Addicts Lie and Therapists Believe Them

I’ve been quiet here for a while because on November 15th I fell in the snowy, slippery, unplowed and unsalted parking lot at work during a storm and I broke my right wrist. I didn’t even have to guess that it was broken. It was obvious. It was bowed out to the right and when I tried to move it back and forth with my other hand, I heard the “click-CLICK, click-CLICK.” As luck would have it, this was a day where I went to the office but Mr. P worked from home and I couldn’t drive myself to the E.R- the pain was so bad. I had to call 9-1-1 and go by ambulance. I wound up needing surgery to install a metal plate and screws so the wrist could be put back together. Did I mention I’m right handed? Well, it was awhile before I could actually type fairly well with both hands. I only yesterday was able to put my bra on by myself. At least workers’ comp is covering all the bills.

While I’ve been somewhat incapacitated, I’ve seen plenty of stuff online about sex addiction that just makes me want to scream, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” so here we go. New year, new rant.

First, let’s talk about Rick Reynolds and his website, nwww.affairrecovery.com. He’s a therapist, a reformed cheater, a little too steeped in Jesus for my taste, and his ultimate goal is to sell you one of his weekend retreats or a subscription to his recovery library, but I will say this: the posts you can read on his website for free are pretty good. If anything, he seems to really “get it” as far as the damage he did to his wife. Since I signed up for his mailing list, I get an email link to one of his posts every couple of weeks or so. Well, he recently sent out a link to a post about sex addiction which was a giant turd. A. Giant. Turd.

Here’s the link in case you want to go back and read it for yourself: https://www.affairrecovery.com/types-of-affairs/sexual-addiction

And here’s the giant turd part:

"These individuals, though married, have never been able to find complete fulfillment from their marriage. They are enslaved by a drive to satisfy their longings. Driven by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, they are powerless over their extra-marital attachments to behaviors, people, or objects (such as pornography). These individuals look to these extramarital attachments to meet their need for love and acceptance rather than their mate."

Mr. P and I almost spit out our coffee right there. “Meet their need for love and acceptance?” Clearly this guy doesn’t know anything about sex addicts. Mr. P tried to set him straight via commenting on that post but it has yet to be published. Here’s what he wrote:

"I have read many things from you in the past, and can agree with a vast majority. On this, I think you're a little "off". I was the guy who ran around on my wife- for YEARS - going to massage parlors and prostitutes. Never ONCE did I feel love for any one of them. In fact, I went to them to feel superior and almost wished I was able to physically abuse them. They were meaningless pieces of meat to be used to make me feel superior and "in control" over them. Love played no part in my process. In fact, it was the complete absence of love. Turns out, I was raped by an authority figure (second grade teacher) who wooed me and made me feel "safe" while performing sexual acts on me, then she ramped it up to include some guy (I still don't remember who this guy was) who anally penetrated me and licked my belly button. On remembering that encounter later after marriage (I suppressed it completely until then) I began to visit massage parlors and prostitutes to make them PAY for what happened to me. Of course they weren't responsible for what happened, but someone were going to be made to pay, and they were easy targets. The feelings of power and control over these women drove me. Not love. Not love or any feeling of closeness or emotional lacking at all. With the projected rate of childhood sexual abuse at 1 in 6, new addicts are created all the time. You might want to sit an addict with an addict and let them ask the questions. You'll never get the real truth by asking an addict directly. You think they want to share what it is to be a monster and wish pain and domination on others? I didn't. Addicts lie and therapists believe it. They are exceedingly proficient at lying. One thing that helped wake me up was listening to other addicts’ reasons and excuses for doing what they were doing. Most of the excuses were utterly insane and foolish with zero basis in any kind of logic whatsoever.

Once I remembered directly the absolute horror and humiliation of being raped, at such a young age, my compulsions stopped and with some "reprogramming" via my genius wife who helped me every step of the way, the compulsion completely melted away. There was no need to simply "deny" it and force myself not to visit prostitutes. The compulsion no longer exists because I dealt with the ROOT problem. And it certainly wasn’t a "looking for love" adventure."

I wish I could say this was the only place where I read something similar to this, but it’s pervasive, and I started to think about where this misinformation comes from, and of course Mr. P nailed it right on the head: Addicts lie and therapists believe it. Who wants to admit they got off on humiliating and dominating women? It sounds so much better to spout some other excuse. And because addicts lie, they ensure that they won’t be able to get any effective help. If they told the truth, the therapist might be able to put two and two together and help them figure out why they are the way they are. But they keep their mouths shut and just go with the therapists’ cues…..”Let’s talk about your father, how’s your relationship with your wife, how was school when you were growing up?” Then the therapist comes up with some cockamamie explanation as to why they were addicted to hookers and they grab onto it: “I didn’t get enough love from my mother, my father scared me, my teachers thought I was stupid so I have poor self-esteem.” Now, all of those things may be true, and all of those things may have caused the addict some distress in life, but none of those things are the reason he couldn’t stop going to prostitutes.

So if you, as the betrayed spouse, decide to let the therapist take the lead on this, that’s the bullshit story you’ll be presented with. Your addict knows that little piece is not the whole story as well, but he’s not willing to dig that deep because to dig deep he has to tell you about the degradation that’s really going on his his head and that’s way too humiliating. He figures he can placate both of you with the “I have poor self-esteem” tale and everyone will stop digging for more. And then he’ll just white knuckle it for the rest of his life, or at least until you get tired of his “relapses” or “slips” or “acting out” and you leave for good. The Great Paradox is that he also thinks if he tells you about the degradation, you’ll leave for good. It’s just a matter of time either way.

“But my husband says he wasn’t molested” you might say. Mr. P would have said the same thing before the shit hit the fan too. In his case, he had blocked the trauma of it. But the fact is, 80 percent of sex addicts have been molested, and that figure is probably low. So at the very least there’s a 4 of out 5 chance your sex addict was molested too. Then think about what would happen to the mind of a boy growing up in the era of our parents’ expectations of masculinity, who is now raped by a man. Is he a “fag” now? What would his father think of him if he knew? I use this as one type of example because, of course, women are sexual abusers also. These boys are not admitting to ANYONE what happened, even themselves.

And while I’m on the subject of hiding things, some of you may have heard of Ashlynn and Coby Mitchell. They were first introduced to the world in a promo video for Addo Recovery, which I recommended in an earlier post. But now they’ve teamed up with this “therapist” and do regular podcasts calling themselves “The Betrayed, the Addicted and the Expert.” What they should have called themselves was “Spewing Word Salad with Ashlynn and Coby.” If you listen to one of their videos your brain will start to hurt from the verbal gymnastics and in the end you won't know what-in-the-hell you just listened to. Now, I think it was very brave of them to come out publicly and put their real names and faces out there for the world to see. Lord knows Mr. P and I haven’t done that…..too much risk that Mr. P could get fired after it’s learned that he was doing his illegal activities on company time, etc., but I really wish the Mitchell’s wouldn’t have joined forces with this “Expert” and I feel sorry for Ashlynn because I don’t think Coby’s ever going to get any better than he is now, and in my opinion, where he is now is not good enough. Why after four years are they doing “in-house separation”? Why is Ashlynn still looking for net nanny software? Why is Coby still “slipping”? And what was the "slip?" If you’re going to put it all out there, why are you hiding what’s going on? How can we relate to you you don’t tell us the truth? What constitutes a “slip” for you, Ashlynn and Coby? Did Coby go to a hooker? Did he watch porn? Or did he just act like an asshole? Here’s another vague example from their Facebook page:

“Coby had told me something that left us both unsure about our future. We felt immediate disconnection & regret embarking on a 2 week trip to Europe as a family. How could we enjoy this trip we’d been looking forward to & not sit in our reality with pain?”

WTF? I feel for you, honey, but if you’re going to put it all out there don’t do it half-assed. How can we relate to your situation and glean anything helpful from it or use it to relate to our own situation if you don’t tell us what the “something” was that Coby told you?

In stark contrast to this I give a shout out to Betrayed Wife at http://betrayedwife.net/. She gives us the details, as in “we had a fight on X day about Y issue and my husband did Z.” And then the rest of us can relate because we also fought about Y issue and our husbands did Z.

As for Mr. and P I right now? We are great, and that’s no bullshit. At this point we’re three years and a few months out from D Day and I’ve been noticing that I’m rarely bothered by his prostitution escapades anymore. Now, rarely does not equal never, but it truly is rare. Mr. P, on the other hand, still is bothered by what he did just as much as he always was, but he doesn’t let that stop us from having a good time, and we honestly have a good time every single day. Does that mean he’s completely grown up and his 7-year-old self never bubbles up to the surface? No, once in a while we get a visit from Mr. Boy, but the incidents don’t last long and he realizes the error in his judgement pretty quickly.

Last weekend we lived through a pout over cheddar cheese. Yes, cheddar cheese. We all went on an excursion to a military antiques store, and then a museum, and then wound up at a burger place in the area that was very well reviewed. Mr P and our son, Teenaged P, decided to split one order of sliders because neither one of them was very hungry. When the waitress asked what kind of cheese I said that our son really likes cheddar. Would Mr. P be ok with cheddar? He did a wishy washy thing for a bit and then settled on cheddar, and after the waitress walked away I got the Pout Face and he started talking about how he doesn’t LIKE cheddar! He wanted AMERICAN! Well, I told him that I didn’t want to hear his bullshit about cheese because he’s a Grown Ass Man and if he didn’t want cheddar then he could open his Grown Ass Mouth and ask for what he wants. So he realized he was acting babyish shortly after that but of course, it takes me a little longer to calm down so I gave him some sideways stink eye for a bit. And on the way home I slyly asked him, “So….how was the cheddar?” And then we laughed about it. It’s never about the cheese, you know.

So would Cheese-gate be considered a “slip” according to “The Betrayed, the Addict and the Expert”? Who knows. I wouldn’t call it that. I would just call it a Brief Moment of Assholery and not a big deal at all.