In other words, sex addicts often come from childhood environments in which they never learned how to create and maintain emotional bonds. Once they reach independence in adulthood, now free of their former rigid environment, they may struggle to self-regulate their behavior. People with traumatic backgrounds may develop trauma responses that manifest as compulsive sexual behaviors. These boundaries aim to provide space for both partners to heal and avoid conflict escalation. If your safety is at risk, you should not tolerate physical or sexual violence and should seek help from appropriate authorities. Common physical boundaries include: Exiting volatile situations: Remove yourself when conflicts become heated. 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. In other words, this issue does not discriminate, and neither should we in our attempts to understand and/or treat it. Counseling and involvement in a support group will help the spouse to deal with the angst in her head and heart, as well as to help her gain emotional strength. Over time, her self-care will improve her ability to deal rationally with the situation-at-hand. The disclosure of her husband s sex addiction may very well turn a woman s world upside down, but with good self-care, counseling, and faith, she will come through the experience stronger, wiser, smarter, more resilient, and in even a closer relationship with God. She was truly an angel, and I wish I remembered her name. My spirits were low, and this was a last-ditch effort to see if we could eliminate pornography from our lives for good. I quickly learned that I could block specific websites and receive weekly accountability emails. For the first time in a long time, I felt some aspect of peace and steadiness coming back into my life. It feels as if you are suddenly outside of yourself watching a movie, seeing yourself react and not feeling connected to your own body. International trauma expert Peter Levine explains that when we are confronted by a situation that our brain experiences as frightening, we automatically go into a freeze response.