In this way our adult relationships mirror our relationship with our parents as children; both, when functioning well, provide us with a secure base from which we can enter our worlds with confidence. Breaking Bad If it is true that when we attach to someone healthy and functional, it feels good and provides a sense of security, grounding, safety and wholeness, then the opposite is also true. Often, it was the unassuming person, ostensibly the harmless law-abiding type, who was committing the most heinous crimes. A sex addict can be your happily married neighbor, your pastor, a doctor, a lawyer, a man or a woman. Sexual and gender orientation are also not factors that determine sex addiction. He needed a smartphone for work, but everything on the smartphone was a trigger or temptation for him. Each relapse into pornography was a cut deep into my personal self-esteem. It took years for me to truly understand that this addiction is very much a physical pathway problem in the brain. The biggest struggle for my husband through this heartbreaking addiction was the concept of integrity and honesty. 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. But just as with the paralytic in the story, we still have to address the inner problem and condition to get healed. 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. That is often the result of internal and external worlds not seeming to match up. When these wives are offered the truth it finally allows them to feel sane. Sex therapists (not to be confused with sex addiction therapists) believe that sexual expression is healthy regardless of the behavior. Understanding the science that drives the addictive process is vital for the betrayed partner s wellness, lest they take responsibility for their betrayer s acting out.