Intimate Treason. Claudia Black
to terms with the sexual and emotional behaviors of the addict is an enormous part of what confronts you. The sexual behaviors may feel offensive, abnormal, and wrong. Learning that he or she saw prostitutes or had a long-term affair(s) has you incensed and outraged.
“How could he do this?” “What’s wrong with her?” “What’s wrong with me?” are obvious questions that run through your mind.
When you are bombarded by the images of what you found out, working through your pain seems like a tall order. Wishing you could shut out the visual images that now plague you or turn back time to when you still trusted your partner is a normal response to the trauma of intimate betrayal. You will probably experience a flood of thoughts, feelings, and new beliefs or hunches as you work to make sense of all the data. Perhaps you are someone who would rather not think of it at all and find that you stay busy and feel numb as a way to avoid the pain.
What you have learned is now a part of your story. In the beginning, the urge to know can be overwhelming and you may find yourself searching for additional facts to substantiate what you already know. Your distress and turmoil mixed with the facts of all he or she did makes you feel as though the pain and confusion will never end. You have a right to know what has occurred and what may be occurring now. Yet searching for more information and trying to clarify what is known is making you feel worse because it draws you further into the morass of the behaviors. Perhaps all this searching is an attempt to come to terms with how little control you had over everything that was withheld from you. Searching is more an attempt at self-protection and a traumatic response to how duped you were by the secrets in the past.
The list below identifies categories of behaviors in which sex addicts engage. In your journal, write down all that apply to your partner.
HINDSIGHT: WARNING SIGNS MISSED
While you may not have known about the sexual behaviors, most likely there were other signs that indicated something was wrong in your relationship. These can be behaviors or activities where addiction was operating, unknown to you. They are patterns that show up in the tasks of daily living that are often ineffectively addressed and over time become chronic. In a relationship where secrets and lies exist, these patterns represent the missing link, the hidden piece of the puzzle from which to draw. You couldn’t know what was kept hidden unless accidentally stumbling across it or being told.
The sexual behaviors were secret and meant to be so. But it is often those other areas where problems existed that will help you reflect on how you quieted your misgivings and doubts, or instead attempted to rehash your concerns/complaints in order to change your partner—all to no avail. Reflecting on these areas will offer you a window into where warning signs existed. Perhaps there was a pattern of allowing his or her reasoning to trump your own or believing that his or her complaints about you somehow justified the actions in some way. Coming to your own aid is discovering how you missed or possibly disregarded the warning signs. Identifying incidents and hunches becomes useful in learning to trust your own judgment as you move forward with the healing process.
The following are examples of warning signs that problem areas existed. In your journal, list all those that you now recognize may have been signs for you.