POSA™ Blog

​Note that the article in link below contains sexual descriptions that may be triggering. If this is an issue for you, you may want to avoid the article.​

"I have had a number of divorce cases where pornography has been at the centre. The couples still want to be together, but their sex lives have been distorted and destroyed." - Dr. Ann Olivarius

For many of us counselors, coaches, pastoral care providers, psychologists, and other treatment providers who work with men and women in relationships broken by chronic infidelity, our work requires us to learn how to help our clients navigate through the litter field of infidelity and sexual compulsion, back towards health and integrity.

As part of that, our training and on-the-job experience usually entails a peripheral learning about the netherworld of the sexual exploitation industries: pornography, stripping, prostitution, etc., since our clients have usually habituated themselves to this realm of commodified sexuality. 

Today we're sharing a most enlightening article that shows how systemic the silencing of women is when they object to pornography. 

As seen through a feminist lens, this sanity-restoring article can help validate our collective grief over the devastation pornography has wrought, not only in our own lives, but globally:

"Why are you triggered by porn?" he asked.
As if my hatred for the industry and the filmed violence inflicted on the bodies of women and girls is nothing more than personal pathology! As if my anger, discomfort, and sorrow at the injustice of porn and its ideological role in constructing women as subordinate sexual objects that exist for male pleasure is actually only due to some personal history of trauma....

Whether the betrayer is in our past or we are still wondering whether change is possible for them, this gorgeous poem written by Nobel prize- winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott (b. January 23, 1930—) feels tailor-made to give comfort to hurting partners. We offer it here to inspire you to stay the course of welcoming yourselves home.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come 

when, with elation, 

you will greet yourself arriving 

at your own door, in your own mirror,

Over the past many years, we have learned so much about what feeds chronic infidelity (and often keeps it change-resistant) from disciplines and modalities besides psychology and addictionology, though psychology has certainly been instrumental to our understanding. Still, it's not the only frame to consider, by any means.

What has interested us the most here has been adding the vectors of sociology and feminism in our quest to understand the context that infidelity behaviors occur in.

After all, behaviors don't happen in a vacuum, nor are family of origin issues and earlier traumas the only variables that impact the development and trajectory of repetitive behaviors once they form. By repetitive behaviors, we refer to the lies and manipulation tactics Betraying Partners use as much as the infidelity behaviors themselves as each reinforces the other. 

Listen to the replay of PoSARC founder, Lili Bee, on the Katherine Albrecht radio show (36 minutes). It's a great listen, full of useful information! For more on Katherine Albrecht: www.katherinealbrecht.com

So many partners are, like everyone else, feeling overwhelmed by world events lately.
Have you found yourself curious about how you are dealing with the onslaught of distressing news about our chaotic world?

This is an important question for POSAs (partners of "sex addicts") because it's likely you are already functioning in the day to day with a much narrower-than-normal bandwidth available to you due to your betrayal trauma hijacking a lot of your available resources (emotional, psychological, sexual, financial, etc.)

Watching TV or seeing news snippets come streaming into our smartphones and other media devices, overhearing others in our proximity talking about the latest terrorist attack, mass shootings, growing nationalistic movements, refugee or immigration nightmare-- it can leave us absorbing huge collective anxieties and despair.

What can you do when you are brave enough to share your story as the victim of infidelity, and you find that your friends and family don't believe you? Or, worse, blame you? Lili talks about how to cope when you feel like you're in a free fall.

Does this ring true for you?  Who has earned the right to hear your story?  Please let us know in the comments below.

I have to say, I am smiling ear to ear after reading the new Washington Post article: The Case for Banning Pornography

Instead of the cautious fence-straddling approach taken by most journalists who dare to even take on the subject, journalist and editor Matthew Schmitz courageously charges right into territory normally so defended by aggressive pornography apologists that even the hardiest of journalists have had to don armor in order to write about it in the mainstream press.

Mr. Schmitz invites his Washington Post readers to retire the old "freedom of speech" trope in defense of pornography use (right, because there's so much speech to protect in pornography) and to actually- gasp— have us consider seriously the misogyny inherent in pornography! I think I might be in love, but I digress.