“The Porn Solution: Relationship Repair After Pornography Betrayal”
Sex Help with Carol the Coach – June 5, 2023 – Dr. Sandra Shachar
Hi, I’m Carol Juergensen Sheets. I’m really looking forward to talking about The Porn Solution. There is no doubt about it; Dr. Shachar really does a good job of explaining why porn can be so devastating. She’s written The Porn Solution. The fact is it’s about relationship repair after pornography. In so many of the sexual addiction communities, we believe that if porn is a problem, it is a gateway, it is objectifying men, women, children, whoever, and it opens up the world to bigger and worse things. So we see porn as a real problem, and we’re going to be talking to her about what a listener can do if his or her partner is using porn compulsively.
I want to tell you a little bit about Dr. Sandra Shachar. Dr. Shachar is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has 30 years of clinical experience working with individuals and couples. Her niche is betrayal and she works with couples and individuals in betrayal and intimate relationships, and she’s a certified IMAGO relationship therapist and certified clinical partner specialist with the Association of Partners of Sex Addicts trauma specialist/APSATS ….She’s a member of the American Psychological Association. She’s just got all sorts of accreditations and affiliations, but what I really think is wonderful is she is authorized in telepsychology in over 30 states. So if you like what you hear today and you want more, first you get her book, and then you can contact her directly at her website, which is drsandrashachar.com. Dr. Shachar, welcome to "Sex Help with Carol the Coach." How are you today?
Dr. S: Thanks Carol, I’m doing well and I’m so glad to see you in person, well virtually in person. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other so it’s a real delight and an honor.
Carol: Thank you. We’ve been in many trainings together, and from the first day I met you, you said, “I am going to write a book,” and this book is so well written. You can tell you wrote it with your heart, but you wrote it with the understanding that people wouldn’t necessarily know where to turn, so can you tell me, what put you in a place where you said I’m going to write about the porn solution?
Dr. S: I do really have a very personal connection to a subject that I know is near and dear to both our hearts and that is betrayal trauma. My early life experience was that I was literally born to heal betrayal. My parents were in a crisis of infidelity. My dad had been having a years’ long affair and my parents decided that having a fourth child would help their marriage. So I was born into a relationship that did not survive, but I grew up with a single parent mom who had been a survivor of betrayal trauma. From the very beginning, I didn’t fully understand of course as a child, but looking back now, I have a different understanding of why my mom struggled in ways that she did and what resilience and courage it took for her to be able to move forward in her life. Sadly, their relationship did not survive, but I began in my career as a psychologist to see early on that I had a real interest in and passion for all things related to human sexuality and intimate relationships.
So in my clinical practice, for many years I have worked with couples and more recently, and I think this has grown out of some personal experiences. Sometimes I share with couples that I’ve been on both sides of betrayal, I have been a betrayer in an intimate relationship and I have been betrayed in an intimate relationship. I know that there is pain on both sides and in many cases especially without help, the relationship struggles and sometimes does not survive. The chances are so much better if the couple can be supported. Each individual member can be supported with compassion and understanding, and the relationship can be supported. Often people are turning to friends or even helping professionals, seeking some kind of understanding, support, and just not finding that. Sadly, looking back on my 30+ years of being a clinician, I also was missing the understanding of betrayal in relationships, particularly when it came to pornography use, so I am finding that in the individual betrayed partners that I work with, I don’t work individually with the folks who have had the betraying behavior or sometimes this extends to compulsive sexual behavior or sex addiction. That’s not my area of training and expertise, so I refer to colleagues like Certified Sex Addictions Therapists such as yourself and other of my colleagues when that is the case. I wanted to help knowing myself that other clinicians be aware that pornography betrayal is betrayal, and that it affects betrayed partners and their relationship in a very particular way.
Carol: That makes a lot of sense. So it’s like your own personal experience led you to this field, as so many people have decided to do sex addiction or partner betrayal. But you’ve also had the gift of being able to put couples back together, and that’s what I think is so wonderful about this book, because it real is a well written guide, if you will, on how do you deal with discovery, how do you deal with your feelings, how do you deal with boundaries, what kind of communication do you use. You even give examples from people that are working through this problem and their stalemating and if they use specific formulas, they do a lot better communicating with one another. So I’m going to ask you, who do you believe this audience is for?
Dr. S: I think there actually are three audiences that I’m addressing all at the same time. One is the person who has the discovery of the hidden behavior. A betrayal is anything that I didn’t know about my intimate partner that I would care about, so I sometimes say to folks if you’re not sure or if there is any doubt in your mind whether something that you’re doing, whether it’s having lunch with a colleague or viewing pornography, if you are at all in doubt about whether or not your partner is okay with this, just ask them and they will tell you. So it’s anything that I didn’t know about you and that it would matter to me to if I did. So the first audience is the betrayed partner who has discovery. It is having to discover something, uncover something or seek and find information that was not freely given to me. One of our APSATS colleagues first shared a saying with me that “information that is freely given is trust building, but information that is taken or has to be discovered or only if I ask exactly the right question, that is trust breaking.” Anything that constitutes deceit, lying, hiding information is a betrayal, no matter the form, whether it’s financial or it is viewing pornography or it’s having sex with other people or emotional connections with other people. That’s audience one.
The second audience is the person who has engaged in the behavior that constitutes betrayal. For that person, they often feel that they’re in a position of having to defend or justify their behavior and they’re at a loss as to how to save their relationship; how do I help my partner and help our relationship move forward. I often hear, I wish we could just get over this, I wish we could just get past it.
The third audience really is the relationship. I’m often saying to the couple, there’s you, there’s me and then there is our relationship and that’s its own thing. The relationship is damaged by the huge disconnect that happens when betrayal is known. These three pieces; it’s to create compassion and understanding for all three of these aspects of what brings people to seek help for betrayal.
Carol: And how can people get your book?
Dr. S: It’s available through the publisher Sano Press at sanopress.com. It’s also available on Amazon in a paperback or Kindle version, so hopefully pretty accessible for most folks.
Carol: Absolutely, and the full name of the book is The Porn Solution, Relationship Repair after Pornography Betrayal. Now you say that there are some common mistakes that couples make. Can you go over some of those?
Dr. S: I can. Some of them are on the individual side, so let’s start with the partner. Partners who have been betrayed often are very resilient, high-functioning, intelligent, competent, courageous individuals who have forged a path in their life that is noteworthy, and they’re used to taking care of things. One of the things I often have to say to very high-functioning, we-can-do-this partners who come to be in my clinical practice, predominantly women. I do want to say that betrayal respects no gender, identity, race, socioeconomic status. It really doesn’t care. It affects every type of couple, but predominantly the people who seek help tend to be women and predominantly in this case with pornography use, their partners are male. However, anyone with any gender pronouns can relate to what I’m sharing.
Betrayed partners tend to want to approach life as a DIY project; I can do this, Google is my best friend, I can figure it out, and also tend to turn toward friends, close family members, and receive well-meaning advice. Our Western civilization tends to give the message that if someone has done you wrong, you should leave. Often I hear from my individual partners, “I used to think if someone did this to me, I would not stay with them, I would absolutely leave this relationship.” For some people, that turns out to be the right decision for them. I don’t think any of us get to tell or judge a partner whether they should or should not stay in a relationship. It’s ultimately up to them to decide, but making that decision or seeking advice from people who have not been in your shoes or don’t have some resources to offer to help you move forward often turns out to be something they wish they had not done. So that’s a common mistake, that I can figure this out on my own or I can turn to some friends or folks who can advise me in this way.
For the person who is engaged in the betrayal behavior, the tendency is to want to justify or somehow explain their behavior, and this can go toward minimizing what already gets minimized culturally; “well, it’s pornography, you didn’t actually cheat on your partner because this wasn’t with someone else, and by the way, everyone does this, everyone I know has seen pornography or uses pornography, some couples watch pornography together; what’s the big deal?” But we know from clinical experience and from some limited research the impact that this has on partners, which is very damaging to their self-esteem, their self image as an intimate sexual partner, so feeling less than and already minimized to have your partner minimize your pain. I’m working often with the person with the betrayal behavior to not justify what they did or try to rationalize this in any way. That is a whole piece of mindset, so we’re looking at changing the mindsets and internal mind states.
The third piece is not getting help sooner for your relationship. By the time couples show up in my office, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well, Carol, they are struggling, they are exhausted, they’ve been having the same conversation sometimes well into the night, many nights, and it doesn’t seem to be helping or moving them forward. Not getting help soon enough, not turning to already existing resources, which many people don’t realize exist: an extensive listing of all kinds of resources, including books that you’ve written, our colleagues have written, websites that are available, support and recovery groups that help the individuals and them as a couple. Those are some common mistakes, I think.
Carol: What has been the response from our professional organization? Because I know that there has been, because of the “oh it’s just porn” philosophy, there is not a lot of emphasis on the fact that it really is objectification which is at the heart of betrayal, and in addition it’s oftentimes like a gateway to other things as the addiction progresses. So what has the response been from the professional community, especially APSATS?
Dr. S: The response from APSATS, from SASH, the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, these more addiction- and trauma-informed organizations, it’s been highly supportive. We have a lot of research to support the impact that pornography has, especially with streaming on the internet, it is now available 24/7, so it’s highly accessible, it’s not well regulated, and young people, we know that pornography has been viewed by children as early as age five. Most of the research is, which I include in my book, that most adolescents by the time they’re 14 have viewed pornography. Some are seeing pornography regularly and that creates a very distorted view of what a human intimate sexual connection consists of. It’s not relational and (sex in) pornography is transactional. It also, as we’re learning from the research, does affect the brain. We have research using MRIs, the magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, and we see that pornography lights up the same areas of the brain as it does for cocaine addicts, and that chronic use of pornography in healthy males who are not diagnosed with sex addiction, but when they have MRIs and were asked about the frequency of their pornography use, the more extensive the pornography, the more habitual the pornography use, the smaller an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus is. So it actually does shrink some parts of the brain that impact our ability to have motivation, have empathic connection, it affects behavior and they figure into some things like compulsivity and even ADHD. We’re beginning to have an accumulation, quite a large body of evidence, of the impact that pornography has on the brain. As you referenced, it keeps the affected partner, the partner who is viewing pornography, from being able to be fully present with their real life partner. That’s the goal in the couples work, to be able to rewire the brain. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “what fires together, wires together.” So we want to lay down some new neuropathways that enable the couple to be more intimately deeply connected with each other, and that’s the work in the couples repair.
Carol: That makes a lot of sense. In some ways, when I was reading your book, I realized that the book was written for the partner, but it also was written for the betrayer, and that’s why I think it’s so helpful. It reminded me of, I hope you don’t feel this is in any way an insult, but it reminded me of the bible of infidelity, After the Affair, written by…
Dr. S: Janice Abrams Spring.
Carol: Right, and then she writes about forgiveness. She’s just a master at infidelity. I loved it because it was so nonjudgmental, it was so informative, it was so helpful, and it really gave step by step instructions which you could do to get through the crisis, to get the truth, and to get over there to what I call post-traumatic growth. As you’re talking about your book, I’m wondering if you are able to generate things that you might do based on this book, like do you think you’ll ever do any workshops or do you believe that you’ll have some groups specifically for this issue? Has your mind been creative lately?
Dr. S: Yes! It’s my hope to be able to do that, and I’m so glad that you used the word ‘nonjudgmental.’ That’s my approach in writing the book. It’s not a judgment of using pornography. Any kind of moral or ethical issues are not addressed in the book, because that’s not its focus. The focus is on having nonjudgmental compassion both for betrayed partners, and I do hope clinicians read the book who are not betrayal trauma informed, because when the betrayed partners and their partner who has had the betrayal behavior come into a couples’ therapist’s office, it is really important to hold the space for the betrayed partner to not be their best self. They’re deeply wounded, they’re often very angry, and it makes sense from a trauma lens. So having also non-judgment for the betraying partner who has become habituated, the brain wants what the brain wants, and I often say this is a brain thing. It’s not a will power thing; it’s not a morality thing…
Carol: It’s not about your genitals; it’s about your brain.
Dr. S: Absolutely right, it is about the brain. So this is a big mindset shift also for individuals and couples to come to, and I love the Imago approach to working with couples. It was so helpful to my husband and me when we met with an Imago therapist who taught us how to deeply listen and mirror one another. As I became more informed about betrayal trauma, I realized what an amazing tool mirroring dialog is for repair of betrayal trauma, because it allows the partners to engage with each other in a very safe and nonjudgmental way. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have emotions and can’t express emotions, but we do it in a very safe and structured way.
I’m often saying to the betraying partner that you become a healing partner in this process by staying present with your partner and you don’t have to like what they say, you don’t have to agree with what they say, you don’t have to fix or change what they’re saying what their experience is. You just need to get it and you need to let them know what you get about this, and that’s acknowledgement that “I caused this pain for you, I do have regret and remorse about that, those are appropriate emotions to have and it makes sense to me.” I’m validating your experience, I’m acknowledging my responsibility for that and I also want to be able to let you know, when it’s my turn to share, what I’m doing to work to make sure this doesn’t happen again. That’s the fundamental question that betrayed partners have, how do I know this is not going to happen again. How can I have safety with you? In the mirroring dialog, we slow everything down. I often say the betraying partner becomes the healing partner. You have to have listening from the beginning. Ultimately we want this to be a dialog between the two of you where you also have a chance to share, and I give an example in my book. But especially when there is a trigger, you just need to be present with your partner in getting their experience, telling them it makes sense, and then creating a place of safety with them.
Carol: You’re singing my tune, because that is exactly what Help.Them.Heal. is all about. It’s about acknowledging and validating and reassuring and holding space. In that book, we even talk to you couples in case you don’t have or aren’t lucky enough to have a therapist or a coach, how to learn that yourself. But we really do want you to use experts if you can.
I’m going to ask, it’s kind of a loaded question, Sandra, but do you think couples can ever recover from betrayal trauma, especially porn betrayal?
Dr. S: I do, Carol, and the reason I say that is because as human beings, we have an enormous capacity to change. We used to think that whatever brain matter we were born with, use it when you can, because this is all you get and as you age, you’re going to lose that gray matter. We know now that’s not the case. Up until people take their last breath of life, we’re capable of changing our brains by rewiring and learning how to do things and see things differently. By using this very mindfully, I’m often saying to couples this is the biggest mindfulness practice you will ever have, because we learn how to be intentional, we build good couples’ habits, good relational habits with each other, so that we integrate what happened in the past with our trauma, with the betrayal, into the narrative of us. It becomes part of the story of us, and at the same time, it doesn’t define us or our future. I love this image, which I have on the cover of my book, and I know some of our colleagues have used it as well, Ambushed by Betrayal with Michele Saffier and Allan Katz, use the image of Kintsugi, this Japanese art form of taking a piece of pottery that is broken and repairing it with beautiful silver or gold that creates something stronger, even more resilient, useful, and beauty comes out of what has been brokenness. In this state or space of heartbrokenness, that we heal in a way that makes our relationship stronger and more resilient and creates more intimacy and deeper connection and compassion.
Carol: I absolutely agree with you. I’ve done some of that artwork, and it is not only beautiful and it’s stronger than it was before, but just like a broken bone, where the bone is broken, it grows stronger.
Dr. S: Exactly.
Carol: We are so hoping that you’ll run out and get this book. Again, amazing, and it’s so understandable. You’ve just done a phenomenal job with that. What I think is that we’ve needed a good book on porn. We’ve got a lot of stuff on betrayal of other types, but we really needed something, because it has been so diminished. You’ve just done a beautiful job. Is there anything else you want to add about the book, concepts, or about your services before we end for today?
Dr. S: I do want to let listeners know that there is hope. That’s a key thing to know that individuals and most importantly as a couple, when both people are doing the work and want to work on themselves and the relationship, then there is every reason to be hopeful and optimistic about being able to repair and be stronger than ever. In terms of availability, I will make myself as available as possible to anyone who reaches out. I try very hard to respond in a timely fashion when you reach out for help, but also in my book, to avail themselves of the many free resources or low cost resources like the books that you’ve written, Help.Her.Heal. and Help.Them.Heal., the books that are available for the individual partners and many of our colleagues who provided online resources that are free and readily accessible, as well as 12 step recovery groups like S-ANON, Infidelity Survivors Anonymous for partners, and the many 12 step recovery groups that are available for sexually compulsive or addicted individuals. I want to put in a special plug for “Recovering Couples Anonymous,” a wonderful 12 step recovery group for couples. All of those are available and I hope people will take advantage of that.
Carol: Very well stated. I don’t know if you know this, but Help.Her Heal. is now a 12 step group and I could see porn anonymous doing the same thing with your book, it’s just that well done. So congratulations. Everybody go out and buy the book, it is absolutely amazing to be able to have a resource that helps you understand that this wasn’t a moral issue. It’s The Porn Solution, Relationship Repair after Pornography Betrayal. Thank you so much, Sandra, it’s been a pleasure.
Dr. S: Thank you, Carol, I really appreciate the opportunity.
Link to the podcast:
https://www.blogtalkradio.com/sexhelpwithcarolthecoach/2023/06/05/the-porn-solution-with-carol-the-coach
Links to Purchase The Porn Solution: Relationship Repair After Pornography Betrayal, Sano Press (2023)
To Purchase from Sano Press Publishing:
https://www.sanopress.com/
To Purchase from Amazon (paperback or Kindle):
https://www.amazon.com/Porn-Solution-Relationship-Pornography-Betrayal/dp/1956620028/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CTBXD0GSKQFM&keywords=porn+solution+book&qid=1687800540&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sprefix=porn+solution+book%2Caps%2C94&sr=1-1