If you are the partner of a porn addict, you probably feel betrayed. You may not define it as betrayal but you do know that his pornography use and his choice to hide it from you doesn’t feel good at all. Actually, it feels worse than just “not good”.
What is betrayal?
An example of betrayal in the context of porn addiction is your husband seeking sexual satisfaction through pornography and masturbation outside of your marriage and hiding it from you. The lying has eroded your trust in him. And, it’s the actions that he takes to engage with pornography that make it (and not you) the number one priority in his life.
In a sense, he has been unfaithful to you. It’s devastating to know that he didn’t trust you enough to tell you what was really going on. Maybe he knew he had a problem or maybe he didn’t…but he knew that he wasn’t being open and honest with you.
Knowing that he can and did hurt you, creates significant loss in your relationship that you will need to grieve in order to heal from the betrayal.
Exploring the loss
At the core, betrayal causes a loss of the relationship that you thought you had. Your husband…the person who vowed to keep you safe and to love you with an intenseness never known before…hid his pornography addiction from you and caused devastation in your life.
His actions and choices do not feel like love and they do not make you feel safe. You should have been his most cherished source of pleasure and connection but he went looking for those things from images on the screen instead. The lies and sexual acting out with pornography not only created betrayal but led you to a crisis point in your relationship.
Experiencing triggers
Triggers can come from anything and you can’t really anticipate what will trigger you until it happens. It may be a sound, an image, or a place amongst many other possibilities.
Triggers are an awful result of the betrayal. Partners are faced with reminders of times when their husband acted out and the pain and fear that you experience can be as strong as it was the first time you found out. When triggered, it’s almost like you are re-experiencing the discovery of his porn addiction all over again.
When you are triggered, your body responds with a fight or flight reaction and you feel tremendous emotional and physical stress. You may even feel unsafe even though nothing harmful is actually happening to you at that moment.
One of my triggers is the sound of my husband’s belt buckle. One day I came home from work early, and surprised him, while he was acting out. In a hurry to compose himself, he had to turn off the video and get his pants back on quickly. All I remember was the sound of his belt buckle and the knowing that something wasn’t right. I didn’t actually “see” him doing anything that day. This incident happened before my actual discovery of his habitual porn use. However, it was the catalyst for starting the detective work that led to my first discovery.
Since that incident, the sound of his belt buckle has been a trigger. In the early years after discovery, the sound could make me feel physically sick. Over 15 years have passed and I have done a lot of work to recover and heal, but the sound of his belt buckle still catches my attention. Thankfully, the trigger doesn’t affect me the same way that it used to. I can acknowledge that the sound is a trigger and move on. As you recover and heal from the betrayal, triggers will lose their stronghold on you but they may never go away.
Betrayal causes a trauma experience for partners
As a result of the betrayal, partners experience trauma that affects them both physically and emotionally. You may feel real symptoms like nausea, inability to eat or sleep, racing heartbeat, strong mood swings and significant stress. Beyond your health, the effects of this trauma experience can impact home, work, and social areas of your life.
As partners, we often beat ourselves up for not knowing. He kept you in the dark so there is no way that you could have known about his addiction until discovery and no way you could know how to deal with it without help. You might even feel a sense of shame about your relationship and blame yourself for the problem.
He might blame you too which only makes matters worse. This is not your fault but your husband might use tactics like gaslighting and manipulation to make you think that it is. As if what we do to ourselves isn’t enough, but this additional mental abuse can cause even more damage. They can make you feel like you are going crazy…like you are out of control…like you can’t trust yourself at all. Repeated discoveries that follow this same cycle of lying, denying, and blaming you deepen the trauma.
As a partner in this situation, you question whether or not he ever loved you and whether or not you are safe in this relationship. You will do almost anything to gain a sense of control that helps you make sense of the situation and to never feel this way again. The problem is that as long as the cycle continues…you can’t recover.
It is so painful
I’ve heard more than one therapist describe the betrayal from porn addiction as a betrayal that hurts your soul. Not only have you lost trust in your husband and wonder if you can ever trust him again. You also feel like he didn’t value you or really ever love you…at least not the way you loved him…and those thoughts can take you to a very lonely place.
The stress response caused by the betrayal impacts our brain. Partners experience very intense emotions ranging from numbness to all out anger and rage. The lies make you question everything which creates chaos and keeps your life off balance. The sad thing is that we can’t fix the problem so we feel helpless.
What we thought were our truths aren’t our truths anymore. Before discovering his porn addiction, I would have described my husband as a great father. He was an equal participant in our daughter’s life, he was always there for her. She had anxiety issues as a child and frequently had physical symptoms like fever, vomiting, and diarrhea when she was stressed. Being in a play at school or going to a large family get-together could cause a stress response for her. On one family trip, she had an anxiety episode so her “great father” went to the store to get ibuprofen, Jello, applesauce, etc. Years later, I found out that while his little girl was feeling sick and waiting for him to return from the store – he found a remote parking lot to watch porn and masturbate before bringing back the grocery items. The truth is his addiction came before everything and everyone which hurts.
Our husbands, who we thought were nice, loving people, are addicts. They are addicts who caused us tremendous hurt. No part of it makes sense to us because we would never do the same thing to them. It truly feels like they were doing things “to us” which is where some of the pain comes from. It’s hard to see this early on but their addiction really has nothing to with us and they weren’t trying to hurt us…but they certainly did make hurtful decisions. In the example above, my husband didn’t set out to make his daughter wait for food or medicine. As an addict, he saw an opportunity to feed his addiction and took it. Does that hurt – yes. Can I rise above the pain – yes. And so can you!
10 ways to deal with the betrayal
- Find Support – reach out to support groups for partners, talk with a therapist experienced in helping partners, engage with a coach.
- Process the pain – you really can’t avoid it. When you feel the pain from betrayal, notice it, name it, lean in to it, and respond to the pain in a way that is integrity with your true self (revenge isn’t the answer). It’s not easy to do, but you can do hard things!
- Focus on your own health – this includes physical health and emotional health so you can be your best self in all of life’s moments.
- Practice intentional thought work – your mind has been hijacked by the betrayal but you can choose your thoughts and choose what you focus your mental energy on.
- Listen to your intuition – you knew something was wrong in your relationship and you might have ignored your intuition in the beginning. As you heal, you need to get back in touch with your intuition and begin to trust yourself again!
- Let go of anything that doesn’t serve you anymore – this includes people and anything else in your life that impacts you in a negative way. You might not want to make a rash decision about your marriage but you may decide that this relationship doesn’t serve you if he won’t engage in his own recovery.
- Set boundaries – this is not as easy as it sounds and you want to be very thoughtful about your boundaries. Decide what you will and will not tolerate along with consequences when boundaries are crossed. Be sure that you can follow through with the consequences though.
- Work toward forgiveness – forgiveness is for you and not meant to condone what he did. You will reap the benefits of forgiveness.
- Plan for triggers – you will be triggered and they may never go away. When you expect them, acknowledge them, and respond in a healthy way, they won’t knock you off your game.
- Give it time – recovery takes time and true healing takes even longer. You can create a dynamic deliberate life that you love!
*The information contained on this site is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. In addition, blog posts may contain affiliate links which means that I may be compensated if you click and make a purchase.