The metaphor of the iceberg is often used in psychology as it helps to demonstrate the things that are happening invisible for the eye but that have a driving force on our behavior and emotional state. As with the iceberg there are only 20% of its volume visible on the surface, and the rest of the 80% are underneath the waterline invisible. The same happens with our deep internal processes. In this post I am scuba-diving underneath the waterline to explore and explain the processes and different levels within the personal iceberg of the betrayer. Trying to give an answer to the question of almost all betrayed partners “why and how could my partner do this?”
The different layers of the personal iceberg – a short overview
If we dive way down to the most profound part of the iceberg we will find a level of trauma. This trauma is the basement of the iceberg and at the same moment the basement where the addictive behavior starts. Above that we will find two levels that impact the shaping of our concepts of gender and of sexuality. Those form part of the trauma base, and as they are really important for the construction and development of the CES (Compulsive Entitled Sexuality) they will be handled separately in this post. Diving up the iceberg we will then find the construction of the Self, based on and impacted by the trauma layers. This layer is divided into three parts, sexuality, gender and personality. Here we will understand how those three parts of the Self are impacted by the childhood and growing up experiences. We will also understand why they are building the layer that leads to the addictive behavior. Leaving this level, we are above the waterline and we can breathe again without artificial help. Right above the waterline we will find the clinical symptoms that manifest for the diagnosis of addictive behavior. Two of those symptoms are the CES (Compulsive Entitled Sexuality) and the IAD (Integrity Abuse Disorder) . Together they build the Deceptive Sexuality, the impact of those behaviors within the betrayed partner. I have talked about those two parts in my last posts – Let´s now talk about the deeper layers of the betrayer and what has happened for him underneath the water line and why that is part of the construction of his addictive behavior.
As we now have a first idea of the iceberg and what to expect, let´s put on our diving gear test if we have enough air in our bottles and then jump in the water to explore the layers that we can find there with more detail and try to make sense out of them. If you feel like you are having problems to breathe please go back on the surface and take some air, because we are starting to look into trauma and our brains really don’t like trauma. So, it is absolutely okay to make a pause, take some air and breathe and if you are ready, you can go back under the water and continue to explore what is going on there. Just be gentle with yourself on this journey.
The Trauma base
Make sure your diving gear works and you are wearing your wetsuit! If so, take courage and jump in the water. Slide down on the side of the iceberg, taking in the different colors, forms and shapes the iceberg has underneath the surface and observe also how it gets darker while you dive deeper. If you need to, you might turn on your light so you can see better what is going on down here. Once you get at the end of the iceberg you can stop diving deeper. You might take a look upwards towards the surface and see how big the iceberg is and how far away you are from the surface and the air that you can breathe so easily when you are up there.
We are in front of the deepest layer of your personal iceberg. This layer has been started to be built in your early childhood. It is created by your nervous system and the information your nervous system needs to feel safe and the environment that surrounded you in your early childhood years. The mixture of those two aspects created for you the reality of your learning experience and the construction of your feeling safe or not and your needs being met or not. We are talking here about your biological factors, meaning the construction of your nervous system and what triggers it and what makes it feel safe on the one side and the reality of what the world and especially your family, your parents and other important family members have offered you. The questions here are, was it a safe environment for your nervous system or not? Did they create for you a safe attachment or not? I am not only talking about a physical feeling of safety, but I am also talking about the emotional feeling of safety. Did your parents or caregivers have been available for you when you needed them or not? Did they offer you a safe physical environment where you could grow up in or not? Have they been available for you emotionally when you needed them or not? Have they helped you understand your emotions or not? Have they helped you express your emotions in a healthy and relational way or not? Those are some of the questions that come into play in this deep level of the iceberg.
Attachment
Let me talk a moment about attachment. For a psychologist it is a term that is well known but I have learned with my clients, that most people do not have a clear understanding of what attachment really is. And that is okay. When we are born we need a connection to our parents or caregivers for the simple fact of survival. A newborn baby is unable to survive without the help of an adult person. So nature helps us a little bit and exposes hormones in the baby and in the mother (and partly in the father) to help create this important bond or relationship. It makes it easy for us to connect and create this important first connection that helps us survive. So that the newborn can connect and trust his or her parents and that the parents are receiving this new being in their family and integrate it. Once we have created this first bond the baby learns over time if his or her parents are physically and more important emotionally available for him or her. And that is where the child builds the deep relationship and the structure of how to relate to people and to the world. This first deep relationship is called attachment. It is the neurologically imprinted structure of how to relate and when to feel safe.
It depends on the presence and availability of the parents or caregivers if the child can build a safe or an unsafe attachment. If the parents are present with consistency in a way that really suits and calms the nervous system of the child, it will create a safe attachment system. If the parents are not consistently present and with that not really helping the child´s nervous system to feel safe, the child will create an unsecure attachment system. Which means there are needs that are not met and it will feel unsafe around people, it will feel unsafe in the world and it will feel unsafe with him or herself in some moments. It does not mean that we have a child that is unable to function. It means that there are moments when the child will not feel safe and it will figure out a way to feel safe or to soothe the pain that this unsafety provokes within his nervous system.
As we are living in a world that has a lot of expectations towards our performance and lifestyle, most of us will have experienced the absence of at least one of our parents during our upbringing. That parent was not available because it had to work and bring back the money so the family can live a decent life in this world. Often the reality is also that both parents have to work which means the child is often alone and has nobody to help him or her understanding the world and him or herself. As it is not only one situation, but it is the repetition of this feeling that the child has to face the challenges of the world alone. Over time it creates a trauma within the child’s nervous system. A pain that is growing slowly within the child. And as there is not a parent really available to help understand and regulate this pain, it puts it away in a place where it no longer hurts. The pain is not dealt with; it is just stored away. That is the beginning of the construction of the deepest level of the trauma. It is also the beginning of the construction of the self, the self-awareness and the self-esteem. If I do not have a safe attachment experience how can I have a safe and secure construction of myself? That is where the whole story of the trauma starts. Now let´s see if we can make some meaning of why a person ends up being a sex addict?!
Complex Gender Shaping
Let´s dive towards the water level a little bit. We are still watching the area of the iceberg that is holding the complex trauma shaping. We are looking into the part of the gender construction and how it is affected by the family and the society. Before we try to understand the complex trauma shaping in the gender construction let´s take a closer look at what the word gender actually means, so we have a common understanding of it.
The word “gender” originates from the Latin word “genus,” which means “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” It was commonly used in Latin to classify nouns into different categories based on their grammatical gender. In Latin grammar, nouns are classified as either masculine, feminine, or neutral, and this distinction influences the agreement of adjectives and pronouns.
The concept of gender as a sociocultural construct is more recent and developed in the 20th century. It emerged as a way to understand and discuss the social roles, behaviors, and identities associated with being male or female. The term “gender” was adopted to differentiate between biological sex, which refers to the physical and physiological characteristics that typically define males and females, and gender, which encompasses the cultural and social aspects associated with being masculine or feminine.
Today, the term “gender” is widely used to discuss the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of masculinity and femininity. It has expanded beyond the binary understanding of gender as male or female and includes a broader spectrum of gender identities, such as non-binary, transgender, and genderqueer.” (extracted from https://symbolgenie.com/origin-of-the-word-gender/)
So what we are looking at here in terms of gender is the understanding of the socio-cultural construction of being male (or female, but as we are trying to understand the iceberg of the betrayer we will focus on the male part). On that behalf I often ask my clients “how many hours did you sit in school or university and learn, or talk about what the meaning of being a man is?”, obviously the answer is always none. Which means we are not talking about the conscious construction of being male in our lives or within the society we live in. And at the same moment our family, our parents and the society give us constantly information about what it means to be a man. Most often those are stereotypes and they are not always really accurate or even healthy. Some of those stereotypes around masculinity are:
- Do not cry or openly express your emotions
- Do not show weakness or fear
- Demonstrate power and control (especially over women)
- Be aggressive and dominant
- Be a protector
- Do not be “like a woman”
- Be heterosexual
- Do not be “like a gay man”
- Be tough-athletic-strong and courageous
- Make decisions on your own and do not rely on the help of others
- View women as objects (especially sexual objects)
- Always want sex and get as much as possible
- View intimacy and love as feminine
- Marriage defines a woman as property (to be owned by the man)
We probably heart that kind of phrases or stereotypes when we grew up and they shaped us in specific ways. Tony Porter calls this shaping the “Man-Box”. Where men have to behave in a way that fits the stereotypes. If you are acting outside of the “man-box” you lose your membership of being a man! And who wants to be excluded from that club? That is scary, to say the least. So we adapt to the stereotypes and integrate them. Even when deep inside of us, they do not fit. Plus, as I have mentioned earlier, we do not really talk about the meaning and construction of what it means to be a man. So, we also do not have a model to compare with or do something differently with the construction. I grew up in a family where my mother watched out that me and my brothers do not become a prototype of a man out of the “Man-Box”. But I learned enough of the rules and stereotypes outside of my family. And I really started to look into my personal “Man-Box” when I did the training with Dr. Minwalla, who opened my eyes towards the question of what it means to be a healthy man!
The interesting thing here is that we are exposed to it and we are not really given a choice of what we want that our gender construction of being a man will look like. We have to integrate what the society is giving us. Which includes next to the stereotypes I have mentioned earlier, the repression of emotions. So men have huge difficulties expressing their emotions. The other big reality or truth is, that the sexuality of men is shaped through their gender construction. So the things I said earlier about stereotypes connected to the sexuality are creating the base of the construction of the sexual self-image of a man. And as you easily can see it inflates the ideas of entitlement which we see in the CES of sex-addicts.
You might ask “why does Dr. Minwalla put the gender construction into the level of trauma shaping?”. I would say it is a very fair question. And the answer is that a lot of the stereotypes are harmful and not healthy on a personal level and especially not on a relational level. Men are exposed to those stereotypes without the possibility to question them or to make sense out of them. Even when they do not fit their internal experience, they have to adapt to them so that they are not excluded from the “man-club”. On a very deep level (like the deep level of the iceberg!) they are constantly harmed and forced to adapt to a gender construction that might not even express their true nature, that might not even fit them. If that is not traumatic for a person, then I don´t know what it is. And again it is a process over time, where a young boy or a young man has no possibility to escape, he is exposed to it and has to integrate and adapt to it. Because the possibility of questioning it implements automatically the high possibility of exclusion. In a moment of building the self-understanding and self-construction, there is no possibility to feel excluded. Men are already so unsecure about themselves during that episode, they cannot just leave the “man-club”, it is way too scary for them so they integrate the stereotypes and try to fit in to be a member of the club.
I will stop our journey here so that we all can swim up to the surface and sit with the information for a bit. Just talking about deep attachment wounds and the reality of the construction of being a man, is a lot of information. We will continue our diving and exploring experience with the next post, where we will look into the Sexuality and body shaping, the two other layers of the complex trauma shaping. So take a good rest and we will continue briefly with the next diving day.
Gundolf