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I’m interested to know if Dr Minwalla believes you can have a happy marriage after all this. My husband’s therapist believes we can and she has seen it in her own practice. THe marriages are ‘reframed’ and the couples are genuinly happy. At least this is what she says. I would love to know Minwalla’s views on this.
I’m sure he does think there is a chance of success Cat or why would he offer couples intensives? I imagine he is just very realistic about the long term success rate and since he deals with these people (and worse) day in and day out he probably has a pretty good idea about how many of them actually change and how much they change?
Knowing a poly is intermittent wouldn’t help with me. He hid the worst stuff and passed anyway. Since then, he’s said I asked if he was excited by pain, and he said no. In the test, he thought of the question as “was he excited when people caused him pain”, to which he easily answered “No”. He is, however, excited by pain inflicted on women. But the polygraph examiner didn’t ask him THAT WAY. Geez, if only I had thought of that. What use is a poly with this man?
I would be interested in also knowing if Minwalla believes in total success stories, or just status quo. My opinion is it would be status quo. Even if your h’s are able to learn to “manage” their addiction, (and I use the word manage-not recovery) there is always the chance of relapse just as there is in alcoholism or any other addiction. I think the spouse has to always be aware of that, and if they can live always waiting for the next ball to drop then that is what is right for them.
I do think having a personality disorder definitely complicates things and makes recovery or managing the addiction even more complicated and years involved of therapy.
lynng2-My Ex h also beat the polygraph. I married him based on the results. If they don’t feel guilty about what they are doing, or believe their own lies, they can pass with flying colors. Scary, huh?Sharron, my experience with Minwalla..which I guess is probably pretty common.. is that there isn’t any hope unless the underlying problems are faced. What he calls the ‘core wounding’ of the addict. Generally the childhood stuff. He says that not ‘acting out’ is really just the beginning of a long and tedious process. Which makes sense to me, though it’s depressing as all hell. The irony is that my SA went to several therapists for years and talked a lot about his batshit mother, but Minwalla says it’s likely he was doing it intellectually, but not really fully facing it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been as likely to have gone off to hooker town. xoxo
Minwalla uses a very reliable polygraph expert. It is the best in the field for SA. It is not 100%. Nothing is.
Minwalla is not totally convinced that this is an addiction. I don’t know much more than that. I think he believes in real happiness if the guy is serious about recovery and if the spouse can forgive and wants to be happy in the relationship.
I think we all forget at times that happiness is a choice. If I decide I am going to stay in my marriage and love my husband then I am going to choose happiness right along with that. Minwalla cannot predict that. People define happiness in personal terms. I might be very happy while someone else might be miserable. You define your own happiness. It is always a choice.
I won’t decide to give a shit unless I can be happy doing so. I haven’t decided that it is possible for me.
Exactly Annie….Minwalla treats the addiction to stop the behavior but the underlaying “trauma” must be treated. My H is now seeing a therapist for that at the urging of his CSAT. he has only ben twice so I don’t know how it will go. I truly believe that facing his childhood shit will be way more difficult than sexual sobriety.
Bev my husband has done that and it was really traumatic for him. Needs to be done though. Just be prepared for the stress before therapy sessions. My husband always felt better once they were over but he hated ‘dragging up that shit’ and talking about it over and over and was incredibly anxious beforehand. In revisiting a trauma they do so at the mental age at which the trauma occurred hence the difficulty with it as they don’t intellectualise (at first) it is just the raw emotion of a say 10 year old trying to deal with it.
He is better for it though in every way not just in treating SA but other anger issues with him that would make living and working with him very challenging.
I agree Bev about happiness being a choice and we do forget that because we have a trauma in our lives that was not brought about because of us. We feel we lose control of our lives and with that all sense that we can control our happiness as well.I can see that Cat. It makes sense. I don’t know that all these guys were “traumatized” but I would bet the farm it was true in most cases. Normal men do not do these things and boys are not born inherently “bad”. I also know tons of men have had abuse or whatever in their past and never took it out on anyone else. so, I have no clue what makes them go to sex as an addiction. My crazy doc truly believes that the sexual acting out is almost 100% symbolic of a sexual type trauma. It does not mean that he was truly sexually molested but he was exposed to something….
I can wrap my head around most of it. What I have yet to understand is the fact that this double life thing goes on and on and a grown man never seeks help on his own. …I do not understand that.
And yet another reason why I think my H’s therapist is mediocore – he focuses primarily are the present and near future and at least, according to my H., they don’t talk much about the past and what happened to him as a child.
I agree Bev that is hard to get your head around. But they don’t see that they have a problem when they can compartmentalise their bad behaviour and return home to their loving wife and children like nothing has happened. I don’t know how my husband did it but he did. We talk about it often how he could satisfy his compulsions and then completely forget about it. I would have expected that he would think about it over and over, relive it etc etc. but this just didn’t happen. He felt shame, he would put it out of his head and he would come home, embrace me, cook dinner like nothing had happened. Why he didn’t need help? Because I was never going to find out and like an addiction the last one was the last time they were going to do it. I don’t think he saw it as a problem or even cheating because there was no emotion involved and I was never going to find out. A parallel life that was working for him very nicely thank you very much. Bizarre.
Bev, Minwalla told him that he needs to ‘unplug’ from the relationship for six months..which basically means no communication between us at all, I guess. Because he said that SA is using the relationship as a way not to look at the core wounding stuff. Did Minwalla say anything similar to your h? Six months with no contact at all..not even email..seems easier said than done to me. (I know it’s different in your case because you’re not separated and still have kids at home, but I wondered if he mentioned this ‘unplugging’ thing at all to you.) xoxo
He didn’t Annie. I am guessing it is because that my H does not run from my anger or pain..??
Your H is having a tough time dealing with your anger/hurt. I assume it is because he is angry at himself but that’s another story. If your H is using your anger as an excuse for not doing his own work then he does need a time out.
I don’t know if that helps you any but if he gets stuck focusing on you then he cannot do any work on himself. I don’t know if you even care but I do know that if I was his therapist then I would tell him the same. To fix anything you must remove all excuses.
You both seem stuck. Maybe it is best to take a time out?
My H has not really delved into a lot of the childhood stuff so I may bail on him. He may bail on me and focus on himself. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t think a separation and no communicating is a bad idea for anyone in this hell. I cannot go full no contact because of kids but I could truly do no contact except kids no problem. We would of course see each other, no way around that.
The funny thing is Bev I don’t think the childhood trauma has to be that bad. I always believed there would have to be something catastrophic happen for a child to be affected into adulthood. As an example I would say having a drug addicted parent or an untimely death in the family. My husband’s trauma was his parent’s arguing. There are probably a million people walking around totally unaffected by their parents’ arguments. So there was arguing in his family, no affection or even interest from his father and little affection from his mother. His ‘affection’ for/from his mother came from washing her back in the bath and brushing her hair. So these things coupled with it taking place around late childhood early adolescence caused his rewiring.
As far as I was concerned I thought he had a happy childhood. I was aware there were arguments and he once hit his father to defend his mother but I had no idea that this and the covert incest (I was not aware of) would/could have such a profound affect on him. I guess he compartmentalised a lot of his childhood too and that is why revisiting it is so traumatic but sadly the trauma is there manifesting itself in depression, anxiety and SA. He was OK I would say until he hit his forties and then the depression hit and then sometime later the SA.
I would say it has been a good thing for him to have some understanding about why he is where he is now. It is traumatic to uncover the childhood stuff but well worth it to discover why they are the way they are and I am not just referring to SA. He will not bail on you. It is all part of his recovery and becoming a better person. xoIt’s a strange ball of wax Catherine. I don’t think anything happened to my h either ( like rape or molestation). I know his father was a mean drunk and his mother was a doormat. He never spoke of his childhood at all. His brother and sister and his mother shared most of it with me. That should have been a red flag for me. My H always just said ‘I don’t remember”. I did know that once when he was 12 he stopped eating and his mother took him to a therapist. His dad got angry so they didn’t go back. Something happened to him…I don’t know what. I can guarantee you that he is not going to enjoy talking about it.
I don’t think he will bail on me either. I am really all he has. That isn’t exactly what I wanted out of my husband. I wanted to think he loved me for me 🙂
No matter what anybody thinks about him, I know he is hurt by all of this. I know he is ashamed. I think he should be hurt and ashamed but it is sad to watch. He has potential to be a good person. he had the tools and the support and love. He never believed in himself if I am understanding any of this correctly. It’s sad.
That is not to excuse his behavior in any way. He is a smart guy. He knew what he was doing and he knew it was wrong on so many levels….
Hey, re: unplugging
I just want to say that without paying me thousands of dollars I have always said that the SA needs to be a apart from us in order to truly face his shit. I have always said we are a defocus.
Ha! I’m feeling very smug….but poor.I’ll bet there is something there. If he stopped eating something went on. I might have mentioned before that my husband’s mother left home for several weeks. The only reason she came home was because my husband wouldn’t eat. My husband can’t remember any of this.
Bev I have no doubt your husband loves you and he truly regrets and is ashamed about what he has done. If he could have his time back again there is no way he would have compromised you or the children and behaved so badly. They are manic when they are doing this and they think they will get away with it and for a very long time they do. I bet you anything he is just like my husband Bev. His shame is as deep as my trauma but he never minimises my pain. He acknowledges that what he has done is his fault only and I am not to blame. He acknowledges that he has had very poor role models (father and older brothers) but that is no excuse for what he did. He would say he is shocked by what he has done and to think back on it is very traumatic for him. He can’t believe what he has done. He says it is like 2 different people.I wrote a blog post once on an epiphany I had – one of those times that I just couldn’t wrap my head around how the hell he could be living two completely separate lives and do it so well. He’d gotten really good at hiding the shame. It was called boxes.
See imagine closet with a whole bunch of boxes stuffed in there. They are all different sizes some are at the front of the closet, some are buried at the back covered in dust. All of them have nice tight lids. When a man wants to deal with something he goes to the closet, rummages through it to find the right box, chooses a box and accomplishes whatever the box requires. Then he puts the lid back on, puts it back in the closet and shuts the door. If he wants a different box the whole process is followed again. The contents of one box are never allowed to see daylight or mix with the contents of any other box.
Then theres the woman. Picture not a closet but a giant storage room. There are shelves, everything is dusted and neatly organized in see through boxes and there are very few lids in sight. The woman knows where everything is, by area, shelf, box and position in the box. She walks regularly through the storage room cataloging stuff in her head. Multiple boxes are out on the work table at once. The important ones never get put away. She spends all day in there and checks things two or three times a night as well.
Because of this insane difference in our brains there is no real way we will ever be able to understand that male mentality. How they can take their jobs, their kids, their happy homes, us, and forget that we even exist while they do the most horrid disgusting things I will never get.
When my sa first started escalating and I called him out I asked him if he had even bothered to take off his wedding ring for the massage. He said no. So some whore is out there laughing her ass off at the fact that she’s snared yet another married man and seeing herself as the “trophy” winner and him as the pitiful waste of human space out there. He on the other hand didn’t get it when I laid that all out for him. They are so far gone they are oblivious to the details.
If you look into his closet…he loves porn and he loves me and those two worlds never even occupy the same space in his head. We’ve discussed it repeatedly. I have my box and the porn has its – and he only plays with one of us at a time.
It makes a person feel pretty worthless just to be the next toy sitting on the shelf waiting for their turn.
Good analogy Ann but I don’t think it is necessarily a male thing. Women can compartmentalise as well. I think for the most part women attach more meaning to sex. Men can just have sex and be satisfied with that. I don’t know why they just don’t masturbate.
As to the whore giving the massage. I would say the majority of her customers are married but that means little to her. The colour of the money is still the same married or notMy SA said all those supportive things to me too, at least in the first year. Not trying to scare you or anything, but to other people including his therapist, meetings, parents, friends — it was all a different story. Part of the double act that comes with fake recovery. I hope your husbands are sincere and truly recovering. I really do. Anyone seeing Minwalla I think has a much better chance.
Unplugging for 6 months… how would it affect you Annie? For me, I know that my hypervigilance and worry would be through the roof. I’d have to spy on him to know what he’s up to, because there would be no way I’d return to a “relationship” after 6 months of not knowing what he’s done and half a year of zero accountability. Everytime my SA has been on ‘his own’ he’s gone back to full time addiction life — porn 10 hours per day, etc… I fear 6 months of that would guarantee him going to hookers. How does Minwalla suggest you cope through that period? And after it?
As for trauma, my SA went to an event on the weekend, an American neuroscientist was in the country giving talks about the effects of porn on the brain. He said exposure to porn at a very young age essentially “rapes the brain”. My SA was exposed to it at age 7 by his dad. His parents never told him that they loved him, emotional neglect from his mother is now apparent. He was also in hospital a lot as a child. As far as I’m aware that’s his trauma. I do think something more must have happened, but I’ll likely never know. I don’t understand where the nudist obsession, voyeurism, exhibitionism stuff came from — everything I’ve read mostly points to sexual abuse, but he says no. Who knows. Rest assured, I don’t think about it much these days. Care a lot more about my own trauma.
Thanks, Bev. Yeah, your h seems to be able to fully confront your pain and anger at this point. Mine has days that he does, and other days..not so much.
Apropos of nuttin…and I guess everything.. there have been several people in the past who asked him if he was gay. And every now and then, I’ve wondered that myself. Not because he seems attracted to men, which he doesn’t at all, but I dunno. He’s got such a phobia around sex, and an erection problem, and apparently sexual experiences when he was young involved him shaking and having to go vomit afterwards. Not exactly the picture of someone you’d think would turn ‘sex addict.’ To his knowledge he doesn’t have any sex abuse or physical abuse in his past, just a cold and weirded-out mom. It’s all too exhausting to try to figure out what exactly is going on underneath. xoxo
Victoria, Minwalla didn’t really give me any ideas for coping with six months of no contact. And what you said about being hyper-vigilant.. I think my worry isn’t so much the hookers and skanks at this point, but the feeling that he seems to be so good at ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ But after 22 years with him, the thought of going half a year with no contact at all just seems weird to me. I guess that’s not very strong of me. But it’s hard to just switch off all caring. xoxo
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