Therapy happens when the pain beneath your struggle is brought to the surface long enough to make new sense of the experience, grieve the loss, and move back into the courage of living a full life, risking being known and connected to others despite the awareness you may be hurt again. Therapy is a process of ownership of your story.

Sex & Porn addiction

What is an addiction? A compulsive relationship with a mood altering experience. How can a natural act such as sex or eating food be an addiction? some criteria indicating you may have a problem: increased tolerance, engaging in sex or with partners more than you intended despite increasing negative consequences, being preoccupied or persistent cravings for more, neglecting obligations such as work, school, or family to engage in sex, increased irritability when unable to pursue cravings.

Sex Addiction is not a label of disease to excuse or avoid the consequences of betrayed relationships or neglected obligations. Learning to own the responsibility of the devastating damage is part of the process. Freedom, authentic intimacy, and healing are possible if the individual wants to get well and the appropriate level of support is in place. CSAT treatment is an inclusive, sex positive approach that encourages healthy sexuality within the client’s values.

Recommended Reading for the Betrayer:

• Healing the Wounds of Sex Addiction, Mark Laaser

• The Voice of the Heart, Chip Dodd

• The Needs of the Heart, Chip Dodd

• Out of the Doghouse for Christian Men: A Redemptive Guide for Men Caught Cheating by Robert Weiss & Marnie Ferree

Recommended Reading for a Partner of sexual betrayal

• Your Sexually Addicted Spouse: How Partners can Cope and Heal, Barbra Steffens and Marsha Means

• Intimate Deception: Healing the Wounds of Sexual Betrayal by Sheri Keffer

• The Voice of the Heart, Chip Dodd

• The Needs of the Heart, Chip Dodd

Betrayal trauma

A betrayal trauma, relational trauma, or attachment injury occurs when one person betrays, abandons or refuses to provide relational support for another with whom he or she has developed a secure attachment bond. Attachment injuries are especially harmful because we are relational beings. Among other important needs, romantic partners implicitly expect and seek comfort, security, belonging, and mattering from one another. When a pattern of fulfilling attachment needs is established, a secure attachment bond forms with an implied trust each will be available to the other in a time of need. A betrayal of this trust shatters the one bond that is expected above all others and presents the betrayed with a message - you are all alone in this world.

Betrayed partners experience post traumatic stress:

Increased Anxiety - scanning the environment for potential danger, paranoia, insomnia, inability to concentrate, agoraphobia

Avoidance - blocking or denial of reminders, unable to remember some or all aspects of the event

Re-experiencing - reliving the event through invading thoughts, memories, flashbacks, and or nightmares

Increasing distress - intense anxiety impacting the daily functioning in multiple areas - work, social, and daily responsibilities

Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy

Individuals in relationship often protect against the felt absence of core attachment needs by use of interactions that promote even further disconnection. These individual patterns often began well before the romantic couple-ship ever formed. Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) helps couples identify their cycles of unproductive interaction, move below the surface of hostility, and experience authentic emotional connection by turning and expressing their core feelings and needs. The result is being known, acceptance, safety, belonging, and mattering. This is the makeup of a secure attachment. It is what we are hardwired to seek and thrive in.

Complex trauma

Complex trauma is a psychological injury referring to a course of multiple exposures to traumatic experience and the pervasive long-term effects that frame a persons life afterwards. Typically beginning in childhood, these traumas involve an attachment injury with a parent or a trusted care giver. Many have little control over their environment or no chance of escape. Complex trauma is not just - what happened, but more profoundly - what actions did not happen particularly by an attachment figure following a traumatic event. Complex trauma survivors do just that - survive with the resources afforded them to avoid facing the deep emotional betrayals and abandonment that has framed their negative view of self, others, and God. Survivors often suffer with post traumatic stress symptoms, including hyper-arousal defending against a constant threat of reliving their deepest fear - believing the sense of worthlessness, unlovable, defectiveness they carry inside - is true.

Treatment

EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing