POSA™ Blog

The learning curve for partners finding out about their mate's deceptive sexual behaviors is steep indeed.
When we stop and consider all that a partner has to learn just to survive the betrayal trauma, it's rather staggering. Then, generating all of what's necessary to move from barely surviving to finally entering more ease and well-being, however long that takes, it should be enough to invoke awe in anyone privy to that partner's experience.

As I contemplated all this today after a client's session finished here,
I thought about how far this client had come and how much grace she had acquired after learning how to survive in the hostile territory that her husband's repeated betrayals and manipulations had landed her in.

I got to thinking how fortunate I was to witness her soul-deepening process.
It hasn't been even a tiny bit easy for her; partners stories never are.

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!!

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.

Every day since autumn, I've peered into a gigantic construction pit which will eventually become the city's tallest residential building- directly across the street from me here in Manhattan. Breaking through granite to dig a deep enough foundation to support a 52-story highrise means non-stop noise from rock-breaking machines, cranes and bulldozers.

But my jangled nerves begin to calm down and I can feel the tension loosen it's grip as soon as I cross Park Avenue and see that just steps away from the insane construction cacophony, Nature could care less about all that: She is very busy herself, heralding the arrival of a long-awaited spring in the Northeast.

What do you have to be grateful for this past year? Perhaps it's been a year of Discovery that your partner has chronically betrayed you and it feels like a stretch to be grateful for anything much at all.

We understand that feeling all too well. Discovery and the shock, anger and grief that usually ensues can challenge every ounce of our being and we may question everything, including even why we're sitting here reading a blogpost about gratitude. Maybe we're feeling so angry at having been a faithful and supportive partner only to learn that he (or she) was reading from a different "rule book" than the one we were. Or they dispensed with the rule book altogether.