Part of what is so maddening about being in recovery with a nice guy is that you’re confronted with what looks like very kind and mature behavior alongside things like deception, betrayal, and even harmful behavior. Here is one duped wife’s account. Many unhealthy folks engaging in the latter kinds of things you can see coming from a mile away. Their lives are littered with broken relationships, immaturity, and aimlessness. Society hasn’t caught up to the notion that one can look great on the outside while doing a great deal of damage within the sphere of their interpersonal relationships. Yes, these people can even be Christians and active in church. Their style of relating is abusive all while giving the right answers, finishing college, showing up to work everyday (even compulsively working), “settling down” and being a good citizen. When we are trying to avoid posers, players, and perverts, it’s precisely these responsible people we are looking for!

In Part 3 I shared videos on personality disorders (vulnerable or covert narcissism in particular) – which is to say what happens when someone is deprived of a childhood experience optimal for healthy growth and development in light of their unique internal landscape. We know that not everyone who has an affair or looks at p*rn is an addict. This is determined by their acting out history. We also know that not every sex addict has a personality disorder. This can be determined by professional assessments and/or how they deal with life in a sober state. For us wives who find our marriages seemingly getting worse after Dday and therapy, there are probably underlying dynamics happening with the addict. This is especially true when you’re married to a nice guy. You’ve known them to be a compliant rule-follower. However, you may be seeing a dark side of them in recovery that you had no idea even existed. In my experience, the seemingly-benign good guy can often be seeking out the most dangerous, dark material in their acting out and/or they’ve been verbally abusive and obstinate after discovery. Saad explained this as the nice guy’s downward involving his shadow AND a vulnerable narc moving into darker, retaliatory behavior. Sadly not all therapists get this because these guys present so well. These guys look great, and they look great to everyone! If you’re in this situation, you’re not alone.

One therapist/author has spent a great deal of his career teasing out precisely who these nice guy abusers are in contrast to the grandiose bad boys. Please take the time to read this article by Andrew Bauman. Thankfully I didn’t come across it before I had this series written out, because I probably would have saved myself the time and simply let this article teach us about nice guy abusers. Every word of his article is what we wives of nice guys need to know…because some of these guys are dangerous… Like Saad, Bauman give us an easy-to-understand spectrum of behavior to help make sense of what we are dealing with. Bauman hits the target when he describes these situations as harm against women. My coach often says “silence is violence.” He also traces the roots of these issues back to traits involving narcissism and selfishness.

The only way I have been able to make sense of the problems accompanying being married to a good-guy-sex-addict is by getting some education around personality disorders. In most cases, wives of nice guys in recovery largely agree on how our husbands present both before and after Dday. Keep in mind, these guys say they want their marriage and family. They don’t yell, run off, or ruin their reputation. Nice guys aren’t the best about putting in hard work. They’re soft and they look for easy solutions. In general, they go to therapy and follow a program. And yet, their heart can seem anywhere but connected to yours. Good guys detest being labeled…. Therapists might think we’re nuts because these guys don’t exactly fit clinical parameters for disorders. Just like the treatment field of sexual addiction is somewhat new, there have been only a handful of pioneering professionals who have identified certain similarities of behavior, defined terms, and outlined treatment for “nice sex addicts.” Along with Abdul Saad and Andrew Bauman, Dr. Kenneth Adams’ mother-enmeshment, Dr. Doug Weiss’ intimacy anorexia (IA), Dr. Janice Caudill’s IA work, Dr. Jake Porter’s practice’s over control course, and Jason Martinkus’ concept of acting in (opposed to acting out) all come to mind. If you’re dealing with one of these nice types, church counseling probably won’t be helpful.

Addicts look like a narcissist while in addiction. The hallmark traits that addicts share with narcissists are the 3 Es: entitlement, excessive self-focus and lack of empathy. Allow me to add exploitative. Whether these traits are merely a learned tendency from childhood that disappear in sobriety or the addict is in fact a diagnosable narc, we wives want to be validated that the tendencies or traits are present and they’re causing major problems within a marriage already reeling from betrayal. Identifying these traits is the beginning of the wife getting some stability in what should be the reconnecting phase of the marriage. Let’s get more specific about the behaviors we are seeing.

In the spirit of entitlement and selfishness, we often experience things like demeaning the partner, withdrawal, gaslighting, lack of empathy or remorse, emotional outbursts, intrusive thoughts, anger, depression, anxiety, poor reality testing, blaming shifting, laziness, self pity. This can be summed up by saying nice guys are addicted to being in the victim seat. If they persist even when the addict is maintaining sobriety and working his plan, that’s when we can start to consider if our husband deals with a mental health issue. All partners of addicts have seen these Es at play in their relationship. It’s very disheartening to see them persist in recovery, though, after significant investments in treatment. It’s also very confusing with nice guys, because they’re not consistently entitled or cold-hearted. We see them cry and seem to have remorse and empathy. It’s a stretch to call them a narcissist. Here is where a more-informed understanding of personality disorders can help. The videos explaining the differences in grandiose and covert/vulnerable narcissism in the previous post are enlightening.

For example, nice guys aren’t going to fall into the a grandiose narc category. Bad boys will fall more into this category. Both types of narcs do share some traits like the 3 Es or a strong need for admiration. Grandiose narcs will be selfish and entitled from a sense of self-importance while many vulnerable narcs exhibit the Es in an effort to calm internal distress. Nice guys have A LOT OF EMOTION! That’s probably one reason they were groomed to be so nice growing up. But as adults, they’re so overwhelmed by their own emotions that they don’t have much left to give others, even though they seem to be team player. Dr. Todd Grande says vulnerable narcs tend to have low levels of extraversion (so they’re introverted) and high levels of neuroticism (sensitivity to negative emotion: anxiety, depression, anger, stress). Conversely grandiose narcs tend to have a high level of extraversion and low levels of neuroticism. This means the classic narcs don’t have negative emotions nagging at them to be nicer while the vulnerable types do. As you learned in the videos, vulnerable narcs have a tendency to be secretly vindictive. However, they’re usually cut off from aggression and anger, so their resentment and vindictiveness go underground.

Nice guys aren’t blowing off steam and getting even like bad boys. They’re pushing their negative emotions below their consciousness, and there it festers. Nice guys aren’t yelling at you – to the contrary. It’s hard to see any outward manifestation of negative emotion. We all have negative emotion from time to time, so what’s happening to these guys in light of a seeming lack of negative emotion? Sex addicts sexualize their emotions because they haven’t learned how to emotionally regulate in mature ways. Their negative emotion, deep in their subconscious, becomes eroticised rage. This is where the p*rn problem enters the picture. Chances are your nice guy’s p*rn consumption or his treatment of you after being discovered has a mean and cruel edge to it. Their descent into a greater state of dis-ease gets increasingly cold, withdrawn, or sadistic. Saad explains this well in the previous post’s Three Levels of Covert Narcissism video.

Another important point that a wife of a covert narc must accept is that while gradiose narcs trend to exploit anyone or everyone, covert narcs reserve this behavior for only one person – their INsignificant other. Not only that, but the ways in which he’s hurting you the most were probably done in secret and you never see it coming. This was a KEY FACTOR for me in making sense out of our relational dynamics. How he could be so nice to everyone yet so secretly mean toward me? He’s nice to our kids, his boss, his mom, everyone at church, my parents, the gas attendant, and on and on. It was because the E’s were at play in his life secretly via lust and p*rn and hurting me until after Dday where it was visible toward me. To everyone else he appeared to be the opposite of entitled or selfish.

Dr. Jim Wilder said in a recent interview “Narcissists make enemies out of other people. Instead of growing love…, although they might talk about, instead they grow enemies. They create problems that you can’t talk about. How does my stomach know if I’m in one of these situations? The answer is if you feel that if I say anything about this, it will only make it worse. Narcissists don’t think they need to love anybody who’s causing them trouble. When you offer to correct a narcissist, it just makes the situation worse rather than better. A technical definition is A person who can not hear correction to their identity without provoking self justification, and sometimes hostility or attack. A narcissist will use fear and self justification to avoid correction and to win.” It’s very difficult to see the problems with our good guys because they have done so many “good” things that we feel in the wrong bringing up their deficits. Their strategy has been to “kill us with kindness.” Maybe they have made great sacrifices like they’re a pastor or a service person. Maybe they bring home a big paycheck and spoil you with money. We feel terrible correcting someone like this! But in truth, they make it very hard to talk about their harmful behavior. They don’t want anyone seeing their shadow parts, even themselves.

It’s a very confusing situation. To be frank, it’s sick and could become dangerous. Hopefully you can get a little more clarity as you continue to read this series. But for now, a good place to start might be with identifying the Es in your marriage: entitlement, excessive self focus, lack of empathy, exploitation. Then consider talking to your husband about how difficult he makes it for you to bring up difficult conversations like his need for change or your pain.