I found it! The word that explains why communicating with my ex was so maddening that it left me deeply confused, often to the point of questioning my own reality.

While Miriam Webster defines PALTER  “to act insincerely or deceitfully”, it turns out to mean a whole lot more.

According to the Harvard Gazette:

“Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they’re not being as deceptive as liars,” said Todd Rogers,  (bolding mine)

BINGO!!

So let’s get this straight. My sex addicted ex lied using the truth so he didn’t have to feel bad about himself! 

Let that soak in. While he protected himself from “feeling bad”, he was building the mother of all bombs that destroyed my family, my past, my present, and my future.

While protecting himself from “feeling bad”, he sacrificed my children and me to years of counseling to rebuild our own self images, trust, and reality. Not to mention a lifetime of whack-a-mole- forgiveness every time we unearth more consequences of his shit.

I knew my ex was sick,  but the deeper I dig, the more I learn just how sick. Every day that passes I gain more clarity and become more thankful I escaped when I did.

At the end, a sex addict’s entire house of cards is built on a twisted foundation: they will say and do just about anything so they don’t feel bad about themselves, while they are doing despicable and often illegal things!

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s delusional at best. And if you’ve lived this firsthand, you know that delusional is just the tip of a deep, dark, ugly iceberg our society lightly refers to as “sex addiction”.