My job is to help you use compassion so that you can surrender to what has happened to you and through compassion find an identity that is separate from partner betrayal. When you do this, you decrease reactivity and begin to trust yourself again so that you can appreciate who you are and your own intuition. Behaviors include masturbation, fantasizing, pornography, flirting, prostitution, massage parlors, sexual affairs, emotional affairs & other acts of infidelity. The lies and deception used by husbands to keep these behaviors hidden can create many emotional and physical symptoms for their wives. When wives internal world of perceptions and intuition does not match up with their external world of what they are seeing and being told, they can develop feelings of being crazy. It is during this stage that the study found sex addicts truly began to enjoy life again and felt confident in having strong, healthy sexual relationships. The Need for Lasting Change It s only natural to feel a sense of despair when you see how long it can take to heal from sex addiction. You should also feel hope, though. As with the paralytic, the conditions we deal with actually consist of two problems. With a pornography/sexual addiction, the outer problem is our acting out behaviors. And for the spouse, it is the loss of trust and damage to a marriage relationship. We want all of these circumstances we find ourselves in to go away. At first it can seem counterintuitive to bring up the damage your addiction has caused her. She wants to know that you remember her pain is a result of your actions. It assures her that you have not forgotten, nor are you in denial. It makes sense to me that looking at our Memorial Day picnic pictures causes you great pain Validation of Her Feelings Using the Five Primary Feelings It can be difficult to ascertain how she is feeling, so it is helpful to focus on her primary feeling (and see if you got it right). We acknowledged that in our active addiction that we hadn't ever responded to his call in ways that respected him. Each of us told him that in recovery we were committed to loving and appreciating him. We understood that he was not going away, but would remain in us as a guide and observer. It was our job to listen and respond to him appropriately.