POSA™ Blog

At the APSATS training for Partner-Sensitive Trauma Treatment (in sex addiction) recently in Dallas, which I was fortunate enough to be enrolled in, I was particularly struck by one of the Board member's presentations. Dan Drake, an articulate and well-informed therapist trained in sex addiction presented on the many ways partners are often psychologically manipulated by their sex-addicted significant other and the effects thereof. His presentation of this often misunderstood and even more often unaddressed aspect of the partner's experience left me feeling relieved that this information was finally out there.Plus, I was inspired that he was teaching a whole generation of other therapists from the partner-sensitive trauma model.

I am sharing a transcript of my interview with Dan in the hopes that you, our faithful readers, will know that there will soon be an end to the days when one cannot find treatment providers (coaches and therapists) who work from a partner-sensitive perspective. The days are soon coming when the term "co-addict" will be a relic of the past.

APSATS TRAINING JUNE 26- JUNE 29, 2013 DALLAS, TEXAS

I caught up with Dr. Barbara Steffens and Richard Blankenship (another APSATS Board member & sex addiction therapist in GA) after the completion of the first-ever training to certify clinicians in the new partner-sensitive trauma treatment model. We were exhilarated and spent, having come through a four-day training so intense there wasn't even enough time for breaks. At night, we "processed" with our fellow trainees and stuffed ourselves on delicious Tex-Mex food in the 100-degree + heat of the Dallas summer.

I couldn't help but often feel emotionally overwhelmed during and especially after our training: there was grief at all that had been lost to those of us who had Discovery in the pre-trauma-model days. Grief not just for our own selves and our own relationships lost, but for those of many of our clients.

I easily (and nostalgically) recall the days before the pornography flood rolled in and so badly damaged so many in its wake. The privilege of my having grown up in the seventies and eighties (besides the excellent rock and roll) is that I know who we all were before the "porn as normal" deluge hit. I knowwhat courtship, dating and real, relational sex looks and feels like, both personally and from other singles and couples I know.

What has been exceptionally difficult is working with young women in their 20's and 30's who contact me for private sessions to help them to work through the discovery of sex addiction/compulsion in their primary relationships. Heartbreakingly, very few of these young women feel they have any ground to stand on to evencontemplate a life that is free of the influence of pornography.

BY GAIL DINES AND ROBERT JENSENAnti-pornography feminists get used to insults from the left. Over and over we are told that we're anti-sex, prudish, simplistic, politically naïve, diversionary, and narrow-minded. The cruder critics do not hesitate to suggest that the cure for these ailments lies in, how shall we say, a robust sexual experience.

In addition to the slurs, we constantly face a question: Why do we "waste" our time on the pornography issue? Since we are anti-capitalist and anti-empire leftists as well as feminists, shouldn't we focus on the many political, economic, and ecological crises (war, poverty, global warming, etc.)? Why would we spend part of our intellectual and organizing energies over the past two decades pursuing the feminist critique of pornography and the sexual exploitation industry?

The answer is simple: We are anti-pornography precisely because we are leftists as well as feminists.

I'm delighted to introduce all our PoSARC readers to my interview with the author of Your Sexually Addicted Spouse, Dr. Barbara Steffans. I think you'll find her as warm, intelligent, compassionate and fiercely committed to helping partners of sex addicts as I did.

You can read our book review of Barbara (and Marsha Means') book here to learn why this read is so invaluable for those of us who wake up and find ourselves partnered with a sex addict/compulsive (SAC).

And....you can sign up to watch this free video series right now with the godmother of the Trauma Model for POSA in the video box on the homepage here.

I absolutely adored meeting Dr. Steffans and spending hours talking with her on all things POSA-related over the course of three long days. We met a couple of weeks ago at the First International Conference on Sex and Love Addiction here in New York and spent time every day connecting and sharing. Barbara was there to promoteAPSATS, her new certification program for clinicians to learn how to treat the partners of sex addicts using the Trauma Model.

If you follow world news, you'll already know that Iceland's Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is calling for a ban on Internet pornography and if the law gets passed, Iceland will be the first Western democracy to block internet porn. Print pornography and pornographic videos are already illegal there, as are strip clubs and allowing employers to profit from employees' nudity. These laws recognize women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale. Imagine that!

Fears about the damaging effects on children have led the Icelandic government to work on legal measures to try and stop the flood of graphic sexual material infesting their country.

Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson has set up working parties to find the best ways to stem the tide of online images and videos being accessed by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones.

What do you have to be grateful for this past year? Perhaps it's been a year of Discovery that your partner has chronically betrayed you and it feels like a stretch to be grateful for anything much at all.

We understand that feeling all too well. Discovery and the shock, anger and grief that usually ensues can challenge every ounce of our being and we may question everything, including even why we're sitting here reading a blogpost about gratitude. Maybe we're feeling so angry at having been a faithful and supportive partner only to learn that he (or she) was reading from a different "rule book" than the one we were. Or they dispensed with the rule book altogether.