Recovering inside a marriage you have damaged means learning to hear a spouse's anger as evidence of their pain rather than as an attack, recognizing how much harm a well-aimed word does after betrayal, and accepting that willpower alone has a poor record. These reflections come from a sponsor in long-term recovery.
About these reflections
The notes below were written by a sponsor in long-term recovery from sexual addiction, to the men he sponsored, and published on our earlier website. They are personal experience, not clinical guidance, and they were written by someone whose own marriage did not survive — which gives them a particular kind of candor.
If you are the betrayed partner rather than the person who caused the harm, this is not the article for you. Our guide for partners speaks to that side directly, and it starts from the position that none of this was your fault.
On accepting a spouse who is rejecting you
If I could go back and change one thing about my marriage, it would be this: I would fully accept my wife during the period when she was rejecting me.
I know how impossible that sounds. I have since found that it is not.
She was hurting. If I had known then how to stay steady, I could have heard what she was saying and doing as evidence of her pain rather than as something aimed at me. I could have been consistently kind through it — and from that place I might have been able to help her for her own sake, rather than in order to get her off my back or to get her to accept me again.
That last distinction is the whole thing. Kindness offered in order to purchase relief is not kindness, and partners can always tell.
I never once found resentment useful, regardless of what she did or did not do.
On what her anger is actually about
The feelings that come up around a woman who is nagging or rejecting you are a critical opportunity — to go to God for your sense of worth and your comfort, rather than trying to win against her, or trying so hard to please her that you lose your own peace in the process.
This is a painful place to stand. It is also where a good deal of the healing happens.
For some men there is a whole storehouse behind it: self-pity, playing the victim, resentment, inflated expectations, and a deep fear of rejection where women are concerned. All of that can be replaced — with respect, patience, kindness, and expectations that are actually realistic.
On the damage a targeted word does
I remembered recently how, in my addiction, when I felt emotionally cornered, I would sometimes flip into a reactive place where I used a wickedly efficient instinct for finding my wife's most vulnerable hurts.
Looking back, I believe it was those moments, more than the betrayal itself, that finally took her over the edge toward divorce.
Since remarrying, I have felt myself move toward that place twice. Both times I could read the physical effect of my words in the room — and it is not really the words, it is the spirit in which they are delivered — and I backed off, for her safety, until I was calm enough to handle the issue from love instead.
We forget how frightening we can be to our wives. One well-aimed verbal assault, and for years afterward she will shut down every time your voice tightens.
On why "never again" kept failing
How many of us have felt that passion to never again indulge — and meant it as completely as Peter meant it when he said he would die before denying Christ?
And then how many of us fell asleep when we should have been watching, and by morning had done the thing we swore we would not do?
How many of us have gone out and wept bitterly at our own weakness?
With all our will and all our mind we committed, over and over. What we lacked was not sincerity. What we lacked was a power greater than our own — and until that arrived, the sincerity was never going to be enough.
That is not an excuse. It is the reason the program asks for surrender rather than resolve.
On what your marriage could still become
A closing thought, from one of our own clinicians rather than from the sponsor.
Max De Pree, the American businessman, is said to have observed that we cannot become who we want to be by remaining what we are.
Becoming is forward movement. Couples very often define their relationship by the injuries of the past — but she said, but how could he — and those injuries do matter. They need to be validated and genuinely understood, both so they are not repeated and because the person carrying them deserves that. But they need not become the whole definition of the marriage.
When couples start using permanent language about what they simply are, it interrupts the ability to become anything better.
Couples are limited mainly by what they believe they can become together. Sometimes that belief needs some tender persuasion, because it has been buried for a long while.
A clinical note
One thing worth stating clearly, because the reflections above are written from the perspective of the person who caused the harm.
If you are the partner reading this: nothing here asks you to absorb mistreatment, to move faster than you are able, or to make your recovery contingent on his. Betrayal produces a genuine trauma response, and you are entitled to your own care regardless of what he is or is not doing. Whether the relationship continues is your decision, and good therapy will not push you toward any particular answer.
If you are the person who caused the harm: the most useful thing in these reflections is the repeated insistence that your recovery is yours. Not something your spouse owes you help with, not something measured by whether they have forgiven you yet.
We provide both sides of this work — CSAT-trained therapists for compulsive sexual behavior and CPTT-trained clinicians for partner betrayal trauma — coordinated where that is appropriate and kept separate where it is not. Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420 or text 801.997.8760.
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