Читать книгу Moving Beyond Betrayal - Vicki Tidwell Palmer - Страница 13
Оглавление“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.”
—Mattie Stepanek
If you’ve taken the courageous step of picking up this book, you’re probably in a relationship with a sex addict, you know someone who is, or you’re the former partner of an addict. Perhaps you’re a sex addict yourself.
If you’re an addict and you’ve picked up this book because you’re skeptical or worried about what I might recommend to your partner, I ask that you trust the process—just like you’re asking her to trust the process of your own healing and recovery. Although you may not like everything you read here, this book will help your partner take care of herself. Practicing good self-care will help her feel better, and when she feels better your relationship will improve—provided you’re engaged in your own healing and recovery work.
If both of you want to stay together and you’re both willing to put the time and energy into your work—individually and as a couple—there is a very high likelihood you will make it. Having worked with many couples who have experienced sexual betrayal over the years, I have never seen one I thought couldn’t salvage their relationship if they both did the necessary work.
As a partner of a sex addict, you may not know where to begin and you may be confused about what to do. The 5-SBS will help you navigate through the painful first year after discovery or disclosure of your partner’s sex addiction, and beyond. You will learn what a sound sexual recovery plan looks like and know your rights as a partner. You will also learn the fundamentals of good boundary work that I refer to as the ultimate self-care practice. When facing a condition as serious as sex addiction, the practice of self-care through good boundary work can change the course of your life and your relationships.
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF BOUNDARIES
When I say that practicing self-care through good boundaries can change your life and your relationships, I speak from personal experience. Boundary work saved my marriage of twenty-nine years. More than a decade ago, after many years of individual therapy and intermittent couples work, I reached the end of the proverbial rope in my marriage. At the suggestion of the therapist I was seeing at the time, I decided I needed a thirty-day therapeutic separation11 from my husband. I realized I couldn’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Separation seemed like the next logical step. I didn’t want a divorce, but I couldn’t live any longer in the marriage as it was.
Therapeutic separation is a planned period of time for the couple to focus on individual work, learn new skills, reevaluate the relationship, and potentially recommit with healthier boundaries and agreements.
The day I decided to tell my husband I wanted a separation happened to be a Friday. Little did I know that my resolve would be immediately tested. When you express a limit (also known as a boundary) to someone, it must come from a place of clarity and commitment. If emotions are running high, you’ll be tempted to make threats and issue ultimatums. The problem is that ultimatums and threats are almost always hollow because they’re not grounded on a firm foundation. When requests and boundaries are based on a foundation of clarity and personal authentic power (more on that in Chapter Six), you will be unshakable. You will feel calm in the midst of the storm.
When I told my husband I wanted a thirty-day separation I was unshakable. He attempted to buy time and perhaps convince me to change my mind. He told me he was fine with leaving but he wanted to wait until Sunday. Without skipping a beat, I told him he could stay in our home until Sunday, but that I would be leaving that day with our son to stay in a hotel until he left. Had I not been clear and resolved I might have gone along with his request or gotten into a power struggle with him about who was going to leave.
Countless times I’ve heard partners ask questions like, “Why should I have to ________ (leave the family home, take a timeout, get tested for sexually transmitted infections)?” Although the frustration is understandable—after all, you didn’t cause the breach in trust—the truth is that you’re the only person you have control over. When you lose focus on your goal and engage in power struggles, you’re stuck in the victim role, and caught up in attempting to use control versus doing good boundary work.
As you will learn, one of the ways you’ll know when a boundary you’ve set is right for you is when you feel a calm, grounded resolve even in the face of pushback, resistance, or outright hostility. You will know by how you feel that it’s right. And that’s exactly how I felt in that moment.
That fateful day was a turning point in our marriage. It wasn’t the end of conflict or disappointment—those are part of being in any relationship. But it marked a fundamental shift in me and in the relationship that has lasted to this day. Of course, it also required a commitment from him to his own personal growth, and to our marriage.
The effective use of boundaries is one of the best ways to determine whether or not your relationship is salvageable.
In my case it was. However, if my husband had made different choices I would have gotten the information I needed to decide whether or not I wanted to remain in the marriage. One of the gifts of good boundary work is that it enables you to see your own limits and the limits of others. You learn how far you’re willing to go with others and how far they’re willing to go with you. When you’re clear about these two things, you avoid wasting time in relationships that aren’t healthy or fulfilling.
My request for a thirty-day separation wasn’t about threats, manipulation, punishment, ultimatums, or the many other ineffective ways we attempt to get what we want and need in relationships. My request was about reaching a limit and knowing what I needed to do to take care of me.
Limits are boundaries, and boundaries are self-care. I would even go so far as to say that boundaries are an act of self-love.
If you’re in a relationship with a sex addict who’s still acting out or is in early recovery, your life and relationship are in crisis. It’s likely you’ve been repeatedly lied to, manipulated, or “gaslighted.” Gaslighting is a term often used to describe one of the ways addicts avoid being found out. It’s a form of psychological manipulation intended to cause you to question your own sanity. For example, your partner may tell you that you didn’t hear what you know you heard, or that he said something that you’re sure he didn’t say. If these deceptive incidents repeat with regularity, you eventually lose faith in your ability to know what is real and what isn’t.
As a partner, you may have even been overtly abused—verbally, physically, or sexually. Your life may be drama-filled and chaotic. Your relationship may feel like it’s about to end, and you may wonder why you’re still in it. Living in the chaos and fog of addiction creates immense pain, suffering, loss of esteem, and undeserved consequences related to the addict’s behavior.
You may live in a constant state of anxiety and feel fundamentally unsafe in the world. Partners often experience panic episodes before and during discovery or disclosure. If you have children, you may worry about how or whether they’ve been impacted by the addict’s behaviors, or how they’ve been affected by living in a family where active addiction is present.
As a partner (or former partner) of a sex addict, you may have attempted to change the addict’s behavior or get him help in various ways. He may have told you he stopped, or that he would stop after a certain time, or that he would get help . . . but he didn’t follow through. You’ve probably made threats or issued ultimatums to the sex addict for continuing his behavior—threats on which you didn’t follow through. There have likely been broken agreements and promises that left you feeling helpless or powerless.
You want him to stop his self-destructive and relationship-destroying behaviors and you wonder why he can’t. You may have thought that if he loved you, he could—or would—stop hurting you so much. Sadly, when it comes to addiction “just do it” just doesn’t work.
I want you to understand how vulnerable you are when you take the perspective that when he stops or gets better you’ll feel better. I want you to recognize and own the power you have now, in this moment, to begin the process of healing and eventually thriving—with or without the sex addict in your life. With the skills and tools in this book, you will learn the power that comes from focusing on you, on your needs and wants, learning how to make requests when that’s appropriate, and what to do when boundaries are broken. The bad news is the sex addict’s out-of-control behavior and what it has done to you. The good news—and the solution to your pain—lies with you. You may have been a victim of his deception and betrayal, but you are no longer a victim. You have the power to take charge of your life beginning right now.
Knowledge is power, and this is especially true when it comes to breaking through the fog and pain of being in relationship with a sex addict. This book will give you, as a partner or former partner, the information you need about sex addiction and sex addiction recovery so that you can make informed and effective choices in your best interest.
Even if you’ve had prior experiences in relationships with addicts of other kinds, don’t expect to use the same skill set and strategies with the sex addict in your life. There are fundamental differences between sex addiction and alcohol or other drug addictions, both in the recovery process and in the issues partners face. You will save yourself time and heartache by knowing the difference.
PARTNERS OF SEX ADDICTS: CO-ADDICTS OR TRAUMA SURVIVORS?
In the early days of sex addiction treatment, the focus was primarily on the sex addict. Most of the literature available, as well as the treatment models used, were geared toward helping the addict establish a solid foundation in recovery. For the most part, the partner of the addict was on her own either with no support or sometimes with a therapist who had little information about sex addiction or worked with the partner from a co-addiction or codependency model.
Al-Anon, the twelve-step program founded in 1951 by Lois W. (wife of Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), is based on a co-addict/codependency model. The co-addiction model says that partners of addicts play a role in the addiction cycle by refusing to acknowledge that the addict has a problem (denial), by enabling the addict’s behaviors, or by using various strategies to control the addict’s behaviors, either directly or indirectly. Al-Anon is a helpful program and I often refer clients to it. However, the co-addiction model doesn’t address the special circumstances and needs of partners of sex addicts. This perspective often leaves partners feeling that they’re at fault for the addict’s behavior.
Most partners see themselves as profoundly defective and inadequate after the discovery of extramarital affairs, anonymous sex, or the compulsive use of pornography. You may believe that if you were like the women (or men) in the pornography your sex addict partner looks at or like the person he had an affair with—he wouldn’t have strayed. Or maybe if you had just gone along with some of the sexual activities he wanted to do that didn’t feel comfortable to you, he wouldn’t have been unfaithful.
Although none of these provide an explanation for the addict’s behaviors, it’s logical and understandable for you to think his sexual indiscretions are about you. When your partner chooses another person or pornography over being sexual with you, the experience and the impact is much different from finding out he’s been secretly gambling or using drugs. The sex addict’s behavior is felt on a deeply personal level that affects you in ways other addictive behaviors don’t. In Chapter Two I offer more detail about how the experience of partners of sex addicts differs from that of partners of all other addicts due to the intimate nature of sexual betrayal.
Most sex addicts avoid emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy with their partners. This is not because they aren’t attracted to their partner or because they think she’s lacking in some way. In fact, sex addicts often can’t understand why they engage in behaviors that cause them to risk losing someone they deeply love and to whom they are sexually attracted. This is one of the reasons I was not in favor of the term “Hypersexual Disorder” as a description for sex addiction or out-of-control sexual behavior as it was proposed for the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In my experience working with sex addicts and their partners, the majority of sex addicts are sexual with their partners far less frequently than they are outside the relationship. Although it’s beyond the scope of this book to address how sex addiction develops, it is often the result of co-occurring mental health issues and/or trauma.
Because of the personal nature of sexual betrayal, you may not relate to the co-addict approach that emphasizes the partner’s role in the addictive dance. You may feel responsible or blamed for the addict’s behavior. Although it’s true that partners can exhibit codependent behaviors and play a role in a dysfunctional relationship dynamic, you are not responsible in any way for the sex addict’s choices.
Thanks to the work of many in the field of sex addiction treatment, we now have a better understanding of how to address the needs of partners. The most immediate need is to assess the level of trauma you’ve experienced. Many partners suffer from symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—the most common being panic episodes, distressing memories, and intrusive thoughts about discovery and/or disclosure, sleep problems, or feeling perpetually on guard and anxious. Some partners have symptoms that rise to the level of a formal PTSD diagnosis. The partner’s trauma is brought on by the addict’s lies, deception, and gaslighting, which are discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four.
First and foremost, partners must be heard and validated. Depending on the severity of the trauma symptoms you’re experiencing, you may need trauma-specific treatment such as Somatic Experiencing (SE), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR), or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. If your symptoms are worse, a multi-day workshop or inpatient treatment may be needed. (See Appendix for treatment resources.)
Once past the initial crisis stage, family of origin issues or other childhood trauma may need to be addressed before you can fully deal with the current relational trauma, especially if you were a victim of childhood sexual abuse or if there was active sex addiction in your family of origin. A partner’s unresolved childhood trauma can render her unable to do the necessary self-care and boundary work in her current relationship that is so important for her healing.
Ideally, the partner’s trauma, as well as any codependency issues, needs to be addressed. I believe it’s a mistake to dismiss either the trauma approach or potential issues of codependency as invalid or irrelevant. If codependency issues aren’t addressed, you may ask too little of the sex addict or accept halfhearted and superficial efforts at recovery. You also may be vulnerable to discounting or ignoring your needs, especially if the sex addict is highly defensive or, worse, a bully. The reality is that most partners experience trauma symptoms as a result of discovery/disclosure. In addition, they often have participated in some way in the dysfunctional addictive system, if only by neglecting their own needs or being unable to speak their truth.
This book offers concrete tips, tools, and skills to help you navigate through this painful and difficult time in your life and regain trust in your intuition. You will learn:
• How to use the 5-SBS to practice exquisite self-care through effective boundary work;
• How to tap into your authentic power and stop using ineffective strategies of control and manipulation;
• How to set boundaries;
• What to do when boundaries you set are violated; and
• How to determine whether or not your relationship is salvageable.
You will also come to realize that, although you don’t have the power to change your partner, you do have the power to change how you navigate this difficult phase and your relationship. You can reduce the chaos in your life, gain clarity, and ultimately experience serenity.
One of the most powerful lessons you will learn is that self-care and boundary work will change your relationships forever—with your partner, family, friends, coworkers, or children. Waiting for someone else to change is a losing proposition. Changing yourself is in your power and you can start immediately.
Here’s a snapshot of the 5-SBS for creating and maintaining good, healthy boundaries:
1. Define your current problem(s) through knowing your reality.
2. Identify the needs that aren’t being met and create a vision for the future.
3. Identify where you have power.
4. Take action where you have the power to effect change.
5. Evaluate the results to determine if your goal has been accomplished or further boundary work is needed.
Of course, there are times when our best efforts fail and that is certainly true for boundaries. Broken agreements, boundary violations, and a host of other factors can get in the way. You will learn how to handle boundary violations and learn what to do about any personal challenges that are sabotaging your boundary work.
My sincere desire is that the information and tools presented in this book will give you hope, help you develop a better relationship with yourself and the sex addict in your life, and guide you in creating the life you want and deserve.
1 Therapeutic separation is a planned period of time for the couple to focus on individual work, learn new skills, reevaluate the relationship, and potentially recommit with healthier boundaries and agreements.
