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This has been a VERY interesting thread and maybe one that we need to spend much more time on? I have read it and re read it. I think that BOTH JoAnn and March are onto something. These men DO NOT make it easy to leave. They don’t just run off with some bimbo and give us all a break. At the same time. they CANNOT force us to stay and March is correct about that too, so obviously we play a part in our own captivity? I guess that is the area we really need to focus on….why do we do that?
Bonnie, hold strong dear girl. They are predators and they can “sense” a change on the wind. He doesn’t love you and he doesn’t appreciate you. How do I know that? Because LOVE does NOT look like that. Hang in there.. Karen x
Stockholm syndrome is real within abusive relationships. Google it, it’s definitely a possible variable.
I think we also eventually get tired of it all. We reach a point where that’s it. I’m not eating another piece of this shit pie.
Stockholm syndrome is now commonly called trauma bonds or betrayal bonds.
I see my son doing it now with his dad. He feels like he has to keep dad happy so dad won’t get more upset and terrorize us. He has learned he doesn’t have a voice (thanks to the legal system and his dad’s lack of empathy). He qualifies anything that he thinks will upset his dad (like getting off the phone b/c he has friends over) with “I’m so sorry…I know you won’t like this but…”. Instead of taking care of himself, he is more worried about dad’s feelings.
Harmony I love what you wrote. Your name really fits you, I love all your posts, very helpful to me!
Love, Nap
Yes, Trauma Bonds have been discussed before, in fact I wrote a piece about it on the married site two years ago:
http://marriedtoasexaddict.com/do-partners-of-sex-addicts-experience-trauma-bonds/
The complexity of all of this makes my head spin. I guess humans are so varied in their experiences, personalities and skill sets that sometimes I get frustrated and think that maybe we shouldn’t even try to analyse it all.
Sometimes it makes my brain hurt.
But, I guess that is what we do. We seek knowledge. We need answers to make sense of the things we don’t understand.
If humans stopped trying to find answers and solutions we would still be swinging in the trees and picking fleas off of each other.
So keep those ideas flowing.
I agree this thread is important.
We are on to something here.
We are always on to something.One thing I always have troubled with is any model of understanding that reduces my love that I gave my husband for 30 years, to some kind of pathology. I have to resist that one.
If I had known what was going on and continued to love that way, well I might understand some concern there. But I didn’t know, and the few times we sought help for things that I now see are related to the emotional incest etc, neither the therapist nor the psychiatrist was even close to nameing any of it accurately. And when I raised questions that in hindsight are EXACTLY the questions to be asking, I was reprimanded by the “professionals” for interfering.
So I’m really not going to stand around now and have my love pathologized by the same assholes that missed absolutely EVERYTHING, so they can blame me.
ps, Bonnie.
Hold steady and plan your way out. I’m very sorry it’s come to this, but you deserve a life, a real life.
Diane.xoAnd Amen, Diane, from me too. Sometimes I get all conspiracy-theory-minded about the weird way partners of sex addicts are viewed. I envision Carnes and the Carnes clones like misogynists who simply can’t envision that anything could possibly be all the damn man’s fault, and who have to pass the buck on to ‘those silly weak feeble women.’ Piss on that. xoxo
Nap, thank you for your kind words, I am also very impressed by your stories/posts, I am still waiting for the rest of your story, and for some of your especially beatufiul poem, as I had mentioned everyone here is so impressive and so special in one way or another.
Bonnie: like everyone else, I encourage you to plan and be cautious as I am sure he is going to play some other games once he knows you have decided to leave.
Yes I think this thread is very interesting and very powerful, with all this brain storming we are going to come up with something, a model, a system to figure out all this madness which maybe can help other sisters who will be coming along, my thoughts on what happen after discovery that it is a process, imagine going through a major accident, a plane crash ( like nap had said) you come off the plane alive but with such major accident, you break your bones, you sustain cuts and hard blows to your inner organs, you are bleeding everywhere and when they rescue you the ambulance takes you to the nearest hospital there it will take many hours for the doctors to stop your bleeding wounds, get your bones back together, you will be in the operating room for hours and hours, and after that your body is so weaken and so shaken you can not even stand on your own feet, you can not eat, you can not even pee, it will take a long time to heal, to learn again how to stand, how to walk, how to eat, this process of healing and rehabilitation may take months and sometimes even years for some people depends on the extent of the injuries and what kind of shape they were in before the accident, imagine on the top of all that physical disability, the amount of anxiety, pain, frustration you experience through the process of healing.
I think that trauma of discovering ( and ofcourse i am not coming up with anything new here as the trauma model had been talked about extensively on this site) that your h had a secret life, that he is a completely different person than the person you all along had thought he is, that he lied, cheated, and exposed you and your beloved children to the most dangerous situations emotionally and even physically, remmeber that discovery day and the shock you felt going through your entire body, well that shock is as severe as being in a car rack, or even a plane crash, many of you here had mentioned how they go for days where they physically so weak they can not even get out of body not alone shower or go on in life , I think the trauma of betrayal is even more severe because with those emotional traumas you sustained, these kind of traumas are invisible, nobody can see them as such nobody can offer the help and support you deserve when you are in this situation, not the medical system, not your friends not your family, it is all in your head and nobody can see the extent of pain you are experiencing, the broken bleeding heart, the fears, the madness the confusion, nobody could see how your soul was shattered into million pieces by all the lies and deceit you had lived with for so many years, how could they see any of it, it is all inside you and it is all crazy, it is unbelievable, you cannot even yourself wrap your head around the extent of madness that your husband has gone through, so how can you ask others to even understand, only people like ourselves here who has gone through such trauma can understand what you are going through, but out there in the world you are alone, you are trying to figure with whatever shreds of life left in you to understand what happened to you, you are trying to make sense of the nonsense, and you realize the dangerous situation you are in, then you are trying to protect yourself and your children from this mad man, your husband and their father, but yet just because of the women we are , kind loving and compassionate, we even try to extend our empathy and love to our own predators, we do that not because we are afraid of them so I really don’t agree with the that trauma bond theory we extend our love to those predators because we care, we had cared and loved them for so long so how can we now when we realized that they are so sick how can we think that it will be easy to switch that flip and stop caring and loving them just like that, it is not possible, you can not switch over night to hating those men and wanting to hurt them, our nurturing loving nature prevent us from doing that, we think wrongly that if we keep loving them and holding the lights for them that they will get better, they even themselves play that game along, they make you feel responsible for them that only if you stay in their lives that they will get better and they throw those little chicken bones for you here and there to keep you hanging, but then they go back to their old selves and they try to push you off the mountain after the plane crash( like Nap had said so eloquently) and you go through another shock, you just cannot believe how when you are trying to help that man who caused that plane crash in the first place and tried to kill you but yet you moved on for the sake of your children and tried to help him to get better, that he is now trying to push you off the cliff, how could such ugliness exist in this orderly universe you believed and trusted all along, it is crazy, it is shocking again and again, but they will do this to you again and again and again, the shock doubles and triples and the dramas will never end with those men, but you get weak, you have been to start with weakened by years of emotional abuse ( I am convinced that each one of us here had suffered over the years with those men a terrible emotional abuse and neglect, as I am sure with their long addiction they were not giving you the normal love and attention that you needed) and then the shock of the betrayal, and then the shock of gross treatment and pushing you away when you are trying to help, your body, soul, heart, brain suffer a major trauma that you are not going to recover from simply overnight, or in few weeks or months, it will take you years I think to get over all this, to heal your body and soul from all this cruelty that you have been exposed to by being associated with those dangerous crazy men who had deceived you for so long, and while the majority of the work has to be done by you, but you still need that professional help, you still need the love and support you can get from your family and friends ( if you dear to share all this ugliness that your own husband has been committing, ) and of course the love and support you get here on this site, but the most important source of love and support you have to count on is within yourself, you have to become your self-friend and advocate, you have to love, admire and appreciate every single thing you have been trying to do no matter what it is , whether you are trying to rebuild the relationship with your h, or trying to get away from him, it is you and only you who can really help to heal and mend those deep wounds you had sustained, because unfortunately only you can see and feel those wounds, so you cannot hope for any doctor or nurse to suture those wounds or put medicine on them because they cannot really see them very well, and while they can put you on some antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine to help you some, but these medicine you know very well will not mend that broken heart of yours, so honor that heart, honor that soul, honor that mind, honor the beauty within you because you sisters are very special group of women, very unique human beings and not many people like you out there with your special abilities to even extend a helping hand to your own predators.
Harmony, I think you covered a whole lot of stuff really well. You must have so much spinning around in your head for all to come spilling out.
I have to say, though everyone may not be tied to their spouse through trauma bonds, I think I was. I was trapped with him because of the financial situation- I gave up my training and have a son that needs homeschooling- and because I have no nuclear family and what family I have is thousands of miles away as are my closest friends. My dear ol’ hubby knew this and so every time I tried to assert myself or ask for something for me, he would threaten divorce. So I went into counseling and got him to come along some of the time. He was told to stop with the threats, but he never did. Anytime I stood up to him, he would start packing his bags, so I would say I was sorry and could we go back to counseling now? Well, I don’t need to fill in how counseling went as many of you suffered similar situations. I was a hostage, and I had to keep my captor happy in order for my kids to have a future. I struggled with it, I don’t think I ever totally identified with him, a la Pattie Hearst, but that fear kept me in my place and trying to make it work. My needs were never really part of the picture- everything was about keeping him happy. It made it hard for me to see how much of myself I had given up and how damaging his delusions were to my self esteem.
Six months later, I am out from under his spell. The bonds are broken, and I can truthfully say that he never deserved me or my family or our life together. I don’t just know it, I can feel it in every part of my body. Those bonds were oppressive and now that they are gone, I feel lighter and more free than I can remember ever feeling.
Harmony you just blow me away—you got it all there. I was with you every word. It’s just like that–what you said, brilliant, compelling, true, ugly, true.
Thank you Harmony, I agree with what Diane said you describe our lives and trauma brilliantly.
Love, Nap
Wow, harmony.. That is so powerful and heartfelt and true that I wish it could be in a book available to every single woman who’s going through this. Bless you for writing that. xoxo
Annie, I think we should write that book together, each one of us will write a chapter, I think it will be a great book to helo guide and save the future generation, our daughters,,sons,,,from this misery we had lived through,,,through the collective wisdom of all the women here on SOS, we can really leave a legacy, true solutions to a widely spread and scary epidemic, the addicition to materialism in its most ugly forms.
I’m not sure I knew you were writing a book JoAnn but put Harmony’s post in it! She said everything I wish I could. I need to go back and read every post on this topic again. They are all so good.
I don’t know if it’s pride or just denial but I cannot seem to get “closure” because I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that my H of 19 years never gave a shit about me. It hurts every part of my body ( true physical hurt) to think about it…From the Patio of Bev!
Considering ordering some of those cute little notes that actually say that … Instead of ” from the desk of..”
Joann that is great you are writing a book,,what would that book be about,,,
Bev I have been along this road for a while now,,you are going to get where you need to get in time,,and i am sure you are going to tell your own story and post in a birilliant way about your own experience and how you handled this trauma,,you just need time,,so give your self the time,,honor your wonds and pain by allowing your self to heal in the right way,,,
loveThe married site was started both as a site to help partners, and also as a source of information for the book(s).
The books are in the works and will hopefully challenge the misconceptions about Sex Addiction and offer solid, helpful information for partners.
Over the last five years I have gathered enough information for at least five books.
My eBooks are kind of the overflow, the detailed information on a particular subject that is much too extensive to fit into just one chapter in a book.
I have my own publishing company and have accounts with the major printers that work with Amazon as well as all the major distributors in over 300 countries.
Your voices will be heard. I promise! ~ JoAnn
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