Let your Intuition be your Guide. A gut feeling that tells us things our conscious brain is more likely to ignore. Trust your inner compass. 90% of the time when your gut feeling tells you something is off, It is! Feminine intuition is extremely attuned especially to our husband’s normal behavior and when internal instincts are screaming that something is wrong, listen to it, a woman’s gut never lies. I thank my intuition for guiding me to the truth. It breaks my heart that some of us, including myself for a while, will trust our husband’s faithfulness and then deny our own intuition. But the truth is that the situation was being gaslighted.
It was the Intuition that would not let me shake it off and then shockingly discovered his double-life-living. For many of us married to men who struggle with sexual addiction, this is the first suffering we endure—recurring cycles of fear, frustration, and self-doubt. We feel crazy because our hearts are telling us one thing while our husbands are busy convincing us that nothing is wrong.
Chronic self-doubt eats away at our confidence and self-esteem. We become vulnerable to stress-related illnesses, depression, and unhealthy coping strategies. And we get really tired. It takes a lot of energy to manage conflicted emotions. When the truth about our husband’s sexual behavior is eventually revealed, many of us feel a strange sense of relief mixed in with the gut-wrenching grief over his betrayal. “How could he hurt me this way?!” is followed swiftly by the thought, “I knew something was wrong! At least I’m not crazy.”
Whether you never saw this coming or your husband is just one more man in a long line of men to hurt you in some way, your grief over his broken promises is agonizing. Many of us have said it would have been easier if he had died.
And it doesn’t matter if he is addicted to porn or prostitutes or anonymous sexual encounters, sexual betrayal strips a woman naked and mocks her in front of everyone.
Then reality sets in. This is an addiction. My husband is an addict. I too also have had an addiction, to alcohol. A recovering alcoholic gratefully sober for four years and stayed sober throughout this excruciating journey and I do understand addiction more than others from my personal experiences with addiction/recovery. If I stay in my marriage, I could experience this pain over and over again. Relapses. This realization is enough to make even the most committed and compassionate woman hesitate. Those of us who have already endured much wounding cannot imagine ever feeling safe in the relationship again. Leaving the marriage becomes the only option we can bear.
Others of us choose to stay in the marriage, sometimes because of our children and sometimes because of our faith. Either choice presents its own path of painful challenges. If I could choose one word to describe this initial year of recovery it would be overwhelming.
For those of us who are married to sex addicts, or who were, it can be tempting at times to define ourselves by our husbands’ struggle and the suffering it brings into our lives. While our suffering is real, so is our choice to remember that we are women of great worth and value, capable of changing the world for good in spite of our pain. Silent suffering of spouses dealing with sexual addiction.
To enormous amounts of healing,
Kelly Krishna Dunn
Chronic self-doubt eats away at our confidence and self-esteem. We become vulnerable to stress-related illnesses, depression, and unhealthy coping strategies. And we get really tired. It takes a lot of energy to manage conflicted emotions. When the truth about our husband’s sexual behavior is eventually revealed, many of us feel a strange sense of relief mixed in with the gut-wrenching grief over his betrayal. “How could he hurt me this way?!” is followed swiftly by the thought, “I knew something was wrong! At least I’m not crazy.”
Whether you never saw this coming or your husband is just one more man in a long line of men to hurt you in some way, your grief over his broken promises is agonizing. Many of us have said it would have been easier if he had died.
And it doesn’t matter if he is addicted to porn or prostitutes or anonymous sexual encounters, sexual betrayal strips a woman naked and mocks her in front of everyone.
Then reality sets in. This is an addiction. My husband is an addict. I too also have had an addiction, to alcohol. A recovering alcoholic gratefully sober for four years and stayed sober throughout this excruciating journey and I do understand addiction more than others from my personal experiences with addiction/recovery. If I stay in my marriage, I could experience this pain over and over again. Relapses. This realization is enough to make even the most committed and compassionate woman hesitate. Those of us who have already endured much wounding cannot imagine ever feeling safe in the relationship again. Leaving the marriage becomes the only option we can bear.
Others of us choose to stay in the marriage, sometimes because of our children and sometimes because of our faith. Either choice presents its own path of painful challenges. If I could choose one word to describe this initial year of recovery it would be overwhelming.
For those of us who are married to sex addicts, or who were, it can be tempting at times to define ourselves by our husbands’ struggle and the suffering it brings into our lives. While our suffering is real, so is our choice to remember that we are women of great worth and value, capable of changing the world for good in spite of our pain. Silent suffering of spouses dealing with sexual addiction.
To enormous amounts of healing,
Kelly Krishna Dunn
written in 2015 • published in 2016
Intuitive Magazine 