A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction

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.

It took Steve that full week, but he eventually admitted what he had been doing. He was not yet ready to acknowledge the content of the sexually explicit material he had been accessing on the Internet to stimulate himself. And he wasn’t ready to talk about the porn videos and porn magazines that had been accumulating since the time he was in high school.

Megan was initially relieved to hear just this portion of the truth. She was certain that there was more to the story, and she didn’t know how she could trust Steve until he told her everything. She also felt betrayed that he had lied to her about the video tapes and that he was attracted to websites that were so abhorrent to her. She couldn’t imagine how she could again engage with him in a sexual way while knowing that he was captivated by the images she had seen on the computer screen.

Megan wanted to be able to trust Steve and Steve wanted Megan to trust him. Steve felt frozen, guilty, and embarrassed. Neither one of them could imagine how they could regain the love and connection they had initially experienced with each other. They hoped there was a way to come back together, but could not imagine how to navigate from Point A to Point B.

How to Begin to Rebuild Trust

When a couple is wrestling with the issue of sex addiction, the man has usually been acting out sexually and the woman is hurt and loses trust in the relationship. At the end of Chapter 4, we provided an exercise for making full disclosure of the sexually compulsive behavior. If you haven’t completed that step, it won’t be possible to begin the task of rebuilding trust. When there is an elephant in the living room, it will be necessary to know how the elephant got into the living room. But when you have an elephant in the living room, it’s important to first get it out. That elephant is causing a lot of destruction. Most importantly, it’s impossible to rebuild trust while the elephant is still in the living room!

It’s probably obvious to you that it’s impossible for a couple to have a conversation about couple dynamics or about how to rebuild trust while one partner is acting violently or drinking alcohol to excess or abusing drugs. In the same way, the sexually acting-out behaviors must at least be put on pause. Even if the stopping is not perfect, there must be the desire to stop and there must be some kind of structure put in place to support the stopping.

Just hoping or imagining that you will be able to stop compulsive behavior is wishful thinking. When the noise caused by the destructive behavior is quieted, then the issues that may be triggering the destructive acting out can be addressed. Building the capacity and skill to address the underlying issues are precisely the ingredients that lead to the rebuilding of trust and compassion.

Any relationship is a dance, and if one partner changes his or her dance steps it will necessarily impact the other partner for the good or the bad. Since none of us is perfect, in every troubled relationship both members of the couple are contributing in some fashion to the disharmony. However, when one partner’s behavior is destructive, “big” in a way that overshadows other aspects of the relationship, and compulsive, it tends to take up all the air space. The focus is on the sexually addicted partner and on his or her compulsive behavior.

If you are the partner who has been acting out, undoubtedly you have some issues with your partner that you’d like for her to hear. Just know that in order for your issues to be heard, you must first stop your sexually addictive behavior. When you do, your chances of finding the compassion, understanding, and trust that you want from your partner are much greater. If the destructive behavior continues, the relationship should not continue. Even if your partner manages to stick with you, resentment, anger, and distrust will prevent the understanding and forgiveness you desire from blooming.

Often, the partner in a couple who is acting out sexually feels that he has been labeled as the bad one, the one who is causing all the trouble, the identified patient or IP. We’ve often heard the complaint in our offices from husbands who are feeling blamed, “I’m not the IP here.” In Chapter 6, we will focus more specifically on how you can work with blame and shame. In the meantime, if you are the partner who has been acting out sexually, realize that you are likely to remain the focus of the issues in the relationship until you can get control over your compensatory acting-out behaviors. Once you get the elephant out of the living room, you can begin to learn how to keep it out of the living room, and how it got into the living room in the first place. You will be able to investigate the nature of the elephant. And most importantly, you can start to restore the living room.

Acting out sexually (or any compensatory addictive behavior) is a distraction from being able to see the underlying issue. Addictive behavior is an avoidance of something. It is about wanting comfort. The addictive behavior is a compulsion that is triggered because you don’t want to feel what you are feeling. It has the added component of the wired-in biological rush that is experienced in the moment of orgasm. In Chapters 6 and 7, we will address building the skill of experiencing what you don’t want to feel. Building this capacity will be a tremendous support in dealing with compulsive urges. Additionally, for both of you, building the skills of dealing with shame and blame and of working with strong feelings and emotions create the pathway to building greater intimacy for you as a couple.

The Outcome of Being Trustworthy

We often disappoint each other and ourselves, in large and small ways. You may have the notion that rebuilding trust means living happily ever after. When we first begin a relationship, we are in the flush of possibility. We are often at the height of sexual connection and attraction. There is a natural and innocent sense of love, connection, and trust. When the relationship is shattered by lies and betrayal, you may wish you could reset the relationship back to the beginning. That won’t happen.

But there is a beauty in the tempering that occurs in walking through the crisis. Some relationships will survive and others will not. Rebuilding trust takes time and attention.

As mentioned, the most important trust to foster is the trust in yourself. The trust between the two partners rests upon that structure. Even though your relationship as you knew it is irrevocably shattered, what can arise from the ashes can be deeper and more solid than before. Forgiveness is a byproduct of the rebuilding of trust. And trust is built by 1) telling the truth, 2) by being able to live with your discomfort about that truth, and 3) by being able to live with your partner’s reactions to that truth.

As one wife wrote to her husband:

I have come to realize that trusting you does not mean that in any individual circumstance you will give me what I think I want. It does not mean that in the future I will not be hurt by something you say or do or do not say or do. It does not mean that you will not disappoint me. But because you have been so willing to tell me the entire truth about what you have done, I am coming to see that you have the strength of character to bear my reaction and that feels trustworthy to me.

The Broken Teacup

There’s an old story about a broken teacup that we would like to tell in our own way to illustrate this portion of your journey. It is a story about a beautiful bone china teacup that has been passed down from generation to generation. This teacup is displayed carefully on a special shelf above the fireplace. One day when the wife is carefully placing the teacup on the shelf, it drops on the floor and shatters.

Heartsick, the wife gathers the pieces together and carefully, over many weeks, reassembles the teacup, gluing it together piece after piece. When she is finished, she is still heartbroken because the beautiful pristine china is no longer as it was. It has been put back together, but to her it appears to be a monstrosity.

As in many good stories, a wise old woman comes to visit, and the wife cries, telling the old woman she no longer has a beautiful teacup in which to serve tea to her guests. The wise old woman points out the beauty of the mended teacup. The teacup is now stronger in each place the glue has bonded piece to piece and the lines of the bonding form a beautiful and elegant pattern showing the immense care with which the teacup has been reassembled. She points out that it is not the same teacup as it was originally, but it is now a stronger cup reflective of the love and care that has been put into it.

Exercise: Experiencing Trust

This exercise can be done in your home, but is best done in some unfamiliar but safe place. Partners stand side to side, both facing the same direction, arms touching. One partner will be the guide and the other the follower; then the roles will be reversed.

Decide who will be the first guide. The follower closes his or her eyes and keeps them closed. The guide puts one arm around the follower’s waist, and with the other holds the follower’s arm or hand.

Begin to walk. The guide, keeping eyes open, guides the follower as they walk so they don’t walk into something or fall. Working together, both partners navigate through space as cooperatively as possible for 3–5 minutes. Then switch roles.

After the exercise: Answer these questions individually and then share your answers with your partner.

• When you were guiding your partner, what was your experience of being responsible for your partner?

• When your eyes were closed and you were being guided by your partner, what was your experience of needing to trust your partner?

This exercise helps you directly experience your relationship around trust with another. There is no correct or incorrect experience. Whatever you experience is information to help you better understand your relationship to trust and feeling safe. Individuals have reported feeling apprehensive with their eyes closed; others have reported feeling safe and relaxed. The partner guiding may feel scared with the responsibility or may feel exhilarated about being in charge. Let yourself be surprised and informed.

For example, one man who believed he was a “tough guy” had a revealing experience doing this exercise. He reported that while being guided by his partner, he shuffled and had a hard time walking. It was difficult to let go, to trust. When the roles were reversed and he was guiding his partner, he was aware that he felt like he was “holding a butterfly.” He became aware of the tenderness that he actually feels and wants to experience in dealing not only with his partner but also with the world. He reported that it felt good to take care of his wife in this simple way. He had cared for his family financially, had given his wife flowers and jewelry, but had not previously recognized how wonderful and precious it was to have the responsibility of tenderly holding someone’s welfare in his hands, to be trustworthy.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Many couples have been able to find their way through the shock of the revelation of sexually addictive behaviors and have been able not only to rebuild trust but to actually strengthen their relationship.

• We each want to love and be loved. Trusting and being trusted is a part of the equation of love.

• The state of being able to trust (or not) is developed early in our relationships with the adults who were caring for us.

• Trust not only needs to be restored in the relationship between the two partners, it also needs to be repaired internally by each partner. Lack of internal trust is a fundamental cornerstone of addictive behavior.

• Rebuilding trust takes time and attention. The most important trust to foster is the trust in yourself. The trust between the two partners rests upon that structure.

• Trust is built by 1) telling the truth, 2) by being able to live with your discomfort about that truth, and 3) by being able to live with your partner’s reactions to that truth.

Looking Forward

Many behaviors can stand in the way of trust. Chapter 6 uncovers how to work with yourself and with your partner in dealing with the inevitable cycle of shame and blame.