Task-Oriented Recovery for Partners of the Sexually Obsessed

As we understand more about sexual addiction interventions and treatment strategies, we also need to provide task-centered interventions for the co-addict.  While co-addicts are encouraged to attend Al-Anon, Codependents of Sex-Addicts (COSA), Recovering Couples Anonymous (RCA), and individual and couples psychotherapy, we don’t provide a roadmap for their recovery.  Co-addicts are left to navigate on their own.  A task-oriented program can help the co-addict focus on themselves.  Structure helps create tolerance as the co-addict is busy healing and growing as well.

As the sex-addict needs structure, so does the co-addict.  Task-oriented treatment has a beginning, a middle and the capacity for the co-addict to create their own ending.

We have the ability to help reduce the toxic shame of the co-addict.  We can create an environment in which we educate the co-addict that the sex-addict’s behavior is his/her own.  We can reduce couple-shame so that the co-addict does not feel “branded for life, thereby suffering the consequences of the addict’s behavior.”  We can provide a structure that allows the co-addict to hold still, begin to examine their early life experiences, and how those contributed to the selection of their life-mate. Our job is to educate the co-addict that we take ourselves with us, no matter where we go, or whom we are with.

A task-centered recovery program provides the co-addict with a way back – away from their feelings of shame, that they were part of the addict’s addiction.  Couple-shame can be reduced, if we teach methods of communication geared towards reducing secrecy.  Secrecy pushes the sex-addiction “Into the Shadows” (P. Carnes) where, over time, it festers into the lives of every member of the family.  Families can deal with almost anything, if they can just talk about it. (A. Miller)

Co-addicts need to learn that sex-addiction does not have to mean the end of their relationship.  A realistic concept of love means not lying to yourself or your partner.  Co-addicts often do so to keep the relationship together.  Rebuilding trust requires the fortitude to tell the truth and to hear the truth.  This truth involves the co-addict taking responsibility for their behavior.  Instead of seeing the addict as the perpetrator and themselves as the victim, the co-addict has to own their own participation “in the relationship,” whatever that might have been.

Healthy relationships require teaching each partner to develop strengths that can improve their capacity for intimacy.  Tasks designed to break down chronic patterns of avoiding intimacy help the co-addict stretch into healthy behavior that they normally would not do, thereby healing both their own and in the process their partner’s wounds.  Harville Hendrix says “We look to our partners to give to us what they themselves are least capable of providing.”  Task-oriented recovery helps the co-addict take responsibility for their own satisfaction and level of intimacy in the relationship.

Our job is to teach the tools, guide or coach the client, be their cheerleader when times seem hopeless, enhance their spiritual awareness, and to describe to the co-addict how “ yes, we have the right to hold people accountable for their behavior, so they can never do it to us again, but to forgive them and ourselves for our human-ness” so we can move forward in our lives.  (L. Smedes)

This workshop will assist the participants in learning a task-centered approach with goals and objectives designed to empower the co-addict in acquiring the skills to reconstruct and mend their relationships and face important truth about themselves and their own sexuality.

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