POSA™ Blog

Losing a marriage or long-term relationship (or even contemplating the loss of the union we thought we were in) is always difficult, but the holidays can make it feel even more so. Gathering around a candle-lit dinner table to partake of a specially-cooked meal, watching excited youngsters open their gifts, hearing holiday music, seeing festive decorations everywhere, all of it can underscore exactly how different this year will be from years past. Dread can seep in just thinking about how much it's all going to hurt if we're having a difficult time this season.

 Hi Friends and Colleagues - 

Are the behavioral patterns we see in chronic betrayers attributable to addiction and nothing else? When colleagues gather here, we often find ourselves wondering whether the term "addiction" is even an accurate one, and/or what else might be going on?

Certainly in the early days right after Discovery, we partners just needed the lying and cheating to stop and complicated-sounding diagnostic terms just addled our trauma-stunned brains further. "Just fix him!", we pleaded, and sure enough, there was a vast array of addiction counselors/therapists claiming the men to be "very sick sex addicts". 

Two weeks left of winter and we are bursting at the seams to unveil a brand new resource for partners that we are thrilled to share with you all!

Hello Dear PoSARC Readers,

While you're holed up trying to stay warm during these wintry days, we thought it would be a fine time to share what we're up to here at PoSARC. Besides being glad for the new energy of this year's beginning, we have an exciting project or three underway which we'll be unveiling during the coming months. 

In the meantime we're writing our new projects and working with the challenges women share with us via our coaching work, as well as in our commenting community on social media and e-mails we receive. And speaking of our community, we didn't want to wait till the end of this newsletter to offer a heartfelt thank you to those who have generously contributed to our work via donations over the holidays.
Besides serving to remind us that our work is hitting a chord for our readers and meeting a need in the world, these financial gifts keep us creating videos, writing new content, connecting with our readers and running our website without ads, sponsorship or the need to endorse various therapists or "sex addiction" centers. That independence is vital to our voices remaining as authentic as possible here. 

by Lili Bee and Cassie Kingan

The best part, the closest-to-our-heart part of having a website and blog like PoSARC is the abundance of personal e-mails we receive from partners who find us online or on Facebook and want to share news about what's going on in their relationships and how it's affecting their lives. While some are primarily looking for quick direction or help, many write in, needing a safe place to share their stories of heartbreak, confusion and also their eventual victories. They know we understand because we've been through betrayal trauma, too.  

Along with the many profoundly intimate, personal stories that are shared with us from those new to learning about their mate's sexual deceptions, often as the months and years pass by we also receive detailed updates from our readers, allowing us to witness how their stories evolve over time. It constantly amazes us just how many connections we have with women we've never even met (yet!), all over the world.

Hello Readers~

Even though our last snowstorm in the northeast was just 6 weeks ago, the increasingly warm days are finally signaling Spring!

Here at PoSARC, we're in the midst of new changes, too. Over the past year, we have been steadily incorporating a more multi-sided perspective on what it takes for women to heal from betrayal trauma, or trauma incurred at the hands of the men commonly referred to as "sex addicts." We're speaking out more about the narcissistic traits like massive entitlement which underlie chronic infidelity, so women can begin to come out of shock and start to understand where these behaviors actually originate from. And we're walking away from models that claim to help but actually end up emboldening men (and even colludes with them) to maintain their "rights" to remain covertly abusive instead of calling them to account for their deceptive behaviors. We're writing more, too, about the treatment-induced trauma we hear about way too frequently from our clients who have been damaged while under the care of therapists/coaches/clergy utilizing the prevailing "sex addiction treatment model". 

Some time ago when we posted our video on Why Do I Stay? The Biochemistry of the Loyalty Bond, the sheer number of comments and private emails we received in response surprised us. What most of those messages pointed to was the consensus amongst almost all of them: women reported feeling stuck in a type of paralysis caused by the pressure to stay with their cheater and "stick it out" despite the constant chaos he was causing.

Some of this pressure to stay with him was internally-generated through religious conditioning, internalized family messages, fear of being alone or starting over, fear of being stigmatized, financial insecurity and more. The women who wrote to us were astute (and brave) enough to be able to recognize this pressure on themselves, no small feat; there are so many unseen forces working against women considering a change-up of the status quo that it takes vast amounts of courage to call out even blatant injustice in their close relationships.

Then there is the external pressure. Even when these women who felt trapped had finally reached their limits on the number of lies, so-called "slips and relapses", trickle-truths and his anger/resentment that they could accept from their mates, often their therapists, clergy or recovery coaches would counsel them to stay longer before making any decisions about their futures. 

Unsurprisingly, for most of them in already spirit-breaking relationships, the proverbial quicksand just got deeper and stickier. Abusive relationships do that.

Making the decision to cut ties with a man perpetrating Intimate Partner Abuse in order to regain one's own sanity and self-respect is never an easy decision - we want women who feel stuck to know they have more options than they think, or that they've been told they have by others who may have an investment in them continuing to stay.

Better yet, we'd like to demonstrate what un-stuckness looks like. Because without seeing examples of actual women just like them who have liberated themselves from this slow torture and often, treatment-induced-trauma, they can't see a path through. And without the ability to see other survivors who are actually experiencing some happiness again in their lives post-relationship, women who feel trapped cannot even imagine a freer life.

We asked ourselves: what can we do to help these trauma-entrenched women so they're not doomed to suffer in limbo forever? What would we have needed to help free ourselves when we were in the same situations? What did help those who emancipated themselves?

Sharing the Survivor Series here is a way to help women envision a pathway out of feeling so ensnared in the nightmarish loop playing out in their relationships, month after month and year after year, even long after many have enrolled their men in "sex addiction" treatment and 12-step programs that can offer no better than the approximately 5% success rate of any addiction recovery.

While everyone hopes their man will be the exception to the dismally high failure rate, it isn't prudent to tie our well-being and identity to whether these men succeed or not; that's entirely up to them. 
As partners, bypassing that fact is a recipe for serious depression, anxiety or worse. We need to keep ourselves in reality at the same time as we keep one eye open for whether anything substantial is changing at home within a reasonable period of time.

In the meantime, if you feel mired down in your own situation, unable to see a way through to some peace on the other side of this, we hope to inspire you with our new video today:

Survivor Video Series
Our Survivor Series, a project we launched last summer that we're very passionate about, continues! We created a video/audio series that actually shows women surviving the nightmare some call "sex addiction", and we call Intimate Partner Abuse. Who are the women who've freed themselves and what was involved in such heroic rescue efforts?
Click below to view the unscripted, unrehearsed Two-Part video interview Lili Bee just finished with therapist and outspoken fellow Survivor, Tania Rochelle.​

Episode 2: Part 1

Episode 2: Part 2