The Sex Addiction-Induced Trauma (SAIT) articulates thirteen dimensions of trauma relevant to the clinical impacts, injuries and symptoms among intimate partners of sex addicts, based on both qualitative research and clinical application with partners and spouses impacted by sex addiction and compulsivity. Each dimension is a cluster of traumatic impacts, traumatic processes, and post-traumatic symptom sequences.
These thirteen dimensions are as follows:
1. Discovery Trauma:
Defined as the traumatic intrusion(s) and resulting post-traumatic symptoms from the intersection of the partner’s pre-existing reality-ego with the deceptive sexual/relational compartmentalized reality-system.
2. Disclosure Trauma:
Defined as a traumatic discovery incident and traumatic process, and may also occur many times in a partner’s experience. Each disclosure is a critical trauma-inducing incident and traumatic process. A disclosure is the process of being told about some aspect of the deceptive, compartmentalized reality-system (factual or not). There can be many disclosures, spontaneous or forced disclosures, and professionally guided disclosures, which is a clinical treatment process.
3. Reality-Ego Fragmentation:
Reality-Ego that fragments from the intrusion of the SA-deceptive-compartmentalized-sexual system often includes the most foundational structures on which many critical cognitive and psycho- emotional schemas and systems of functioning, including relational functioning, are necessarily dependent. Ego-reality fragmentation then becomes one of the critical injuries of SAIT, and from this many SAIT symptoms and trauma-inducing dynamics evolve. A traumatized, fragmented, and injured ego causes functional impairment, similar to brain injury. The actual ability to utilize the ego towards initiating and effectively implementing health attempts becomes compromised and diminished.
Traumatic ego-reality dissolution and fragments manifest as traumatic memories, body experiences and traumatic coping patterns and intrusions seeking clinical metabolization and integration. Symptoms of ego fragmentation among partners and spouses often include alterations in consciousness, alterations in self-perception; amnesia or hypermnesia, transient dissociative episodes, depersonalization, de-realization, and “reliving traumatic experience” either through PTSD symptoms or through the process of ruminative preoccupation.
4. Impact to Body and Medical Intersection:
This involves the trauma to one’s physical body, which can be significant for partners. This could include the impact on body image, triggering of eating disorders, weight loss or weight gain, vomiting, shaking, hair loss, defecation, insomnia and sleep disturbance, psycho-emotional dissociation, crying episodes, physical expressions of rage, hyper-vigilance, muscular constrictions, stomach sickness, falling to the ground, fetal position, vaginal spasms, aversion to physical or sexual touch, sharp pains, uncontrollable primal screams and screaming sounds. These are simply some of the hundreds of physical and medical symptoms of trauma and SAIT among partners, as it is clear that psychosomatic traumatic manifestations are profound.
5. External Crisis and Destabilization:
All the practical changes, sudden or long-term external changes, and the overwhelming chaos that ensues and often endures as a direct result of the sex addiction, particularly post-ego fragmentation, and as a result of all the associated dynamics of abuse and violation. These dynamics are a significant source of stress that alone often can cause functional impairment.
6. SAIT Hyper-vigilance and Re-Experiencing:
Hyper-arousal and re-experiencing is a well-established symptom of trauma in which specific internal/external, and objective/subjective stimuli, perceptions, thoughts, feelings or sensations will remind the psyche of the trauma and the system will react to the stimulus – causing psychological, cognitive and emotional changes related to fear, panic and feelings associated with traumatic memory.
7. Dynamics of Perpetration, Violation and Abuse:
Defined as emotional abuse, psychological abuse, family and relational domination, covert management of deceptive-compartmentalized-reality, sexual abuse and coercion, child neglect and abuse, and other patterns of harm to human beings and violations of human rights, termed “sex addiction-induced perpetrations”. Gaslighting is the process in which the addict intentionally manipulates a partner’s reality in order to protect reality and the truth from becoming known or discovered by the partner. This is a form of psychological manipulation and covert psycho-emotional abuse and perpetration. The serious damage that can often result from gaslighting a person is that it erodes or ruptures the person’s relationship between their psyche and their intuition which has been impacted by reality-ego fragmentation.
8. Sexual Trauma:
There can often be trauma to a partner’s sexuality, inclusive of traumatic incidents and ongoing traumatic patterns that traumatize a partner’s sexuality. Ongoing systems of sexual and gender domination, control and utilization and violation of a partner’s body and sexuality may sometimes exist within intimate partnerships impacted by sex addiction or compulsivity disorders. The sexuality of a partner is often impacted by sex addiction in a similar way that women who have been raped or sexually traumatized are impacted in terms of symptom similarities.
9. Gender Wounds and Gender-Based Trauma:
To the extent that there is gender subservience as a mandate of repression, then there exists gender-based violence as a factor that serves to maintain the subservience. There are myriads of dynamics informed by gender-based violence causing symptoms of gender-based trauma in all of us and in humanity. Partners and spouses often experience significant gender-based trauma based on patterns of gender-based violence and abuse associated with sex addiction-compulsivity patterns and perpetrations, including the harm they may endure from clinical treatment interventions.
10. Relational Trauma and Attachment Injuries:
Healthy and secure attachment to human beings is essential to psychological health. Disconnection from human beings results in pain, dys-regulation, and disease. Rupture from what was experienced as a secure attachment, which included psychological and emotional dependency, is a traumatic and critical event and dynamic in itself.
11. Family, Communal and Social Injuries:
While trauma impacts a partner’s interior world, and primary adult attachment, it also has far reaching implications for other relationships, including the parent-child bond, the social world, the experiences of being in public, the sense of communities that provide stabilization and dependency, and relationships to others in general, and all human beings. It is common for many of these often extremely painful dynamics to go unacknowledged and excluded from discussions on sex addiction. However, these consequences on social functioning and interpersonal functioning can be a significant source of trauma, and may involve multiple attachment injuries, significant grief and loss over many relationships, and profound, sudden and prolonged shifts and alterations in the ways a partner relates to other human beings on the most basic level. Often a family system is invariably impacted by sex addiction. Partners may end up holding secrets from loved ones and family, experiencing a loss of integrity with others she had always cherished. Partners may lose friends, may find out their friends colluded or also violated her. The trauma may also cause social constriction and avoidance, causing significant changes to how the partner relates to her social reality, community, public space, and to human beings in general, including agoraphobic symptomology or loss of faith in humanity.
12. Treatment-Induced Trauma:
Treatment-Induced trauma is another trauma inducing critical injury of SAIT. Often this dimension of trauma is caused by clinical interventions that are fundamentally organized on the traditional co-sex addiction model (COSA), or single-concept codependency model (CODA), and other traditional interventions, such as sex positive therapy, based in the omission of recognizing or treating SAIT among partners. Many “sex positive” counsellors and educators will prescribe, “date nights or sex nights”, for traumatized and sexually abused partners and couples impacted by SAIT.
13. Existential and Spiritual Trauma:
Existential trauma or spiritual trauma is a form of ego fragmentation, possibly representing a foundational structure on which much of the psyche may be organized. The traumatic shattering of a person’s existential reality and their relationship with divine systems of benevolence or protection can be altered. This can result in ego destabilization, ruptures with benevolent or omnipotent attachment and core psychic reliance on God, faith, humanity, love, and life itself.
Mike Quarress CSAT-S