How do you make any progress as a couple, if you all believe that you re the unforgiving, unloving problem partner too stuck to move on? When it comes to betrayal trauma recovery, sending partners off to seek individual therapy doesn t do either partner much good. Betrayal Trauma Recovery for the Unfaithful Partner: How To Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair Recognize That Your Partner s Trust Will Not Come Easy After Infidelity To trust right now is an act of bravery. When this anxiety is triggered, the affected person may resort to sexual behavior to decrease the discomfort they are experiencing. When anxiety and trauma are severe enough, the sexual behavior can become all-consuming. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a common treatment for those with a sex addiction rooted in trauma. This allows the betrayal trauma response to calm as you gain the ability to be present with the natural normal distress resulting from the discovery that the addict has betrayed them. Your reactivity decreases and your distress acceptance takes the charge out of the fear equation. The secondary gain is that you begin to apply this constructively compassionate mindset to others as well. These may take the form of neglect, abuse, abandonment or the absence of an appropriately nurturing caregiver. Addictive behaviors show up, sometimes early in life, according to Hatch, as a coping strategy in the form of self-medication to emotional pain. Sex addiction, in particular, creates a sense of excitement and pleasure, while simultaneously ensuring emotional distance and avoidance of true connection the kind of intimacy that can leave one open to being hurt. This is healthy, normal, mutual dependency. It is what makes relationships fulfilling and sought after. We all want this special someone to attach to and intermingle our lives with. In fact, attachment researchers talk about the paradox of attachment saying, The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become, (Attached). Some counselors would say that spouses are codependent at this point, a term that is defined as: A psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (as an addiction to alcohol or heroin). Or, more broadly speaking, this can be defined as: Dependence on the needs of or control by another.1 However, while in most addictions the assumption can be made that the partners are co-dependent, or at least the addict s partner had co-dependent behaviors, this is not necessarily so in the case of sex addiction.