As a relationship expert, I had two immediate questions: Who gave him the idea that he needed to surrender to anything? Why did he think was doing it wrong? I soon learned that the very person he and his betraying partner turned to for guidance, their couples therapist, had implicated him as the problem partner! The addict acted out because he is an addict. He did not act out because you were not good enough or not worthy of his love. You could not cause his acting out. A secondary gain of mindfulness is that over time, you can learn to be present with the uncertainty, which is a normal response that is manifested out of betrayal trauma in a manner that was not reactive driven. Bottom Lines, Border Lines and Top Lines All this discussion of sexual sobriety leads to the need to discuss exactly what constitutes a "relapse" in sex addiction. The simple answer is that relapse is defined as any sexual activity that falls outside of pre-determined boundaries. Sometimes people in 12-step recovery refer to acts that would constitute a relapse as "bottom-line behaviors". 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. Before putting it all back together, partners must find their meaning in their own personal hero s journey. To accomplish this, partners must discover how to make meaning out of suffering. In his book Man s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, asserted that even in the worst suffering, having a sense of purpose provides strength. More than anything else, you need support during your recovery from sexual addiction. You need to know that there are others out there who have gone through what you re going through and are willing to help you as you struggle through the tough times. First Feelings You ve done things in your life, various sexual behaviors, out of a ritual.