Many people struggling with PTSD feel as if they can no longer love or be loved. Why is that? Why do some PTSD sufferers engaged in infidelity and devour pornography?
The PTSD-Identity seeks to isolate us and then kill us. One of the primary means by which PTSD isolates us is to alienate us from our healthy relationships.
Yet, we don’t get up in the morning and choose to damage our most healthy and sacred relationships. PTSD has to work at ruining our relationships. It may be through anger or drugs/alcohol. These days, PTSD has been executing its alienation gig by splitting up relationships through pornography and infidelity.
PTSD-based pornography addiction and infidelity are caused by damage to a person’s self-worth. They feel they are no longer pure enough to keep being pure in their sexual actions. Everything that was normal, before the trauma took place, has been turned upside down. PTSD diminishes our ability to desire to remain unstained in the world (ref: James 1: 27). This vector causes us to harm our pre-existing relationships and encourages alienation and isolation.
Trauma and Pornography Addiction
Time and again I hear about someone who was a loyal spouse, who after a tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan (or further back in Korea, Vietnam, or Desert Storm), came back and started sleeping around. These were people with little or no former interest in pornography. After their trauma experiences, they spend more time watching porn. In many cases a porn addiction takes hold.
Like an alcoholic they will
- sneak porn
- say they can stop whenever they want to
- say they just need a hit now and then to unwind
- end up needing more and more and get less thrill from it
- claim it is not hurting anyone else
- choose porn over family and faith
When they realize they have an addiction they may enter deeper despair.
Trauma and Infidelity
People may be driven to infidelity in order to attempt to feel some small modicum of worth. PTSD damages our self-worth; it makes us feel small, and wants us to feel like we don’t matter at all.
Even though our loved ones tell us they love us, the PTSD makes us feel as if that is not true or that their love is not very important.
It is almost as if the PTSD-Identity says the only way to know if you have self-worth is if someone else is willing to get naked with you for 3-7 minutes, in some cases even over night.
In the PTSD perspective, a variety of partners then shows that one has more value.
Besides the obvious problems of catching physical diseases, one discovers they will feel even less worthwhile after they have engaged a new partner. This experience encourages despair and then PTSD says, go find someone else, that will prove you are a worthwhile person.
Ironically, the more a PTSD afflicted person sleeps around and cheats on their spouse, the worse they feel about themselves.
How Does the PTSD Soul Wound Damage Self-Worth?
While there are four ways to contract PTSD, two ways tend to damage the sense of self-worth the most. Perpetrator PTSD and Victim PTSD each make the person feel tainted beyond worth, value, and redemption.
Perpetrator PTSD is when a person traumatizes someone else.
If I shoot someone, even in self-defense, I have perpetrated trauma and am liable to get PTSD. If I torture people for the government (like the Roman soldiers did to Jesus at the orders of their government), then I can contract perpetrator induced PTSD.
Victim PTSD is to have been traumatized yourself.
Someone or something did something to me and I now have PTSD. Shot at me, raped me, whatever…I have been traumatized and my soul has been wounded with PTSD. This is the PTSD type we normally think about.
PTSD Wants Me to Feel Impure
In my conversations with PTSD sufferers I find that they often feel spiritually tainted. They did something or something was done to them that makes them feel unworthy, unclean, stained at the level of their souls or identity. This feeling of impurity is a result of PTSD, it is a PTSD symptom.
Sometimes (not always) a rape victim will later become promiscuous. I am told that this is because they no longer feel pure.
PTSD Says: Your purity has been ripped away, so what is the point of keeping clean and honorable?
These PTSD symptoms cause despair. In a search for self valuation, the person may begin to sleep around, even with people they don’t really like.
Sometimes someone who has killed someone else will say that they can never go back to not being a killer. They wish they could, but now they are stuck, molded, into the life of a killer, someone who does not value the humanity of others: Such a person is someone who sleeps around and consumes porn.
The PTSD sufferer is made to feel as if they are not loveable. As if they can never be redeemed. As if they can never properly love another person again.
When someone with PTSD says
they don’t know if they can ever love again or ever be loved,
that is a sign of the PTSD soul wound.
The PTSD-Identity Seeks to Inhibit Love.
In order to isolate and then kill the sufferer the PTSD-Identity wants to destroy all healthy relationships. The best way to poison a relationship is to cause betrayal and the loss of love. This is accomplished through pornography, infidelity, and promiscuity.
If someone looks at porn, most spouses feel threatened.
It is very difficult to forgive adultery: Physical adultery through actual sex acts with someone else, or mental adultery by fantasizing about an abused/exploited sex worker.
Either form of adultery causes not only damage to the people directly involved (sex workers, prostitutes, other side of an affair), but also to the spouse. It bites at their own self-worth; it tears at their own sense of self. Even though they are not the cause of the infidelity or porn usage, they may think so and enter their own despair.
Regardless, infidelity and porn strain relationships. That is a PTSD Goal: Strain and Destroy Relationships to Cause Further Isolation and Despair.
Infidelity can be recovered from. It is difficult. It requires grace and prayer to be blessed with the deep forgiveness necessary to cleanse that kind of soul wound. But it is possible.
The PTSD Relationship Destruction Paradox
PTSD damages our sense of self. It makes us feel impure because of the trauma we have suffered and/or have inflicted upon others. This makes us feel less worthy and less pure than the time before we became traumatized. Paradoxically, in order to feel alive and as if we had self-worth, we engage in the very behaviors that damage us further, alienate us from those who love us, and deepens our despair.
Yet, we can defeat this cycle. We remain individuals who have inherent self-worth. We are created and loved by God. We don’t have to give into the PTSD temptations. Even if I have harmed others, God still loves me. I still have value.
It is a hard ride. We may have to ask forgiveness. As hard as it can be to forgive others, it is also hard to seek forgiveness.
The PTSD wants us to give up and wallow in despair. Yet, through love, we can heal. No matter how we got our PTSD, love can help heal us. Love is an antibiotic to the PTSD bacterium.
It is never hopeless.
Semper Pax, Dr. Z
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you Dr. Z!
Love heals so much. As a military spouse of a combat vet (OIF and OEF), I have been on the losing end of porn addiction, promiscuity and infidelity. He asked me to forgive him, I was able to. It takes time, consistency and love. Your words help to understand and channel the pain I feel about the infidelity on PTSD…it is the illness not the man. My husband is still the greatest man I have ever known. It’s not his fault, and he is making efforts to heal.
His pain is real and I love him every moment of every day. I wish I could take his pain away.
Hi, A colleague recently read through all of my essays (I guess he was getting a jump on purgatory) and then he mentioned to me that he found they had a theme of “Love” throughout. I was relieved as I fear i am sometimes too bitter in my writing. But it is certainly true that love is an antidote to PTSD. And real love requires compassion and forgiveness. I have been praying for you and your husband so that love may permeate your lives. Semper Pax, Dr. Z
just stumbled on this blog and am in tears reading it. how do i help my husband realize he has a problem and he may have ptsd? our marriage is on the verge of desstruction and I know he’s got stuff to deal with but he refused to seek individual counseling, though he is engaged in marital counseling after infidelity and then seeking hookups online on ashleymadison type sites and using porn a lot. we nearly got separated and my esteem has been so damaged. i’m just rebuilding but he’s back at the same actions, though he doesn’t know I know, and i don’t know where to turn. as i type i’m waiting for my individual counselor to call me back and counsel me on what to do as i just last night learned he’s engaging in the same online activities.
Hello,
You are going through a terrifying time. Have no doubt about that. I am relieved you are also getting guidance from an individual counselor as well a marriage counselor. In my experience, most PTSD-based infidelity is not directed at the spouse, they don’t really mean or want to hurt you. It is as if there are two compartments, one that loves you and the marriage and the other which is the PTSD-Identity. The latter seeps in and overrides the former.
The affairs and the porn are usually in response to the PTSD and self-worth issues. They are not meant as an affront or attack on the spouse or the marriage. While it is incredibly painful it is not focused with intent at you. Having said that, I know it is still so painful and rips one’s guts out.
You must be careful you do not get your own secondary PTSD from the trauma you are experiencing in this situation. See http://www.ptsdspirituality.com/2009/11/01/ptsd-spirituality-ptsd-shrapnel-makes-ptsd-contagious/ for an essay I wrote about that.
I don’t know if you can bring in your spouse’s parents. Some people can, some cannot – every situation is unique. Also, you might ask the marriage counselor to bring PTSD into the discussions and counseling. It would be a valid part of the therapy.
You may be familiar with the PTSD Relationship work of Dr. Diane England. She has a very useful website and book. I have not finished the reading her book, but I like what I have seen. Her site is: http://www.drdianeengland.com/
At the risk of overemphasizing my own website, I know that some people have printed off some of these essays and shared them with spouses and their adult children who come back with PTSD.
Be sure to take care of your own mental and spiritual health. Keep seeing your own counselor. Start or keep praying. If you don’t keep a journal, then start one. If you don’t know what to write, then write “I don’t know what to write” until you fill three pages. Most people find they only write it out a dozen times and then they are writing the important stuff. You need not share it with anyone. But writing it out will help you better understand the situation and your options, and like prayer, it will bring solace.
I, and others, will keep you and your husband in prayer.
Semper Pax, Dr. Z
Dr. Z,
Thank you for your reassuring words. Your site and these posts are incredibly helpful in letting me know I’m not crazy and I’m not alone. It’s been a very long road up til now to begin to learn that it’s not directed at me; some days are better than others. I’ve started writing and am thinking about finding a way to share my story and struggle with others as the spouses of PTSD seem to be shamed or guilted…or something, into silence. Thanks again for your help and all you do!
i was abused as a child. i am now 24 yrs old and just realized where my pain stems from. i have come to associate sex with love and self-worth. lately i am not experiencing that much..therefore i am in a turmoil, emotionally speaking. i came to an epitome today about this today. my problem now is how to deal with porn, how to handle knowing that my bf looks at it, and how to overcome the silly ideas of “not good enough” it plants in my head…
One of the first parts of healing the PTSD soul wound is recognising we have PTSD and then sorting out what caused it. Child abuse is certainly one of the ways that we can be afflicted with trauma and then PTSD. Suurvivors of child abuse may seek solace in porn as they mistake the sex act for authentic love. Getting unhooked from porn can be a difficult and challenging journey, but it is well worthwhile. If we can quit being inslaved to porn we will lead more auithentic lives and won’t be investing our tine and mnoney into an industry that turns the sex workers into meat pupets.
Getting past the “not good enogh” stage is also part of the journey, but much like curing porn, curing this stage can also be a successful journey.
If you have timne take a look at the porn category oin this website, it might prove useful for you and yuour boyfriend. Bringing the images of sex workers into our own beds means that we are not having authentic love. Rather we are just masturbatung with the involvement of another person. I say this because the porn user will often fantasize about a sex worker they sawe in a porn film while making love with their spouse or partner. That cheapnes love and fideliity and it further degrades the sex worker as well.
Don’t give up on this. Sometimes you will be stronger than other times, if you stumble, then know it is normal to do so and then carry on the shedding of the PTSD addictions and behaviors from your life.
Congratulations on discovering the abuse-PTSD-porn connections. We will pray for your well-being and being free of porn’s infection.
Semper Pax, Dr. Z
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