Our Conjoint Pornography Recovery program treats the Porn Addict & helps the Betrayed Spouse simultaneously.
Conjoint therapy is a unique form of marriage work. It is used when the couple’s situation does not lend itself to more traditional marriage work. In fact, when infidelity is the problem, traditional couples counseling tends to drive the couple further into despair or even divorce.
When relationship betrayal is still raw or active, couples counseling is not likely to be effective due to high levels of pain and defensiveness. In conjoint work, the partners each work separately with a counselor to deal with their own feelings and coping skills. When ready, they are then brought together for more traditional couples work. In this way, we protect the relationship from being damaged from forcing reconciliation before the couple is emotionally and psychologically ready.
During his Addiction Recovery Process, the Husband must learn:
- Victim Empathy to understand and respond to the hurt he has caused his wife.
- Confrontation Tolerance to stop his defensiveness and accept his wife’s need to confront him as part of her journey towards healing her fear and doubts while he is working to deal with his addiction.
- How to master the triggers he has developed that reinforce his addiction and begin to rewire his brain and remove the deeply rooted causes that reinforce those triggers, so that porn loses its hold for good.
The Betrayed Wife needs to work on:
- The pain of betrayal and the fear of future hurt causes her to hold the betrayal too close, keeping it active and at the forefront of her mind. Being betrayed causes places the future of her relationship on hold while she waits for proof that her partner has changed. Betrayal Trauma counseling helps victims release the pain caused by the transgression of porn on your relationship, and how it broke the love story. The goal of counseling is to assist the victim of the betrayal to resume the relationship safely for now, and to begin to plan for a new version of the relationship when the time is right–to begin a new love story.
- To learn how to effective dispose of his automatic tendency to blame-shift his actions and return the responsibility back to him without engaging in his tactics.
- Understand and accept that his porn addiction has zero to do with you. It has never been about you, your appearance, your performance, your age, or your moods. His addiction is about habits formed years ago, before he knew the cost of the decisions he was making, and that are now programmed deeply into his psyche.
- Establishing your safety needs, rights, and boundaries in the relationship so that, for your part, the relationship is health.
- Learn to use healthy confrontation to verify your safety without triggering his tendency to relapse so that you can feel safe and still be heard. No more walking on eggshells.
- Understand his cycle to be able to support his recovery without giving up your own emotional safety.
Support for Women. While your husband goes through our structured recovery system, we offer a free weekly support through our Healing Hearts group for women, an advocate-led group where women can vent, learn, grow, and heal. There is no additional cost to you for this support. If you would like to learn more about that group, email us at support@connectcounselor.com
Conjoint therapy, where both spouses are seen separately for a while, before the couples work can begin, is designed to prepare you both for the work of reconnecting and healing the marriage. This is needed because when a counselor or therapist attempts to do couples work before each partner is ready, it often can do more harm than good. To keep the cost as low as possible our counselors generally see each partner on opposite weeks for three to six session, then bring them together to test their readiness for the deep work of reconciling the hurts. in this way, both partners have a voice, and the counselor is able to focus on the relationship, not just on one side. This dramatically shortens the counseling process.
Support for Men. Our Overcomer’s support group is a free group that helps men to get real with their porn problem, see the damage they have done to their wives, and learn tools to work collaboratively to free their marriage of the hurt. Overcomers meets every Saturday at 10:00am ET online. For information on joining Overcomers, email support@connectcounselor.com
For more structured healing, we offer Master Classes and Structured Courses, Process Groups, and other programs that take men and women from crisis to healing. Check out our courses here.