Personal action items may involve seeking personal counseling for emotional healing, along with creating a plan for different scenarios based on your husband s response to recovery efforts. If he earnestly seeks help, you can commit to working on the relationship together. If he refuses help, you must follow through with consequences when boundaries are crossed. Their lives are broken to pieces, and they are overwhelmed with shame, often thinking, How could I be so stupid not to realize what was happening right under my nose? I m such a fool for trusting him/her. They feel they are going crazy. But these feelings are all normal because in all likelihood, this is the most shocking and confounding crisis they have ever experienced. Addiction occurs when the physical brain has taken control of the mind. The mind is the intelligent part of us that gets frustrated at losing control. It is in the sense that the conscience exists. This is the part that generates feelings of right or wrong. The physical brain has no concept of right or wrong. The crisis stage. During this brief stage, one to three months long, the addict s problems reach a crisis level. She makes a firm commitment to change after experiencing a crisis moment. This could be the diagnosis of a sexually transmitted disease, an arrest, attempting suicide or anything else that causes the addict to commit to change. Addicts learn from other recovering addicts what healthy sexual behaviour is and what it is not. Without help to address the underlying causes that drive sexual addiction, sexual addicts are only able to stop acting out temporarily, and that only because of an enormous amount of willpower. Eventually willpower alone is not enough. Sometimes, sex addiction develops during or after substance abuse. Abuse of stimulants and the intense sexual desire that can accompany these drugs can jumpstart a pattern of compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual addiction can also become a substitute addiction for people who are in the process of quitting an addictive substance.