03: Support for Relationships Dealing with Sexual Addiction with Mari Lee

Are you hurting or deceiving someone you love? Or has someone you loved betrayed you with an affair or sexual secrets and your heart is broken? Perhaps you have been struggling with depression or anxiety and don’t know where to turn. If so, you are not alone. Every person and couple stumbles at some point in their life and needs support along the way. Today’s guest is Mari Lee. She’s a respected and trusted therapist, who brings a compassionate and direct focus to her work treating each counseling client as a unique human being. Mari is recognized nationally and internationally for her work with spouses and partners of sex addicts, and with male and female sex, love and pornography addicts. Additionally, Mari is the best-selling author of Facing Heartbreak: Steps to Recovery for Partners of Sex Addicts, and speaks and teaches nationally on this topic, as well as supervises and trains other therapists and counselors around the world in sex addiction recovery treatment. Listen to the episode as Mari discusses:

• Why the feeling of being out of control is very common
• The differences in the way women vs. men are viewed with sexual addictions
• How you can confuse intensity with intimacy
• The roots of sexual addiction are normally trauma
• How to figure out what is really going on with people who have a sexual addiction
• How to discern what is healthy sexuality vs what is sexual addiction
• Why sexual addiction is really an intimacy disorder
• Why a healthy relationship with sex doesn’t harm or hurt anyone else
• Sexual addiction can also be replaced with hyper-sexualization or sexual compulsivity
• Sexual compulsion outside of your relationship is a trauma wound
• Spouses of those with sexual compulsions have the same symptoms of betrayal, shock, and even physical manifestations
• The role isolation plays in sexual addiction
• How sex addiction can be an attempt to soothe pain
• What recovery looks like for couples dealing with sexual addiction
• Why staggered disclosure is traumatic in a relationship

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