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Episode 310
ABOUT THE EPISODE:
When your child’s phone becomes their constant companion, you might dismiss it as typical Gen Z or Alpha Generation behavior. But this week’s guest, Duane Osterlind, a licensed marriage and family therapist with nearly two decades specializing in sex and porn addiction, shares a far more urgent reality: the average first exposure to online pornography is now 10 years old. This conversation isn’t about moral panic or judgment, it’s about understanding how high-speed, 4K internet content impacts developing brains in ways our neurobiology simply wasn’t designed to handle. Duane brings his extensive clinical experience to illuminate why younger and younger people are seeking help for porn addiction, often in their early twenties, after years of private struggle that began in childhood.
Our conversation extends beyond your child’s relationship with technology to look at how behavioral addictions create reverberations throughout entire family systems. If you’re navigating both a child’s substance use and suspecting similar patterns in your partner’s behavior, Duane offers a candid perspective on betrayal trauma that moves beyond simplistic advice. He shares why most relationships impacted by sexual betrayal actually stay intact—and often emerge more durable—when the person causing harm is genuinely willing to address the shame that fuels addictive patterns. His framework for moving from shame to resilience applies whether you’re supporting a young person just beginning to recognize problematic patterns or grappling with the emotional proximity required to hold space for a partner’s recovery.
You’ll learn:
- Why adolescent brains exposed to intense sexual content at 10, 11, or 12 develop neural pathways that make porn addiction particularly tenacious by their twenties
- The startling demographic shifts Duane has seen in his practice in recent years
- How parents can open a conversation with their kid(s) about porn, its impact and ideas of how to limit exposure
- What discovery trauma is and why discovering betrayal in a partner can bring on PTSD symptoms
- The critical distinction between supporting a partner or spouse through their addiction versus taking responsibility for their healing—and why partners betrayed by sexual acting out must see a long-term commitment before making relationship decisions
- How shame operates as both the genesis and the sustaining force of behavioral addictions, and why addressing core shame is essential for anyone hoping to show up authentically for their family
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- The Addicted Mind Podcast
- Shame to Resilience Workshop (for adults)
- Brenda as a guest on The Addicted Mind podcast ep. 360
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Duane Osterlind
[00:00:00] Duane, so good to see you again. This is so fun. Twice in one week that we get to actually, or yeah, I guess it’s about a week. Yeah, we get to talk. Absolutely. Yeah. And about all the things that we talk about. So welcome to Hope Stream. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. So we, gosh, I think we got introduced on the Keep Coming Back film.
That’s right. Which I’m also trying to kind of promote in the background. It’s being shot right now, but it’s, I think one of the only films from the perspective of the parents around addiction and substance use. Yeah. And so I know you’re excited about it. I’m super excited about it. Yeah, absolutely.
That’s a piece that often gets missed in this is all the family members that are impacted by addiction and all the hurt and pain that comes with that. Yeah, so I had Mark Rossman on. Did you have Mark on your podcast? Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re listening, just. You know, do
[00:01:00] your search, find Mark Rossman.
It’s gonna be a great film. I think they just started filming in Utah, which is cool. That’s super exciting. So anyway, that’s that. But we wanted to chat today. First of all, tell us a little bit about you. I’m curious, ’cause I always love the origin story of a podcast, how you started The Addicted Mind, and a little bit about what you do day to day.
Yeah. Well, I’m Duane Osland. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’ve been in practice almost two decades now, which is, seems like such a long time. And I’m also, that’s, how did that happen? Yeah. And I’m also a certified sex addiction therapist supervisor. And I run a group practice in Long Beach, California called Nova’s Mindful Life and also do the Addicted Mind Podcast.
And gosh, I’ve been doing The Addicted Mind almost seven years actually. Which is a long time. I kind of got into podcasting before it was super big. It was getting big and you know, the real
[00:02:00] reason, honestly, the real reason I started the podcast was I thought, well, it’s good exposure and good for business.
And this is my profession and I wanted people to understand all this work, but it’s grown into something so much more than that. I couldn’t have predicted that when I started, and now I just love doing it because I get to interview all these amazing people who have come through some of the hardest things in life and gotten to the other side.
And I always find that so inspiring and right, like I get to talk with people like you and then at the same time with that the other part I love about it is that it helps people not feel so alone. In especially this area of addiction and mental health and I think it brings people together and lets people know that
you know, they’re
[00:03:00] worthy of healing. There is hope out there. ’cause these situations can feel so hopeless. So I just, I love doing it and that’s how it all kind of started and it just comes together. I love it. Could you have ever imagined, like when you were in grad school and becoming a new therapist, that someday you would have this huge podcast, like it’s such a cool thing that there’s this new
avenue, right. For bringing this information to light. Yeah. I would’ve never thought that, at all and I feel really grateful that I get to do it and once again, get to meet all these amazing people and just share this and I think what’s also really I love about it, one more thing, is that when people reach out to me and, you know, they listen to some of these episodes and they just thank me for doing it.
I just realize like how meaningful this is to people and sometimes, you know, when we’re behind the microphone and we’re doing this and we’re talking to each other, we don’t realize like all the
[00:04:00] people that this influences and can help and support and that’s really meaningful to me to be able to see that.
Yes, it’s, well, and that’s why I started Hope Stream. ’cause I was like, wait I’m doing this work with moms. I was doing coaching. I’m not a therapist, one-to-one and I just thought, gosh, this feels so slow. Yeah. Like, it’s gonna take a really long time to help very many people and so the podcast, yeah, like you sit, we sit here one-to-one.
It’s very cozy and casual and all that, but thousands of people get to hear your expertise and I am so grateful for this conversation because, you know, in our community, in Hope Stream, we talk mostly about mental health and substance use and addiction as a, you know, kind of a part of that and I noticed recently that so many of the moms in our community.
Are worried about tech
[00:05:00] addiction and I think tech addiction is a little bit of a safe term for porn addiction. Yeah, right. Because what are, yes, some kids are looking at like, I don’t know, mechanical stuff or quantum physics on their phones, but there’s a lot of ’em that are not. There’s a lot that’s available out there.
Yeah. So I’m so grateful for you coming on today and sharing your expertise around this because it’s something we don’t talk about enough and it is, and I don’t even know the scale of the problem like you do, I have to imagine it’s a huge problem. Yeah, I think it is as we were talking earlier, before we started recording, I was telling you about my experience in this field, and I’ve worked in sex and porn addiction almost from the beginning.
And that started because I was working in a treatment center, it was a Prop 36 program in California at the time and it was treatment in lieu of jail time. Right, okay.
[00:06:00] I was working there a lot, and as I started to work with clients, this issue started to come up and, you know, it took ’em a long time, often after they had you know, gotten some sobriety. I have this other issue and I don’t know how to talk about it, and we would start to talk about it. And then from that I started to get my training in that and became some of the, one of the first csat out there in the beginning training and training in this area under Patrick Carnes.
And kind of took it from there and have been working in this field, in this part in sex addiction. Porn addiction, betrayal, trauma for most of this time, and this is where most of my experience lies, but as you were saying earlier, I’m gonna go back to what you were talking about. You know, parents and kids.
One of the things that I’ve seen in the evolution of the field is when I started, most of my clients who came in maybe were in their thirties and forties and fifties, maybe even sixties. [00:07:00] Would come in and say, Hey, I have this problem with sex. I can’t seem to stop. It’s out of control. It’s causing problems in my life and I don’t know what to do about it.
And that was usually most of the clients coming in at, in that age group. It hit some kind of crisis. Maybe their partner had found out, maybe they got arrested for something, for prostitution and everything spiraled out control and then, you know, they’re in this situation, they need support.
But what I’ve seen in the last, I would say probably 10 years is younger people contacting our office, which I had never experienced before and these younger people, and when I say younger, I’m saying like 23 year olds, 24 year olds calling us and saying, I have this problem. Right. I have this issue and I am stuck in this world of porn and I can’t get out, my life has become engulfed by it, and they’re 23, right? And that which means don’t, it’s probably been going on for a while. You know that this, that
[00:08:00] sex has become so problematic to them at such a young age, and I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but my guess is that that’s also when you know, if you start looking at the age
of when people are exposed to porn and online porn. These are young people that were exposed to porn early in their childhood. 1213, actually this is a really sad statistic. The average first exposure to online porn now is 10 years old. Oh my gosh. Which is really shocking and yeah you wanna protect your kids from that because
the thing is with online pornography, our brain wasn’t really wired for high speed internet pornography. It just wasn’t. And so you get these young brains seeing very intense sexual material and the brain reacts to that and their brain is in a very
[00:09:00] highly malleable state in this age of development.
So these young people would come in. Now what was also very surprising to me, you know, they would come in to get help and support. My life is outta control. I can’t have relationships. I’m spending every waking moment just scrolling on my phone, on pornography, and I know it’s ruining my life. Now, what’s also kind of interesting here, the older people, there was a lot of shame.
Around their behavior when they came in, you know, in the forties and fifties and sixties. They come in with a lot of shame around sexuality and everything. This younger generation, it’s not so much the shame. Right? That was a part of it because in some ways it seems like everybody is looking at porn, all their friends are looking at porn and so they don’t feel that about it, but it’s out of control.
They know this is destroying their life and they can’t stop, and you know it’s available to them 24 7,
[00:10:00] wherever they’re walking with their phone, it’s just there and so they can’t get away with it. They can’t get away from it. Now, what was also interesting is that it seemed to be easier for these older people who did not have this early exposure to pornography, actually had an easier time stopping than these younger
Individuals who had exposure to porn at a very young age, you know, 13 years old, they had a much harder time stopping because it was so, my thought is it’s so in ingrained at that point into how they cope with life and how they cope with distress. And so they really needed a lot of support around them and encouragement.
And they needed it with their peers too. One of the things that we started here was just a group for younger people, right? And I used to never have groups for younger people and
[00:11:00] now here we are, you know, and these from 20 to 30-year-old individuals coming in and saying I have this issue.
And I would say I’m talking a little bit from the male perspective, but also women struggling with this as well are also showing up and saying, I have this issue with pornography as well. Sometimes it manifests a little bit differently, and for women, it’s even there is a lot more shame for them.
And so they have a really, really hard time reaching out for help as well. But it’s there and it’s a real issue. Wow. I have a billion questions are just rolling through my head about all of this. I think the first thing when I listen to you, it sounds to me a little similar to when I hear eating disorder therapists talk, because you can’t just take food out of your life if you’re addicted to food, you still have to eat with this.
You still have to be like, you can’t just take all technology away,
[00:12:00] right? Yeah. I mean, you could for a while, like you could do a kind of a detox. But to live in this world, you have to basically have a smartphone. You have to be online a lot. So it seems like that’s an added layer of complexity versus if you’re addicted to cocaine or fentanyl, let’s just remove all of that from your life.
Right? Right. So do you see that? Is it like, how do I navigate a digital world when part of that digital world is completely ruining my life? Yeah, and I would add to this as, in your comparison to eating disorders is that, you know, you have to have food in your life. We also have to have sexuality in our life.
Right? Yeah. That’s a deep part of who we are, and we need to be able to have healthy sexuality, so we can’t just cut ourselves off from our sexuality when we’re working to heal from compulsive and maybe deceptive sexuality. We can get into that piece as well. But you know, so you have
[00:13:00] that, and then we’re in this technological world where, you know, you can’t function without a cell phone, right? A lot of times parents want to say, okay, I want to keep my young child off a phone as long as I can, which I think is a really, really good, good choice as long as you can. But they’re bumping into situations where, you know, the teacher at school says, okay, take out your cell phone and scan this QR code to get the worksheet to do the thing.
And if they don’t have a phone, they can’t function and then on top of that, well, all their friends or on Instagram or you know, TikTok, then that’s how they communicate to each other. They text each other through that, so then it isolates them. So there’s this really, really delicate balance
of helping young people and protecting them until they are old enough to make whatever decision they need to make around their sexuality and what’s right for them. But it’s definitely, it is a challenging situation.
[00:14:00] Yeah. And I’m just thinking of all, you know, every conference I go to, what I hear is.
We haven’t even really seen, like all we’re seeing right now is the tip of the iceberg as far as the COVID effect. And so I’m thinking about, yep, 8, 9, 10 year olds who were at home in their rooms on devices all day during COVID, knowing that age where, you know, they’re first introduced to porn and so now those kids are 14, 15, 16, you know, in that range and
what the impact of that must be when there’s just, when it’s so prevalent and all the kids are doing it and some kids are starting to realize like, oh, this is actually impacting my life and I don’t even know, like what is the long term impact of that? Either exposure, early exposure, or when it becomes addiction.
[00:15:00]
Like, I think we, you know we can fast forward on a THC addiction or a fentanyl addiction or cocaine or meth. Like we kind of know that road. We know where that goes. It’s usually jail or a grave or very dysfunctional life. Do we know where this addiction leads? Like, what does that look like? Yeah, I mean, from a society perspective, from the bigger macro picture I still think we’re learning that we don’t know exactly how that’s gonna turn out in the long term but I think it’s definitely gonna have an impact. That’s what my gut says from what I see the other part is for the individual. What I see is a lot of isolation, depression, malaise that they, there’s a hopelessness in them and it consumes so much of
[00:16:00] their time that they don’t have other interests, right?
One of the things that happens is that this has becomes so much a part of their life that it is their main interest and so all these other things that you would develop to lead a happy life to get satisfaction, contentment, enrichment. They just don’t have anything built and then they, you know, through this age that’s the age of discovery where you discover what is interesting to you.
You discover what you want, to do you try things, you do things. But because porn has taken up all of their time, they have no idea. And so they get, stuck there, and that’s another challenge that they have to face. So they have to not only remove porn and protect themselves from pornography.
And that might be setting up a lot of restrictions on their phone. Once an individual comes in and goes, okay I really want to
[00:17:00] change this, then, you know, they voluntarily put the restrictions on their phone, right? Because you know, what I say is like, we’ve gotta outsmart your own brain.
Because your brain is gonna lead you down this path, and we have to be smarter than that. And if you want to do that, but then they have to go through all of the depression. You know, it takes time for the brain to reset from all of this and then, you know, here they are not knowing what brings them joy in their life.
Yeah, yeah. Because they haven’t had the opportunity to explore that. So, that’s the other challenge, because then they don’t feel good and they feel hopeless and what’s the point? And there’s no joy here. So it really robs these individuals of that joy and it sounds, yeah.
Yeah. It sounds so similar to a substance addiction, you know? Yeah. Do, do they, well, I think it really is in the same, same way. I mean, there’s been a lot of
[00:18:00] arguments around whether sex can be addictive or not and some people are saying, no, it’s not, and but one of the things I think most people can agree on is that sex can become problematic for people just like gambling can become problematic.
It’s a behavior and the way our brains are wired for some individuals this does become or mirror an addictive compulsive process. I mean, what you want to call it, I guess, can be up for debate. You wanna call it compulsive sexual behavior. You wanna call it sex addiction, you wanna call it outta control, sexual behavior, hypersexual behavior.
That’s fine. I know the people that come in, they’re struggling and they’re hurting and they need help changing their behavior because they know they’re not living their best life and they know it and so that’s part of it. Yeah. You can put whatever name on it you want it doesn’t really matter as much as when you’re
[00:19:00] seeing it in real life day to day.
What would a parent. ’cause I imagine there’s parents listening who are getting this extreme anxiety building in their chest about Yeah. And as the mother of four boys myself, I think about this and I’m wondering what would be an indicator to us and especially if there’s other substances involved.
And I’m curious to know, is that common, like would you see a THC gaming sex addiction, or does it tend to be more just one? Because what I guess where I’m going with this is like, what would a parent potentially be seen that might be an indicator that, Hmm, this is a conversation we should probably have.
Yeah. Well, the way I look at addiction is that it all overlaps, right? Addiction at its core is about escape. It’s about avoidance. It’s about escaping and avoiding
[00:20:00] pain. So usually you see addictions interact with each other, right? Mm-hmm. So oftentimes, like I was talking to you earlier when I was working in the Prop 36 program and working with addicts, you know, they would get off whatever their substance was or, and because they’re still working on their pain, sex became the alternative way of coping and escaping and avoiding when we’re feeling sexual.
We’re not feeling pain when we’re feeling sexually aroused and excited. We can focus on that and we don’t have to focus on what’s hurting or the things that gotta fix or the job that’s not, you know, where am I gonna work next week or whatever it is, or this problem, this relationship problem. So when I look at that, it’s, they all interact and I think it starts as a society and as us being able to talk about it and
[00:21:00] put it out in the open and say, this is what, you know, people can struggle with this, right? That this can be an issue and do you need support about this, but the thing with sex is that there’s also so much taboo around it, especially in our culture.
We don’t want to talk about it. We’re afraid to talk about it. We’re afraid to discuss it. We want to just, you know, put it over there and let’s not look at it. And so the discussion doesn’t happen and I think that leads to more isolation. More shame, right? And still an inability to you know, get support.
And I would say for parents, I really think the best thing you can do is if you have a home internet, right. You know, lock it down, so to speak. You know, get there’s tons of systems out there that can block this stuff
[00:22:00] and make it a hurdle for kids to accidentally stumble upon it.
Right, right. And I think that’s a really important element. But the other thing, as a parent myself, I also realize I can do that at home. But there’s their friends and other parents who aren’t gonna be as thoughtful that they’re gonna be exposed to it. So having the discussion about it, talking about it, saying, Hey, this, you know, I want you to know this is out there and you know, you have to make a decision about how, what you’re gonna do with this.
Pull the shame out of it. Mm. So that that’s there because they will see it. There’s no, we’re just not, we’re not stopping that and we won’t stop that. Right. Yeah. So it’s gonna be there. So more of an open conversation. I think it’s is critical to that. I love that. And it sounds exactly
[00:23:00] like what we, how we guide parents to have the conversation with their kids about substances, which is often through the friend angle.
Do you have a friend that you’re worried about? Is this something that your friends are looking at? How do you feel about that? So it sounds like it could be a similar conversation, but I think there’s another layer to this that we also have talked about, which is if you are concerned about your own relationship.
Okay. And maybe your partner, you’re not sure exactly what’s going on with them, or maybe there’s been betrayal, and I know you’re an expert in partner Betrayal, and so maybe we can tap into that a little bit because I think that could be a really triggering layer to say, I have this thing potentially going on in my partner or my spouse relationship.
I don’t think I can even touch. What, what might potentially be going on with my kid? I’m just gonna, kind of, like you said, we’re gonna kind of set it over there and just hope for the best.
[00:24:00] So how does all of this play into the family dynamic? Yeah, that is a really good question and that is one of my areas expertise. I, you know, working in sex addiction and porn addiction, you know, we’re often in relationships with others and because that is secretive or deceptive when someone’s engaging that in an addictive and compulsive way, that creates trauma within the relationship and that’s a huge,
huge issue that comes in and oftentimes what I have seen is, you know, there’s a partner who is concerned about their kids and talking about their kids and making sure their kids are safe, and meanwhile their partner is over here engaging in pornography or what I would say deceptive sexuality.
That’s the key piece. It’s deceptive and they don’t know about it. And then those
[00:25:00] worlds collide together and create an immense amount of trauma for the betrayed partner. Hmm. That sounds like an overwhelming situation to be in and I was telling you before we started here that just in the last year, I’ve had two friends that have really had big issues in their marriage with this between online addiction, porn addiction, real life.
Yeah. And I think it is, there is just so much awkwardness and shame and like I would in a million years rather talk about fentanyl than sex. Right, right there is, ask me anything you want about a substance and so that just probably adds a layer of like you said, secrecy and let’s just make this go away somehow.
But that can’t be good for a relationship. No, not at all and I think there’s a key part here in this that
[00:26:00] often gets missed now, and what really is here and where the betrayal comes from is that deceptive sexuality. And this comes from Omar Min Wallace’s work, and he calls it the secret sexual basement and the analogy is imagine you have a house, right? And everybody’s living in the house and everybody’s going around doing their business, cooking meals and watching TV and everything and one person in the house has this secret sexual basement that they go to and
do whatever they’re gonna do in there. Right. And disappear. And no one else in the house knows that this is there. Right. Right. And if you think about it, you know the partner who may have like, something seems off here, right? Something doesn’t seem quite right, and the person who has a secret sexual basement is like, oh no, everything’s just fine.
Don’t worry about it. Right, but it’s
[00:27:00] like it’s there and it’s present and it’s present in the family system, and that impacts everybody when there’s deception and then when that secret sexual basement. Let’s say something happens and it blows up, right? All of a sudden maybe their partner discovers the secret sexual basement somehow, right?
They’re vacuuming one day and they pick up the carpet and they see there’s a door, and they go down and they go, holy moly and then that causes an immense amount, what we call like discovery trauma for a partner and it’s really a reality fragmentation where they thought the house was built like this and all of a sudden there’s this piece of information that changes the whole structure of the house and they are left in a state of shock.
Right. And this is where their reality literally
[00:28:00] fragments, and they don’t know where to put all of these pieces together. Yeah. And so they actually go into, post-traumatic stress and then as they realize this, right, they realize the deception of it. Right. And then they start to question everything.
Right. It’s like, well, what was happening two years ago? Were you acting out then? Did you see a prostitute then? Were you acting out with porn then? What about this? What about this? All the way back to the start of the relationship, and so everything falls apart and the partner doesn’t know how to do it and
I can go into a little bit of the biology of that and how that works in the brain, because I Yeah, that’d be great. I think that would be helpful for this piece. So this analogy comes from a colleague of mine named Jake Porter. And I like it. It’s the filing cabinet analogy.
So we have two parts in our brain here. One, we have the amygdala. The amygdala is our,
[00:29:00] it’s a small little piece size part of the brain. It’s our fight flight and freeze and, you know response. It alerts us that there’s danger going on, right? And then we have the hippocampus and the hippocampus part of our brain helps us form memories and sort memories, right?
Sort them. So we have a story of our life. We have the story of our life. Having a story of our life helps us feel safe. If we have a story we can predict. Our environment and our brain says, if I can predict the environment, I can keep you safe. We are threat animals, so we are always looking for threat, right?
So what happens when someone is exposed to deceptive sexuality and they have this discovery trauma? This new piece of information that changes everything, right? They discovered the secret sexual basement. It changes everything. It’s like that filing cabinet that the hippo campus kept in order is
[00:30:00] now thrown out over the ground and all the files, all the memories are now, they don’t make sense, and so the brain doesn’t know how
to sort that information to keep the person safe. So what you’ll see with a betrayed partner is they will ask question after question after question. They will search everything because the brain has the priority to keep them safe and to sort their memory so they can feel safe, and the brain can predict the environment, now
so this information comes in and that is so unsettling. So often you’ll see with betrayed partners, they’ll ask the same question over and over again, from a different angle, from a different way. They’ll search everything. They’ll go through every single phone because it’s a survival response.
Yeah, that makes sense. So they get, yeah, they get stuck in that post-traumatic stress. And and then of course, you know,
[00:31:00] going back to the family, right? This impacts the whole family and I see parents when I work with couples, it breaks my heart because they want to try and protect the kids from this, their children, right?
But it’s so overwhelming that it comes out everywhere. Even, I mean, they’re trying their best and so they need a lot of support, but it impacts the whole family system and even that you realize as kind of clarity happens that secret sexual basement you also realize how that through the history of the family has impacted the family structure too, because if a partner is engaging in this secret sexual basement, and that means they’re giving time to that, just like we were talking about the young person who is, you know, engulfed in pornography that is taking all of their time. So a person who’s engulfed in their secret sexual basement right. It’s taking time from kids, it’s taking time from the
[00:32:00] relationship, and that has had this whole negative impact as well. So it can be really, really, really devastating and oftentimes we miss the intensity of the trauma for the betrayed individual. Right. Yeah. Is it even possible to come back from something like that, from a marriage standpoint?
I mean, you’re the person working with folks, so do you see marriages that can stay intact or is it kind of like this is, this is too much for a relationship to heal from? Well I do this work and the surprising thing is that most people and most relationships do stay together.
Now we often think as a society it’s like, if that happened to me, I’m out. And some relationship that does, but the majority of people do work it out. When you get to the reality of the situation of leaving a relationship, there’s so many things to consider.
[00:33:00] Right. There’s kids, there’s family, there’s history, and if the person who’s done the betrayal right, is struggling with an addiction, and they really want to do the work, they have to take the lead in that healing process.
But it absolutely is possible. I think the thing that is really, really hard is that piece of shame around this, when we look at addiction in some ways is rooted in trauma, but it’s rooted in shame and so the person who’s done the betrayal has to work on that piece so that they can actually show up for their partner and offer that empathy that they’re gonna need to heal.
And there’s a long road for that, but absolutely, relationships do heal and what’s interesting is when the person who’s done the harm right, makes the amends and really, really
[00:34:00] works on this and then the partner who’s been betrayed decides to stay oftentimes, you know, and it’s hard to hear this when you’re in it, but oftentimes
their relationship is so much stronger than it ever was before. It has a deep meaning to it. Mm-hmm. Now, I would say the caveat is there is that the person who has the addiction and is struggling with the addiction is really willing to do the work and work on that piece. Yeah, that would be critical because I could just imagine there’s a huge amount of resentment on the side of the partner who realizes all of a sudden the deception, the time away.
Yeah, the financial aspect of it. All of that would just be so, I mean, I just think about some of the little quibbles I have with my husband about dumb stuff and I can hold onto that resentment. Like, you didn’t unload the dishwasher when you were
[00:35:00] supposed to. Like, I can’t even wrap my head around how difficult that would be and how much dedication and work it would take
to work through something like that and say, yeah, we’re both gonna put in the effort, but especially, it’s really, really hard and I would just add to that one piece here is that it really is up to the person who’s done the betrayal to do the work. The person who’s been betrayed in a way, has to stay on the, how do I say this?
They don’t have to make a decision about the relationship, right? They’ve gotta see that this person is gonna show up and it’s gonna take time. This is not something that gets fixed in, three months, four months, five months. This is a two to three year process of a lot of work and a lot of help.
One of the things that I’m doing is the shame to resilience course for this specifically because oftentimes the person who has the addiction,
[00:36:00] right? They already, they’re filled with shame already in their core and if they can’t heal that shame, they can’t heal their partner, but they can’t heal themselves either.
And this is just for addiction in general, right? Not just sex and porn addiction, but addiction thrives in that shame and we’ve gotta create the space to be able to heal that. Yeah. Well if we can get a link to that, we’ll put it in the show notes. Is that something that people can access from your website or, yeah, they can, well, they can just go to shame to resilience.com.
It’s says, I do the Addicted Mind podcast, but I’m also doing this very specific topic around this. I have a lot of passion for this because I know how much pain is there and how hard it is and how difficult it is. But I want, there is a road out. Right. Yeah. And it, and you have to work through that process.
Well that’s, that’s so encouraging ’cause it, it can seem, I’m sure, just
[00:37:00] so hopeless and overwhelming. Is the core something that’s more suited for adult sort of partner relationships or is it something that This course that have I going now is specifically built for men who have betrayed their relationship.
Okay. Okay and it is about, it’s built with the relationship in mind, but it’s about them healing their shame so that they can show up and heal their partner. Mm. And take accountability and we look at how shame manifests itself, but we also look about how gender impacts shame too and male sexuality.
We look at that as well and, you know, go through that process because men have to own that part of it as well in this whole picture and especially when we talk about pornography and how it manifests itself in our society and in our culture, we have to look at that
[00:38:00] male sexual entitlement piece to get through this as well.
Yeah. Wow. What a powerful thing. We’ll definitely put a link to that and if you don’t know the A ddicted Mind podcast, I don’t know where you have been, but if you don’t, please go and follow Duane there because what I love about your podcast is you have such a wide ranging view on different topics, different angles at, you know, addiction.
I mean it’s just, it’s incredible. So anyway, add that to your Oh, thank you playlist for sure. And thank you just so much for joining us here and talking about this and kind of lifting the veil a little bit. And I think making it something that parents can approach with their young people also start looking at that partner relationship, if that’s part of it.
I think it helps to have somebody who can just very clearly and from a really informed and educated standpoint, help us understand what we’re looking at and to know that there is a way
[00:39:00] out and there is healing involved in that. What would you say, let’s focus on the more on the partner side. What would you say to somebody who’s listening, who is dealing with this in their relationship right now as a word of wisdom or hope?
Get support. Get support. Reach out for help. Right. There’s so many people out there that can help you. You don’t have to do this alone. Often, partners who have been betrayed feel so isolated because they can’t talk to friends, they can’t talk to family because of the shame and all of that.
And so they feel so alone, and I want them to know that there are others out there who can support you and if they have anything, they can go to the addictive mind. They can reach out to me and I can help them get resources that they need. They’re not alone. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you for all that you do as well.
[00:00:00] Duane, so good to see you again. This is so fun. Twice in one week that we get to actually, or yeah, I guess it’s about a week. Yeah, we get to talk. Absolutely. Yeah. And about all the things that we talk about. So welcome to Hope Stream. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. So we, gosh, I think we got introduced on the Keep Coming Back film.
That’s right. Which I’m also trying to kind of promote in the background. It’s being shot right now, but it’s, I think one of the only films from the perspective of the parents around addiction and substance use. Yeah. And so I know you’re excited about it. I’m super excited about it. Yeah, absolutely.
That’s a piece that often gets missed in this is all the family members that are impacted by addiction and all the hurt and pain that comes with that. Yeah, so I had Mark Rossman on. Did you have Mark on your podcast? Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re listening, just. You know, do
[00:01:00] your search, find Mark Rossman.
It’s gonna be a great film. I think they just started filming in Utah, which is cool. That’s super exciting. So anyway, that’s that. But we wanted to chat today. First of all, tell us a little bit about you. I’m curious, ’cause I always love the origin story of a podcast, how you started The Addicted Mind, and a little bit about what you do day to day.
Yeah. Well, I’m Duane Osland. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’ve been in practice almost two decades now, which is, seems like such a long time. And I’m also, that’s, how did that happen? Yeah. And I’m also a certified sex addiction therapist supervisor. And I run a group practice in Long Beach, California called Nova’s Mindful Life and also do the Addicted Mind Podcast.
And gosh, I’ve been doing The Addicted Mind almost seven years actually. Which is a long time. I kind of got into podcasting before it was super big. It was getting big and you know, the real
[00:02:00] reason, honestly, the real reason I started the podcast was I thought, well, it’s good exposure and good for business.
And this is my profession and I wanted people to understand all this work, but it’s grown into something so much more than that. I couldn’t have predicted that when I started, and now I just love doing it because I get to interview all these amazing people who have come through some of the hardest things in life and gotten to the other side.
And I always find that so inspiring and right, like I get to talk with people like you and then at the same time with that the other part I love about it is that it helps people not feel so alone. In especially this area of addiction and mental health and I think it brings people together and lets people know that
you know, they’re
[00:03:00] worthy of healing. There is hope out there. ’cause these situations can feel so hopeless. So I just, I love doing it and that’s how it all kind of started and it just comes together. I love it. Could you have ever imagined, like when you were in grad school and becoming a new therapist, that someday you would have this huge podcast, like it’s such a cool thing that there’s this new
avenue, right. For bringing this information to light. Yeah. I would’ve never thought that, at all and I feel really grateful that I get to do it and once again, get to meet all these amazing people and just share this and I think what’s also really I love about it, one more thing, is that when people reach out to me and, you know, they listen to some of these episodes and they just thank me for doing it.
I just realize like how meaningful this is to people and sometimes, you know, when we’re behind the microphone and we’re doing this and we’re talking to each other, we don’t realize like all the
[00:04:00] people that this influences and can help and support and that’s really meaningful to me to be able to see that.
Yes, it’s, well, and that’s why I started Hope Stream. ’cause I was like, wait I’m doing this work with moms. I was doing coaching. I’m not a therapist, one-to-one and I just thought, gosh, this feels so slow. Yeah. Like, it’s gonna take a really long time to help very many people and so the podcast, yeah, like you sit, we sit here one-to-one.
It’s very cozy and casual and all that, but thousands of people get to hear your expertise and I am so grateful for this conversation because, you know, in our community, in Hope Stream, we talk mostly about mental health and substance use and addiction as a, you know, kind of a part of that and I noticed recently that so many of the moms in our community.
Are worried about tech
[00:05:00] addiction and I think tech addiction is a little bit of a safe term for porn addiction. Yeah, right. Because what are, yes, some kids are looking at like, I don’t know, mechanical stuff or quantum physics on their phones, but there’s a lot of ’em that are not. There’s a lot that’s available out there.
Yeah. So I’m so grateful for you coming on today and sharing your expertise around this because it’s something we don’t talk about enough and it is, and I don’t even know the scale of the problem like you do, I have to imagine it’s a huge problem. Yeah, I think it is as we were talking earlier, before we started recording, I was telling you about my experience in this field, and I’ve worked in sex and porn addiction almost from the beginning.
And that started because I was working in a treatment center, it was a Prop 36 program in California at the time and it was treatment in lieu of jail time. Right, okay.
[00:06:00] I was working there a lot, and as I started to work with clients, this issue started to come up and, you know, it took ’em a long time, often after they had you know, gotten some sobriety. I have this other issue and I don’t know how to talk about it, and we would start to talk about it. And then from that I started to get my training in that and became some of the, one of the first csat out there in the beginning training and training in this area under Patrick Carnes.
And kind of took it from there and have been working in this field, in this part in sex addiction. Porn addiction, betrayal, trauma for most of this time, and this is where most of my experience lies, but as you were saying earlier, I’m gonna go back to what you were talking about. You know, parents and kids.
One of the things that I’ve seen in the evolution of the field is when I started, most of my clients who came in maybe were in their thirties and forties and fifties, maybe even sixties. [00:07:00] Would come in and say, Hey, I have this problem with sex. I can’t seem to stop. It’s out of control. It’s causing problems in my life and I don’t know what to do about it.
And that was usually most of the clients coming in at, in that age group. It hit some kind of crisis. Maybe their partner had found out, maybe they got arrested for something, for prostitution and everything spiraled out control and then, you know, they’re in this situation, they need support.
But what I’ve seen in the last, I would say probably 10 years is younger people contacting our office, which I had never experienced before and these younger people, and when I say younger, I’m saying like 23 year olds, 24 year olds calling us and saying, I have this problem. Right. I have this issue and I am stuck in this world of porn and I can’t get out, my life has become engulfed by it, and they’re 23, right? And that which means don’t, it’s probably been going on for a while. You know that this, that
[00:08:00] sex has become so problematic to them at such a young age, and I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but my guess is that that’s also when you know, if you start looking at the age
of when people are exposed to porn and online porn. These are young people that were exposed to porn early in their childhood. 1213, actually this is a really sad statistic. The average first exposure to online porn now is 10 years old. Oh my gosh. Which is really shocking and yeah you wanna protect your kids from that because
the thing is with online pornography, our brain wasn’t really wired for high speed internet pornography. It just wasn’t. And so you get these young brains seeing very intense sexual material and the brain reacts to that and their brain is in a very
[00:09:00] highly malleable state in this age of development.
So these young people would come in. Now what was also very surprising to me, you know, they would come in to get help and support. My life is outta control. I can’t have relationships. I’m spending every waking moment just scrolling on my phone, on pornography, and I know it’s ruining my life. Now, what’s also kind of interesting here, the older people, there was a lot of shame.
Around their behavior when they came in, you know, in the forties and fifties and sixties. They come in with a lot of shame around sexuality and everything. This younger generation, it’s not so much the shame. Right? That was a part of it because in some ways it seems like everybody is looking at porn, all their friends are looking at porn and so they don’t feel that about it, but it’s out of control.
They know this is destroying their life and they can’t stop, and you know it’s available to them 24 7,
[00:10:00] wherever they’re walking with their phone, it’s just there and so they can’t get away with it. They can’t get away from it. Now, what was also interesting is that it seemed to be easier for these older people who did not have this early exposure to pornography, actually had an easier time stopping than these younger
Individuals who had exposure to porn at a very young age, you know, 13 years old, they had a much harder time stopping because it was so, my thought is it’s so in ingrained at that point into how they cope with life and how they cope with distress. And so they really needed a lot of support around them and encouragement.
And they needed it with their peers too. One of the things that we started here was just a group for younger people, right? And I used to never have groups for younger people and
[00:11:00] now here we are, you know, and these from 20 to 30-year-old individuals coming in and saying I have this issue.
And I would say I’m talking a little bit from the male perspective, but also women struggling with this as well are also showing up and saying, I have this issue with pornography as well. Sometimes it manifests a little bit differently, and for women, it’s even there is a lot more shame for them.
And so they have a really, really hard time reaching out for help as well. But it’s there and it’s a real issue. Wow. I have a billion questions are just rolling through my head about all of this. I think the first thing when I listen to you, it sounds to me a little similar to when I hear eating disorder therapists talk, because you can’t just take food out of your life if you’re addicted to food, you still have to eat with this.
You still have to be like, you can’t just take all technology away,
[00:12:00] right? Yeah. I mean, you could for a while, like you could do a kind of a detox. But to live in this world, you have to basically have a smartphone. You have to be online a lot. So it seems like that’s an added layer of complexity versus if you’re addicted to cocaine or fentanyl, let’s just remove all of that from your life.
Right? Right. So do you see that? Is it like, how do I navigate a digital world when part of that digital world is completely ruining my life? Yeah, and I would add to this as, in your comparison to eating disorders is that, you know, you have to have food in your life. We also have to have sexuality in our life.
Right? Yeah. That’s a deep part of who we are, and we need to be able to have healthy sexuality, so we can’t just cut ourselves off from our sexuality when we’re working to heal from compulsive and maybe deceptive sexuality. We can get into that piece as well. But you know, so you have
[00:13:00] that, and then we’re in this technological world where, you know, you can’t function without a cell phone, right? A lot of times parents want to say, okay, I want to keep my young child off a phone as long as I can, which I think is a really, really good, good choice as long as you can. But they’re bumping into situations where, you know, the teacher at school says, okay, take out your cell phone and scan this QR code to get the worksheet to do the thing.
And if they don’t have a phone, they can’t function and then on top of that, well, all their friends or on Instagram or you know, TikTok, then that’s how they communicate to each other. They text each other through that, so then it isolates them. So there’s this really, really delicate balance
of helping young people and protecting them until they are old enough to make whatever decision they need to make around their sexuality and what’s right for them. But it’s definitely, it is a challenging situation.
[00:14:00] Yeah. And I’m just thinking of all, you know, every conference I go to, what I hear is.
We haven’t even really seen, like all we’re seeing right now is the tip of the iceberg as far as the COVID effect. And so I’m thinking about, yep, 8, 9, 10 year olds who were at home in their rooms on devices all day during COVID, knowing that age where, you know, they’re first introduced to porn and so now those kids are 14, 15, 16, you know, in that range and
what the impact of that must be when there’s just, when it’s so prevalent and all the kids are doing it and some kids are starting to realize like, oh, this is actually impacting my life and I don’t even know, like what is the long term impact of that? Either exposure, early exposure, or when it becomes addiction.
[00:15:00]
Like, I think we, you know we can fast forward on a THC addiction or a fentanyl addiction or cocaine or meth. Like we kind of know that road. We know where that goes. It’s usually jail or a grave or very dysfunctional life. Do we know where this addiction leads? Like, what does that look like? Yeah, I mean, from a society perspective, from the bigger macro picture I still think we’re learning that we don’t know exactly how that’s gonna turn out in the long term but I think it’s definitely gonna have an impact. That’s what my gut says from what I see the other part is for the individual. What I see is a lot of isolation, depression, malaise that they, there’s a hopelessness in them and it consumes so much of
[00:16:00] their time that they don’t have other interests, right?
One of the things that happens is that this has becomes so much a part of their life that it is their main interest and so all these other things that you would develop to lead a happy life to get satisfaction, contentment, enrichment. They just don’t have anything built and then they, you know, through this age that’s the age of discovery where you discover what is interesting to you.
You discover what you want, to do you try things, you do things. But because porn has taken up all of their time, they have no idea. And so they get, stuck there, and that’s another challenge that they have to face. So they have to not only remove porn and protect themselves from pornography.
And that might be setting up a lot of restrictions on their phone. Once an individual comes in and goes, okay I really want to
[00:17:00] change this, then, you know, they voluntarily put the restrictions on their phone, right? Because you know, what I say is like, we’ve gotta outsmart your own brain.
Because your brain is gonna lead you down this path, and we have to be smarter than that. And if you want to do that, but then they have to go through all of the depression. You know, it takes time for the brain to reset from all of this and then, you know, here they are not knowing what brings them joy in their life.
Yeah, yeah. Because they haven’t had the opportunity to explore that. So, that’s the other challenge, because then they don’t feel good and they feel hopeless and what’s the point? And there’s no joy here. So it really robs these individuals of that joy and it sounds, yeah.
Yeah. It sounds so similar to a substance addiction, you know? Yeah. Do, do they, well, I think it really is in the same, same way. I mean, there’s been a lot of
[00:18:00] arguments around whether sex can be addictive or not and some people are saying, no, it’s not, and but one of the things I think most people can agree on is that sex can become problematic for people just like gambling can become problematic.
It’s a behavior and the way our brains are wired for some individuals this does become or mirror an addictive compulsive process. I mean, what you want to call it, I guess, can be up for debate. You wanna call it compulsive sexual behavior. You wanna call it sex addiction, you wanna call it outta control, sexual behavior, hypersexual behavior.
That’s fine. I know the people that come in, they’re struggling and they’re hurting and they need help changing their behavior because they know they’re not living their best life and they know it and so that’s part of it. Yeah. You can put whatever name on it you want it doesn’t really matter as much as when you’re
[00:19:00] seeing it in real life day to day.
What would a parent. ’cause I imagine there’s parents listening who are getting this extreme anxiety building in their chest about Yeah. And as the mother of four boys myself, I think about this and I’m wondering what would be an indicator to us and especially if there’s other substances involved.
And I’m curious to know, is that common, like would you see a THC gaming sex addiction, or does it tend to be more just one? Because what I guess where I’m going with this is like, what would a parent potentially be seen that might be an indicator that, Hmm, this is a conversation we should probably have.
Yeah. Well, the way I look at addiction is that it all overlaps, right? Addiction at its core is about escape. It’s about avoidance. It’s about escaping and avoiding
[00:20:00] pain. So usually you see addictions interact with each other, right? Mm-hmm. So oftentimes, like I was talking to you earlier when I was working in the Prop 36 program and working with addicts, you know, they would get off whatever their substance was or, and because they’re still working on their pain, sex became the alternative way of coping and escaping and avoiding when we’re feeling sexual.
We’re not feeling pain when we’re feeling sexually aroused and excited. We can focus on that and we don’t have to focus on what’s hurting or the things that gotta fix or the job that’s not, you know, where am I gonna work next week or whatever it is, or this problem, this relationship problem. So when I look at that, it’s, they all interact and I think it starts as a society and as us being able to talk about it and
[00:21:00] put it out in the open and say, this is what, you know, people can struggle with this, right? That this can be an issue and do you need support about this, but the thing with sex is that there’s also so much taboo around it, especially in our culture.
We don’t want to talk about it. We’re afraid to talk about it. We’re afraid to discuss it. We want to just, you know, put it over there and let’s not look at it. And so the discussion doesn’t happen and I think that leads to more isolation. More shame, right? And still an inability to you know, get support.
And I would say for parents, I really think the best thing you can do is if you have a home internet, right. You know, lock it down, so to speak. You know, get there’s tons of systems out there that can block this stuff
[00:22:00] and make it a hurdle for kids to accidentally stumble upon it.
Right, right. And I think that’s a really important element. But the other thing, as a parent myself, I also realize I can do that at home. But there’s their friends and other parents who aren’t gonna be as thoughtful that they’re gonna be exposed to it. So having the discussion about it, talking about it, saying, Hey, this, you know, I want you to know this is out there and you know, you have to make a decision about how, what you’re gonna do with this.
Pull the shame out of it. Mm. So that that’s there because they will see it. There’s no, we’re just not, we’re not stopping that and we won’t stop that. Right. Yeah. So it’s gonna be there. So more of an open conversation. I think it’s is critical to that. I love that. And it sounds exactly
[00:23:00] like what we, how we guide parents to have the conversation with their kids about substances, which is often through the friend angle.
Do you have a friend that you’re worried about? Is this something that your friends are looking at? How do you feel about that? So it sounds like it could be a similar conversation, but I think there’s another layer to this that we also have talked about, which is if you are concerned about your own relationship.
Okay. And maybe your partner, you’re not sure exactly what’s going on with them, or maybe there’s been betrayal, and I know you’re an expert in partner Betrayal, and so maybe we can tap into that a little bit because I think that could be a really triggering layer to say, I have this thing potentially going on in my partner or my spouse relationship.
I don’t think I can even touch. What, what might potentially be going on with my kid? I’m just gonna, kind of, like you said, we’re gonna kind of set it over there and just hope for the best.
[00:24:00] So how does all of this play into the family dynamic? Yeah, that is a really good question and that is one of my areas expertise. I, you know, working in sex addiction and porn addiction, you know, we’re often in relationships with others and because that is secretive or deceptive when someone’s engaging that in an addictive and compulsive way, that creates trauma within the relationship and that’s a huge,
huge issue that comes in and oftentimes what I have seen is, you know, there’s a partner who is concerned about their kids and talking about their kids and making sure their kids are safe, and meanwhile their partner is over here engaging in pornography or what I would say deceptive sexuality.
That’s the key piece. It’s deceptive and they don’t know about it. And then those
[00:25:00] worlds collide together and create an immense amount of trauma for the betrayed partner. Hmm. That sounds like an overwhelming situation to be in and I was telling you before we started here that just in the last year, I’ve had two friends that have really had big issues in their marriage with this between online addiction, porn addiction, real life.
Yeah. And I think it is, there is just so much awkwardness and shame and like I would in a million years rather talk about fentanyl than sex. Right, right there is, ask me anything you want about a substance and so that just probably adds a layer of like you said, secrecy and let’s just make this go away somehow.
But that can’t be good for a relationship. No, not at all and I think there’s a key part here in this that
[00:26:00] often gets missed now, and what really is here and where the betrayal comes from is that deceptive sexuality. And this comes from Omar Min Wallace’s work, and he calls it the secret sexual basement and the analogy is imagine you have a house, right? And everybody’s living in the house and everybody’s going around doing their business, cooking meals and watching TV and everything and one person in the house has this secret sexual basement that they go to and
do whatever they’re gonna do in there. Right. And disappear. And no one else in the house knows that this is there. Right. Right. And if you think about it, you know the partner who may have like, something seems off here, right? Something doesn’t seem quite right, and the person who has a secret sexual basement is like, oh no, everything’s just fine.
Don’t worry about it. Right, but it’s
[00:27:00] like it’s there and it’s present and it’s present in the family system, and that impacts everybody when there’s deception and then when that secret sexual basement. Let’s say something happens and it blows up, right? All of a sudden maybe their partner discovers the secret sexual basement somehow, right?
They’re vacuuming one day and they pick up the carpet and they see there’s a door, and they go down and they go, holy moly and then that causes an immense amount, what we call like discovery trauma for a partner and it’s really a reality fragmentation where they thought the house was built like this and all of a sudden there’s this piece of information that changes the whole structure of the house and they are left in a state of shock.
Right. And this is where their reality literally
[00:28:00] fragments, and they don’t know where to put all of these pieces together. Yeah. And so they actually go into, post-traumatic stress and then as they realize this, right, they realize the deception of it. Right. And then they start to question everything.
Right. It’s like, well, what was happening two years ago? Were you acting out then? Did you see a prostitute then? Were you acting out with porn then? What about this? What about this? All the way back to the start of the relationship, and so everything falls apart and the partner doesn’t know how to do it and
I can go into a little bit of the biology of that and how that works in the brain, because I Yeah, that’d be great. I think that would be helpful for this piece. So this analogy comes from a colleague of mine named Jake Porter. And I like it. It’s the filing cabinet analogy.
So we have two parts in our brain here. One, we have the amygdala. The amygdala is our,
[00:29:00] it’s a small little piece size part of the brain. It’s our fight flight and freeze and, you know response. It alerts us that there’s danger going on, right? And then we have the hippocampus and the hippocampus part of our brain helps us form memories and sort memories, right?
Sort them. So we have a story of our life. We have the story of our life. Having a story of our life helps us feel safe. If we have a story we can predict. Our environment and our brain says, if I can predict the environment, I can keep you safe. We are threat animals, so we are always looking for threat, right?
So what happens when someone is exposed to deceptive sexuality and they have this discovery trauma? This new piece of information that changes everything, right? They discovered the secret sexual basement. It changes everything. It’s like that filing cabinet that the hippo campus kept in order is
[00:30:00] now thrown out over the ground and all the files, all the memories are now, they don’t make sense, and so the brain doesn’t know how
to sort that information to keep the person safe. So what you’ll see with a betrayed partner is they will ask question after question after question. They will search everything because the brain has the priority to keep them safe and to sort their memory so they can feel safe, and the brain can predict the environment, now
so this information comes in and that is so unsettling. So often you’ll see with betrayed partners, they’ll ask the same question over and over again, from a different angle, from a different way. They’ll search everything. They’ll go through every single phone because it’s a survival response.
Yeah, that makes sense. So they get, yeah, they get stuck in that post-traumatic stress. And and then of course, you know,
[00:31:00] going back to the family, right? This impacts the whole family and I see parents when I work with couples, it breaks my heart because they want to try and protect the kids from this, their children, right?
But it’s so overwhelming that it comes out everywhere. Even, I mean, they’re trying their best and so they need a lot of support, but it impacts the whole family system and even that you realize as kind of clarity happens that secret sexual basement you also realize how that through the history of the family has impacted the family structure too, because if a partner is engaging in this secret sexual basement, and that means they’re giving time to that, just like we were talking about the young person who is, you know, engulfed in pornography that is taking all of their time. So a person who’s engulfed in their secret sexual basement right. It’s taking time from kids, it’s taking time from the
[00:32:00] relationship, and that has had this whole negative impact as well. So it can be really, really, really devastating and oftentimes we miss the intensity of the trauma for the betrayed individual. Right. Yeah. Is it even possible to come back from something like that, from a marriage standpoint?
I mean, you’re the person working with folks, so do you see marriages that can stay intact or is it kind of like this is, this is too much for a relationship to heal from? Well I do this work and the surprising thing is that most people and most relationships do stay together.
Now we often think as a society it’s like, if that happened to me, I’m out. And some relationship that does, but the majority of people do work it out. When you get to the reality of the situation of leaving a relationship, there’s so many things to consider.
[00:33:00] Right. There’s kids, there’s family, there’s history, and if the person who’s done the betrayal right, is struggling with an addiction, and they really want to do the work, they have to take the lead in that healing process.
But it absolutely is possible. I think the thing that is really, really hard is that piece of shame around this, when we look at addiction in some ways is rooted in trauma, but it’s rooted in shame and so the person who’s done the betrayal has to work on that piece so that they can actually show up for their partner and offer that empathy that they’re gonna need to heal.
And there’s a long road for that, but absolutely, relationships do heal and what’s interesting is when the person who’s done the harm right, makes the amends and really, really
[00:34:00] works on this and then the partner who’s been betrayed decides to stay oftentimes, you know, and it’s hard to hear this when you’re in it, but oftentimes
their relationship is so much stronger than it ever was before. It has a deep meaning to it. Mm-hmm. Now, I would say the caveat is there is that the person who has the addiction and is struggling with the addiction is really willing to do the work and work on that piece. Yeah, that would be critical because I could just imagine there’s a huge amount of resentment on the side of the partner who realizes all of a sudden the deception, the time away.
Yeah, the financial aspect of it. All of that would just be so, I mean, I just think about some of the little quibbles I have with my husband about dumb stuff and I can hold onto that resentment. Like, you didn’t unload the dishwasher when you were
[00:35:00] supposed to. Like, I can’t even wrap my head around how difficult that would be and how much dedication and work it would take
to work through something like that and say, yeah, we’re both gonna put in the effort, but especially, it’s really, really hard and I would just add to that one piece here is that it really is up to the person who’s done the betrayal to do the work. The person who’s been betrayed in a way, has to stay on the, how do I say this?
They don’t have to make a decision about the relationship, right? They’ve gotta see that this person is gonna show up and it’s gonna take time. This is not something that gets fixed in, three months, four months, five months. This is a two to three year process of a lot of work and a lot of help.
One of the things that I’m doing is the shame to resilience course for this specifically because oftentimes the person who has the addiction,
[00:36:00] right? They already, they’re filled with shame already in their core and if they can’t heal that shame, they can’t heal their partner, but they can’t heal themselves either.
And this is just for addiction in general, right? Not just sex and porn addiction, but addiction thrives in that shame and we’ve gotta create the space to be able to heal that. Yeah. Well if we can get a link to that, we’ll put it in the show notes. Is that something that people can access from your website or, yeah, they can, well, they can just go to shame to resilience.com.
It’s says, I do the Addicted Mind podcast, but I’m also doing this very specific topic around this. I have a lot of passion for this because I know how much pain is there and how hard it is and how difficult it is. But I want, there is a road out. Right. Yeah. And it, and you have to work through that process.
Well that’s, that’s so encouraging ’cause it, it can seem, I’m sure, just
[00:37:00] so hopeless and overwhelming. Is the core something that’s more suited for adult sort of partner relationships or is it something that This course that have I going now is specifically built for men who have betrayed their relationship.
Okay. Okay and it is about, it’s built with the relationship in mind, but it’s about them healing their shame so that they can show up and heal their partner. Mm. And take accountability and we look at how shame manifests itself, but we also look about how gender impacts shame too and male sexuality.
We look at that as well and, you know, go through that process because men have to own that part of it as well in this whole picture and especially when we talk about pornography and how it manifests itself in our society and in our culture, we have to look at that
[00:38:00] male sexual entitlement piece to get through this as well.
Yeah. Wow. What a powerful thing. We’ll definitely put a link to that and if you don’t know the A ddicted Mind podcast, I don’t know where you have been, but if you don’t, please go and follow Duane there because what I love about your podcast is you have such a wide ranging view on different topics, different angles at, you know, addiction.
I mean it’s just, it’s incredible. So anyway, add that to your Oh, thank you playlist for sure. And thank you just so much for joining us here and talking about this and kind of lifting the veil a little bit. And I think making it something that parents can approach with their young people also start looking at that partner relationship, if that’s part of it.
I think it helps to have somebody who can just very clearly and from a really informed and educated standpoint, help us understand what we’re looking at and to know that there is a way
[00:39:00] out and there is healing involved in that. What would you say, let’s focus on the more on the partner side. What would you say to somebody who’s listening, who is dealing with this in their relationship right now as a word of wisdom or hope?
Get support. Get support. Reach out for help. Right. There’s so many people out there that can help you. You don’t have to do this alone. Often, partners who have been betrayed feel so isolated because they can’t talk to friends, they can’t talk to family because of the shame and all of that.
And so they feel so alone, and I want them to know that there are others out there who can support you and if they have anything, they can go to the addictive mind. They can reach out to me and I can help them get resources that they need. They’re not alone. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you for all that you do as well.
