Episode 1 - The Secret Sexual Basement

Welcome to the From Harm to Healing podcast. I'm your host Chris Jones and I'm a therapist who runs the From Harm to Healing Treatment Program, an online program for men who have engaged in infidelity or compulsive sexual behaviors within the context of an intimate relationship. I started this podcast to illuminate some of the common blind spots within the treatment fields for compulsive sexual behavior or sex addiction through the lens of the deceptive sexuality trauma model. I hope you find this resource enlightening, particularly if you're somebody navigating the pain of betrayal and deception for yourself. Thank you for listening to The From Harm to Healing podcast. Welcome to this first episode of the podcast. As I mentioned in the intro there, my name is Chris Jones and I'm a therapist based in the UK that works pretty much exclusively through the lens of the deceptive sexuality trauma model, which some of you may already be familiar with and some of you probably won't be. One of the main things I really want to do with this podcast is break that down a bit and explain the model, explain the approach. And again, as mentioned in the introduction, really try and highlight some of the blind spots in the traditional treatment in these fields of compulsive sexual behavior and sex addiction. Inclinating those blind spots is a critical part of the model and once we understand those things that may have been missed in the past, it also changes the treatment approach in some fairly significant ways. Now as a starting point, if we just look at the name of the model itself, the DST or deceptive sexuality trauma model, many people will also know it by its unofficial name of the Minwala model and that's because it was developed by Dr. Omar Minwala of the Institute for Sexual Health. And as a side note, you can always find out more information about this model at minwalamodel.com. But again, if we just take the name as a starting point, deceptive sexuality, we're already getting right to the centre of what we're looking at with this model, which is a two-part problem rather than a one-part problem. So we are making the assumption here that we're talking about a sexual behavior or a pattern of sexual behaviors that have been hidden and so deceptive behaviors have been used to keep them hidden from the intimate partner. And so straight away, we have deceptive sexuality, a pattern of behaviors that are deceptive in nature and a pattern of behaviors that are sexual in nature. And so we're already thinking perhaps a little bit differently because we are equally looking at those two things, rather than a traditional, compulsive sexual behavior or sex addiction approach, which might focus very heavily on the sexual acting out part of the behavior. So in this episode, I'm really going to focus on breaking that down and giving you a simple metaphor that we use in this model to really explain what we're talking about. And then in subsequent episodes, I want to break down each part of that a little bit more. My intent here on the podcast is to clearly articulate the topics and ideas that we're going through, but for it to also be very accessible. And it's one of the reasons that we use metaphor a lot in this model. It makes it more intuitive, more accessible to a lot of people, because it tends to help us really get to the heart of the matter and to be able to understand quite complex ideas, but in a relatively simple way. Just before we get to that, I want to acknowledge an important part of how I will present this information. Throughout these episodes, I'll be speaking generally of the person who has engaged in these deceptive and sexual patterns in the masculine. So I will often refer to him or the husband, for example. And when I talk about the partner, the betrayed partner, I will generally refer to she or her or the wife, for example. And there's quite an intentional reason for that, but I do want to acknowledge first of all that deceptive sexuality can obviously be engaged in by anybody. So it's not exclusive to men in that regard. However, it's also true to say that firstly, the majority of people that present with these issues, or certainly that present for treatment with these issues are men who have betrayed a female partner. And secondly, the DST model is particularly directed at this dynamic, because it also recognizes the impact of masculine gender shaping and societal shaping that can be particularly impactful for men and can be an important part of the puzzle, if you like, for understanding how and why the patterns of deceptive sexuality developed and why they are so normalized or even accepted in some ways within our society. My use of language, therefore, is not in any way intended to diminish or minimize the impact when things are the other way around, or if we're talking about same-sex partners, for example. But it's to try and honour the approach that I take, the clients that I work with, and the model that I use, and how it takes gender imbalances into account. I mentioned previously that metaphor is very important with this model, and I'm going to bring us today in this episode to the central metaphor that we use to understand deceptive sexuality. But before that, I'm going to go into the clinical understanding behind it, and the more technical term that we have for understanding the behaviour. So we're going to start with a little bit more depth. Then I'll bring it to the metaphor to simplify the idea down. I think it's important that we can break it down in a more clinical sense first, so we know exactly what we're talking about. And so the acronym that we use to clarify or define deceptive sexuality is dcsr, which stands for deceptive, compartmentalised, sexual relational reality. So we need to start by looking at each of those terms. Deceptive means that the behavioural pattern that's been engaged in is non-negotiated, and so it hasn't been discussed and agreed. It's not within the boundaries of the relationship that have been agreed. So we can define it as a non-negotiated pattern of behaviours that goes against the explicit and/or implicit agreements of the relationship, and it involves the intentional use of deceptive behaviours to maintain it. The second is that it's compartmentalised, so it's intentionally kept separate and hidden from other people, especially the intimate partner, and it often involves the violation of values that the person holds or professes to hold in other areas of life. So you have that clear image with compartmentalisation of, "When I'm in this compartment over here, I'm behaving in one way, living by one set of values, and when I'm in this compartment over here, perhaps the one that the people around me see or that I let people see, I'm acting in a different way and living to a different set of values." Thirdly, you have the "S", which refers to the sexual or relational element of the behaviour. So that means that the behavioural pattern includes repeated violations of the fidelity of the relationship with sexual behaviours and/or romantic, emotionally intimate or even exploitative relationships. So the behaviours must have a sexual or relational element to them, to fit in with this model. A gambling addiction, for example, could fulfil the first two, it could be deceptive, and it could be compartmentalised, but it isn't sexual or relational in nature, so again it wouldn't fit with this model. We then come to the "R" or "Reality". So this is the idea that it is an ongoing reality that's intentionally being hidden. This isn't something that's happened as a one-off or something that happened and then the person came clean about it. This is an ongoing reality that is being maintained and is being hidden from the other person in the relationship. That means the reality of the intimate partner is being manipulated. Hopefully that makes sense because that alone is a very, very important point here. The reality of the intimate partner is being intentionally manipulated because this other compartment is being deceptively hidden. So the person who is engaging in these behaviours and the intimate partner in the relationship are living in two different realities and that separation is being intentionally maintained. So this is the clinical way that we can understand and define deceptive sexuality. A deceptive, compartmentalised, sexual relational reality is maintained within the context of an intimate relationship. So now we come to the metaphor and again the metaphor is so important because whilst that idea of "DCSR" really encapsulates what we're talking about here, we also want a simple, clear, almost visual way of thinking about it. And the metaphor that we have in this model, which many people might already be familiar with, is the secret sexual basement. So if you try and follow my words here, but as I'm describing this, really try and visualise what I'm talking about. So imagine a family home with a family living in it and perhaps there's a couple of cars on the driveway. The home is nicely decorated, it's nicely furnished. You can see activities going on in the home just like any normal family. Everything you would expect to see from a family home you're seeing in front of you. And now imagine that one of the members of the family, and let's say it's the husband and father in this case, has built a secret sexual basement underneath the home that only he knows about. He goes into that basement to engage in sexual behaviors or relational infidelities, whilst continually pretending that the basement doesn't exist. As he goes into the basement, he makes sure nobody is looking and then closes the trap door behind him, and as he leaves the basement, he rolls the rug back over the entrance. So he's hiding any evidence of the basement wherever possible. And if his wife suspects something, if she wonders where he keeps disappearing to or what those noises underneath the house are, he tells her that she's imagining things. He tells her that she's making up stories in her head, that she's going crazy. So this is the image, the metaphor we have of the secret sexual basement. So hopefully you can see in this simple idea of the secret sexual basement, we have the entire DCSR concept that I just broke down. It's deceptive because the rest of the people in the home don't know that it's there and didn't agree to it being built. We have the compartmentalisation because it's another compartment hidden underneath the home and kept separate. We have the sexual relational piece because of what's happening inside the basement when the husband is in there. Then we have this idea of reality, the reality of the people in the home above and the reality that the husband knows about are two different things and are intentionally kept that way. So that brings us full circle to this idea of a two-part problem rather than just a one-part problem. You have the behaviours that are happening inside the basement and those are the behaviours that a lot of the traditional treatment would be targeting what might be clasters sexual acting out behaviours. But you also have this whole other behavioural system that is being used to keep the reality separate, to keep the basement hidden. That can be lying, lying by a mission, deleting or hiding of evidence, gas lighting or crazy making, manipulating the partner and really a variety of other deceptive or manipulative behaviours. So if we're only working on one part of the problem, the behaviour that's happening inside the basement, we're naturally going to have huge clinical blind spots because we're going to miss that second behavioural system that is protecting or hiding the basement, which is so critical. And this isn't just a technical concern, this has real world implications for the people involved. If we start with the betrayed partner, so often you find that in the long term, the deception and the manipulation is as impactful, if not more impactful, than the sexual acting out itself. So you have these situations where perhaps the man has been in treatment for the compulsive sexual behaviour, the infidelity, the sex addiction and is perhaps even done well in that regard. In many cases I've worked with clients, with many years in recovery from that part of the problem, and yet the partner still doesn't feel safe. The partner still in a sense doesn't know who she's married to, doesn't know what's going on for him, doesn't know if she has the full truth or not. And so it continues to be extremely destabilizing and traumatic for the partner. And then for the men that I work with in that kind of situation, there can be a real sense of confusion because it appears that they're doing well with their treatment or their recovery plan. They haven't acted out, perhaps for a significant period of time, and yet things aren't moving forward. They can't understand why their partner still doesn't feel safe. And so it really doesn't work for anyone if we're missing that significant piece of the puzzle. I'm going to bring us to a close now for this first episode. And hopefully it's left you with a clear understanding and a clear visual for the secret sexual basement, the two-part problem that we're aiming to treat with the deceptive sexuality trauma model. And in subsequent sessions, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper on some of the specific parts of that so we can understand them even more. But this is a great starting point and the secret sexual basement idea will be one that I refer to over and over again when we are talking about this topic. Thank you for listening to this episode of The From Harm to Healing Podcast. If you'd like to find out more information about the deceptive sexuality trauma model itself, you can visit minwalamodel.com. If you're interested in the services that I offer, in particular The From Harm to Healing Treatment Program, please visit chrisjonestherapy.co.uk.