoveries, he denied that the videos were his or that he had visited the porn websites. In fact, he yelled at Megan for intruding on his privacy. Megan wasn’t certain what to do about what she had found, but she was clear that she couldn’t live with this behavior. She told Steve she was moving out in one week unless he could at least admit what he had been doing. During that week, Megan felt the pain of the possibility that her relationship with Steve might indeed be over. She slept in their spare bedroom and ate her meals alone.