If your spouse has a sexual addiction, you have likely experienced extreme trauma as a result of their actions. Safety-seeking behaviors are common for trauma victims in your situation because your entire world has just been turned upside down by your spouse’s betrayal.
Like many couples, you once felt safe and secure in your relationship with your spouse. Discovering that the most important person in the world to you is not what they originally seemed and that your connection with that person is much different than you thought can be traumatic.
Understanding Safety-Seeking Behaviors
When your relationship transitions from secure to insecure, it can become dark and dangerous very quickly. As the victim in this scenario, there is nothing that can compare to learning that your life has been filled with one lie after another.
Safety-seeking behaviors are normal, and they might include things like:
- Checking your partner’s pockets
- Checking your spouse’s wallet
- Secretively looking at their cell phone
- Searching their computer history
- Using GPS tracking devices to monitor their location when not at home
In the book, Your Sexually Addicted Spouse: How Partners Can Cope and Heal, the author equates discovering a partner’s sexual addiction to the trauma of living through an earthquake.
“Sex addiction produces a lifequake, leaving traumatic effects on a relationship and on lives. When new tremors – or even perceived tremors – occur, an already traumatized partner almost always has a stress response, just like an earthquake survivor does.”
Are Safety-Seeking Behaviors a Sign of Co-Addiction?
The addiction community leans toward labeling safety-seeking behaviors as signs of co-addiction. In other words, they claim that if you exhibit these types of behaviors, you are addicted to your spouse’s addiction.
However, this belief seems to communicate that you need your partner to continue in their sexual addiction so you can continue in your addiction. Most trauma victims – at least at some level – are desperate to heal. They want nothing more than to find relief.
For this reason, safety-seeking behaviors are likely more about preventing the trauma from taking place again.
Healing as the Partner of a Sexually Addicted Spouse
People who live in California constantly deal with the threat of tremors and earthquakes. In the same way, you as the spouse of someone with a sexual addiction experience a sense of fear of your partner acting out again. You may even be terrified of what you view as perceived betrayal.
Many spouses in your position will experience some level of healing once their partner promises to get help or starts their own healing process. However, as soon as there is a relapse, the trauma strikes all over again. It becomes a constant pattern of being traumatized and healing, and with each cycle of the pattern, healing becomes even harder to grasp.
Fortunately, it is possible to experience true healing. You do not have to continue to go through that destructive pattern, and you are not a co-addict. Trauma therapy can change everything for you.
If you would like to know more or you’re ready to get started, please contact me today for an appointment.
