As your trauma is uniquely yours, the events you have experienced play upon your psyche in a specific way; your wounds are unique and your recovery will be unique. There are some guideposts, though. Directing your own recovery with the support of a group for Partners of Sex Addicts (PoSAs), friends, PoSA coaching, etc. can give you the confidence you may be lacking in taking care of yourself in the world.

Both innocence and trust can be reclaimed and become even more powerful energies in our lives. Innocence does not mean ignorance. Until we are put to the test, our innocence is really more ignorance than innocence. We can no longer “not know” about sex addiction. We do know. We have been put to the test. Our innocence has become separate from our ignorance. We move to a more crisp, full-bodied innocence because it is a knowing innocence. No longer is it undifferentiated and unconscious.

It is a process, and sometimes it takes longer than we want it to. Perhaps we would give anything to go back to the day before we met our Sex Addict/Compulsive (SAC) and choose to have been elsewhere in a vain attempt to reclaim our innocence and ability to trust. It does not work that way, alas. Our trust will now be guided by our developing and intuitive discernment. No longer will our trust be handed out like a party favor to all comers. No longer is our trust cheapened by believing words without actions. We remain open and yet, exercise a nascent discernment that's been waiting for our entire lives to be heard, to be honored by us. Slowly, we learn to honor our discernment and to come to a trusting that will not disappoint us over and over again because we are engaged with discerning curiosity all along.

Here are some guideposts that most PoSAs find essential:

Be in a support group for partners of sex addicts/compulsives

If there are not any in your area, start a PoSA Group of your own! Although other types of support groups can be helpful, such as Al-Anon, often one is discouraged from mentioning any addiction other than the one the group specifically deals with. Personally, I (Lili) often found this quite frustrating after imploding from finding out my SAC had just acted out again and then lied to cover it up. Feeling like I needed to get to a meeting and "share" but then having to omit any details revealing the pain of betrayal from his sexual compulsion felt like yet another concession I had to make, living with a sexual compulsive. Then again, in my city, there was only one meeting a week for partners of sex addicts, so I was grateful to be able to supplement that once a week meeting with Al-Anon meetings as needed. At Al-Anon, I learned some helpful guidelines for keeping me focused on my own boundaries.

Still, we think it best to find or start a group of other partners (PoSAs) who are going through the same thing as we are, and show up, share, reach out to others as you are able, and if possible, do the steps or workbook that group utilizes. Our PoSARC workbook will be available shortly.

As for telling family or friends about what you’re going through:

We find that using your intuition works best for this. Only you know who is likely to be able to hear non-judgmentally what you want to share about your situation. Above all, be really clear about your intentions in telling others:

• Are you trying to turn them against your SAC out of retaliation for what he’s done?
• Are you nervous that if you don't tell a certain someone about your SAC's behaviors right away, that they'll find out eventually, and possibly blame you for his acting out behaviors?
• Are you trying to throw a divisive wedge between him and someone else you’d rather he not be so close to?

 

An example of this last example might be that perhaps you think he spends way too much time/energy hanging out with his brother, so you decide to tell the brother your husband’s a sex addict who’s hurt you terribly, anticipating this will drive a wedge between them. There are many scenarios in which your motive to share this potentially damaging information with those close to you/him might be less than lofty.

Talk to a neutral person first! Let them help you make this decision if it’s not clear to you already. Remember, once this cat is out of the bag, so to speak, there’s no putting it back in. Then, if your SAC decides to embrace recovery, he’ll be forever stigmatized by others who are often ignorant about sex addiction issues.

Speaking from personal experience, there was no one in my inner circle I could safely tell because either they were an active compulsive of some kind themselves and might defend my SAC as being “just a normal guy,” or else they’d completely freak out and insist I leave my SAC immediately. That didn’t feel helpful to me at all! (Lili)

Same thing goes for telling friends: Make sure they won’t just project their own fear, shame, etc. onto your situation and worsen your concerns about your future.

And try to be mindful that sometimes addicts do get help. Make sure he’s not painted with a black brush for life just because today, you needed to call family or friends to vent! If you’re not careful about whom you tell, you could actually cause a hindrance to his recovery: he might feel he’s already lost the respect of his friends and family anyway, so why even bother getting help?

In the other direction altogether, be sure you’re not covering up for him, or protecting him from the poor choices he made by keeping secrets for him. That’s another trap we PoSAs can fall into.

The truth is, we will need to talk with others, we just have to practice awareness with this. Whom to tell can be an extremely sensitive decision we’re forced into making, so we at PoSARC stand at the ready to assist you via a Supportive Coaching session to help you with this often challenging aspect.

And if you leave him for failing to embrace recovery, your friends and family will probably find out at that time.

It also helps if you are clear to whomever you are confiding in, exactly what it is you need from them. If you need encouragement, say that. If you need empathy, say that. If you need someone to sit and hold you while you cry, say that. If you need help identifying your feelings or to validate your rage, say so.

Until you know exactly what you need from the person you are considering confiding in, you may get reactions that you find less-than-supportive. You have to determine if that is a chance you would take.

I (Terre) have two friends to whom I would tell (and have told) everything—no matter what. It does not matter to me what their reactions are, those friendships are of such value to me that I never want to withhold anything. Ever. Other friends I have been more circumspect with in regards to information shared. All in all, I find that telling is better than exploding and/or isolating.

Get therapy for yourself

If finances allow, find yourself a good therapist, well-versed in the field of sex addiction and truly commit to giving yourself the gift of therapy for as long as you need it. Some therapists will work with you on a sliding scale, so do inquire.

In our opinion, there is no better use of money than giving oneself the gift that will help you heal from this devastation, build yourself back up and gain a personal, neutral ally in your quest for wholeness again. Just make sure the therapist is willing to utilize the trauma model outlined in the wonderful book, Your Sexually Addicted Spouse. Working this way will ensure you heal on the deepest levels where the betrayal trauma has struck, not just superficially as with behavioral therapy. Please note: this means individual therapy. If you can afford couples therapy in addition to individual therapy, by all means, avail yourself of that as well.

Work with a PoSA coach

A PoSA coach is someone who has been through the experience and can give you an hour a week just for you (or more as your budget allows). Besides offering practical tools for your healing, coaching with another PoSA can offer much-needed empathy for what you are going through as well as help you with finding and setting boundaries, then gaining the courage to enforce them.

I (Lili) found I received needed empathy and I learned a lot about the disease of sex addiction and how it linked up with my upbringing from my therapist and from my coach I got empathy and acknowledgment that was deeply validating. My coach had been through finding out her husband was a porn addict and sexual anorexic a few years earlier and had learned a lot, so I could grow from her mistakes and utilize her good resources. She acknowledged all the hard work and love I had put into helping my SAC see his addiction. She is someone who acknowledged all that work I did by saying, "You're not sick or codependent to have done that—you are a woman who wants to help save your relationship if it can be saved. I see and value your generous nature! He is so lucky to have you as a lamp in the darkness—if he never comes around to seeing that, then please know that I see and acknowledge that.”

I cried a lot hearing that every time we spoke, because many of my friends told me I was crazy to stay with him and try to save the relationship, which just made me feel even more broken.

But both my therapist and my coach also kept me focusing on what I needed, because my SAC was so involved in his addiction, my own needs just crawled underground, effectively mimicking my entire childhood environment! No wonder I couldn’t spot it on my own, yet my depression and anxiety were cue cards both my therapist and my coach spotted and worked with.

Love ourselves

That’s a big statement and much of this love will “happen” as we commit to doing our healing work in therapy, coaching and in group work. Some roads into this self-love might be:

Reconnecting with the inner child in us can help restore a sense of love in us, respect for the child who was only doing what she knew how to do to gain love, acceptance and safety.

• Can you find some gentleness, kindness and compassion for yourself?
• Can you allow some forgiveness for yourself as you find yourself in such a painful situation?

What about our anger? Can we channel that safely so we don't get sick from repressing it?

There are some wonderful books on helping us connect with our own self-love and you can find recommendations in our Media Resources section.

Can you remember what helped you feel good about yourself in the past? Maybe it was attaining some goal you held dear, like finally losing those last 20 pounds, mastering the Italian language or putting in that herb garden off the kitchen. Gaining a sense of accomplishment is often really helpful when everything else in our life feels out of our control. Make a list and promise yourself to start one small thing on it today.

Then spend some time with your journal and jot down some things you can do to remind yourself of your own special worth as a woman (or man). My list included reminding myself that I was a good friend to many, that I can make people laugh at the ironies of life, and that I trust that Spirit is always leading me. Those things make me recognizable to myself, so I keep that list handy for days when I’m feeling particularly unknown to myself.

I (Lili) like to read uplifting spiritual books that confirm my worth as a special and unique child of God/Spirit as a daily reminder. I remember days when those readings were my only slender threads to wanting to stay alive. My personal favorites include anything by author Joel Goldsmith as well as books of a Jungian nature because they so beautifully link the spiritual world to the psychological.

I also limited my time around certain acquaintances who seemed more focused on what was wrong with everyone, me included, than with what was right about them. Surround yourself with your most uplifting friends, the ones who mirror your special value to you. Make a list right now of who most supports you as a friend. Then pick up the phone or send an e-mail to them.

Spend time in nature/connect to beauty

We all know that feeling of connecting to something much larger, grander than all the relative smallness of our daily problems. When I can’t get out in deep nature settings for that reconnection, watering my garden or connecting with a pet can be a good “bridge” activity as can watching nature shows that highlight the majesty of beautiful natural environments.

Connecting to beauty—art, literature, poetry, inspirational films, whatever you find beautiful can help tremendously for inspiration and to help you remember the bigger picture.

Recharge friendships

Oftentimes when dealing with the trauma of life with a SAC, the first thing to go was our friendships. Perhaps the shame kept us isolated, or in my own case, I felt incapable of reciprocity in friendship since just getting through a day without crying every few minutes took every ounce of my energy. I was scared to alarm my friends because I knew I was in bad shape and they'd immediately detect it. Whatever the reason we may have neglected our friends, now is a good time to reconnect with them and begin the joy of giving and receiving that true friendship offers. I truly believe that Spirit works through people, and it’s in friendships that I often see the hand of Spirit at work, with a well-timed phone call, a card, gift, or a visit that came just when I most needed it.

Take good care of yourself physically

For some of us, we may have let ourselves go as we became aware our partner was directing his sexual and emotional energy to others instead of to us. Perhaps we gained a lot of weight, let ourselves get badly out of shape, or starved ourselves in an attempt to compete with the objects of his affection...perhaps we neglected our hair or dressed in shabby clothing as a reflection of how awful we felt about ourselves.

Make no mistake about it: living with a porn addict who’s gorging himself on hundreds or thousands of images of attractive young women definitely takes its toll on us, causing brutal damage to the way we see ourselves. This damage actually compounds if our SAC also ignores us sexually, withholds praise from us, or berates/ blames us for not being as attractive as we once were. Or worse, as attractive as they’d like us to be.

Besides betrayal, damage to our self-esteem seems to be the most virulent side-effect of porn use  on partners and we need to acknowledge that right here. It is real, devastating and can be very long-lasting if not attended to. This might help you understand why the repairs on our self-esteem can take a while!

Often, rebuilding our self-esteem follows the arc of how our “inner work” of therapy is progressing, and generally speaking, neither is a quick fix, so please, please, please be patient with yourself! Don't beat yourself up because you’re not looking (or feeling) the way you’d like to right now. Be as gentle and kind with yourself as if you were your own four-year old child who has been through hell. Have faith that when the time is right, you’ll begin to practice good physical self-care as feels appropriate to you.

In the meantime, try to allow yourself to rest, even if it means temporarily using a sleep aid, prescribed by a doctor or else available from a good health food store. Nothing restores our equilibrium like a good night’s sleep, and nothing derails a good night’s sleep like the deep trauma of betrayal and the threat of losing our attachment to our beloved.

Release anger, grief and other strong emotions

If you're on this site, you are probably no stranger to feeling intense amounts of anger. Betrayal by one's partner has a way of inciting deep reservoirs of anger in us, and it's critical to discharge it (appropriately, of course.) Anger is our psyche's response to boundary violations. It asks us to draw a line in the sand and hold to that. The difficulties occur when we either cannot hold the line or we never draw the line.

If we came from a childhood home in which our anger was disallowed, releasing anger may be a real challenge. Still, it's absolutely necessary to discharge it so that you do not somatize it further and have it manifest later as physical illness. We know too many PoSAs who end up with auto-immune diseases so we cannot overstate how important it is to attend to your feelings. If they are especially intense, you may want to seek out a qualified therapist.

There are a few different schools of thought on how to best release anger. The older school teaches that you must physically express it, through beating on pillows with a baseball bat, or else yelling at a stand-in for your perpetrator, for example.

The newer school of thought on that (for example, in Somatic Experiencing work) takes its lead from trauma treatment, and posits that reliving intense anger not only doesn't release it, it only more deeply ingrains it into our nervous systems, though the intensity it provides in the short-term feels great, so we think we're actually permanently releasing the anger or rage. In Somatic Experience work, as pioneered by Peter Levine, Ph.D., we are taught to work with a trauma practitioner well-versed in taking us back through these dark places safely. Treatment here consists of mentally creating a safe space inside and then being guided to discharge the anger, often on an "internal" screen while keeping contact with the safe space. The idea is to bring the nervous system up to current reality and remove the endless feedback loops that link present trauma to old, past wounds. Instead of intensely reliving the old feelings, we safely revisit the event and learn how to self-soothe and self-regulate a nervous system that's gone out of regulation due to the trauma of betrayal.

We feel blessed here at PoSARC to avail ourselves of the guidance of a Somatic Experience therapist, Sonia Levine who also happens to be a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT). You can read more about her perspective on working with a partner's pain from sex addiction-related trauma under her Bio.

Whichever way most appeals to you for healing from the toxicity of anger, we encourage you not to overlook this step. Anger isn't something you process once and it's gone forever; when we get re-triggered by a reminder of our partner's acting out behaviors, we are often thrown right back into the deep end of the pool of our anger, so it's important to work with our anger, discharge it and not let it accumulate.

One technique I (Lili) liked was to write letters, and I could do this on my own:

• Write a letter to your SAC that you are not going to mail and tell him what you really feel. Really pour your heart out and have a box of Kleenex ready.
• Write another to his acting out "partners" of choice (strippers, paramour, porn stars, etc.) and really let them have it.
• Write a letter to say goodbye to the innocence you once shared together.
• Write one to say goodbye to your own dreams for your future together.
• Write and say goodbye to the preciousness of the love you had for him.

And so on…

Reading the letter aloud to a therapist or coach was incredibly powerful and completed the exercise for me in profound ways I hadn't even imagined.

It can be very cathartic to write these, and the anger soon gives way to deep grief, which also must be felt, experienced and released.

What worked for me (Terre) was journaling, documenting every thought, feeling and event daily so I could come back to it later should I ever choose to do so. Life with a SAC is so surreal that I frequently questioned what I was experiencing, what I witnessed, what I heard and how I felt about it all. The journaling provided a much-needed self-validation.

Towards the last six months of the relationship I chose to share much of my story with friends and members of my S-Anon and CoSA groups. This opening proved to be a life-saving ballast in the increasingly bizarre reality that I faced with my SAC. Their love and gentle reminders of an addict's distortions kept me on track to leave an abusive and increasingly dangerous situation.

Many potentially explosive situations were contained in the pages of those journals and the hearts of my friends and group members.

Also important to say here, is that unless your SAC is already well into recovery, he will not be the person to go to for anger release work. Yes, he's the cause of the anger but realize that his inability or even downright refusal to let you vent can traumatize you further.

At some point in his recovery, he may be encouraged by his therapist or sponsor to be open to you expressing your feelings about his betrayals, but until then, do not expect empathy from him. We aren't saying it's fair; in fact it's one of the most unfair aspects of being partnered with a SAC: he caused a world of hurt in you, and now he can't/doesn't want to hear about it. What could be more enraging?

Please know we are here for you as Support Coaches to listen and validate what you are going through. We can hold the space for you to acknowledge the full range of your feelings and allow you the experience of being seen and heard by those who understand because they've gone through it themselves. We will also refer you to exercises and modalities that can assist you further in this work.

Allow music to help your healing

How amazing the power of a good song is to uplift us, to inspire us, and to catalyze the expression of feelings that perhaps we’ve stuffed down. Music therapy can be especially helpful when we feel so traumatized that we cannot even think or reach out for help.

Music helped save my life and I’m sure that Spirit managed to put the perfect song on whenever I was in danger of slipping away altogether. Our Music tab might have some helpful songs to assist you in your time of despair. (Lili)

Humor

Humor, to me (Lili) is a sign of Spirit's presence among us. That's what I believe because it shows up so often in my life, even in the darkest times. Even when your world is falling apart and the last thing you feel like doing is laughing, it can be so wonderfully healing to rent a comedy video, or go out and watch a stand-up comic who resists resorting to low-crass, sexist humor. Ask Spirit to reconnect you with the joy of laughter and allow yourself to be surprised when it shows up in unexpected ways.

Alternately, you can click on our Humor tab and you'll find another sister in healing from being with a porn addict, Lindsay Mc Kinnon. Lindsay is a British comedienne who somehow manages to turn the tragedy of porn addiction into a laugh-out-loud experience while you're listening to her. I know, it's hard to even imagine, and I was trepidatious when I went on her site. Within minutes, however, I had tears rolling down my face, tears from laughing so hard, and it bought me an afternoon of lightness when I could not find any on my own. Thanks for that, Lindsay!

As you begin the journey of healing, your life force will return to you and eventually you begin to see where/how you are being restored. Our wish for you is to be gentle and patient with yourself. And to have faith that you are on your way and you do not have to walk this alone.

We are here for you. Reach out.

—Lili and Terre

We recommend:

Books:

Terre and I are both the types that, in the presence of craziness, we start to feel some semblance of calm once we can wrap our minds around the thing. Usually that happens for us through reading. There are numerous books listed in our Media Resources section of this site, but one we found particularly helpful was the book, Your Sexually Addicted Spouse (see Book Reviews)

Alas, this book is rather new, and came out years after we had to deal with our Discoveries. We so wished we'd had it during that time. However, we believe this is the BEST new book for PoSAs and we recommend it to you now.

Also, if you are spiritually inclined (but not necessarily religious), anything by Joel Goldsmith can be wonderfully uplifting. Another favorite author whose work is inspired by A Course in Miracles, is Marianne Williamson.

I (Lili) am inspired by mystical Christianity so I found anything by Father Thomas Keating and Father Richard Rohr very illuminating.

Art:

Art is, of course, subjective but please check out our Art section.

—Lili