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. In essence, the only difference between a heroin addict and a cocaine addict is the way the drug enters the system. The brain responds to information received from the eye quicker than from any other source. Visual information is processed in the limbic system in microseconds. This is why pornography is such a big deal. 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. I may have done something bad, but that doesn t make me a bad person. Addicts have to learn how to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy shame. Engaging in shameful behaviour does not mean that an addict is a shameful person, unworthy of love. It means that they have engaged in unhealthy behaviour that can be forgiven. Empathy Breeds Connection By Carol Juergensen Sheets LCSW, CCPS-S, CSAT, PCC Empathy is the needed ingredient in relationship building and is an essential requirement when repairing betrayal. Men seem to have an empathy deficit and so I found that breaking it down was much more helpful in teaching this all important skill. Furthermore, people who came from rigid, uninvolved and emotionally absent families were also more likely to experience sex addiction (77%). 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.