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  When traumatic events invade our lives we feel shocked, rocked to our cores and no longer safe in our world. Like a boulder dumped into a still pond, trauma generates ripple-like symptoms that move outward from the point of entry, ultimately impacting multiple areas, just as it did in Katherine’s and Abigail’s lives.

  Trauma’s Symptoms and its Long-Lasting Effects

  The symptoms experienced following emotionally traumatic events may vary from person to person depending on several factors, including personal history, the type of traumatic event experienced, the amount and kind of support available to help one grieve and heal and whether the “victim” remains in an unsafe environment or relationship. But regardless of these factors, a long list of typical symptoms flood into our lives, some immediately and others delayed in their arrivals. These symptoms can include the following, among others.

  On A Personal Note: Which of these symptoms have you experienced as you’ve struggled to deal with your partner’s sex addiction?

  Examining this list, it becomes clear that traumatic events in our lives need to be taken seriously. When traumatized, we need support and helpful resources in order to heal and avoid long-term chronic trauma symptoms. Without help and support, trauma can weave its way throughout an entire life and create patterns that can have crippling effects. In many ways, trauma’s threads wove their way through every strand of Lenore’s life. Note them as she shares:I first experienced sexual abuse at the hands of two teenage boys when I was four or five years old. And at four I also recognized how unclean we were—our clothes, our house, our bodies. That same year, my parents put me on a bus—alone. I was sent to stay for a while at a relative’s house several hours away. I remember at five wishing I had clean, pretty dresses like my younger cousins wore.

  At seven, I realized our family wasn’t like “normal” families. At eight, my embarrassment grew. My shabby, dirty clothes, my shoes with holes in them, the two-room shack without running water or a bathroom where we lived all became a source of great embarrassment.

  At age eight, the live-in nanny told me about her sexual escapades with my father and the other men in her life. By the time I was nine, I began to shoplift, usually grooming supplies: shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, fingernail file, bobby pins. I “ran away” on my bike at ten, but as darkness fell and fear came with it, I decided to ride back home.

  As I grew older, I realized that I was never played with, held, hugged or kissed like other children. I began to realize how strange it was to have a nanny sleeping with my father, while my mother turned her head and looked the other way.

  My teens were filled with many geographical moves and school changes. In one place where we lived, rats ran across my bed at night; in another, my sister and I slept under the carport, covered by a plastic sheet to protect us from the leaking roof in our rainy, northwest environment.

  There were sexual violations, including waking up in terror one night in the tent while on a family camping trip as a relative was sexually assaulting me.

  At eighteen, I married my boyfriend, totally oblivious to the fact that my childhood history affected my choices. I did not know it then, but that day I made a choice that set me up for many more years of heartache and trauma.

  As Lenore’s story illuminates, trauma can have a lasting impact on our lives, often changing its shape for years to come.

  Post-Traumatic Stress and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

  Nearly all of us who live through a traumatic event experience posttraumatic stress—trauma stress that hangs around for a time even after the traumatic event has passed. Yet for some, post-traumatic stress symptoms take on a chronic nature and develop into a serious, long-term condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

  PTSD can last a lifetime. Long-term PTSD sufferers develop painful coping mechanisms that burden their lifestyles and become ingrained in their personalities, or they may develop physical symptoms. Often they develop both. Post-traumatic stress that becomes chronic can take a terrible toll on our bodies. We take an in-depth look at the frequent health responses to trauma in chapter 5.

  PTSD has strict diagnostic criteria that must be evident in a person’s life before he or she receives a PTSD diagnosis from a mental health professional or medical doctor. These criteria include:• Exposure to a traumatic event: “…the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.” Their response to the event must have involved “intense fear, helplessness or horror.”• Persistent re-experiencing (of the event).

  • Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma.

  • Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (such as difficulty falling or staying asleep or hypervigilance).

  • The symptoms last more than one month.

  • Significant impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning. 2

  Though rigid and technical in nature, the above list of symptom criteria weighs down the people experiencing them. In a very real way, PTSD can restrict and restrain its victims no less than heavy anchors and binding chains. Extreme PTSD can restrict one’s personality and make life nearly impossible to live. Such was the case for Deborah, another woman whose life has been shaped by the effects of ongoing, unhealed trauma.

  I am the oldest of three children and my earliest memories include my parents treating me with love and delight until I was four and my brother was born. It seemed that once they had someone else to love they almost forgot about me. And that pattern held true when my sister was born when I was seven years old.

  Because I was the oldest, I was expected to take care of my younger siblings, especially my sister. When she was a baby, I had to push her around the block in her buggy almost every day. And if I wanted to go play at a friend’s house, my parents made me take my baby sister so I could watch her while I played. That embarrassed me so much that I chose to stay home rather than have to drag my little sister along with me. The rides my dad gave me on his scooter stopped, too, just as soon as my brother was old enough to go in my place.

  I grew up believing my parents only wanted me if they needed me or if they could use me to clean the house, do the dishes or watch my brother and sister. I was shy and quiet, stayed in my room alone a lot and learned to try hard to please my parents—something that trained me to be a people-pleaser even at my own expense.

  And I felt lonely. Even at school I was alone and felt lonely, always having to sit all by myself at lunchtime. By then, I had grown so timid and quiet I simply didn’t know what to say to people. Even when someone did try to befriend me, they didn’t hang around for long, because I didn’t talk. I simply didn’t know what to say. One of my teachers told me I was the quietest person he had ever met.

  I was fearful growing up and every year through the eleventh grade I threw up on the first day of school, as I dreaded being alone again every day for nine months. I began to dream of meeting my prince charming—a man who would love me for who I was.

  I was drawn to seemingly fun-loving men and both my husbands appeared to be carefree and full of life before I married them. However, not long into both marriages I learned they were cruel, abusive men and womanizers.

  A year after my first divorce, I was so afraid that I developed agoraphobia. I had two small children to raise with no money, no car and no job. I was a single mom for eight years and was actually surviving, even with agoraphobia, when I met my second husband. He made good money and I thought he loved me and that life would finally be better. It didn’t take long to realize I had gone from the frying pan into the fire, but by then I felt so fear-bound and helpless I remained in that marriage for thirty-five years. Now, finally, at sixty-five, I’m breaking free and determined to become who God really created me to be.

  Deborah’s painful story portrays what can happen when we can’t find a way to heal from events we experie
nce as traumatic: Our trauma symptoms can become chronic. They can shape and color our choices and decisions and alter the course of our lives. When that happens, the list of symptoms grows longer and proves increasingly challenging to heal, like Deborah’s impairments. No doubt you’ll recognize many of her symptoms in the following list. PTSD Symptoms • Increased feelings of anxiety that result in behaviors like scanning the environment looking for any signs of potential danger or threat, paranoia, overwhelming terror, insomnia, inability to concentrate, agoraphobia or startling easily.• Avoiding reminders or conversations of the event or not being able to remember some or all aspects of the event (blocking/ denial).

  • Re-experiencing the event through invading thoughts or memories that can’t be held back, be it through flashbacks and/or nightmares.

  • The person’s distress grows so intense it impacts them in multiple areas of his or her life, such as the ability to work, take care of day-to-day responsibilities or participate in relationships.

  On A Personal Note: Can you identify with any of the behaviors listed as PTSD symptoms?

  Relational Traumas

  Relational traumas, often called attachment injuries, occur when one person betrays, abandons or refuses to provide support for another with whom he or she has developed an attachment bond. One researcher found these traumas—or attachment injuries—to “…overwhelm coping capacities and define the …relationship, as a source of danger rather than a safe haven in times of stress.” 3

  Research indicates that following a relational trauma we begin to focus our efforts to interact with others in one of two ways: We may attempt to get our partner to reconnect with us, or we may do the opposite and build emotional walls to defend ourselves from his or her lack of care. In doing either of these actions, it’s likely we’ll begin to display many of the PTSD symptoms listed above.

  Betrayal in a committed relationship includes violating relationship norms. When your partner violates the standards you consider to be the norm in your relationship, you may experience it as a relational trauma. 4

  Strangely, few professionals have extrapolated relational traumas to include what we experience when we learn our partners act out sexually. Certainly, most partners of sex addicts report that they experience their spouses’ behaviors perpetrated by sexual addiction as significant and damaging betrayals that threaten their relationships, as relational traumas are defined, yet very few therapeutic professionals examined this reality closely.

  Two researchers did, however, study four Internet message boards where partners of sex addicts posted their feelings and stories. As the researchers studied 100 spouses’ entries, they discovered several common themes. Three themes were included: experiencing the discovery of sexual addiction as a traumatic event, viewing the sexually addictive behaviors as betrayal or infidelity and feeling the need to reappraise their relationships as a result.5

  The spouses sharing their feelings and stories on those four message boards perceived their partners’ sexual addictions as betrayal or infidelity. We hear this response from many people we encounter in our work, too.

  In Barbara’s research for her clinical study of partners, she scoured everything written that reported on partners’ experiences of betrayal and trauma. However, the only literature available within the therapeutic community discussing a partner’s experience as traumatic was that which reported on infidelity in committed relationships. She found nothing that called sexual addiction within a committed relationship—within an attachment bond—relational trauma.

  Infidelity and Relational Trauma

  Within the community of professionals who focus their work on infidelity in committed relationships (rather than on sex addiction), trauma recognition abounds.

  One researcher wrote that traumatic stress symptoms “…are the usual results of the discovery of the infidelity.” Another reported that the news of a partner’s infidelity “sends a jolt of adrenaline into the body that sets off a stress reaction.” And others have written that in cases of infidelity they see emotional responses replicating those of other traumatic events, including shock, repression, denial, intense mood fluctuations, depression, anxiety and lowered self-esteem. They also report that healing from the pain of infidelity shares many similarities with healing from other kinds of traumatic events. 6

  And so we ask:

  If counselors recognize that infidelity in a committed relationship creates trauma, why don’t they recognize that sex addiction incites similar effects, especially for those who experience the sexual betrayal—whatever form it takes—as a breach of the marital promise? And what about the fact that sexual addiction generally involves multiple acts of breaking the marital promise? Why don’t more professionals recognize how traumatic this is for committed partners?

  We believe our questions should echo with validity and importance for those who hope to help individuals and relationships heal from the pain that sexual addiction produces in a committed relationship. Due to the absence of available help, many women and some men tell us that they feel misunderstood, invalidated, lost and alone in their efforts to heal their pain and the impact the addiction has on their marriages. Rebecca’s story echoes the stories of so many with whom we’ve spoken. She emailed us:I am looking for help dealing with my husband’s porn addiction. I’ve tried to find help in my city but I can’t find anything. My husband is getting lots of help and support, and he’s excited because for the first time he has tools to use to fight his addiction, but I don’t have anything.

  We have a marriage counselor who is helping us as a couple, but he can’t provide what I need for healing myself. I made the mistake of sharing my husband’s addiction with my support system at church and they asked me not to come back until we got our life straightened out! Now I’m afraid to tell anybody else, but I desperately need to talk to other women who share my pain and I need some way to heal. Please let me know if you offer anything that might help me.

  As in Rebecca’s case, many partners’ efforts to find help and hope leave them feeling lost and more alone in their pain.

  On A Personal Note: Have you had difficulty finding the help that you need?

  What We See in Our Work with Partners

  We find that nearly all partners of sex addicts we encounter bear the symptoms, express the feelings and report the experiences described earlier as a result of the shock and pain disclosure of a sex addiction can bring to their lives. Yet few in the helping professions view a partner’s pain and symptoms as coming from the trauma the partner has experienced.

  Many recognize it as a traumatic event initially, but most soon try to turn the person toward forgiving, moving on and dealing with his or her own “stuff.”

  Other counselors encourage the hurt people to join their partners’ addictive behaviors, which many say only adds to their confusion. They know what they feel in response to their spouses’ sexual choices: It hurts. However, a professional is now advising them to participate, causing them to question their own instincts, needs and judgment.

  Both of these responses leave women and men experiencing a partner’s sexual addiction emotionally lost and without the validation they desperately need for their extreme trauma pain. This leaves the partners of sex addicts without the help and resources they need so they can heal and move on. Danelle shared feeling such difficult emotions during marriage counseling after discovering her husband’s sexual addiction. Danelle told us:I feel mostly misunderstood by our marriage counselor. The counselor said, “Danelle, the roots of your pain are coming from your childhood sexual abuse, not from what your husband did.”

  There was sexual abuse in my childhood, but that is not what hurts right now; right now, it’s his addiction! The counselor doesn’t address my husband’s affairs as sexual addiction, even though they happened repeatedly. At our last session he asked me, “What would it be like to forgive your husband, Danelle? Why can’t you move on?”

  I finally said to him, “I feel like yo
u’re brushing aside the pain I’ve been through. It’s only been a few months.”

  After that he apologized to me and said he hadn’t meant to do that. But I still have no way to deal with my feelings. It’s altered the way I see myself; it’s affected my personality—I’m not free and fun like I used to be. I’m not even the same person anymore.

  After we sent Danelle a handout about trauma in partners of sex addicts, she wrote back: “It’s really nice to know that all of the things that I’m going through are normal and I’m not losing my mind. Thank you.”

  We’ve found that once the hurt partner feels heard, understood, validated, supported and equipped to deal with the current pain, in time we can help the person move through a process that will enable him or her to look at other areas where new growth and new skills would better equip the person for life with (or, if s/he so chooses, without) the sexually addicted partner.

  While many who work with hurting partners do help them process their grief and loss, at least for a time, most simultaneously treat their symptoms and feelings from the commonly held perspective that the partner is a co-addict and therefore codependent to both the partner and that person’s addictive behavior.

  From that perspective, most mental health professionals prescribe changes in thought patterns, emotions, relational interactions and quite often 12-step program participation, none of which is bad. Indeed, those things can prove beneficial in everyone’s life and they were enormously beneficial in Marsha’s life. However, they weren’t enough to help her heal and avoid long term stress or worse, post-traumatic stress disorder.