Part 1 – Videos on Nice Guys and Pseudo Alpha Males

Part 2 – Personality Structure

Part 3 – Personality Disorders

Part 4 – The Spectrum of an Abuser

Part 5 – His Double Life, Her Cognitive Dissonance

Part 6 – More on My Story’s Tipping Point

Part 7 – Tips for Her

Part 8 – Tips for Him

While I was writing this series I saw these socks for sale (post photo)! We know better, ladies. Being a so-called good guy is nothing to make light of. But in all seriousness, allow me to be vulnerable for a moment. The things I’ve shared in the this series are deeply painful for me and confusing. I’ve devoted probably hundreds of hours of study to sexual addiction material, and a large bulk of that has been trying to understand “nice addicts.” The psychological anguish this creates for the partner is acute. And yet it seems no one in the “marriage-in-crisis emergency room” has the clear, concise treatment at hand. I don’t blame them. It’s a complicated issue. I’ve tried to put together a thorough and helpful treatise on the topic. What I’m sharing in this post will be the finishing touches.

But before I share information from the experts, I can’t finish this series without mentioning my favorite girls in the world – my recovery girls. I am blessed to have a small group of ladies, mostly married to “good guy cheaters,” who talk with me, listen to me, answer my crazy questions, send me resources, give me loads of feedback, share/receive urgent texts at all hours of the day and night, get face-to-face as needed on zoom, and MORE! I can’t discount the help we’ve received from therapists, authors, experts who provide free content like blogs and podcasts, and coaches who are in the trenches every day. But I don’t know where I’d be without my girls. They’re some of the most beautiful, brilliant, courageous, devout, and loving women I have ever met. Their unfaithful husbands don’t know how lucky they are. I am so sorry I had to meet you under the conditions that we find ourselves in. You deserve so much better. Know your care and patience toward me has made all the difference, and I hope to pay it forward in a small way by putting our research and conclusions here. To those reading, you can rest assured that our collective knowledge has been purified and tested in the real-life trials by fire.

When recovering couples show up in their respective support groups, we’re hurting and we’re desperate for the right help. In no time at all we listen to other stories and notice the similarities and differences. “If it worked for them, it can work for us!” Our lives as we know it are hanging in the balance. The lives of our children as well. As time goes on, it seems the specific answers to our specific problems are pretty hard to find for a lot of us. Each coupleship is unique, and we don’t have a rubric to pinpoint the nature of our specific problems. The journey I’ve been on to find the answers I need has produced some helpful theories that I wish we had had early on. For example, the following categories:

In recovery circles, sadly many wives have partners who don’t want to repair or save the marriage. They don’t even try. Recovery is a marathon not a sprint, and many men simply don’t have the emotional fitness to handle it. Then there are some guys who say they want to save their marriage, but they never put real effort into sobriety or doing the work. They don’t get very far. They were poor husbands before Dday, and they continue to disappoint after Dday. They’re ACTUAL BAD BOYS. Eventually the wife gets the message: they’re not changing. These women are exhausted from years of battling with these men.

For the guys who are “doing the work”, this assumes they’re establishing long term sobriety. But wait! There’s more! Wives are also looking for lasting changed behavior (new behaviors) and a felt safety and emotional connectedness – because she is now a cherished priority to her partner, and it shows. The man our husband was before recovery has nothing to do with the man he will be IN recovery. Before recovery “bad” husband behaviors were demonstrated by things like yelling, hurting us, not working, selfishness, abandoning us, breaking the rules in broad daylight, etc. When a bad boy is serious about maturing and saving his marriage, it’s a beautiful thing! We see those two things we are looking for: changed behavior and emotional connection. By doing the work, these former bad boys become heros! While the victory was often hard-fought by both the husband AND the wife (who has the heart of a saint), the end result is dazzling. They’re BAD BOYS TURNED GOOD. We love those stories.

Now consider the men who seemed like exemplary husbands before recovery… Partners of these guys have pretty good expectations going into the recovery process. Some of these “nice guys” aren’t very nice at all at home. They have a stellar reputation in public, so much so that their wife would NEVER suspect any kind of sexual misconduct at all! The pain of infidelity is the same for wives of bad boys or nice guys. But with the nice guys, the impact of the shock feels like 25 fatal events hit you in a moment. It’s quite devastating psychologically. What happens in recovery with the nice guys is they seem to fall into a few different categories over time. Keep in mind these guys say they want to repair their marriages, right? Because that’s the nice thing to say…. Also nice guys have some temperament traits that allow them to hang in recovery circles for a very long time. Some want to preserve their family while others only want to preserve their family-man image, and it takes time to learn the difference. This first category of nice guy I call NICE IN-PUBLIC-ONLY. These guys have a dead ringer giveaway: their wives emphatically don’t think they’re real nice guys. When asked, they label them as pseudo alpha males. While these guys might look nice to their therapist, support group, or church friends, over time the lack of real change at home becomes too much to bear for the wife and she calls his bluff. NICE IN-PUBLIC-ONLY guys are ACTUAL BAD BOYS in disguise.

Then there are REAL NICE GUYS who can exhibit some real change in recovery. Obviously they don’t have as much room to dazzle their wife with new behavior as the bad boys because their old behavior was pretty good most of the time before discovery. But in the end, his consistency using his new tools starts to make her feel safe. As he grows in authenticity from doing the work over time, they will grow in emotional connectedness. The impact of the shock of deception is a serious wound in the wife which takes a long time to heal. Remember my coach’s excellent quote: It’s harder to heal when you’ve been harmed through apparent kindness. But these marriages can be healed with the husband’s work. Like Abdul Saad says, most nice guys aren’t too far away from being grounded, healthy, and protective of the right things. If your husband was nice before Dday, he’s nice in public and nice at home with very little information to refute that, and he’s committed to his recovery process, you’re likely to see significant healing in the marriage if you can give yourself the time to heal – and that could be longer than you expect.

Then the last category is the CONFUSING NICE GUY. He’s nice in public and he’s nice at home as well. He is sober and doing the work, but the wife has tremendous struggle feeling safe and connected. Many of these nice guys have a dark achilles heel, like in my case (the cruel thoughts and comments about my appearance). These things are often revealed in the disclosure and recovery process. Or perhaps even though he’s very compliant and committed to the work, he finds his own ways to withdrawal emotionally or make you seem like the one with the problem. Maybe the ways in which he was acting out was very dark and dangerous. Maybe he seems to be doing well but loses his cool randomly and attacks you verbally. Maybe his recovery and change simply feels more manipulative than genuine… You get the gist… There’s something holding you back from having faith in the validity of his recovery. Sometimes I jokingly say about our marriage: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The “good” these guys exhibit seem more good than the average guy, while the “bad” seems more dark. The dynamics at play in the shadow of these guys are serious and need intense therapy to reintegrate it into his adult self. While this is probably the smallest group represented among those in sex addiction treatment, it’s my opinion that it’s these partners who experience the most cognitive dissonance and struggle to find the right kind of help and a sense of stability. These guys also have a dead ringer: While they’re wife can’t deny that they’re good or nice, she doesn’t feel safe or secure. She feels as if she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Dr. Omar Minwalla has an excellent work out about the abuse that takes place in an intimate partnership where one party has been sexually unfaithful. At this link, you can find his recent paper “Deceptive Sexuality and Trauma (DST): A Clinical Model.” In my mind, the sexual addiction treatment field must adopt his theory to understand that sex addicts have not only a sexual compulsivity problem but an integrity abuse disorder. He does a masterful job at laying out how the interpersonal exploitation and deception that sex addicts are so skilled at point to serious deficits and personality disorders. And this happens on a spectrum. If you aren’t familiar with his work, such as ‘the secret sexual basement,’ you’ll benefit by taking advantage of his resources. Minwalla podcast on integrity abuse disorder is here. If you want to learn more about how these things set up in ones personality structure, this podcast by Dr. Omar Minwalla lays in out very clearly.

According to Minwalla, the harms that occur in marriages that have experienced infidelity are: lies, deception, gaslighting, blaming, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, relational abuse, patterns such as having a secret sexual life while pretending not to while engaged with people who depend on you in a family system. These are akin to interacting with someone with traits of narcissism, or even diagnosable NPD. Most partners say the damage caused by these things have been greater than even the betrayal. Another author on narcissism says that narcissists are very skilled in how they choose to act against others. Most of the time they aren’t doing “crimes” or obvious rule-violating behaviors. It’s very subtle, it’s very hard to put your finger on. However when one of these infractions does and occur and the partner confronts her husband, while may even apologize and commit to change, these things continue to happen. Over and over for years. Those two things are what we are watching for to pinpoint the relational abuse: subtle harm to the partner that never ceases despite her requests.

I want to share the work of one last expert to bring us full circle. Patricia Crittendon has devoted her career to serious attachment problems. She’s developed her own attachment categories in a system that she calls The Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) of Attachment. You can find a podcast on this model here.

As you look at this model, what most of us would call secure attachment would be B3 at the top. Children growing up in traumatic situations will make their way around the circle (from “noon” down toward the 6, to use clock terms), on one side or the other, toward psychopathy. I want you to see this because it correlates so well to what Saad shared in Part 1 about Nice Guys vs. the Pseudo Alpha males. The nice guys will correlate to the categories on the left side of this circle, red. Notice how, like Saad, Crittendon concludes that compulsive compliance and caregiving (nice guy behavior) can lead to sexual promiscuity if the individual continues to move toward unhealth. If you find this interesting, I hope you’ll listen to the podcast linked above. She explains that if you draw a horizontal line across the center of the circle, it’s those who fall in the categories below the line that make their way to treatment for issues like addiction and more. There can be some A-C types, and we’d call that category disorganized attachment. For partners of sex addicts, I imagine it’s easy to look at the A-C categories in the lower part of the circle and see all of those at play in our partner. Crittendon says the attachment styles on the right side of the diagram appear to be very angry. However, they need to see and heal their hidden fears below the anger to get better. The nice guys, to heal, must address their increasing distorted thinking and disconnection from their negative affect (or their shadow). Now we see the patterns! This rings true. For me, married to a CONFUSING NICE GUY, A3-7 make a lot of sense! Compulsive compliance and rule-following to survive as a child make a lot of sense!

Educating myself on the relational and personality dynamics at play in my partner have made me feel more stable in my healing journey. Phil recently told me he had created a situation in his life where he didn’t have to be vulnerable (Crittendon’s A6 self reliant). How that affected me is he was the leader, the strong one, the good example, the one who made the rules and encouraged their enforcement. I worked hard to make sure the kids and I followed his rules. I attuned to him, to his emotional neediness, to his excessive focus on work. Now I see there wasn’t real mutuality in our marriage. Now, I know the harms when I see them. I know how health should look. I can make sense of our particular hang ups.

By way of review, those with complex trauma seem fine until they’re triggered, according to the Tim Fletcher video in Part 3. Every partner knows what it’s like to be talking to a grown man in one moment and he, with no warning, turns into an angry, defensive child in the next moment. He has his blame shifting pointed directly at you, and there’s no problem-solving happening. It’s quite painful. In triggered states, not everyone acts out in grandiose or aggressive ways. With covert types, you never see it coming…. Compliant, good guy types will exhibit quiet smugness, superiority, entitlement, self focus, magical thinking, fantasy, passive aggression. They will manipulate with charm, be sneaky, sensitive, shy, fragile, victim mentality, no growth mindset, repression, projection, impulsive, need for thrills, disregard for the boundaries of others. They lack real intimacy, empathy, conscience, remorse, moral compass, real apologies. They have to be “special.” But keep in mind they’re experts at looking normal and even amazing! They’ve perfected “the look” for survival. Crittendon says this has left them with the inability to have the right solution for their problems. They lack healthy problem solving skills and realistic self awareness. Remember, covert types will only exhibit these negative traits for one person – their insignificant other. They must impress everyone else. In general they will be nice and compliant. Part 4 links Andrew Bauman’s article that says many guys exhibiting these behaviors are unaware fools. But if a man is confronted with the harm he is doing to others and refuses to change, he is abusive and dangerous.

Before ending, I want to make this applicable. Do a thought exercise with me. Imagine a couple shows up in a therapist’s office after the discovery of infidelity. The therapist asks each one of them what would need to happen to make this OK. The wife will ask for things that require change in him. He will probably say something like he just wants everything to be OK again. What she is asking for is not only reasonable but 100% necessary. For things to be OK, it demands that he changes. And many times he simply has no intention of that kind of change. He just wants to feel OK – it’s the addict way…. So she keeps showing up, week after week, hoping and praying, but no real change happens. Change like what we’re talking about in this post… Sure maybe he gets sober, but that’s the start not the end. This is painful to watch – this is painful to live.

Recently Phil and I heard the term “couple bubble” from our sweet coach. We like using it when talking about protecting the health of our marriage. Addicts don’t naturally operate in a couple bubble system. Their life is consumed with a self blob. What feels “normal” to them, is very self-protective and isolated. It’s ensconced in their personality structure. Their overwhelming, dysregulated emotions take center stage above others, important relational systems, or being consistent with their own system. This is why much of the good we see in a good guy’s life is like apples strung on a tree rather than real fruit. They’re using compulsive compliance to emotionally regulate rather than an act of self expression. This is a lack of integrity. Phil is coming to understand what’s needed to nurture our couple bubble. For us, it’s critical that he manages his tendency toward delusional thinking. I’ve mentioned in Part 4 how sex addicts sexualize their emotions, which leads to subconscious sexualized rage. “Healthy reality testing” is common language for us. He’s willing to go the distance to help me heal and to open the door to his shadow for his own healing. There is some frightening stuff down there. He’s gaining real tools to slow down processes related to emotional dysregulation, typically crippling anxiety, which in the past could lead to acting out.

Minwalla is a forerunner in the sex addiction field, and his work is seminal. Healing the relational damage that comes along with being close to an addict is imperative, and sadly not all CSATs know how to do this. Not all addicts are willing to do the work. That means intimate partnership is impossible, even if you choose to stay married for other reasons. “The hardest lesson to learn about going back to a relationship that didn’t work, is going back doesn’t fix what didn’t work. Here’s the thing, you don’t have to close the door on getting back together but you do have to close the door on going backwards. What was good is not the issue. The issue is what didn’t work – the behavior that didn’t work, the communication that didn’t work, the emotional starvation that didn’t work. When you go back without understanding and addressing the root causes for why the relationship didn’t work, the problems will resurface and repeat themselves. If the problem is love, then a lack of affection, a lack of intimacy, a lack of respect, covenant dishonor and pointless arguing are symptoms of the problem, not the problem. Going back without addressing the problems [integrity abuse disorder], is an indication that the love is not mature enough, healthy enough or ready enough to go forward beloved.” Patrick Weaver, author and psychologist For recovering couples, it’s hard for talk realistically about these things because it’s shameful for the addict and he lashes out. To be fair to the professionals treating us, many addicts are extremely defended against looking at this stuff. It’s difficult. This came up recently while I was talking to Phil and he kept saying he was ashamed. They’re ashamed that they’re being perpetrators, they’re exploiting and harming others, even the ones they love the most. There are remedies for shame! Owning the problem and making it right. Minwalla is showing us how to start this process. Getting sober isn’t going to touch this stuff, but getting sober makes it possible.

In closing this series, I want to say one last time that this series was for the girls. It was for me! I needed to do this for my healing. It’s for my tribe who has helped me learn so much about these things – they’re words, insights, and resources are shared in nearly every paragraph. And it’s for the girls married to confusing good guys that seem unlike anyone else you know. It seems no one knows that to do with him. I understand your pain and shame. You’re not alone.