If you are a partner of a sex and love addict, chances are you responded to the discovery of your significant other’s addiction with a mix of emotions: anger, fear, hurt, grief, rage, sadness, loneliness. These emotions often come out of nowhere and blindside you. You then have to deal with triggers that arise unexpectedly and bring surges of these intense emotions back. You’re constantly revising history with the new information about the addiction at the forefront.
Just like anyone who has suffered an unexpected and devastating trauma, recovery from the revelation of a significant other’s sex and love addiction can be challenging and take time and a lot of work. But one place that I see partners get stuck is with their eyes on the addict rather than their eyes on their own healing.
Where You Get Stuck
Immediately following discovery, your pain can serve as part of the push that generates enough discomfort for the addict to get into treatment and turn their life around. This is often a good thing! But not every addict responds in this way. Sometimes the addict refuses help or seems half-hearted in their attempts to achieve sobriety.
In these situations, you might respond by focusing on the addict’s recovery: what he’s doing or not doing, how he is changing or growing in empathy, or a lack of change. Being aware of these changes (or lack thereof) isn’t all bad. It becomes a problem, however, when it’s all you think about. When how well you are doing depends on the addict’s progress, that can lead to a tug-of-war in your relationship as you attempt to gain control over the impact of his addiction and his approach to recovery.
In attempting to take control of the addict’s recovery, you are trying to control your significant other’s choices, thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes. But these areas aren’t something you have power over: their choice and responsibility belongs to them. Attempts at control might include threats, manipulation, passive-aggressive comments, or constant criticism.
This response makes sense in light of powerlessness and fear that come with betrayal trauma. But over time, you’ll see that it leaves you feeling hopeless, trapped, angry, and restless.
What Could Be Beneath
Often, when partners shift into fix-it mode or any of these attempts to control their spouse’s recovery, it hints that they might be avoiding more painful emotions or uncomfortable realities they are now forced to face. These might include the process of grief associated with finding out the person you married wasn’t who you thought they were. It could involve insecurity about yourself, reminders of past experiences of trauma with an addicted family member, or re-organizing your concept of safety because of the addict’s deception. You might be battling feelings of shame that prevent you from being able to share about your experience with others.
When you shift your gaze to your own healing work, you can finally experience the relief and freedom from chaos for which you’ve been longing. You can move toward facing the reality of your current circumstance and taking decisive action to heal and become empowered.
Practical Ways to Focus on Your Healing
Practice acceptance and commitment.
When I hear the Serenity Prayer, I think of the balance of acceptance and commitment: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. For you as a healing partner, this requires acceptance or recognition of the reality that your addicted partner is dealing with a legitimate addiction that has caused legitimate trauma, pain, and harm to you and others. Courage and commitment come when you make empowered choices and recognize the control you have over your own life, response, and healing.
An important note: acceptance does not mean pretending that everything is okay and that you aren’t hurting. That is denial, not acceptance. Acceptance instead means recognizing that what has happened has actually happened and that it cannot be changed by wishing it were different.
The Karpman drama triangle can help us recognize reality. When we look at the dance of the roles of victim-perpetrator-rescuer, we can identify where we’ve been swept up into the drama of addiction. Recognize the drama you tend toward and learn ways to step outside the drama by identifying your own responsibility and making choices that reflect that.
Gear up with self-care.
Going through the trauma of the discovery of sex and love addiction is like getting in a car accident: you sustain injuries, some of which are plain to the eye, and some of which are invisible. You need to take time and space to heal physical injuries by taking care of yourself: doing physical therapy, having regular doctor’s visits, eating and sleeping to recover, and resting your body. Similarly, recovering from the wound of a betrayal requires you to take time and space to heal.
Vicki Tidwell Palmer suggests focusing on the acronym PIES for self-care: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual self-care. How can you care for yourself in each of these ways?
Much of this self-care is best in the context of a community of support. Find support for yourself through a 12 Step fellowship, support group, or a trusted group of friends who you know are safe. Safe people are people who can handle hearing about what you’ve been going through without siding too strongly with you or with the addict. They give you space to process and make your own decisions. Support also comes through professional help with a therapist specialized in working with partners of sex and love addicts.
Learn and set your boundaries.
Boundaries are an important part of recovery from betrayal. Saying no to continuing to tolerate behaviors that are intolerable while also taking responsibility for your own thoughts, emotions, choices, and attitudes are important pieces of recognizing your limits. Setting boundaries can involve making requests of your spouse to change a behavior, but it is ultimately your responsibility to care for yourself regardless of their willingness to change.
The purpose of boundaries is to care for yourself, not to punish the addict. These are not consequences you’re enforcing, like a parent with a child. Instead, you are adapting your own behavior to respond to your partner’s behaviors in a way that best cares for you. One way to conceptualize this difference is to ask yourself: if my spouse never changes, how might I take care of myself? You can make requests for him or her to change, but ultimately you are responsible for your own well-being and healing.
Unfortunately, setting boundaries in the early days post-discovery often become empty threats. Threats to file for divorce or leave often get tossed around in the initial impact of the trauma, but usually they aren’t followed through upon. Instead, define for yourself what your true deal-breakers are: what behaviors, if continued, would lead inevitably to needing to leave the relationship? If we don’t know the answer to this question, every mistake or misbehavior gets categorized as non-negotiable. However, if you’re not willing to leave when that behavior occurs, it’s not truly a non-negotiable. As mentioned earlier, a trained counselor can help you through this process.
Get in touch with your emotions.
Emotional awareness is an important component of betrayal trauma recovery. Your emotions provide a window to past experiences and clarify pain that needs care. Emotions also connect to physical symptoms that may be frightening, like panic attacks, heart palpitations, pain with unknown origin, or decreased immunity. (Note: if you have any of these symptoms, be sure to get checked by your primary care physician to rule out any other causes.)
While there are similarities to the symptoms of trauma, every betrayed partner has a unique, personal experience with discovering their significant other’s addiction. This is heavily influenced by your unique upbringing with varied levels of trauma or pain. Recognizing how the emotions that are arising now connect to themes of past experiences can help you heal from past wounds and identify what your needs are in the present. As you become aware of your personal emotional reaction, you might also recognize what you might be avoiding by focusing on your partner’s recovery rather than your own healing.
Recognize distorted thought patterns.
Begin to recognize the common thought patterns that either allowed you to stick your head in the sand and avoid seeing the addiction, or that are chipping away at your confidence and ability to be empowered. Common distorted or unhelpful belief patterns involved in betrayal trauma recovery include such thoughts as:
The addiction is my fault. I wasn’t a good enough partner.
I don’t deserve any better due to my shameful past.
If only I had done ________ differently, this wouldn’t have happened.
Other people don’t have to deal with this: I wish I could be like them.
It isn’t the addict’s fault. It’s the fault of the pornography industry/affair partner/addict’s work environment.
I can’t make it on my own. I can’t survive without my spouse.
Do any of these phrases or other similar thoughts run through your mind? Identifying which thoughts come up most often for you and dismantling them to uncover the truth is an essential part of your recovery journey.
Identify your particular tone of trauma.
In the same way that your emotional landscape is influenced by past experiences in your family-of-origin or other areas, the way in which trauma manifests often carries echoes of the past. What trauma symptoms do you most identify with? Do you feel trauma physically? Emotionally? Spiritually? How might this be similar to what you’ve experienced with past trauma or with your family growing up?
If you recognize a history of past trauma that pre-dated the discovery of the addiction, it wouldn’t be surprising to have reminders of that past trauma resurface post-discovery. Methods such as EMDR can help you process and heal those experiences such that you’re not carrying the pain from those into the challenging work of betrayal trauma recovery.