Written by Everyone has an opinion and opinions seem paramount in discussing sex addiction. Anecdotal evidence is touted as scientific proofs for outrageous recovery and cure rate claims. Treatment centers use methodologies that have no professional basis and claim high success rates.
So, why do I take it upon myself to cry ‘foul? It’s because of the voices of tens of thousands of women who have spoken loud and clear about what this thing that is erroneously called sex addiction really is and what the long term results are of 12 step programs, CSAT therapy and sex addiction treatment centers.
In case anyone has ever wondered here are some statistics on my websites.
The Sisterhood started in February of 2011 at the request of many women who needed a private place to share their experiences. The Sisterhood has been up and running for a little over 7 years. Thousands of women have come and gone and shared their stories and experiences.
The original site, sisterhoodofsupport.com was archived because of a software conflict with a new membership software update. I would have lost all of my data if I had updated that site. So, I started anew with sisterhoodofsupport.org while still having access to the data on the original site.
The original .com site has 6,449 Topics and 119,053 replies archived.
As of today, March 16, 2018 the sisterhoodofsupport.org site has 5,711 Topics and 99,245 replies.
Currently the Sisterhood of Support website gets over a million and a half hits per year.
The marriedtoasexaddict.com website has been running since 2005 and consistently gets an average of 30,000 unique visitors per month. It does not have a private forums feature but the blog has hundreds of posts written by me with thousands of comments.The most popular posts on that site have had over a half a million views.
These sites have gathered more information on partners and wives of sex addicts than any other resource that I know of. The Sisters do not take their replies lightly. We speak not only from our own experiences but from the wisdom that we have learned over the years as wives and partners of sex addicts.
We have not found a unicorn (a truly recovered sex addict) yet. We’ve had a lot of ‘maybes’ and a lot of ‘wannabes’ but nothing that ever lasted.
My son is a neuro scientist. When I post about research I have real scientific research to back it up. When I post about personality disorders I have real scientific research and medical documentation to back it up.
Patrick Carnes, Robert Weiss, CSATs, SA groups and 12 steppers have none of this to back up their claims of recovery and cure rates. All they have is anecdotal evidence, poorly conducted surveys and research and ridiculous statistics that have no basis.
It’s time to start asking therapists, treatment centers and SA groups to produce real statistics conducted using the scientific method along with long term follow up studies before giving them your money, your time, your future and your trust.
For 20 years I have lived with a man who admitted seven years ago to being addicted to pornography and masturbation. I suspected as much during the first ten years of the marriage, but part of me didn’t want to believe that I had made such a devastating mistake in marrying a second time. Then he acknowledged that he’d started using images that he found sexually stimulating in his teens, and that his sexual behavior had contributed to the problems in his two previous marriages.
When he admitted this (to me, to our marriage counselors, to our families and to our friends, the counselors and I assumed that he wanted to change. That was not the case. When he was asked to change his behaviors in the specific ways I needed to even consider trusting him again he became resentful, insulted and angry. He never followed those steps on his own, not even for three days in a row.
Five months later our counselors bluntly asked each of us: Do you want to continue to work on your marriage? I said YES, resoundingly. He said, No. It’s too hard, too much is required of the man. It’s not fair.
I have asked him why he chose to tell me when he did (17 weeks after the death of my 35 year old son.. My20 year old daughter died in a car accident 13 years before my son’s death, when my husband and I had been married just six months..) He never could tell me why he’d decided to tell me then, when I was still reeling from the death of my last child.
But even when he told me about his addictions he lied. He said he’d stopped using pornography a year ago. When I asked Why didn’t you tell me, when you knew how important that would be to me? After the usual “20 Questions” routine I had by then learned to use if I wanted to get at anything close to the facts, he said that he’d stopped watching VIDEOS, was still looking at STILL images — and to him that was “not using pornography.”
Within three weeks of the statement that working on the marriage was too hard, and that he would not try to find sexual addiction therapy either, my mother died. Overwhelmed and almost in shock most of the time I formally moved out of the bedroom and into my own. I had actually been sleeping in the guest bedroom most of the time because my husband hated sleeping with me and became angry if I spoke to him in bed, tried to make physical contact, etc.. I finally paid attention to his behaviors rather than his words and his actions told me that he wanted nothing intimate to do with me.
He would have welcomed sex, of course, but only on his terms, which was that his sexual needs were the only thing that mattered, that our sexual activity mostly mirrored his experiences with prostitutes, or porn stars, and had nothing to do with our relationship (which was emotionally void and empty, and extremely painful to me, emotionally.” In fact I had become physically incapable of having sex with him: my body froze and refused. to allow me to participate, a condition known as vaginismus. ( (It was wiser than my mind.)
This is the 20th year of this marriage. For a variety of reasons I tried to avoid a second divorce: through him i have five grandchildren and two stepdaughters and their husbands. I didn’t want to jeopardize those relationships or give the grandchildren the message that marriages are lightly ended–and I definitely couldn’t possible be honest with them about the real reasons this marriage had failed. He had shared a letter acknowledging his addictions with both his daughters but to my knowledge, other than at the time of the revelation, there have not been any further conversations about his addiction.. I know he did not tell them — or anyone else except me — that he considered pornography normal and that he’d decided not to try to stop,
But I have finally recovered enough from the deaths of both my children and through counseling about life with a sex addict to realize that I cannot live the rest of my life this way. I am 73 and I want to live the rest of my life without this awful ugliness lurking in the background, even though we have lived in different houses most of the time for the past three years, and even though we have never really been a couple in the true sense of the word as I understand it.
I have suffered greatly because of the stress of this, physically and emotionally, and spiritually. However, through counseling I have also learned to set firm, healthy boundaries, I’ve learned to insist that they be honored, and I have lost my fear of having to start again at this age.
At the moment I am preparing for the divorce, which will be complicated and possibly ugly, but I feel like a healthy, alive woman again. I had shut down sexually so completely that I wondered if I’d killed that part of me off. (It was necessary if he was anywhere around me.) I am happy to say that my sexuality is apparently alive and well, even it’s been severely starved for much of the past 20 years ….
Oh Miriam, my heart just aches reading your story. It has taken so much courage for you to reach the point you are at now to want more for yourself and to begin the long journey of leaving a toxic marriage. My thoughts are with you my dear. ~ JoAnn