Spouses of Sex Addicts

For most partners of sex addicts, when they discover the sexually compulsive behaviors they enter a period of crisis. Partners will often experience the following:

THE PROTECTIVE FOG OF SHOCK

Shock is the brain’s effort to protect a person from what seems too overwhelming to deal with. Someone who loses a loved one suddenly will often go into shock. A protective cloud will envelop them, numbing their feelings, holding all the implications of their loved one’s death at bay until they can absorb what has happened.

This type of protective fog lets them get up, shower and get dressed, answer questions about funeral arrangements, attend the funeral and interact with family and friends. It helps them to function when otherwise they might collapse. This same type of protective shock often envelops partners when they initially learn about the addict’s sexual behaviors.

DIFFICULTY FUNCTIONING

In addition to shock, most partners will also experience some changes in their daily functioning. During this initial stage, whatever you are feeling and experiencing, others have felt the same.

– Forgetting things
– Clumsiness, accident
– Sleeplessness or a desire to sleep all the time
– Difficulty concentrating
– Mixing up your words
– Inability to complete small tasks
– Wanting to isolate
– Anxiety, panic attacks, overwhelming fear
– Unstoppable crying or the inability to cry
– Anger, rage or frustration
– Depression
– Racing thoughts or an inability to ‘turn your mind off’
– Intrusive thoughts of real or imagined scenes of your partner’s sexual behavior
– Twitching eyes, legs, arms
– Loss of appetite or increase in appetite
– Headaches/migraines
– Body aches
– Feeling numb, robotic, or disconnected
– Sour or churning stomach

EMOTIONAL ROLLER COASTER

After discovery, most partners experience a period of emotional variability. During this time, one of the things that can be confusing is how rapidly thinking and emotions change. Partner’s may one moment feel hopeful and that they are doing well. The next minute they feel that their world is ending and they are falling apart. They may call a divorce lawyer in the morning and then in the afternoon find themselves online looking for a couples counselor. The rapid shifts from hope to despair, calm to rage, certainty to confusion, and fear to stability can be crazy.

This is normal. The human brain can only process one emotion at a time. That is why it can seem like feelings change in a split second. This is the brain processing each emotion in turn so that each one can be felt and move through the body.

LOSS AND GRIEF

Discovering sexual betrayal plunges partners into loss and grief. Suddenly the losses are mounting up on all sides. Loss of trust in your partner, loss of trust in yourself, loss of the relationship you thought you had, and loss of your dreams for the future.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a pioneer in the study of grief and loss associated with death and dying, identified five stages of grief. These five stages have become recognized as the stages that people dealing with all types of trauma and significant change go through. The stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages are not linear, it is common to move around in them, forward and back sometimes experiencing several simultaneously.