POSA™ Blog

Thank you so much to all the PoSARC readers who texted and e-mailed yesterday to wish us well in New York as the Great Blizzard started blanketing the city in a huge snowfall.

New York's Governor issued our first-ever State of Emergency, with all public transportation stopped by 8pm and arrest penalties for any vehicles on the road after 11 pm. Seemed pretty serious!

E-mails poured in here from all over the country: Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, Southern California, Arizona, Ohio and more.....so instead of reporting that we are ok to everyone individually, I thought I'd send you all some postcards from Central Park one hour ago:

I have to thank a generous PoSARC reader in the Northwest for recently sending me a wonderful article titled: X is for X-Rated, which offered up some surprisingly fresh insights about the impact of pornography use on relationships with self and partners.

I don't normally link to outside blogs since I enjoy writing my own material here, but this article isn't one our readers will want to miss. Not only that, it's one you might want to share with your partner as well.

The writer, Zach Brittle, a couples therapist, deftly deconstructs the myths perpetuated by pornography use: the myth of perfection, the myth of ease, the myth of privacy and the myth of escape - and he does so in language that feels light yet substantive at the same time.

Once again, another intrepid POSA started her own free support group meeting in the Sonoma County area which I've heard has already grown to about 8 women, just by word of mouth from her and her therapist. Also, her therapist is part of small group practice and there is now an artful POSA Meeting flyer available for the other therapists and clients using that suite of offices.

I know these meetings can provide a lifeline back to reality and back to one's self....the self we were before the relational rupture of Discovery happened. And it can help to have a room full of what in Seminary was termed "Compassionate Witnesses" when we are in the early formation stages of creating our new lives after the old one has been shattered. Anyone who's ever gone through this trauma knows that nothing is ever the same after "D-Day". Who will 'hold' us and witness the we we are becoming?

Once again, a POSA has decided to step up and offer her community a safe space for healing from the trauma of finding out one's committed partner is a sex addict/compulsive (SAC).

This meeting will take place at a church in a beautiful area of the country, Charleston, SC and there is even an SA (Sex Addicts) 12-step meeting there that sends the wives and girlfriends to that PoSA Meeting! So if anyone is in that area, whether SAC or POSA, there is support now available for you.

A PoSARC reader wrote to us a few days ago, telling us how grateful she was for having found us, for our advocacy on behalf of partners and for the POSA Support Group Meetings that acknowledge she's not a co-addict, she's a trauma survivor of a multiple-decade-long marriage filled with her sex addict's deception. She's grateful her healing has begun now, and she wanted to gift us this poem.

We would like to share it with all our PoSARC readers in gratitude to all of you this Thanksgiving. We are continually inspired by the courage, determination and resilience we witness in partners of sex addicts every single day.

Happy Thanksgiving…..and thank you for this gift, RL in California!!

I hear from many partners of those who've been chronically cheated on who express needing local support and encouragement from other POSAs ---but--- something gets in their way- either they feel they have to be strong already in order to start their own support group, or else they're afraid that a meeting may be way more involved than they have energy or time for.

So we created a short video that answers some of those concerns and helps you get a better sense of, well, how to get a meeting going and how they work best. 

This online Forum on Reddit is for porn addicts who wish to stop PMO (their acronym for porn-masturbation-orgasm) and seek support and encouragement from one another. It is an open forum and a colleague of mine sent me this poignant Comment posted by a porn addict in recovery for a few months now:

I was struck yesterday by virgins talking about their porn use. It made me think about my childhood. Back then porn was something that people did watch and consume but it came with a great stigma. Few decent family men or even virgin men would walk into a video rental and rent porn. They might come into a possession of a porn mag or two. But even that was something that people were ashamed of.

A POSA told me through her sobs today that this is her "day 16" after Discovery.

It is also day 15 of her sleeping alone in the marital bed and wondering how her life has become the nightmare she can't seem to awaken from.

Even though she managed to spare her son the details, he knew something was terribly wrong because she can't seem to stop crying for very long.

In his incredibly touching effort to console his mom, he found this poem to give to her and asked her to put it on her table so she would see it every day and stop crying.