If it feels wrong, creepy,  bizarre, or unsettling, there is a good reason. It probably is.

The sociopathic sex addict will tell you who they are. Are you listening?

     1.  Listen for absurd accusations :  

Sociopaths are masters of projection. They assume everyone else is just like them.

For every accusation he hurled at me or anyone else, he had done that very thing or worse.

Every storekeeper was out to screw him. Every neighbor was lying. Every co-worker was gaming the system to get ahead.

And me? I was accused of infidelity, stealing money, never loving him, and more. I was told I was worthless, lazy, crazy and ungrateful. On and on it went.

When I learned of his sex addiction, the twisted manipulations and hypocrisy hit me like cold water. Prior to that moment, however, the years of gaslighting had nearly destroyed my ability to trust myself.

     2.  Listen for the odd truths that sneak out and leave you confused:

My ex’s favorite was “You’re going to leave me someday.”

He knew he was a deceitful selfish man. He knew that I would eventually discover the truth and would, indeed, leave him.

He would say this and I would predictably feel sorry for him, doubt my own ability to show love, and reassure him that I would stay no matter what. What a sick dance.

     3.  Listen for the wide sweeping, bizarre proclamations of grandeur:

When he wasn’t busy telling me what a great guy he was, my ex would very often say to me “I will never leave you or forsake you.” You know, like Jesus. Ewww.

Apparently he had quite unusual definitions of “forsake” and “great guy”.

It always left me unsettled, but I couldn’t put words to it at the time. I should have listened to my inner voice that was screaming, “Hypocrite!!”

For spouses of sex addicts, this was a tough week.  There’s been a lot of confusion for me and my fellow warriors who called in tears – unexpectedly triggered by the Kavanaugh hearings.

I’m NOT saying Kavanaugh is a sex addict. That’s never even been alleged. And I’m NOT taking sides. Surprisingly, I can’t…. yet.

This is much deeper than politics to those of us who’ve been entangled with a sex addict.

The problem with sex addicts isn’t just the sex, it’s the abusive patterns of lying, gaslighting, and projection, mixed with whopping doses of feigned righteous anger.

Even after disclosure, intensive therapy, and weekly attendance at Sex Addicts Anon meetings – where our sex addicts often “led” their groups while still screwing whores – we’ve watched them pound tables, cry, and declare their innocence with legendary righteousness.

We’ve seen our sex addicts lie to judges, children, family, and counselors, often with seething anger because anyone would dare think ill of them.

The entitlement of sex addicts is a wonder to behold. The denial is staggering, upstaged only by their firmly held belief that they are great spouses, fathers, and employees – despite mounds of evidence to the contrary.

Many of us couldn’t get past Kavanaugh’s “righteous anger”.  It was too familiar. It tied our stomach in knots and took us back to divorce courtrooms where we sat across from our once husbands and listened as they dismantled us with lies.

It took us back to counselor’s offices, where our then spouses threw things, yelled, and demanded the counselors stop accusing them and instead fix their “crazy” wives.

And so, we couldn’t quite believe Brett Kavanaugh. We couldn’t get past that righteousness.

On the other hand, we’ve had to live thru our own character assassinations by our sex addicts.  Most of us assumed that once the addicts had confessed and taken steps to “fix” their addiction, they’d forever be honest about it.

It took us completely off guard when we learned how our exes had turned the tables and accused us of the hideous things they’d actually done. For many of us, that projection has been the hardest abuse to stomach in all this mess.

We often struggle with a burning desire to clear our own names of  false accusations. We’ve pounded our pillows, cried, yelled, and been physically ill when learning of our ex’s continued lies at our expense.

And so, we want to believe Brett Kavanaugh. We, too, have been consumed with the need to be heard and have our reputations restored.

Because we have survived both ends of this argument, it turns out many of us are having a hard time taking sides.

Most of us know who we want to believe, and we don’t always agree on that. But we do agree that it’s been one hell of a week.

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”.

The sad truth about divorcing a sex addict/sociopath is this: You may never get what the court orders.

I didn’t believe that. Instead, I battled through 7 years of court to get what was rightfully mine in the first place. It ended up costing me more than I got.

It all ended with a(nother) letter from my ex, which basically stated: Take this pittance that I’ve calculated and go away, ….. or else.

Or else what?  Or else he’d appeal, countersue, and continue to take me to court until we both had nothing left and he became “inactionable”. This from the father of my children.

Easy for him to say. He remarried for money, then inherited enough to last him the rest of his life – none of which could be considered in the divorce. He didn’t have to destroy me; that was just for sport and to claim that he was right.

Divorce is a serious game to personality disordered sex addict. They will fight like a cornered animal when their reputation is on the line. You can continue to meet in court, or you can do it the sex addict’s way at the very beginning.

I foolishly thought my ex, who had defied laws of nature, reason, man and God throughout our marriage, would suddenly comply with authority.  I was wrong.

It cost me my finances, my health, relationships with friends who could no longer watch my shit show, my sanity (for a time), self-respect, and so much more.

If I could go back…..

I’d leave the second he said “I think I might be a sex addict”. Turns out he had already blown thru hundreds of 2nd chances every time he screwed another whore or blew another man at a nudist colony.

I’d get a court-ordered lie detector test. Witnesses and documentation will matter GREATLY in the years to come, especially if you have children together! Me asking for the test didn’t work. A counselor suggesting the test before he was allowed time with his children didn’t work.  Go for the court order!

I’d take whatever I could get, which would essentially be whatever pittance he offered. There is no “winning” or even “negotiating” with a personality disordered man. Given the chance, they’d rather destroy you.

I’d never look back, knowing that I was lucky to escape without being annihilated in the process.

But then, all I had at the time was some sketchy superficial diagnosis of “sex addict” and promises that our marriage could be better than ever. And so, I forgive myself and keep moving ahead. 

After 16 years of marriage, I found out my ex was a severely depraved sex addict. I asked him to leave that very night, and he did.

Before you praise my heroic and decisive action, you’ll need to know the rest of the story – the part where I start to look like the typical confused and traumatized spouse of a sex addict.

For 2 years, he lived elsewhere. We had very little contact except for counseling. He even became the leader of his Sex Addicts group. I guess they didn’t know he was still “acting out” – or worse yet, they knew and didn’t care.

So I let him move back home, trusting that he had changed. Boy was I wrong. Trusting a sex addict turns out to be an oxymoron.

The next few years were hell. He now had recovery language in addition to his arsenal of bible verses to lob at me.

His self-righteousness increased tenfold. Now he could even proclaim that he was winning the recovery race, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t just “get over it”.

Finally, after those  “bonus” years of being completely beaten down emotionally while he continued to cheat, I filed for divorce.

The cost of trying to reconcile with a sex addict was more than I could have possibly imagined.

Money: he spent those 4 years hiding money and preparing for the inevitable divorce.

Health:  Living under the enormous stress just about killed me. As is the case with many spouses of sex addicts, I will pay for the rest of my life with compromised health.

My children’s respect: I held them hostage with my indecision. I forced them to spend some of the most precious years of their life in a purgatory that I allowed.

Sanity: It’s one thing to live with a person when you don’t know they are a deviant sex addict. It’s quite another to stay when you are in the process of unearthing the extent of abuse.

Self respect: It’s been a long road to forgiving myself. As my children became adults, they, too, forgave me – but not before we all went thru several years of trauma counseling, emotional distance, and pain. 

Time:  This one hurts the most. I’ll never get back those wasted years when I could have been living a peaceful and active life.

I’ll ever be the same as I was before the abuse, but in some ways I’m better.  My victories often felt small or hollow, but I just kept stacking those victories until the day I finally recognized myself again. 

I’m happy to say that I now love the life I have. I worked hard for it. I am at peace and am learning to trust again.