Editor’s note: Resource Perspectives features articles written by members of Lovefraud’s Professional Resources Guide.
Rebecca Potter works as a licensed mental health counselor in West Palm Beach, Florida. She can be reached at: tlc211@gmail.com.
Surviving betrayal and trauma
By Rebecca Potter
Rebecca Potter profile in the Lovefraud Professional Resources Guide
I recently attended a workshop by Dr. Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., author of The Betrayal Bond. I was shocked by the denial of the psychological community regarding the trauma experienced by survivors of emotional and sexual trauma. I took my worn and used copy of The Betrayal Bond to Dr. Carnes for his signature. He signed my copy and asked, “Why used?”
Dr. Carnes’ work has helped me surface from the web of pain and confusion developed while trying to safely escape an emotionally, verbally, financially abusive husband. When I left, I was further damaged by my exposure to the legal system and Family Court. There was no place that I could go to receive treatment, attorneys took advantage of me, insurance companies lied and hid fraud that they had committed with my former mate. Need Dr. Carnes ask why my copy was used and battered, somewhat like me?
Just get over it and move on
This was the attitude I faced when I tried to find professional legal help. The pain in my body was so real, yet invisible to anyone else. I couldn’t explain the terror that I felt when I had to sit in the same room with my former husband: The intense emotion I felt when he told the courtroom lies and the court believed those lies without evidence. The permission that the Court gave to him, which allowed him to further abuse me and how I was ignored and told, “Just get over it and move on.”
The impact of sexual addiction induced trauma
The field of treatment and intervention for disorders related to compulsive sexual behavior and sexual addiction is a new emerging field. Research has focused on the sexual addict, creating models for diagnosis and treatment, while the partners of sex addicts have been neglected and ignored.
Current clinical treatment models prefer to address the partner of a sex addict as a codependent or co-addict, which basically implies that the partner has their own disease termed: co-addiction or codependency. Codependency is in a category of a process addiction—an addiction to certain mood-altering behaviors, such as a tendency to behave in overly passive or excessively care-taking ways that negatively impact one’s relationships and quality of life. Other process addictions include: gambling, food, shopping, spending and hoarding.
The clinical needs of partners of sexual addicts continue to be ignored, minimized, obscured and gravely misunderstood. Partners actually often experience clinically significant sex addiction induced trauma. These traumatic symptoms are a result from the direct impact of sex addiction:
- chronic patterns of sexual acting out
- relational perpetration
- emotional abuse
- deception
- betrayal
- psychological manipulation
Traditional therapists continue to ignore the symptoms of trauma. These partners often present with symptoms that match rape trauma syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder. Sex addiction-induced trauma is a highly specific type of trauma that involves symptoms of fear and panic of potential disease and contamination, fear of child safety and potential of child molestation, social isolation, embarrassment, shame, guilt and intense relational rupture and attachment injuries.
Neglecting the treatment of trauma and focusing instead on co-addiction and codependency are inadequate and clinically contra-indicated, wrought with moral and ethical challenges. Partners and spouses of sex addicts are a profoundly and clinically traumatized population requiring informed care and ethical treatment.
Recovery
I know, because I experienced similar trauma. Recovery has been a long road. I still experience flashbacks and have adrenal fatigue when my symptoms are triggered. I have started women’s and men’s relationship recovery groups. We meet each week to support each other with the withdrawal of leaving a chaotic relationship and help each other process the deep brain injuries from the exploitation and trauma.
I also suggest that survivors participate in online support groups if they are not able to find a trauma therapist in their area. One online group : www.adultchildrenofalcholics.org. There are phone meetings daily. The websites will list the phone meetings. The pain that you are experiencing is real and must be processed with those who understand trauma.
I look at my marriage as an educational process that I needed to experience to assist others in healing. Yes, my ex will marry others and commit the same abuse. There will be many women and children harmed by his manipulation.
Okay, I’ll say THANK YOU REBECCA for this great article! So many of us have been damaged by the trauma bonds….and you are so right that the professional community has more or less not even noticed the damage the betrayals have done to us as individual people and as a group.
Welcome to Love Fraud, Rebecca, glad you are here and am lookin forward to more articles like the one above! God bless.
YES….Thank you Rebecca for your participation in LF and doing what you “KNOW” to help other survivors.
We have found, many therapists don’t ‘get it’…..and this adds to the frustration of the recovery process. We go at it alone…..and keep searching for those elusive answers.
I’ve come out of alot of situations in my life….but i’ll tell ya…..living with a toxic person has topped them all…..people in general don’t get it….and yes…repeatedly we hear….”JUST GET OVER IT” it’s been xx amount of time….”MOVE ON”.
Family’s don’t support, friends are confused and the courts….well….that’s a whole different battle.
If it were only that easy!
I’m sure as a therapist in WPB, you will be seeing some of the spath I was involved in for 28 years, new dupes in your office…..at one point of another….he twilights in your area.
I wish I had contol over protecting the world from this person…..but alas….I know differently.
“I look at my marriage as an educational process that I needed to experience to assist others in healing. Yes, my ex will marry others and commit the same abuse. There will be many women and children harmed by his manipulation. ”
This statement by you is soooo how I feel.
His sex escapades…..and realing in young girls as he parties into the night with men….just makes me sick.
Then comes the drug dealing…..and conning.
WPB seems to be a great spot for him……he’s been protected and taken in in WPB by sooooo many. He creeps into the superficial….the money folks with kids or a left of center lifestyle of sex and drugs. They think they’ve met an angel…..but he’s the devil in disguise.
Thanks again for your contribution to LF and all you are doing to share your life experiences in order to help others and show them the way!
As we know….life DOES get better! It’s a rough road!
EB
We’re starting this thread over. At the suggestion of a Lovefraud reader, I got rid of the prior comments which were necessary at the time but not on topic.
Thanks Donna, for cleaning up after us…
Regarding this article, it’s a very important one for anyone just leaving the relationshit with a spath, because the spath has been manuevering to isolate and control the victim since DAY 1. He doesn’t stop just because you are getting a divorce or moving out. He will continue to manipulate all those involved, including attorneys, cops, judges.
Someone posted on another thread, that during their split with the spath, it seemed that a “perfect storm” had been brewing, things started going wrong in other relationshits etc….
Same thing happened to me. But I understood that it was the work of the spath. He had, over 25 years, inserted people into my neighborhood, my family and the cops. These people were willing and able, ready to be called on by the spath to perpetrate whatever attacks were needed. You might think I’m paranoid, but I’m not. This is how they all work. Even my Best Frienemy suddenly turned on me and when I told him that my spath was doing unbelievable things, he told me to “Call Oprah”. WTF? Spath had gotten to him because he was closet gay.
The spath had cops doing his bidding and even the county sheriff, an elected official. The spath is not that powerful, but he can sense immediately those who are already corrupt, just as he can sense who is vulnerable.
BlueJay posted on another thread that her Spath’s brother was manipulating the attorney into billing her for HIS personal agenda. Yes, they are perfectly capable of that. That’s why we need to have solid boundaries and the same ability as the spaths do to recognize a corrupt court official.
Between the spath, the spath’s minions, and the fencesitters who come out of the woodwork when they smell blood in the water, we really have our work cut out for us. WE ARE THE MINORITY. ACCEPT THAT. Find others like us and build your army.
Rebecca, Donna
Thank you for a really on-target post.
Everything you said sings to me (except I don’t know what relational perpetration is). Can anybody help there?
I have said soo many times here, on LF, during my recovery, that I feel like I have been raped. I do. In a way, it was worse than rape for a couple of reasons.
First, my spath was so-over-the-top sexually I spent more hours with him having sex with him in our 3 year relationship than I had in my entire adult life, and I’m mid-40s. So part of was the sheer amount of the sex. It was like a 500 hour rape.
The second part of it is that I really loved him, or who I thought he was. I physically felt it in my heart and in my bones. When he was with me, I was making LOVE to him. Little did I know it was only a mirage.
For me, sex was emotional. For him, it was functional.
Grief comes in stages as does recovery.
All weekend long my body has been actually physically shaking.
I’ve been thinking of all the hours we spent having sex, and I am brused, abused, shocked, traumatized. It was all lies.
Then I find myself sorting through things he said, things he did, getting lost in what skylar says is “COG DIS”. I’m having the ridiculous conversation with myself, “he loved me” and then “but he hurt me”.
I find myself in another phase of COG DIS where on the suface I’m thinking that I SO WANT HIM TO LOVE ME STILL.
And the other part of me wants REVENGE. I can’t believe he did this to me.
I am sitting here on my couch this morning, getting ready to go for a 10K, and I just don’t know what to do with my grief and my pain, except to sit in it.
Superkid
Sk – i am sure that you will feel better after your run, with those chemicals coursing through your body.
you said, ‘I’m thinking that I SO WANT HIM TO LOVE ME STILL.’ SK – he never loved you. love is a verb. that’s the piece of info which will dissolve the cog dis. he played you – that’s the truth of it.
((((hugs))))
Rebecca, My post to you got removed with the other posts, but will just tell you how much I enjoyed your article and how right on it is. I am looking forward to more great articles from you!
The dismissing of the victim’s distress as “co-dependent” or “enabling” (though actually we may have enabled them some, I think that comes with the territory of being abused) but that doesn’t mean the victim is RESPONSIBLE for the abuse, which is how many professionals seem to respond to the victim, “treat” the abuser and blame the victim.
While I accept responsibility for my own “enabling” of my personal psychopaths, none-the-less, I was NOT responsible for their abuse. I have learned now to set boundaries, and no longer enable them, but was in NO way “guilty” of what someone else did.
Thanks, and glad that you are here. Your article was I think very helpful to all of us, but especially to those who are newly out of a relation-shit with a person high in P-traits. Patrick Carnes is also my HERO!!!! My copies of his books are also well worn.
Again, welcome to LF! Looking forward to your articles in the future!
Oxy…your post is at the top….
Oops! Thanks EB! Not only CRS but BLIND as well! LOL
Donna, you are getting your message across and thank you for all your efforts otherwise I would have gone mad x I did make a contribution to this article re: “current wife”, the message is out there, thankfully.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2047902/Relationships-Beware-charming-man.html