How To Know If Your Husband Has A Sex Addiction

Have you ever wondered how to know if your husband has a sex addiction? You’re not alone. On The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Podcast, women who ask this same question share how they found out if their husband was a sex addict.

Anne Blythe, M.Ed., host of the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Podcast, interviews Naomi, a member of the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Community – a community for wives of addicts.

If you relate to this podcast, our community is here for you. Attend an online Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session TODAY.

My Husband’s Addiction Started Before We Married

Naomi describes how to know if your husband has a sex addiction, and how her husband groomed her when they dated.

How Does A Man With A Sex Addiction Groom His Wife?

To identify whether your husband’s addiction is causing him to manipulate you through grooming, watch for the following:

• Feeling “swept off your feet”
• Always receiving the “perfect answer” to your questions
• Constant attentiveness and love-bombing
• Pushing your boundaries (sexual, physical, emotional) but always apologizing afterwards and committing to never doing it again
• Claiming to have never used pornography or other sexual acting out behaviors
• Overly generous with time and money

If you’re still unsure if he’s been manipulating you in this way, enroll in The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Living Free Workshop.

I Believed Him When He Said He Said He’d Get Recovery For His Addiciton

One of the most painful aspects of being married to a addict is struggling to determine if he’s telling the truth. Why?

• Sex addicts are very persuasive.
• The grooming/love-bombing process is a relief from overtly abusive behaviors, and distracts victims from identifying abuse.
• Men with sex addictions skillfully manipulate others and say exactly the right things to appear repentant and willing to change.

Women in this situation often struggle with their addict husband’s claims that they are naive, stupid, or desperate.

As women learn about the trauma his behavior has caused, they empower themselves to voice their stories and feelings. This paves the way for healing.

Further, when a woman understands all the facets of how his addiction affects her, she’s able to make decisions to protect herself.

At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we understand the struggle to know if your husband has aN addiction.

Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Sessions offer women the validation, support, and community that they deserve. Attend a session today and begin your healing journey.

Transcript: How To Know If Your Husband Has AN Addiction

Anne: We have a member of our community on today’s episode, we’re going to call her Naomi. Welcome, Naomi.

Naomi: thank you.

Grooming and The Early Signs of aN Addiction

Anne: Let’s start at the beginning of your story when you were dating.

Looking back. How would you describe it? Was there anything happening that would have helped you know if your husband has an addiction had you known then what you know now?

Naomi: I think it was a pretty typical grooming process. But I didn’t know how to tell if my husband was grooming me. He was just really kind. We were friends at first and then it progressed into more. He was very attentive and in contact almost hourly. I always got text messages, and he was always complimentary and kind. He swept me off my feet.

Early signs of Abuse in marriage

Naomi: After we got married, he had these huge outbursts of anger, and said horrible things. I quickly learned that if I stayed in line with what he wanted, those did not occur as often.

And so I very quickly learned to anticipate what might cause angry outbursts. To avoid the name calling and the yelling and throwing things and stuff like that.

Anne:   Which is the purpose of abuse: to coerce someone to do what you want, rather than a healthy way of interacting, being honest and asking them nicely and giving them the ability to choose for themselves. Often when you know your husband has a addiction, they’ll use coercion in really subtle, even kind ways to stop you from talking about it. This is one thing that can help you deal with an addict husband.

When did you discover your husband’s addiction? from talking about it.

Discovering the truth, how to know if your husband has an Addiction

Naomi: About three years into our marriage, I discovered he was involved with a woman. At that point, I was willing to take most of the blame. I had said, obviously I’m not meeting your needs. We need to go see a counselor. We need to talk to the bishop. Let’s work this out. And so he acknowledged he was using pornography. I am pretty smart and I’m quick with computers.

I checked up on him a lot. He’s also very smart and very, very good with computers, and so he quickly learned how to avoid getting caught. So we kind of played this game for a while, where I would check up on him a lot, but eventually I couldn’t catch him anymore because he figured out all the ways that I was checking up on him and he found ways around them.

the patterns to know if your husband has an addiction

Naomi: And then about four years later, I discovered he was involved with a girl at work, and there were other women in between, so we separated. I was staying with my parents. The two bishops I worked with really wanted me to work it out with him.

I didn’t know what else to do, and he was good at convincing me that he was going to change things, and that things were going to get better. So I stayed, and then I caught him involved with a girl again. She was staying in his hotel.

And so at that point, I said, we need a separation. That’s the point when someone brought up my husband’s addiction for the very first time.

When a therapist doesn’t know if your husband has an addiction

Anne: So was this from a therapist? They didn’t help you identify the abuse, but they said your husband has an addiction?

Naomi: So we had been to therapists, we went to therapists the whole time, through 11 years.

But I didn’t realize he was abusing me, and I didn’t think my husband has an addiction either. They never said the word addiction. It was just a pornography problem. Something that he needed to address. At that point, I discovered a lot more about sex addiction. Gaslighting, table turning, grooming.

Understanding Gaslighting

Anne: Could you provide examples of how your husband was gaslighting you?

Naomi: One of the first ones that comes to my mind is when I sensed something was wrong. I always felt like something was wrong, but every once in a while I would just feel it strongly.

And so I’d be like, is everything okay? Is there something going on maybe that you need to tell me about? He would say, you know, eventually you’re going to figure out that that’s just your paranoia or he would question everything I said. Because he is genuinely a very, very intelligent person.

It would leave me feeling like maybe I was crazy. Maybe it was me. He would turn things around, and he would say other people could see it, as well.

Separation

Naomi: We separated, and he still claimed it was going to get better. But when I set boundaries, he decided I was holding him back, and he left.

He did not file for a divorce, but he asked me to do it.

I didn’t want a divorce, but I did what he wanted.

How to know if your husband is recovering from a sex addiction

Naomi: It was good for me to let go and say, this isn’t my problem anymore. But I didn’t want to at the time, and I was devastated.

I didn’t recognize gaslighting as abuse. It took me until after the divorce to recognize that there was abuse, that there was anything other than pornography use.

I read one of the articles you had put out there, and it was talking about ways to recognize whether someone was actually working addiction recovery. I started recognizing a bunch of things that were still going on in my interactions with him after the divorce. Before that, I had had therapists advise me to read a book.

As I read the book, I thought, you know, this doesn’t really seem like me. And then, after reading your article, I read it again and I was like, holy cow, this is exactly me.

He would attack me, but at the end of his attacks, when I was upset, he’d say things like, “You just hate that someone else thinks differently than you, and you can’t control what they think.”

And I would believe him, because I was feeling upset by that point. And so I was like, yeah, I feel upset about what he’s thinking. I didn’t recognize that his attack was actually the cause of what I was feeling.

But there were times when I had great clarity, and I realized that I didn’t deserve to feel guilty. And then I started listening to different things, like your betrayal trauma podcasts. And I started recognizing slowly that he wasn’t very nice, and I started recognizing my feelings and emotions.

The emotional toll when you know if your husband has an addiction

I buried my emotions deep so that I could just get through each day. But they started coming out, you know, as I’d remember things and think about things that would be different. I noticed I was happy, and I hadn’t felt that in a while. It was because I got away from his abuse and had confidence in myself.

I didn’t feel like I constantly had to please someone else, or there were going to be huge repercussions. My relationship with my children became even better, and it was pretty good. They were struggling, and as we worked through it together, finding ways to talk about things that were hurting them inside. I gained confidence in my mothering skills and everything around me, where I hadn’t even realized I hadn’t had confidence before.

While listening to betrayal trauma podcasts, I started to recognize just more and more and thought, Oh my goodness, this was way worse. I think when you’re in the situation at the time, you can’t think about how horrible it is, because that would be too hard to handle the situation itself and recognize how bad it is.

Final Reflections on how to know if your husband has an addiction

Naomi: For a lot of people, it comes after.

Anne: Yeah, I experienced the most trauma after he left the home. And I realized how bad it was. Yeah, it’s shocking.

Naomi: And it was your podcast.

It was the Betrayal Trauma Recovery podcast that really helped me recognize. A lot of times I think for the professionals, it’s hard to say abuse. It’s hard to say those words and it’s hard to talk about abuse like grooming, gaslighting, things like that. But it’s really important for the survivor of abuse to hear those words and to understand what really happened to them.

And once they do hear those words. It’s life saving, because it helps you recognize why you had the reactions that you did, that it was really that bad. And that’s why you’re feeling the way that you’re feeling. It was really important.

Anne: Naomi. Thank you so much for sharing how discovering your husband’s addiction helped you realize that he was abusive to you emotionally, psychologically, and even sexually. Your story will help other women struggling to know if their husband has an addiction. Thank you for sharing it.