What Fresh Hell Is This?

It’s time for a big change in the way partners of sex addicts are treated–not small or incremental, not a change that protects the ineffective traditional model or its practitioners, but a massive, sweeping, take-no-prisoners kind of change. My goal, as a member of SOS, a partner, a partner advocate, and a clinician, is to facilitate that change.

For more than thirty years, the therapeutic community has misdiagnosed and mistreated the partners of sex addicts, labeling them “codependents” and failing to address the devastating trauma that results from discovering your life partner has been living a sordid secret life. I use the term “sex addict,” because that is what the CSATs call these sexual and emotional abusers. I’m not going to debate whether the diagnosis of “sex addict” is appropriate. It will make no difference to the way they are coddled and pandered to in the therapy offices and treatment centers, while wives and partners are shoved to the side and told to “bite their tongues” and “sweep their side of the street.” This is “the low below…” Still reeling from discovery, a woman seeks help and is then re-traumatized by a therapist who subscribes to the Codependent model. She is not heard. Her feelings are not honored. She is practically disappeared as a person, then used as an object to prop up her husband’s treatment.

I care about three decades’ worth of women who have been labeled “co-addicts” or “codependents” simply because they were conned by men who have spent their whole lives lying and keeping their sexual exploits under the radar–men who fooled not only their wives but also their families, friends, employers, co-workers, neighbors, parishioners, the PTA, the kids’ soccer teams…the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. They’ve fooled their entire communities, but it’s the wives who are deemed to be “sicker than they are.” The partner is diagnosed before she has even met the therapist or told her story.

The standard of treating partners under the Codependent Model has come under scrutiny in the past few years, thanks to professionals such as Dr. Barbara Steffens, Marsha Means, and Dr. Omar Minwalla. Their research led to the development of the Trauma Model, the rational and effective way to treat victims of the insidious and systematic abuse that sex addicts perpetrate on their wives/partners and children. I am linking to information on the subjects rather than explaining them here. I will be using this forum to address current articles and videos that are vehicles for further misinformation and continued abuse. If you discover publications that I miss, please let me know. We’ll get to as many as we can.

The objective is to call the professionals to task, to take down the status quo, and to prevent–as much as possible–the use of partners as adjuncts to the recovery of sex addicts. Partners need, and must demand, our own treatment, designed to help us heal from the life explosion of Discovery.

But first, let’s take a look at how the whole Codependent thing got started in the first place. The paradigm for treating sex addicts and their partners was developed by a sex addict. He named the condition, created the treatment model, and trained a generation plus of followers, who consider him nigh the Second Coming. Imagine your own SA getting to decide the best course of treatment for YOU. It might go something like this:

Let’s see, how can I get my wife to stay so that I suffer the fewest consequences for what I’ve done? I’ll call her a codependent and tell her she’s as sick as I am, that she knew what I was doing all along and pretty much enabled it. I’ll tell her to go to 12-step meetings and do her own work, while staying out of my business. I’ll say that if she checks up on me, looks at phone records and computer history, she’s “slipping” in her own recovery. I’ll create more negative labels and apply them to her normal responses to betrayal, calling her expressions of anger and pain “shaming” me and her need for information “pain shopping.” I’ll get the therapists on board to tell her she should agree to stay with me for at least a year and that as long as she’s sticking around, she should have “hot sex” with me, interspersed with periods of abstinence as I deem necessary–with no consideration for her as a sexual being. I’ll go to secret club meetings, where we all share lurid details of our sexual activities and make a phone list so we can call each other privately. We’ll never tell our wives what happens in our meetings or our therapy, so they’ll never have a clue about the true status of our recovery. Even better, I’ll design my own certification program to get other mental health professionals (many of them sex addicts themselves) on board with my program.

So it went until those pesky folks came along using that “T” word. Now, the therapists would be forced to call it trauma or tack the term onto the existing MO. What to do now?

Hmmm, since the partners drive the recovery, we’ll have to appease them. At the very least, we’ll need to integrate the term trauma, straddling the fence between the Codependent model and the Trauma model, claiming that “each has its merits.” We should create a “formal disclosure process” wherein the addict spends weeks or months writing out his list of lies and misbehavior, with our guidance. We’ll convince the partner to hold her horses, with the promise that she’ll get a complete accounting of what’s been withheld from her for the past five…ten…twenty-five years. We’ll encourage her patience with this vital process, which should be good for quite a few large weekly checks. In the meantime, she can sit on her hands and stew in her pain while attending COSA or S-Anon meetings where she’ll be scolded if she checks up on him or demands any accountability.

This, Ladies, is what happens when the lunatics get to run the asylum.

Please go to The Sisterhood of Support for more comprehensive information about partner trauma and abuse, and on the philosophy I share with its founder, JoAnn Russell, who has been blazing a new path for partners for more than ten years.

So welcome. Let’s deconstruct some articles.

Tania Rochelle, MS, NCC