Don’t Treat me Like a Child!
Growing up in Sex Addiction Recovery
by Gregory Hasek MA/MFT LPC
Executive Director
Misty Mountain Family Counseling Center
Don’t treat me like a child! Often times when a couple comes to me for counseling, I hear this statement from the husband who is trying to recover from sexual addiction. His response to his wife in regards to her questioning or lack of trust is that he feels that he is being treated like a child. What is ironic is that the wife will often say this statement, “I am tired of being your parent!” Both people seem to be in roles that they don’t want to be in, but they find themselves stuck or unable to escape the very roles they hate. I want to take a few moments to explain the etiology of this “dance” and then offer some solutions for beginning to “dance” differently.
Let’s begin by looking at the etiology of the “dance”. Often times when I receive a call for the first time from a client, it is not the husband who calls but the wife who is calling for him. She is the one who just happens to get the job of finding a therapist that her husband will go to. It is also not unusual that she has been asking for many years only to get promises, rationalizations etc. That this time, “I promise I will stop.” So the etiology of the “dance” I see before me, begins with the phone call. The wife finds herself in a parent role of nagging or threatening her husband to finally get some help and go to counseling.
But the parent/child roles often begin many years earlier, even before their marriage. A husband’s sexual addiction often has it’s roots in childhood. The normal child developmental process is altered by early exposure to pornography, combined with masturbation. These building blocks of future life long addiction provide an escape often times from a childhood that is lacking in nurture and at times abusive. The escape at first provides relief and is an adaptive survival behavior. But soon the behavior becomes maladaptive and begins to get in the way of normal child/adult emotional and social development. The child is not able to find more mature ways of dealing with emotional pain and actually gets stuck in childhood. The husband’s childlike behaviors follow him into adulthood. These behaviors keep him from bonding and attaching in an intimate way with his wife as God had intended his marriage to be.
The wife’s role often begins many years earlier also. Many times the wife began her parentified role early in life also. For example a wife may have grown up in a family where her father was an alcoholic and her father would threaten her mother and family when drunk. As a child, the wife would then take care of her mom’s or her sibling’s emotions. In an adaptive effort to provide love and care, she begins to grow up too quick and her own voice gets quieted. She begins to lose her childhood. Caring for others becomes a way of establishing control over one’s life and at the same time provides a distraction from her emotional pain and shame. What was adaptive becomes adaptive again and maladaptive at the same time. The wife’s caretaking role follows her into adulthood.
So as you see, the steps of the “dance” are well learned prior to meeting and getting married. The husband often enters into the marriage with a secret life that has it’s roots in childhood. The wife often enters the marriage with a caretaking role that has it’s roots in childhood. Often in counseling, couples come in when the “dance” is no longer working after a disclosure or the husband has been caught, causing the wife to be traumatized by her husband’s addiction. The process of recovery begins for both individuals and the marriage. But will the “dance” change?
Changing the dance requires the husband to grow up and become an adult. What that means is he has to process and heal in the areas of his childhood that have caused him to be stuck in his emotional development. He has to learn new ways to regulate emotions and delay gratification. He has to begin to show self discipline and proactive leadership. He has to take responsibility for his recovery and for helping his wife heal from the trauma his addiction has caused. His wife has to begin to see him as a safe sacrificial person and one she can respect and trust. (Ephesians 5)
A turning point for men is often when they realize that they need to put their childish ways behind them so they can become a man. (I Corinthians 13) They no longer respond to their wife in defense by saying, “Don’t treat me like a child!”, but respond with understanding and empathy for their wife’s trauma and realize that not being treated like a child requires of them adult like behaviors.
Changing the dance for the wife requires first that she has time to heal from the trauma of betrayal and is able to begin to trust again. As time goes on she is able to begin to look at how she is also part of the “dance”. She is now able to begin to look at ways to trust God for her husband’s recovery and begin to focus more on her own emotions. She has to first recognize and acknowledge where the parent role came from and get in touch with what it means to find her own value in who she is as a person, instead of being needed for the parent role that she so often played. She is able to begin to grieve her own pain of lost childhood and lack of nurture, in which she is able to find that she is unconditionally loved for who she is through God’s eyes and not what she does or how she performs.
What is so amazing for me as a therapist is to see the husband put away his childish ways and become a man. In addition the wife is able to put her parent role behind her and become a child in God’s eyes. In that child like state healing begins to take place. The wounds of trauma and betrayal lesson and she begins to see her husband as the MAN she thought she married years ago.
What a blessing it is for me to be part of this transformational dance!
*Please Note: The roles above are typical roles that I see in my counseling office. Often times these roles can be switched. I understand this. This article is only one attempt at providing a solution to common dance no matter what roles each partner might play at the time.