Q&A – Is there an effect on the spouse of a porn user?

Narrator: This is Pathway to Recovery, an SA Lifeline Foundation podcast featuring hosts Tara McCausland, who is the SA Lifeline Executive Director, and Justin B., a sex addict living in long-term recovery. We have conversations with experts and individuals who understand the pathway to healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma because we believe that recovering individuals leads to the healing of families.

Tara McCausland: Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery Podcast. I am your host, Tara McCausland, and I have here with me Justin B., my co-host. Welcome, Justin.

Justin B.: Thank you, Tara. Good to be here.

Tara McCausland: And also, we're excited to have Jenny Brockbank here with us. Jenny is actually a member of the staff of SA Lifeline, but she's going to bring to the table today, her strength, hope, and experience. And today in our Q&A, we will be discussing the question, is there an effect on the spouse of a porn user? And we felt like this was an important topic to discuss because there's plenty of conversation about the fact that if we use porn on our own, it's just impacting us.

And we want to discuss whether or not that's true. So in addressing that question, is there an effect on the spouse of a porn user. Jenny, what are your initial thoughts there?

Narrator: I can say as the spouse of a porn user, there absolutely are effects. And having been in thousands of recovery meetings, I'm not alone. So anybody listening who might feel like maybe they're unique if they're struggling, I just want to say first of all, It's okay. You're not alone. You're not crazy. And it makes sense that you're struggling because living with a porn user, somebody who is compulsively using any kind of substance, it's really chaos. And it doesn't always make sense because it shows up in these different sideways ways, but that we don't understand.

We don't always see the effects. We don't see the acting out behavior. But we certainly feel it, and it can feel unnerving, disturbing, distressing, stressful for sure.

Tara McCausland: Thank you. Justin, from a recovering addict's perspective, did you think that your behavior— I understand it was in secret for the first 10 years of your marriage— did you think that your, your behavior, your porn use, was having an effect on your spouse and on your relationship?

Justin B.: You know, I sure hoped not, and I didn't think it did. I thought it was just a me issue and that I was only— I was the only one being damaged. I wasn't damaging anybody else. And, and even into post-disclosure, I figured that although I knew that her reaction to my disclosure was way more severe than I thought it would be, was way more You know, it really hit her a lot harder than I thought it would.

I still thought for those next 7 or 8 years that I continued to struggle and not do anything in recovery, I still thought, hey, this, it's just pornography. I'm not involving anyone but myself and a screen, you know, or myself and an object walking down the street, which was, which is an awful way to say that, but that's how I thought.

Tara McCausland: So Jenny, tell, tell us more about how in those years of not knowing about the behavior, what did your relationship look and feel like? And what— why did it feel off?

Narrator: I would say it was so confusing because he could show up pretty wonderfully and then really not, you know, just— and it didn't make sense. There were explosions about things that to me were not that big of a deal. There were— there was a lack of showing up as a partner in basic things like finances or taking care of the home. And I didn't understand the reasons behind it. And, and I just kind of wondered, is he just immature?

What's going on here? And kind of learned, because, you know, before I started recovery, I'd been in this for like 17 and a half years before understanding. And so I just kind of learned to get by, to try to make peace, you know, to try to make our home as calm as possible. We have 6 children, so that's a really impossible task. There's just no way around that. But I did my best. And so, yeah, it was, it was just unstable.

And like I said, he could show up wonderfully. He really could. He would take me on dates. He would open my car door. We would go to dinner, you know, a lot and just sit and, and have great conversations. So it was like confusing because he could show up well sometimes and sometimes not. And I didn't know why.

Tara McCausland: Can you flesh that out for us a little bit, Justin, why that might be?

Justin B.: Well, I can give it my best shot. I know some of my worst blind spots are right here looking right back at myself. But what, what Jenny mentioned really resonated with me, you know, in so many areas of my marriage. In fact, I used this as a, as a justifier. Hey, I am— we're going on date nights every week. I am taking care of the house. I'm, I'm earning the money. I'm bringing home the money. I'm doing these things.

I'm, I'm present for most of my kids' activities, but then I would disappear anymore. Yeah. Emotionally, I was gone. You know, emotional— there was an emotional disconnect, although by the physical connection and the financial connection and the, you know, all of these other connections I felt were there. I can't speak for my wife, but after disclosure and for a few years, she would say, you know what, things are starting to make sense now that I see what's going on.

I'm starting to make connections that I couldn't make before with why there was a disconnect, why there was an absence in certain places. And that really actually hurt me when she'd say that. I was like, whoa, I thought I was hiding things way, way better than that. Anyway, so that's my take on that from my own blindness, my own myopic view of it.

Narrator: Yeah, that makes sense.

Tara McCausland: Well, I just want to insert something here. So we're talking specifically about the relationship between Spouses. But I think we also do well to remember that in every relationship there is an impact. And so as the daughter of a recovering addict, for years I didn't know what was going on, but I also felt that disconnect. My father could engage well in certain settings. He could be very sociable at church or in community functions, but when we'd get home, he'd go and sit behind a newspaper.

Or he'd turn on the, the game, and I just could not connect. As I've heard him speak in recent years, I understand that it was his feelings of hypocrisy in those family settings that kept him from wanting to connect, that it heightened his sense of hypocrisy in his most important relationships. And so I think as you speak to that, Jenny, Like they could be on some days or in certain relationships, but in those most critical times when you needed the connection, you needed the support.

I know that as a child, as a daughter, I so often just felt like I couldn't access him and I wasn't sure why.

Narrator: For sure. That's very relatable. And I love that you bring in kids. My kids are struggling, you know, right now as well. So love that you give them a voice as well, Tara.

Justin B.: My youngest child is now 16. And she, my next youngest child, had a totally different experience with their father than my oldest 2, who are now 23, 24 years old. And with those 2, I was totally disconnected for most of their formative years until they were 15, 16 years old, you know. And, you know, yeah, I coached my son's baseball team all the time, but I connected more with the other kids than I did with my own son. And I think it was that hypocrisy thing that I was— I felt like I wasn't worthy to connect with them in that way.

And so I backed off. And that just is a— it's a painful realization and one that I've had. But you just hit me again with that memory, which I hate having those feelings, but it is good to remember. Yeah. That it's not just me it affects. It's my spouse, it's my children, it's other relationships outside of that that I think have zero correlation with my life, but I still affect those people. So yeah, thank you, I guess, for sharing that.

Tara McCausland: Thank you, Justin. Thank you for sharing a vulnerable point with us. So we're going to go more into really what the effect is to the spouse in later Q&As, but Jenny, do you wanna put a name to what it is that you experience and share a little bit more information about that?

Narrator: Yeah. So we, we in the recovery community often refer to it as betrayal trauma. And the interesting thing is so many of us, because we are suffering in silence, we don't understand that others are also suffering. But I know you had Barbara Steffens on recently, and Dr. Kevin Skinner has a similar statistic, but it's about 70%, and depending on the study, sometimes higher, of women who do struggle with PTSD-type symptoms after a sexual discovery or disclosure. And so what we're looking at is there is a severe mental health crisis that is going on that's not recognized.

that is really, really harmful. And in a BYU study recently, they talked about how 1/3 of married men are compulsively viewing pornography daily or weekly. So if we're looking at that, and that women are struggling as we receive disclosures— and this can go for men too, who might be struggling when they receive a disclosure— But for me as a woman, I'll just use that. But when we receive a disclosure or a discovery, and it just kind of rocks our world, and it's like an earthquake hit with all these aftershocks that we don't know when are going to come, that we're struggling often in silence and isolation.

I did it, like I said, for 17 and a half years. I'm not alone in that. There's so much shame around the subject that nobody wants to say my spouse has been unfaithful, my spouse has been looking at, you know, other women and, and I don't measure up to what I think that they're wanting or whatever. It is a really, really painful thing. And so we have women who maybe aren't sleeping, who forget to eat, or maybe it's like their bodies are like, I'm gonna eat a lot because of the trauma and the stress.

Or they— their thoughts— mine did this for sure— on a loop, like, you cannot get out of this loop that just seems to never end. Nightmares, awful nightmares that can't be controlled and, and can make sleep even difficult to want to go to sleep. So there's this often feeling of not being safe no matter where we're at, and it is a distressing feeling. And because we're not necessarily understanding this is trauma, this is a real problem.

This is not because I'm crazy, which is what I would think is I must be nuts or something. Because of that, it's just unsettling. I know people who have been suicidal during disclosures and discoveries. It is a very, very distressing ordeal to go through.

Tara McCausland: Well, thank you so much, Jenny and Justin, for sharing some of your experience with this. So is there an effect on the spouse of a porn user? An absolute yes. So we will continue to talk more in later Q&As and full episodes about the effect on the spouse. But we, I think we'll call it good for the day. Thanks again for being here. Thank you to our listeners. We'll see you next time.

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