Is Your Relationship Struggling After Sexual Addiction?
Sexual addiction is a part of a life that is marked by out-of-control sexual behavior and is often accompanied by denial, rationalization, minimizing, and lying. The effects on your relationship are devastating. Good individual recovery is not enough to help your relationship recover.
Couples Therapy for Sexual Addiction
The traditional model of healing from sexual addiction was that each partner would do their own healing work. However, individual recovery does not lead to a safe and secure relationship. At ECRC, we take a relationship-centered approach to recovery. Your relationship needs its own healing. Without the correct healing for your relationship, you and your spouse risk drifting apart despite your individual recovery efforts.
When Should We Begin Couples Recovery?
The short answer is a soon as possible. Integrating relationship work into recovery can start soon after individual recovery begins. Good recovery requires a team approach. Our therapists are trainied in addiction recovery, betrayal trauma recovery, and couples recovery. We provide a team approach to set you up for success. If you already have an individual therapist, we are also accustomed to working with therapists around the state to ensure that you get the care you need.
What’s the Plan for Couples Recovery after Sexual Addiction?
Couples recovery can feel like a confusing and overwhelming process. While there is a lot to manage, there is a road map to follow and a process that many couples before you have successfully navigated. To quote from Recovering Couples Anonymous couples recovery involves “each partner accept mutual responsibility for the problems or progress of the coupleship, and furthermore, that both recognize their own individual development and recovery as essential factors for couple recovery.” When addiction was present in your relationship, there was not mutual responsibility for the health of the relationship. Often the betrayed spouse was hoodwinked into thinking there was mutual responsibility while in reality they were holding the relationship together while their partner continued acting out. To counteract this imbalance the early phases of couples recovery can feel imbalanced with the former acting out spouse carrying most of the responsibility and weight. This imbalance is necsassry but not sustainable. Your therapist will work with yout through a proven plan to help safely bring mutuality and trust back to the relationship. For many couples the type of relationship they experience after recovery is the type of relationship that they have always wanted.
The Couple’s Path To Healing
Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for recovery. You can expect the couples recovery journey to take 3-5 years. The journey beings with bringing safety and stability back to the relationship. This part of the process involves learning empathy skills, discovery toxic patterns, and establishing routines and behaviors that demonstrate trustworthiness and predictability.
Once safety and stability have been restored your couples therapist will help you through a formal healing process and help you find productive and safe ways to grieve the losses that addiction has caused and process the raging anger that right now seems like it may never go away.
As you grow through this healing process your therapist will guide you through emotionally healing, connection, trauma integration, family of origin issues and when appropriate sexual reintegration therapy.
What To Look for In a Couples Sexual Addiction Recovery Therapist
The International Institute for Trauma & Addiction Professionals (IITAP) is an organization responsible for training and certifying Certified Sexual Addiction Therapists (CSAT) and the Certified Couples Betrayal Recovery Therapist (CCBRT). The CSAT and CCBRT designations are recognized throughout the addiction recovery communities as an experts in the field of sexual recovery. Matthew Driggers is an LPC and holds the CSAT and CCBRT designation. He stays active in the IITAP community to continue to increase and maintain his knowledge to better serve his clients.
Welcome To The Other Side: Freedom from Sexual Addiction
The other side of sexual addiction is discovering a calmer, more ordered world. Your relationship is new. What once was a place of chaos and trauma becomes a place of safety and security.
The background music of life doesn’t have to be a symphony of anxiety, anger, shame, and grief. The journey to that other side may seem unreachable at the moment but with hard work and the right support healing is possible.