I’m not certain that I have ever looked so forward to seeing another woman as I did to seeing our Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) yesterday upon her return from maternity leave. We were able to meet with her only once prior to her leave, and I was confident I could get by till she returned, but it was tougher than I thought.
It has been three and a half months since we last met with her. In normal people years that isn’t a very long time, but when you’re well within your first year post DDay, it seems like a lifetime. There were new disclosures to face, accountability and boundary issues to navigate, and although progress was definitely made there remains a lot of individual and couples work to be done. In short, we need her. I need her.
As torture goes, it was a good session.
She asked me how Handsome’s sexual acting out and the partners he chose made me feel, and asked me to tell Handsome. My main answer? Diminished. I feel like everything about me and my life is “less than” because of what he did. I am looked at with pity by those who know what he did whereas I used to be viewed as a person of strength. Dealing with the betrayal trauma has negatively impacted me as a mother and as a daughter. It has impacted my work. I have withdrawn socially. At least for the last 5 years I did not have the marriage I thought I had. I could go on.
I’m accustomed now to thinking through these thoughts and to writing about them here, but this was the first time that I actually got to express them to Handsome where he was a captive audience.
We talked briefly about Angel Baby and the CSAT asked Handsome about his relationship with her and whether it was sexual. He said it wasn’t. Since I’m sitting RIGHT THERE though, I was able to turn to him and say “… but you’ve admitted you wanted to have sex with her. You actually slept with her in a bed in our house and supposedly had an erection…?” He then fessed up and acknowledged that yes, in the end, it got sexual even if (he maintains) they never had sex.
This is going to be a different therapy experience for him. He doesn’t just get to tell his version of events without challenge. He can still minimize and deflect the way sex addicts love to do on things I don’t know about, but on anything else he cannot hide. I think I’m going to find this to be very refreshing.
Good for you, Mr. P has learned I won’t let him get away with bullshit stories/changed versions of stories as well. It’s probably why he would rather chew on glass (as you mentioned in he past), but too bad, he’ll have to chew on the truth instead.
I’m so glad she’s back from her LOA. It’s man-up time.
How are you feeling today after your session? How is your hand?
I feel pretty raw, which caught me off guard. I thought I had done a good job of processing a lot of my initial DDay feelings, but being asked to go back “there” and describe them brought them all back to the surface. I’m not curled up in the fetal position on my bathroom floor (so I guess that’s progress), but I do feel like my emotions are bruised. I’m nursing a 2-day headache which, I’m sure, is stress related. No hand spasms though, so that’s good.
It is SO man-up time for Handsome. This is not going to be the same therapy experience he has had before. I’m not actually sure that he could have handled this several months ago. I think he could have easily shame spiraled before he learned tools to deal with those feelings. Maybe the delay in starting this process is actually for the best. Even at that it is not going to be easy for him.
I think the timing is probably best for the both of you, you’re doing really really well. This is a really difficult journey, but one that promises personal growth and change xo
Have a wonderful weekend lovely lady xo
Thanks so much! You too!
xo
It’s a long holiday weekend here in the States, so that extra day off is awesome (and needed). 🙂
Long weekend here as well, and so I took today off to make it extra long!! Have a good one 😘
Having a CSAT is SO important. Regular therapists tend to treat it like plain old infidelity which it is not. My husband saw a regular therapist for a year which was a waste of time and $. He’s been seeing a CSAT now for a year and has made amazing progress. This therapist insists on regular polygraphs because an SA will lie to a therapist which makes no sense to a regular person. It really is a very different type of therapy. And it’s not “just like alcoholism only it’s sex” either. Much more complicated than that.
I agree completely Maggie. A bone of contention in Handsome’s treatment is that I don’t believe that his individual therapist (not a CSAT) is fully attuned to dealing with a sex addict. There is no emphasis on accountability and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on Handsome forgiving himself and putting his years of acting out in the past. While I agree that he’ll need to do that eventually, this guy was pushing on that really soon after DDay (and prior to DDay #2). Also, after Handsome’s intensive with Dr. M there was supposed to be a debriefing between Dr. M and Handsome’s doc. It took over three months to get that call scheduled because the doc basically refused to have the call. He said he read Dr. M’s report and didn’t need anything else. Handsome assured him that he’d pay for his time for the call and didn’t want him to lose out financially if that was an issue. Nope. He was just too arrogant to get on the phone with a nationally recognized expert in the field. After the call finally occurred, he told Handsome that he didn’t feel Dr. M had anything to offer him. WTF?
The flip side is that Handsome really likes him, trusts him, and doesn’t want to “start over” with someone else. He says that he will if he absolutely has to, but he doesn’t want to. Handsome is making great progress, but I feel like far more of that is due to Dr. M than to this guy. Perhaps that’s unfair.
The CSAT is “our” therapist, but I’m hoping that she can fill in some blatant gaps in his individual weekly treatment. I also think that if she gets the sense that his regular doc just isn’t cutting it that Handsome will take that opinion better if it comes from her than he will from me. Prior to the debacle with Dr. M he was somewhat resentful when I would voice my opinion on the issue, but even he had to shake his head at the hubris the doc displayed and he recognized that the doc was more interested in his ego than he was with Handsome’s well being.
Oh, BW, I can relate. My husband also did not want to start over and really liked his first therapist, “Tom.” One of the first things Tom had my husband do was write a letter to his mother. We were in total crisis like a week post D-Day and he’s writing a letter to Mom? WTF???? Tom didn’t think a formal disclosure was necessary, but my CSAT therapist insisted on it with polygraph. We ended up with a disclosure and no polygraph bc Tom thought that there was no need to make this punitive. He saw husband’s insistence that he loved me and wanted our marriage as “proof “ that husband was ready to “give this up.” Tom thought if husband and I would just get closer and start having sex on a regular basis this would cause the need for the addiction to stop. He seriously said that. I went to a few sessions with Tom and he was the nicest guy ever but I felt frustrated that he kept focusing on working on the marriage. Long story short, after over a year of weekly therapy with Tom, husband had not given up his addiction,was secretly acting out and telling lies to everyone about it. A crisis happened when husband kept hitting on a younger woman who got fed up and reported him. All hell broke loose. And I was done. Husband got his ass to the best CSAT in our area and it was a whole new ballgame. The progress husband has made has been amazing. It’s been a year now and I do believe my husband is sober. For the first time in his life he’s getting the help he needs. SA is a very complicated disorder that takes expertise to treat, in my opinion.
Yes. I fear that Handsome has a doc like Tom. There is work they are doing that is good and helpful and ultimately necessary (addressing Handsome’s anger issues, family of origin issues, and low self esteem, etc.), but I’m alarmed by what I see as a lack of focus on the addiction itself. I don’t even think the doc ever raises the issue of whether or not Handsome is acting out. We go over that in our weekly check ins, but I would expect the therapist to cover that as well. It just seems fundamental to me.
❤️
“Diminished.” What a bang on word choice that brilliantly encompasses everything about the effects of sexual betrayal trauma. I don’t think I have ever consciously chosen that word to describe my emotions, but you have articulated it perfectly in that one word.
I wholeheartedly agree with you and Maggie that a CSAT is essential. Not only for the addict, but for the partner as well. I first had a few sessions with a regular therapist who essentially began preparing me to divorce my husband as she told me there was no hope for him or for us. That wasn’t at all what I needed to hear in a fresh crisis. She told me about a CSAT for my husband, but I made an appointment for me. And immediately felt validated and understood and was set on a recovery path for me. The healing of my husband and survival of our marriage soon followed. And even if it hadn’t, the CSAT definitely had a superior grasp of my brokenness and how to support and lift me out of the devastation.
Blessings to you as you find a new refreshment, hope and focus in your therapy and healing! xo
Thanks Cynthia. I’m hopeful that this woman will be as helpful to me/us as your CSAT was for you.
It’s interesting. Part of Dr. M’s theory on betrayal trauma is that there are something like 13 potential components of such trauma. One of them – I can’t recall what he names it specifically – is essentially trauma by therapist. When you tell your story to a therapist and they essentially tell you that your life is gone and there’s no hope, that’s bad. But I’m guessing it can be equally trauma inducing for the addict to put all their eggs in the basket of a therapist who is utterly unequipped to help with their addiction. I fear that’s what is happening to Handsome, so I’m hoping things go swimmingly with the CSAT.
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I went to a CSAT for myself from the beginning and I’m so glad I did. My first question was, “Can a sex addict recover?” His answer was, “Absolutely.” If you look online like I did, it’s pretty discouraging. The message seems to be to kick him to the curb and if you don’t, you’re spineless or have no self esteem. I wanted hope. There were too many good things about my marriage. I wasn’t ready to give it up. The CSAT used Claudia Black’s workbook, “Intimate Treason,” as a framework for therapy. Even though I went to therapy to save my marriage, I came to realize that if my husband wouldn’t recover or stay sober, I couldn’t stay married to him. The cost to myself was too great, even though I did still love him. There’s a section in the Claudia Black workbook that addresses that issue. Basically it cautions against getting used to tolerating the intolerable. That scared me and gave me the courage to set and enforce boundaries.
I know a couple of women who are seeing regular therapists and both are being encouraged to leave “because there’s no hope for SA” yet neither wants that and their spouses are in recovery.
“There were too many good things about my marriage. I wasn’t ready to give it up.”
That’s me in a nutshell. I also recognize and have come to accept that if Handsome can’t stay sober our marriage will end. It will be beyond sad, but I know that I’m done “tolerating the intolerable.” (Not that I ever did or would tolerate the acting out… I didn’t know about any of that… but I put up with his angry outbursts and blame hurling. No more. ) Handsome knows this.
I feel for the women you know who are being told to leave. That’s just tragic. I hope that maybe they’ll see you as a living example of an alternative to that dire end.
❤️
Btw- thank you for the Claudia Black reference. I wasn’t familiar with it but I just ordered myself a copy. 😊