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.
Can’t really say he was lovebombing all that much… The last 3 months he came online for me perhaps 2-3 times, and then only per facebook chat, not skype. Only contact was over the phone if I called him, but he was hardly home. Talked more with his half-brother than him, who often told me “he’s a liar, don’t trust him”. I had had an operation a week before he officially switched, and it took me over a week to reach him to tell him what was happening… that was I finally managed to have him on the phone 3 hours before I had to go in, in the middle of hte night… I was so angry. I knew it was the end. Said so too. But then that addiction bond made me reach out for him again 2 days later, after the operation. At first he sounded angry and annoyed, and then he said he didn’t want to come to Belgium anymore. My grieved reaction to that made him turn on his ‘sweet voice’ again. Told me he needed to go to Costa Rica, and that he would call me in a week. I got the facebook message a week later.
I laugh about it now, with a green face… what a total jerk he was. And I thought when his brother said he was a liar that he meant “he says he’s gonna go to the internet and go on skype, but then he doesn’t, so he lies.” How strange that we compartmentalize the lies, the empty promises, instead of accept that the big picture is a lie as well.
The horror show in the aftermath when I heard so much and put two and two together (well a dozen and a dozen) felt like I had stumbled in Redbeard’s room with the bloody women’s dresses, the blood sticking to my hands, and when I staggered back out of the room, the whole castle was suddenly filled with corpses that I had simply overlooked.
Constantine-
You said you have a girlfriend now. How long did that take? I can’t even imagine dating let alone being in another relationship with someone.EVER!!!!
You said she doesn’t even know about about the spath. How is that possible? How do you just “chop” that part of your life out? The betrayals, lies, manipulations…all the craziness? When do you trust/or even try again? It’s almost as if you’de need to put barbed wire around your heart to try again…
You’ve done it, and so has Donna but how and when?
I think this is a great article. So matter-of-fact and straight to the point. And dead on. The flashbacks are really strong for me, and I’m starting to learn what triggers me.
What has helped the most is actually LF, believe it or not. LF was my saving grace, because this is the ONLY place where people GET IT. And I cannot even imagine a man or woman trying to get through this kind of trauma without at least one other living person understanding what they are going through. If the world of psychology is failing to understand, then they are failing their patients and are many times becoming more of a problem than help, because they can exhaust a problem by prescribing the wrong treatment.
For example, I know that a lot of us had some “weaknesses” or “ticks” that the spaths played on to “take over” and destroy us, but to treat a victim as though there is something profoundly wrong with them seems inaccurate as well. If you start injecting someone with heroine without their knowledge on a daily basis, they will become a heroine addict, and this doesn’t mean they had co-dependency issues to begin with. Some of us may have had co-dependency issues, true. But just the fact that we got addicted to our “spath as a drug” situation doesn’t automatically mean we had a major codependency flaw to begin with.
More and more, too, I’m realizing just how crucial is it that we chose our sexual partners VERY carefully. I think that is the loudest message I am getting from this sex-as-bonding condition that creates a kind of addiction. Before starting a process of integrating another person so intimately into our existence that they are almost impossible to remove without breaking a few things, we should be sure that they don’t bring with them anything toxic which could slowly eat away at our essence in the process. In short, HEALTHY bonds are the only bonds that are worth creating, because we’ve all learned just how STRONG these bonds are. SCREEN CAREFULLY, RIGOROUSLY, RELENTLESSLY. As a young woman, I wish I had learned this sooner. The media and culture I was raised in didn’t seem to communicate this message strong enough….I mean….please don’t turn on the television! Sex is a powerful thing.
Oh, I just went off on a tangent now and I have to run anyhow.
Hello LF! I’ll be back later.
Bye
Thanks, Katy, EB and superkid. I needed your wisdom to pull me out of the mindf*ckery, and the absolute sorrow I have been feeling lately.
I dreamed about him last night. I would welcome any interpretations.
We are on a road trip, somewhere, and we stop into a bar and find ourselves on a single bed. I reach out and take his hand and it is like a million years of repressed emotion rises up and the walls come tumbling down!!!
We start kissing and cuddling, and he gets an erection and he is rubbing it against me and kind of poking me with it. I am gigling and happy. I feel excited. He wants to make love…now, and we almost do, but don’t because we are in a bar with people everywhere.
Then, the scene shifts, and I am standing at an eisle, (still in the bar) and he is waiting for me to finish my work of art. I have been coloring in a color book. I’m not sure what the image is, but I have almost finished it, when he walks up behind me, and I am distracted and look away from my art work, for an instant, and when I look back, the image has changed. It is a color-book image of a bride, in profile holding a bouqette of flowers, down in front of her. I am confused. What happened to the image I was working on? I was embarred because I didn’t want him to see this bride and think I was focussing on getting married. I knew it was way too soon, and I knew it would freak him out! So I quickly folded up the eisle and the coloring book, and said, “I’m finished. Lets go.” We walked out of the bar. I woke up with the tune of, “Color my World’, playing in my head.
Here’s what I get from it:
First, it is a single bed. This is good sex between single people. I took his hand….Marriage. We almost had sex, (didn’t) because there were so many people around. His job, other women.
My work of art was a coloring book. Obviously childish and wishful thinking, like a little girl does when she dreams about her wedding and herself as a bride, but more than that, the is an episode of, “sex and the City” where, “coloring” is used as a code word for sex…and I took a Lit class way back when he and I were together, in which the professor insulted my preference for, “The One’s Who walked Away From Omalas” to “Araby” by saying it was equavalant to comparing a childs coloring book to a Picasso. (He was a formalist, I’m more of a Psycho-analitic critic, so it’s no wonder. I still got an A for the class, and he sort of apologized to me later, by writing on one of my essays how nice it was to have an intellegent adult in the class!! 🙂
Then years later, when I am in recovery, working a 12 step program, and getting treatment, I comment to friends that I feel like a Picasso painting…I am trying to explain to them that I feel sort of fragmented and crazy(who wouldn’t be after all I’ve been through with crazy-making X hub).
Then, in the dream I fold-up the work of art and tell him I’m finished. In reality, I was very angry with him, and hurt and confused, because he took NO interest in planning our wedding, and I knew he was starting to panic. It was an issue because he had told me (before leaving on a west-pac for 9 months) that he couldn’t wait to marry me, when he came home. He was so sincere, and I was so in love…Just more mind-f#uckery?
Any-way, my entire marriage felt like he didn’t want me, but the promise was there that when the job was over he would….so, once again I waited………..
Whatdoya think, guys? Do tell.
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that the bride image had not been colored in…not one stroke!!!
Skylar’s recent post about the TELL her spath did with leaving the bag of porn on the front porch triggered a memory for me. It was a tell from my spath too.
We met on Craigslist.
About a year into our relationship, he sent me a post he saw on CraigsList for somebody looking for casual sex. He sent it to me with a great guffaw, saying, “ha ha ha, you wrote this!” – implying he thought it was hilarious that it sounded like *I* WROTE IT. And acted like he thought it was hilarious because it sounded like a description of HIM.
I thought it was so strange that he sent me that post, because he wasn’t a happy, joyful, guffawing kind of guy.
And the post wasn’t that funny.
Now I realize it was a TELL.
He was telling me he was scanning Craigs List for sex.
Dickhead.
Superkid
Kim, I have a question. Are you still in love with him?
Superkid,
I think he was telling you more than that. He wrote that craigslist ad and he wanted you to see it.
I agree with Sky. He wrote it.
kim:
Do you have contact with this ex husband? I was never able to determine that from your posts. I apologize if you did say and I missed it.