Reflections of a Partner of the Sexually Obsessed at a COSA Convention

By Judy B. (Used by Permission)

 FRIDAY

I feel such pain right now. 

I am one of those women (scared) enough though, I didn’t tell my story. 

How did I get here? I don’t want to be a member of this club!

My life wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.  I never imagined at 50 that I’d be a member of COSA. 

Being around all these sex addicts gives me the creeps.  They look unkempt, strange, and unsafe.  I don’t want to be in an elevator with them, or anywhere else. 

How did I get here, anyway? 

I don’t belong here.  I don’t want to be part of the group.  I just want to run away and pretend I’m a CODA person not a COSA. 

I guess being in Al-Anon and not talking about sex addiction has protected me and insulated me from the fact that I’m married to a sex addict.  Even though I know I am.  I don’t think about it a lot, I just work my won program.  Here I am faced with that fact at every meeting.  I want to run. 

I don’t think that I’ll ever come back to a conference.  All these men remind me of my father and (my husband.) 

I want to think of it all in an abstract way, so I can feel OK.  I have a lot of shame about being a COSA. 

SATURDAY

 Today I’ve come out of a Sexuality After Recovery Workshop, and I feel immense pain.  I want to run away and be far away from this conference.

 The stories I’ve heard just now force me to see the terrible destruction this addiction does to the lives of the co-addict, with wreckage of self, and their sense of who they are as a woman. 

The stories I heard all go back to the sexual abuse by someone in their youth, and how this shaped how they thought of sex.  Many different views of sex and yet the outcomes are the same – attractions to a sex addict.  The women are bewildered as to how they got here and yet they do know how – it just seems so unreal.  How wasted the years of disappointing relationships, failed marriages; all because of the action of men in their lives.  Men who only care about what’s good for them, not seeing the havoc that is heaped on other’s life.  Years that they can’t get back to do it differently.

© 2003

This page last updated on:  Friday April 23, 2004.