POSA™ Blog

As the last month of summer continues to bless us with warm days and abundant gardens and the kids head back to school, we are excited to offer another episode of our Survivor's Series. These are the actual accounts of real women who reclaimed their lives once they freed themselves from the Intimate Partner Abuse that chronic infidelity, in all its many forms, engenders. We've written about cheating as a form of narcissistic abuse, as well, since it is the common component in recurrent infidelity.   

When we first launched this Survivor Series, we explained why we felt it was so important to help validate and honor the brave women who had found a way out of the constant anxiety and eventual erosion of self-trust and self-esteem they had come to live with while staying with a chronic cheater, often called a "sex addict". Here's that earlier post: https://www.posarc.com/blog/new-survivor-series-video

In today's new episode (which is audio only, so you can listen while you drive, cook dinner, relax, etc.), you'll hear me interview Sandra, a professional woman with two young children, married for over a decade. Her words reflect the painstaking discovery process, the slow crawl out of the trauma and the patience needed to arrive at the truth she found for herself in the end, all of which she articulates with keen reflective abilities and spiritual generosity. Many of us can relate to the empathic approach she took towards her husband's hurtful behaviors when she says:

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"My personality is more about making things right, fixing things and getting them to work (in my marriage) ...but there's a downside to that: I had to learn to let go and stop trying to fix."

In addition to the valuable insights and lessons from Sandra's story, take note of the somewhat surprising circumstance under which she finally arrived at her decision to create a better life for herself and her children. 

Because almost all of us were so blindsided by Discovery, we spend weeks, months, even years trying to piece together the "hows, whens and why's" of the deceptions generated by our chronic cheaters. 

In attempting to create an orderly narrative out of the chaos that our mate's betrayals brought into our lives, we swing between trying to stabilize ourselves— and—trying to fathom how we missed their deceptions playing out right under our noses, usually for years. 

Often, our sense of ourselves as formerly perceptive and/or intuitive can evaporate as we survey the breadth and depth of what are often incredibly elaborate deceptions unfolding in our relationship, unbeknownst to us.