Imagen yourself, your partner and your children sitting around the table and having a meal together, a normal family situation. You are laughing and talking and eating, sharing a beautiful family moment together. You have built this house, together with your partner including the dining room you are sitting in at this moment. Both of you designed it and you have put a lot of time, money and energy in it to make it home, your home.
At this moment you have no idea, that your partner has built a secret basement underneath your home. He is the only one that knows about this room and he is the only one that has access to it, because he knows where the door is and he is the only one who has the keys to enter this room. He is also the only one that knows what is going on downstairs and who else is in that room.
Later you will find out, that it is not any kind of basement where you store a good wine in it, you will learn that it is a secret sexual basement. You will find out that your partner has a secret sexual life apart from the intimate relationship he has with you. He never talked with you about it, he kept it a secret, something he hid from you. For some reason (we will get to that later, but for now we will put it into an area of not knowing) your partner has created this secret basement. And you and your children are sitting on top of it, not knowing that it exists.
Discovering the secret sexual basement
One day you will discover that in your house exists a door that is unknown for you. You will discover that it leads into a basement because the door is open and you can sneak a view into this room. You are shocked that this room exists in the first place and more than that what is inside this room. You do not want to believe what you discovered. Because if you believe it, it means that your world as you have known it, will crash completely. You are scared of that possibility and you avoid it to be true. You start asking your partner a lot of questions like: what is going there?, what is this room about? and why do you not know about the existence of this room? You have a million more questions and he is trying to avoid answering those questions. And if he answers them you will only get very vague responses and information. You will accept the answers he is giving you because you love him and you trust him and he says he loves you and cares about you. So why would he lie to you? If you would have known at this moment what you will learn some months or years down the road, you will have every reason of not trusting him. Because you will learn that your partner has a sex addiction and that part of it is lying, manipulating and gas lighting to cover up and protect the secret sexual basement he has built.
The big “Why-Question”
You probably already have this big “why-question” in your head. A question that all betrayed partners have. Why did he do that? Why could he do this to me and to our children? He says he loves me, why would he …? Those two worlds do not fit together! And the answers you will give yourself are even more disturbing and more painful than the question itself. And the worst part of it is, that your partner can not answer those questions either, because he has no idea why he did what he did. He does not even know that he is a sex addict (and once you bring it up he will fight against it and will deny it). He has no answers to all those deep questions. He has already problems to answer questions like “in April of 2018 did you went on that business trip with your acting out partner?”.
Understanding the existence of the secret sexual basement
To understand the existence of the secret sexual basement we have to understand three things. What is the origin of the sex addiction? What are the two mechanism that govern the sex addiction and with that maintain the secret sexual basement? So let´s try to shine some light on those questions.
Origin of sex addiction
Let start with the origin of the sex addiction. In simple terms it is complex trauma shaping during the childhood and adolescence. When I use the term trauma I am not talking about abuse or domestic violence, I am talking about moments when you have been rejected, refused, discriminated, devalued and so on, on the level of your body, your gender, your sexuality, your person or the ideas and dreams you had. Each of those situations in itself will not be traumatizing for the psyche, it will hurt and be painful. But if you receive a certain information over and over again that forms over time a trauma base within you. A container that is filled up with moments of pain and rejections. The amount of those moments form over time what is called a complex trauma. It is the collection of situations that have been painful to deal with during our childhood and growing up. We have been exposed to those situations without a possibility to escape them or to do something constructive with them. Most often the only possibility we have had, was to store them deep inside of us, inside of our systems. Imagen the amount of pain and rejection you have stored throughout those early 20 years of your life. It is a lot of pain!
What can you do with this pain? When you step into it, it is overwhelming and unbearable. You continue with your life and once in a while you are in situations that are similar to what you have experienced in your childhood and adolescence and your brain remembers the pain and all the bad feelings around that situation. You still do not have an answer to that pain. Two interesting things happen during growing up. One is, we get into puberty and we discover our own sexuality. It feels great and the most important thing is, it lets us forget for a moment or a short time, all the pain. So, whenever this pain creeps back into our system and in our memory our brain has a positive response to it: sexuality.
The Neuroscience behind it
Neurologically spoken it is a huge Dopamine-kick that we receive from sexuality. It is very similar to injecting drugs into your body, with the difference that we are having the drugs in our own body available, constantly. The neuro-receptors that are occupied are actually the same. Our brain learns that we can escape the tremendous pain from our childhood by sexual activity. And we use it over and over again and our brain creates an addiction towards sexuality. Our brain starts to “need” sexuality to soothe ourselves. And we seek it more and more often, as a drug addict is seeking drugs to soothe himself. It will not happen after our first or second sexual experience, but over time our brain learns to use sexuality to calm the pain. And it turns into a compulsive sexuality. Compulsive means that it is very difficult to control it. It starts to become its own dynamic. And the brain uses the sexuality as a firefighter, whenever the pain raises it goes to acting out, using sexuality to stop the fire (the pain within us).
Entitlement and man-box
The next thing that comes in very “handy” to the addiction, is the rights men have. We grow up in societies that favor men. They have better jobs and they still earn more money than women in the same position, in the families they receive a different treatment with privileges, till this day they have more freedom around sexuality. Men grow up in a society that teaches them to be entitled, to have more rights and to have more power. I could write a whole blog about the injustice that is happening there (and I will write about it!), but this is not the topic here. I hope you are getting the point of this reality.
Men (not all of them, but many) believe they have a right to have sex. And that believe comes out of the entitlement society teaches them. With that entitlement men express and live their sexuality in a certain way. They do not ask their partner if it is okay to watch pornography and masturbate, they just do it. And with that you have the first part of the sex-addiction covered: entitled compulsive sexuality. An addict experiences his sexuality and his need to express sexuality from an internal place of entitlement and they have a compulsivity that comes with their sexuality, meaning they are not really able to stop this behavior and they act out on their need of soothing their nervous system that is flooded with pain and their childhood trauma.
Integrity Abuse Behavior
This is the first mechanism or problem of the sex-addiction. The other problem is the integrity abuse that the addict uses to cover up his secret sexual basement. The lying, gas lighting, manipulating, lying by omission, blaming the partner or the relationship and so on are the tools to protect his acting out. This behavior also does not come by chance, it has in general a history and a time line.
Men that use integrity abuse behaviors have learned very early in their childhood a very important survival tool: they learned when they did something that their parents or teachers does not like and they tell the truth about what they did, there will be negative consequences which included often punishment. One day they took the courage to not tell the truth and the punishment and negative consequences did not follow. So they had a very positive experience about lying. They tried that the next time again and the result was equally positive. So they are learning if I do not tell the truth I am better off. The few times their parents find out that they were lying, and the punishment they received in that moment is far less painful then the punishment they received when telling the truth. It is actually a mathematical solution for their survival problem. They learned to lie because it was over time less painful then telling the truth.
As sexuality in general is not a topic that is talked openly about or discussed at our dinner table we already have a huge bias in terms of secrecy around this topic. If an adolescent had learned as a child to lie it is easy to connect those two things. My sexuality is my very private and internal life and nobody has access to it, so if somebody asks me about my sexuality I will lie about it. The connection of compulsive entitled sexuality and integrity abuse behavior is starting to build and getting stronger with every time they are showing up.
The two-part problem
When this person starts an intimate relationship they bring in their luggage two behaviors: compulsive entitled sexuality (CES) and integrity abuse disorder (IAD). They learned to lie and with that they can cover up their secret sexual basement. They go downstairs whenever the pain is to overwhelming and they have enough tools to cover up the secrecy. Sex-addiction does not fall from the sky; it is an accumulation of situations and learning experiences that shape over time the behavior. CES and especially IAD are learned responses to life threatening situations (for the interpretation of the nervous system) that are so deeply rooted in the behavior system of the betrayer that they are not aware of what is happening. They are aware of the sexual acting out, but they are not aware of the circumstances that trigger this action. And they are for quite some time not aware of the entitled integrity abuse behavior.
Being in a relationship with a sex-addict means to be in front of those two problems simultaneously. The difficulty with that is, that the betrayed partner and the children are not aware of what is going on. We can actually go back to the beginning of this blog because that is the reality the family is experiencing and living until the discovery hits them.
Imagen yourself, your partner and your children sitting around the table and having a meal together, a normal family situation. You are laughing and talking and eating, sharing a beautiful family moment together. You have built this house, together with your partner including the dining room you are sitting in at this moment. Both of you designed it and you have put a lot of time, money and energy in it to make it home, your home. At this moment you have no idea, that your partner has built a secret basement underneath your home. … You remember this from the beginning of the blog and I hope it makes more sense now as you have read about the two part problem and the childhood experience that lead to childhood trauma and that acting out is a solution to survive the internal pain – to be very clear here: this is not an excuse for all the things that has happened and the pain and trauma it produces in the betrayed partner and the children! It is the intent to give a first answer to the huge “Why-Question”. Every sex-addict has to find his own personal story and understand it and own it, so that he can answer this question to his partner.
The Betrayer is also a human being
This was a journey into the secret sexual basement of the betrayer and the mechanisms that are behind the construction and the maintenance of it. I hope that it makes sense and that it also helps to put the betrayer in a place of a human being that has been exposed to very difficult situations and that he is also a person that needs help to overcome the sex addiction. Betrayers are often labeled as monsters and insensitive but they are actually living a very difficult life with very little tools to be relational. Over the years I have seen those “monsters” transform into very sensitive human beings that can be actually in a functioning, safe, healthy and honest relationship. It is a long journey for both of them and it requires a lot of hard work and dedication especially on the side of the betrayer. From my experience of working with betrayers, sex-addicts, abusers or whatever label you want to give them – for me they are very wounded human beings -, it is worth it.
Wishing you a wonderful day and looking forward to connecting with you through the next blog. Your comments and suggestions are more than welcome!
Gundolf