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EXAMPLE
I remember confronting my husband and telling him he had to leave. It was evening. I was alone, and I sat at the kitchen table and cried and cried. I was so scared, but I knew he couldn’t stay in the house after what he’d done. It was the first time I was ever alone since being a child.
When you think of that day there may have been signs or prior circumstances that had you questioning your partner’s actions. Describe prior circumstances and/or events where you had suspicions and his or her behavior was called into question.
EXAMPLES
Ten years ago I found a list of phone numbers in my husband’s wallet. It made no sense so I called a few and found out that these were women and/or men, who, when I asked who they were, hung up.
From the time we started dating, I knew my husband was looking at porn. I thought all men did this so I didn’t mind. But last year I came across a website where he had been chatting with other women and then learned he met a woman from another part of the country. He had been lying to me and cheating with other women.
As you recall the memories of that day it may bring up prior events that had you second guessing and suspecting your partner’s behavior and you now realize you were probably right. That too is a part of your story. As you are flooded with memories of the past, you often gain greater clarity about the present, even though it may raise additional questions and cause you painful, scary, and uncertain feelings. You have been denied the truth—truth you had a right to know. Writing your part of the story helps you claim your experience.
Now you will focus on identifying those sexual behaviors, situations, or attitudes that represent your partner’s acting out. In this exercise you identify those times where warning signs, suspicions, or triggers were known to you and the ways you did or did not respond. This helps you examine how you were betrayed and deceived—often by half-truths, blatant lies, or avoidant responses thereby hampering your ability to react appropriately at the time. You will also come to recognize how you became unknowingly complicit in the acting out. By understanding these patterns, both of the addict and yourself in ignoring, denying, or overreacting to a suspicion, you will learn new ways to handle suspicions and come to trust yourself. Recognizing how suspicions were ignored often provides you with some understanding as to the development of the addictive behavior. It also empowers you to move forward with your healing.
Coming 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.
