I’m very excited to share a wonderful new find sent to us by Tania Rochelle. Tania has gone back to graduate school to receive her second masters (first one is in fine arts, this one in counseling). The world will be a better place with Tania in it offering her counseling services to the growing community affected by sex addiction.
In her studies and research, Tania came across a therapist in Beverly Hills, CA who specializes in sex addiction and sexology, Dr. Omar Minwalla. We’ll let you read just one of the many laudable documents on his site in it’s entirety but first we want to issue a huge gratitude to Dr. Minwalla from PoSAs everywhere!
Thank you, thank you, thank you Dr. Minwalla, for giving a professional voice to what we who have survived the trauma of being partnered with a sex addict have known all along: we are/ were suffering through intense trauma and all the deeply challenging symptoms that go along with that.
When we finally arrived in therapy ourselves, none too happy to be spending our precious time and money on what was pretty clearly his problem, we were told it was also actually our problem. Not as in, “Well, since you’re a couple, the addiction affects you both”. No, that would be only logical.
Instead, one of our sex addiction therapists told me, right in front of my SAC (sex addict/ compulsive), “The co-addict is usually just as sick, if not sicker than the addict himself.” Huh? On what planet could that even be true? He was an addict before I met him, and if I leave his sorry behind for relapsing, he’ll still be an addict. That implies my co-addiction how, exactly?
Adding these stigmatizing labels to our already substantial, mountain-sized pile of pain is thoroughly retraumatizing. Not to mention insulting. Then add that there’s no acknowledgement of our trauma so of course, there’s no treatment protocol for said trauma. Instead, we’re constantly told to work on our own recovery. Time and again I’ve witnessed sex addicts being treated with kid gloves in therapy because, you know, they’re imploding or suffering a shame spiral, or whatever– while we, the PoSA are supposed to stoically hold it all together, keeping the focus only on ourselves while our lives and hearts have been torn to bits by the addict’s behaviors. This is why Dr. Minwalla’s work comes as such a relief to us, because it promises to place us on somewhat more equal footing in our couple- as more than just the lucky winner of the “hope he recovers and good luck in not offing yourself” sweepstakes.
Going to couple’s therapy can present an even deeper challenge, in my own opinion. How many times did I feel that I had to educate the therapist on the trauma I was experiencing, repeatedly, in the years we attended therapy together but in which my SAC was still acting out? And what was I told? I was told yet again, to attend to my own recovery and that snooping to find out if he was still acting out and lying to me (while looking me in the eyes and saying he wasn’t), meant that I had a disease. All that for the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars per session.
As I write this, (a counselor and PoSA myself) I have an ongoing counseling client whose husband is in SA recovery for over two years. He’s doing fine but it is she who remains traumatized from being “treated” by a sex addiction counselor for her “co-addiction”.
Her so-called treatment consisted of being resolutely disallowed any discussion of his acting out (which was still ongoing at the time they were in couple’s therapy together) and spending her sessions with the therapist searching for ‘clues’ as to why she allowed such a serious codependency and co-addiction to take hold. When she pleaded with the therapist that No, he was an expert liar and covered his tracks incredibly well, the therapist insisted that all partners of sex addicts “know”, even when they claim not to. Do I even need to tell you how livid hearing this makes me?
We at Posarc initially discovered the trauma model as laid out by Dr. Barbara Steffens and Marsha Means in their book Your Sexually Addicted Spouse, which is reviewed here at PoSARC under Book Reviews. While we still highly recommend that book, we’re even more thrilled to learn that the trauma model is gaining traction amongst more therapists, specifically sex addiction therapists.
I recall asking no less than four different therapists my SAC and I went to, all of them specialists in sex addiction, to not refer to me as a co-addict, and to please read Your Sexually Addicted Spouse. It’s many years later, and to date, not a one of them actually has. Nor have any of them accepted Posarc’s self-coined term for ourselves as PoSAs, a respectful acronym that stands for Partner of a Sex Addict.
So now, we at Posarc are super excited that a long overdue change is afoot: the trauma model is being embraced on Dr.Minwalla’s website and at his full treatment center in California, which offers treatment and intensives for both the sex addict and his partner. We look forward to reviewing the facility there in person and will give you a full report just as soon as we do.
As a treat, here’s a small excerpt from the full article, linked here:
“Sex addiction-induced trauma is particularly acute around discoveries (finding out about sexual acting out, deception and relational violations), disclosures (being told about sexual acting out, deception and relational violations) and around the continued traumatic incidents that result from the presence of sexual addiction in an intimate relationship and family system. Partners often present with a set of symptoms that match symptoms similar to rape trauma syndrome (RTS) and complex post-traumatic-stress disorder (C-PTSD), including psycho-biological alterations, re-experiencing of the trauma, social and emotional constriction, constant triggering and reactivity, significant anxiety, emotional arousal and hyper-vigilance. Sex addiction-induced trauma is a highly specific type of trauma that involves nuanced symptoms that can include fear and panic of potential disease and contamination, fear of child safety and potential of child molestation, social isolation, embarrassment and shame, and intense relational rupture and attachment injuries.”
Please help spread the word by sharing this blogpost with your therapist, if you are seeing one. If you are in the process of seeking a therapist to work with, you are within your rights to insist they adhere to the trauma model as a condition of working with you as a client. And then, insist on it!
If the field of sex addiction is relatively new, the treatment of partners of sex addicts is in it’s infancy. But in time, when enough therapists have been mandated by their PoSA clients to utilize the trauma model, and when they see their professional peers practicing healing modalities based upon that model, the healing of PoSAs will truly begin.
I hope you’ve been encouraged by this piece of good news, something every PoSA could use a lot more of. But please know that wherever you’re at in your journey, we are here to encourage and support you in any way we can.
In gratitude, Lili