Couples Therapy (Marital Therapy)

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Couples therapy can address difficulties in the relationship caused by the sexual behavior of the patient which frequently are a source of great stress and discord.  It is also hoped that it will allow the patient to experience better sex in a committed relationship and improve intimacy in their relationship

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Effects  of pornography addiction on marital relations: trust, emotional struggles of sham, anger, resentment and insecurity, secrecy, hopelessness, loss of control, lack of communication, egotism, and a negative effect on sexual relationships.

Married couples recovering from husbands' addictive use of pornography...

Pornography's primary stimulus to autoerotic behavior, combined with its complete eroticization of sexual experience, readily produces profound disconnection of the sexual experience from relationship context and meaning.

A spouse's preoccupation with pornography casts doubt on the reliability of their promise of emotional, psychological, and sexual fidelity.

As preoccupation with pornography consumption sets in, couples report experiencing deterioration of marital and family relationships.

Repeated attempts and failures at discontinuing pornography consumption and associated sexual behaviors, in spite of awareness of significant negative effects.

Pornography is divorcing the sexual response and experience from the natural constraints of attachment relationships.

Pornography elicits and enables the development of addictive dynamics.

Benefits of couple therapy

• higher levels of resiliency
• surrendering secrecy that enables addiction and debilitates intimacy
• reducing excessive shame and/or guilt that is interpersonally disabling and associated with relationship alienation and isolation
• increasing spouse understanding of addiction yielding more effective spouse intervention
• increasing understanding of addiction (more empathic and supportive emotional and psychological stance)
• an emotional openness that supplants addictive dependency with dynamics of healthy intimacy

attachment reparation

rebuilding/restoration of trust

attention to restitution efforts

awareness and identification of recovery motivation and progress

Therapists' promotion of spouses' emotional availability and responsiveness to one another represents softening and enables spouses to tackle difficult emotional issues surrounding addiction (e.g., self-blaming, hurt, resentment, insecurity, anger, emotional withdrawal, and shame).

Separating addiction and its meaning from self and other (externalizing) - not allowing addiction to contaminate one's view of self or other.

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Couple therapy can help partners to be aware of each other's thoughts, perspectives, issues, and struggles. Couple therapy can be a forum for addicts to learn to identify and share feelings and create a communication bridge.

Therapy can help the spouse focus on defining her own personal limits, communicating those to her partner (not as an ultimatum but as preserving her own dignity), and taking actions up to and including separation to maintain boundaries

Setting limits and boundaries, having a plan to deal with boundary violations.

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A marriage with improved trust and openness aids recovery - being honest for sex addict is an essential element in healing from sexual addiction.

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Couple therapy allows both partners to be a part of each other's healing process, sharing feelings with each other, and learning to be more open, factors that may facilitate a more rapid growth in trust.

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The key tasks of couple’s therapy are increasing your clarity about:

• The kind of life you want to build together
• The kind of partner you aspire to be in order to build the kind of life and relationship you want to create
• Your individual blocks to becoming the kind of partner you aspire to be
• The skills and knowledge necessary to do the above tasks

How to Focus on Relationship Building after a Cyberaffair 

• Computer Use - Cyberaffairs often happen inside the couple’s home and the "cheating" partner’s behavior is centralized around the computer, a tool that may also be used for non-romantic purposes such as for business or home finances.
  However, each time the offending partner approaches the computer for a legitimate reason, it may trigger feelings of suspicion and jealousy for the spouse.
  The therapist must help couple evaluate how the computer will be used at home so that they can establish reasonable ground rules such as supervised computer use or moving the computer into a public area of the family home.
• Psychoeducation - The practitioner should also provide psychoeducational consultation for the couple to help remove the typical rationalizations exhibited by the offending partner and to help the spouse understand the motives leading up to the cyberaffair.
  The cheating partner may not have purposely gone on the Internet to look for someone else, but the online experience afforded an opportunity to form intimate bonds with fellow on-line users, which quickly escalated to erotic chat and passionate conversations.
  The cheating partner often rationalizes the behavior as just a fantasy, typed words on a screen, or that cybersex isn’t cheating because of the lack of physical contact.
  Therapists should be careful not reinforce these rationalizations and focus on ways for the cheating partner to take responsibility for their actions. This is an important element in therapy if the couple is to rebuild honesty and trust in their relationship.
• Renew Commitment - Finally, the therapist should help the couple evaluate how the cyberaffair has hurt the relationship and help formulate relationship-enhancing goals that will renew commitment and improve intimacy between the couple. To help the couple renew commitment, the therapist must stress forgiveness. Care should also be taken to evaluate the types of activities the couple used to enjoy before the Internet and encourage them to engage in those events once again. Finally, inventions, which focus on a couple’s weekly progress and how couples can use the Internet together for sexual enhancement, should be explored.

1. The partner who has not engaged in hypersexual behavior is invited by the therapist to articulate the injury and the impact it has had. This injured partner is encouraged to begin risking reconnecting with his partner (now accessible to him through couples therapy). Generally, the injured partner recounts the emotional pain associated with the hypersexual behavior. In describing her experience, she might share feelings of abandonment or helplessness or times when she experienced a violation of trust that damaged her belief in the relationship as a secure bond. Often, the injured partner speaks about this injury in an emotionally reactive manner. Through this account, the injury becomes alive and present rather than a distant or disconnected recollection. The hypersexual partner will often discount, deny, or minimize the incident, and this act trivializes his partner’s pain. He subsequently becomes defensive as a way of protecting their fragile sense of self. In many cases, the defensiveness is a manifestation of narcissism desperately trying to protect the broken sense of self.
2. The injured partner begins to integrate the narrative (the story or context in which the events occurred) and the emotions associated with the story. This process accesses the attachment fears associated with the injury. The therapist helps the injured partner remain connected with the pain of the injury and begin to articulate its impact and significance with respect to attachment-related emotions. At this point the identification and expression of painful emotions often elicits new emotions. Anger is translated into clear expressions of hurt, helplessness, fear, and shame. The connection of the injury to present negative patterns in the relationship becomes clear. For example, the injured partner says, “I feel so hopeless. I find myself yelling at him to show him he can’t pretend I’m not here. He can’t just wipe out my hurt like that. I want him to suffer too.”
3. The hypersexual partner develops understanding of the significance of his behavior and acknowledges his partner’s emotional pain and suffering. The hypersexual partner, supported by the therapist, begins to hear and understand the impact of his sexual activities in the context of attachment. He reframes the pain of his injured partner as a reflection of her love for him and realizes that her suffering exists because she considers him a person of importance. The ability to give an alternative explanation to his partner’s emotional pain empowers the hypersexual individual to let go of beliefs that her protests are personal attacks or a reflection of her own inadequacies. He is invited to continue exploring his injured partner’s pain and suffering and elaborate on how the behavior evolved for him.
4. The partner who has been injured moves toward a more integrated articulation of the injury and how it relates to her attachment bond. She expresses the grief and loss involved with the injury and any fears that may exist about the attachment bond (e.g., fears of abandonment, being alone, not being loved, or future betrayal and ruptures of trust). The injured partner, in the safety of the therapist’s office, allows her hypersexual partner to witness her vulnerability.
5. The hypersexual partner acknowledges responsibility and empathetically engages in the process of healing the relationship. He becomes more emotionally available as he assumes accountability for his part in the attachment injury. Expressions of empathy, regret, and remorse may be present.
6. The injured partner is invited to express her emotional needs (e.g., I need reassurance, I need to feel loved, I need to feel safe). She may risk by asking for reparative comfort and caring, which were unavailable and inaccessible at the time of the attachment injury.
7. If the hypersexual partner is able to demonstrate the ability to meet the emotional need of the injured partner, a bonding event occurs, creating an antidote to the hurt created by the traumatic experiences associated with the hypersexual behavior. Beliefs about the relationship are redefined (e.g., the relationship can be a safe place), and the couple collaboratively reconstructs a new narrative of the traumatic events. This narrative has order and may include, for the injured partner, clarity about how the hypersexual behavior developed and why her partner made choices that undermined the foundation of their attachment. For the hypersexual partner, he may reconstruct beliefs about his way of coping with stress or emotional pain. He reorganizes his beliefs about the attachment being a safe place where his needs can be met.

See also: Individual therapy, group therapy

Last update: Saturday, December 01, 2007.  Feedback - send an email to: