On Being Seen

Group therapy for women married to sex addicted men

Trigger warning

I had a trauma therapist. I’ve called her Tonya on this blog. We parted ways—me, simply by not booking another session. As great as she was, and as much as I desperately needed her when I first reached out, I soon realized I needed someone who understood how my Christian worldview impacts me beyond mere emotions or thoughts. How I believe God made our mind and therefore knows how to heal it, and therefore has equipped people—doctors, therapists—to help mend us.

Before we parted, Tonya had suggested something. Session after session, after hearing about the 100s and 100s of comments I was making on Reddit and Facebook groups sharing my pain, she told me it might be best for me to join a group. A therapy group. It would be healthier for me, she suggested. I could build community. But mostly because Reddit is full of keyboard warriors, and group therapy is with a licensed, trained professional.

So I did it.

And once I started looking, I was shocked. I filled out forms—some in my city, others more far afield—and I could not believe how many groups exist for women whose partners have betrayed them in this way. Who have husbands who are “sexually acting out.” I didn’t know such a world existed. Such a need. One therapist group I reached out to told me she only works with people who plan on working together, on doing a full disclosure. I was already past the that point. I had asked Kwame to do a polygraph over 3 times, and he had refused. (it was only after I had been gone for months he pretended as if it was something he would have done but that I was too hasty to end tings and didn’t really want reconciliation….it’s gaslighting). Then she pointed me toward a few other groups. One was a Christian therapy non-profit.

I applied.

The intake call that followed was over an hour long. I felt heard. I shared my pain. I shared the words my husband had said to me: “ask yourself why your husband prefers prostitutes over you.” The therapist did an intake of breath and said she hurts for me hearing that. That it hurt her to her such words were said do me. I shared the times I had asked for transparency and been told I didn’t earn it, didn’t deserve it—because I had looked into his phone, or eavesdropped on a call after I discovered he had paid over 30 prostitutes and escorts and cam girls in just a mere 9 months. I shared my pain, and my pain was held and honored.

I also shared the advice a pastor gave me—that maybe I need to be more sexy. Dress like the women my husband finds so attractive, to snatch him from the hands of Jezebel. And the intake therapist told me the danger of that advice. It is dangerous because it demeans me, as a wife and as a child of God, to have to dress like a prostitute. But it is also dangerous to Kwame—what I call my soon-to-be ex-husband on this blog—because it feeds into his addiction rather than heals it. She said these things, and I truly felt heard. I felt seen. I knew I was in the hands of a professional. A CSAT, trauma-informed group.

A week after that call was yesterday. I pulled up to the church where they meet, and I was nervous getting out. Nervous that people may judge me. That they might see me, and that by seeing me they would know what I have endured, and by knowing what I have endured, I would once again feel that same shame that Kwame has always heaped on me—the way in which I was faulted for his actions.

But I went in.

And getting in was its own small ordeal. I got lost a bit. Kept pulling on locked doors. Ended up in one section of the church where each time I said hello, a group responded, and I somehow ended up in the middle of someone’s after-work snack or something. It was odd and funny, walking through a series of half-dark corridors to a trio of voices waiting for me in the one place with light. Feels oddly biblical.

But anyway. Wrong spot.

When I eventually found the group, the space was beautiful. Tea-time themed, with a faux flower arrangement on each table, pearls, books. Very Pinterest-worthy. They sat me next to a woman who is a facilitator, known to be good and welcoming to newcomers. I was handed a name-tag with only my first name—and slowly at first, but then very suddenly, I realized I was in a room with women who knew my pain before I even had to speak.

Then we began. We discussed the topic for the day: Shame. Healthy and unhealthy shame. Shame from a biblical standpoint. We talked about the ways husbands like ours shift their own shame—their inability to feel or acknowledge their own self-loathing—onto us instead. My eyes kept welling up, but I didn’t cry until I did. I suddenly remembered all the horrid things he had said to me. The way he made me feel so low I thought I should die. How I had kissed my child’s head to say goodbye and cried and cried with plans I would die in our basement, and how the grace of God pulled me from that moment. I cried because I remembered how badly he had made me feel. How wretched. How stupid. How filthy. How undesirable. How little I was worth to him for him to never state what he did but instead blame me. I remembered how he brought a prostitute to talk to me on FaceTime, and how even his own mother—who hates me, by the way—told him how messed up that was.

I cried, and I couldn’t stop for a while, because the facilitator—CSAT and trauma-informed—had the language. The precise language, to describe this precise pain. And I felt so seen. I felt the full brunt of my pain. A woman old enough to be my mother patted my arm, and she hugged me, and another new girl handed me a box of tissues. And I cried in front of other people. A room full of women. For the first time.

And in that crying I felt heard and seen in a way that Kwame never did. I cried, and they did not see my tears as manipulation (as he had told me my tears ewre), but as the cathartic release of a woman who had been hurt for so long and finally was letting herself feel it.

Then we talked it through at the table, in our small group — which of these categories our husbands, our ex-husbands, had put on us to avoid feeling their own shame. And after that came an exercise. We had to look each other in the eyes and speak affirmations, the opposite of everything we'd just named. We had to pour life into each other. And when life was poured into me, I cried, albeit briefly, again.

Afterward, we all packed up. Two long hours together, and then it was time to go. I helped stack chairs. Stood awkwardly in the middle of the room for a bit. Hugged one of the facilitators goodbye, and promised to return — if I could find an evening babysitter.

I have spent so long being the one who holds things. Who researches, who explains, who carries the proof of my own pain so that someone, anyone, might finally believe me. Yesterday I didn't have to hold anything. I just had to sit in a room full of women who already knew, and let them hold it with me. That is the thing no one tells you about group therapy — it is not that strangers understand your pain in the abstract. It is that they have lived close enough to it to know exactly where it hurts, and they reach for that place gently, the way you'd touch a bruise you already knew was there. I am so thankful I joined tea-time with those ladies.