POSA™ Blog

Once again, a POSA has decided to step up and offer her community a safe space for healing from the trauma of finding out one's committed partner is a sex addict/compulsive (SAC).

This meeting will take place at a church in a beautiful area of the country, Charleston, SC and there is even an SA (Sex Addicts) 12-step meeting there that sends the wives and girlfriends to that PoSA Meeting! So if anyone is in that area, whether SAC or POSA, there is support now available for you.

A PoSARC reader wrote to us a few days ago, telling us how grateful she was for having found us, for our advocacy on behalf of partners and for the POSA Support Group Meetings that acknowledge she's not a co-addict, she's a trauma survivor of a multiple-decade-long marriage filled with her sex addict's deception. She's grateful her healing has begun now, and she wanted to gift us this poem.

We would like to share it with all our PoSARC readers in gratitude to all of you this Thanksgiving. We are continually inspired by the courage, determination and resilience we witness in partners of sex addicts every single day.

Happy Thanksgiving…..and thank you for this gift, RL in California!!

I hear from many partners of those who've been chronically cheated on who express needing local support and encouragement from other POSAs ---but--- something gets in their way- either they feel they have to be strong already in order to start their own support group, or else they're afraid that a meeting may be way more involved than they have energy or time for.

So we created a short video that answers some of those concerns and helps you get a better sense of, well, how to get a meeting going and how they work best. 

This online Forum on Reddit is for porn addicts who wish to stop PMO (their acronym for porn-masturbation-orgasm) and seek support and encouragement from one another. It is an open forum and a colleague of mine sent me this poignant Comment posted by a porn addict in recovery for a few months now:

I was struck yesterday by virgins talking about their porn use. It made me think about my childhood. Back then porn was something that people did watch and consume but it came with a great stigma. Few decent family men or even virgin men would walk into a video rental and rent porn. They might come into a possession of a porn mag or two. But even that was something that people were ashamed of.

A POSA told me through her sobs today that this is her "day 16" after Discovery.

It is also day 15 of her sleeping alone in the marital bed and wondering how her life has become the nightmare she can't seem to awaken from.

Even though she managed to spare her son the details, he knew something was terribly wrong because she can't seem to stop crying for very long.

In his incredibly touching effort to console his mom, he found this poem to give to her and asked her to put it on her table so she would see it every day and stop crying.

Whenever any good news comes my way related to sex addicts recovering, I like to report it. It's hard enough getting hopeless and depressed by the amount of sexual acting out going on in the culture. That's why I'm inspired whenever I learn that thereare those addicts who want this affliction behind them, who are keenly aware of how it's damaged themselves and others.

The young artist who wrote the song in the video here, Jason Chu, is one such man. He writes candidly about first becoming hooked at 11 years old by the "angels" in lingerie store windows at the mall and then about his subsequent fall into pornography addiction.
(I know none of you know the name of the mega-chain of lingerie stores he's referring to when he mentions "angels". Nope, not a one of you.)

Dear Posarc:

I'm totally lost in a very painful sea and your website is helping me more specifically than any other resources can.

I struggle through a cycle of various painful concerns, but for the last several days my main concern has been my body image. Logically, I understand that I could be Helen of Troy and it wouldn't stop him from looking at porn. But, I have thoroughly internalized the message that I'm not pretty, sexy, or "fit" enough to really do it for him.

Can you point me in the direction of help with this?

Thank you,
Lauren Jones

Dear Lauren-

Since there is such universality in your question and this exact issue only gets brought up in my private sessions with clients oh, about 10 times a week, I thought I'd write a blog post to respond to your question. I know so very many others feel as you do. I certainly did.

Esquire Magazine, ironically the very same magazine that runs annual special editions of the 'hottest' women in film, on TV, etc. complete with highly sexualized photo layouts of them hit a home run with this article on porn addiction and why young men are quitting.

It may just be the first article on this topic I've read in this extremely popular men's magazine that didn't include the usual porn apologist sections. None. I'm very impressed.

Equally impressive is the fact that the journalist, 29-year old Sam Parker, did not focus on the more common side-effect of prodigious porn use, erectile dysfunction. One might surmise that a men's magazine would focus there, what with the big bummer of intending to boost one's solo sex life only to find oneself utterly incapable of having a sex life because of equipment malfunction that even pharmaceuticals designed to counter that effect often can't help with.