Episode 31 - The 22 Rooms (Part 3)

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. Today's episode is the final part of this short series I've done on the 22 rooms, this core idea within the model to really try and highlight and name the traumatic impacts of deceptive sexuality. So we did the first episode looking at the covert phase trauma ward. We did the second episode moving to the exposure phase trauma ward. And now we are moving to what we call the symptom progression phase trauma ward and looking at the rooms, the treatment rooms in that place. And as a brief reminder, the symptom progression phase simply refers to that aftermath of the exposure phase. The exposure phase, of course, focused on those acute impacts when the two realities crash together. And now again, we are looking at that long-term outworking, the aftermath of that. And so we're looking at sometimes the deeper, longer-term impacts that might occur that somebody might need to work through having experienced this kind of trauma. So perhaps slightly less acute in their impact, but long-lasting. And in particular, we're considering really core injuries to the self, to one's identity, sexuality, gender, relationship with one's body, and then really thinking about attachment, the ripple effect on other attachment relationships that might occur. I'll add again that this can be very difficult material to listen to. My hope is always that it's validating, that it is naming an important reality that isn't often named, but please give yourself what you need as you're listening to this. That might mean taking breaks, that might mean slowing things down, finding somebody to talk to about this stuff perhaps. And also remembering that this is a relatively simple quick look at each of these concepts, each of which we could spend a great deal of time talking through. And indeed we do, when we do the clinical work here, a lot of time spent in each of these rooms potentially as we work towards healing. As with the previous episode, I will start by simply listing the rooms and then break them down a little bit more one by one, but it's good to just have them laid out together so you can get perhaps used to the language that's used here. So we have rooms 15 to room 22. Room 15 is the symptom progression phase integrity abuse shaping, which of course carries on from room 1, the covert phase integrity abuse shaping and room 4, the exposure phase integrity abuse shaping. Room 16, reality ego reconstruction, this of course links to that room 7 in the exposure phase of the reality and ego fragmentation. We then have room 17, sexual symptoms, room 18, gender wounds and room 19 impacts to the body. And these three rooms together are linked to that idea of the triadic core that I've done a previous episode on. So the overlap of one's sexuality, gender and physical body as really being a core part of what it is to be human. Room 20 is the persistent negative relational patterns that occur. Room 21, family, community and social impacts, and then finally room 22 treatment induced trauma. So these three rooms taken together, negative relational patterns, family community and social impacts and treatment induced trauma are all linked to this cluster around attachment, attachment relationships and attachment harm. Now if we go back and start in more depth in room 15, so symptom progression phase integrity abuse shaping. And of course very intentional that each of these phases names the integrity abuse shaping and we know that in this model, this idea of the integrity abuse pattern and the complex trauma shaping that occur are so central. And so it's right that it is named all throughout this. We are never losing sight of the ongoing patterns of harm that might be occurring. So all of the other traumatic impacts we're looking at are important individually, but equally important perhaps more important to realize that they are all happening in this bigger context of ongoing harm. And of course there have already been at this point two distinct phases of integrity abuse and trauma. So we can also consider that in this stage in this third phase, the partner is likely to be different. Their tolerance for further integrity abuse is likely to be extremely low. And of course any ongoing integrity abuse is directly impacting their ability or their potential to be able to heal and move forward through this journey. And if we now think about specific integrity abuse behaviors that might occur in this phase on top of perhaps in addition to a lot of the previous behaviors we've already identified, we might see things like the person who has caused this harm refusing to participate in repair or healing. We might see violation of agreements and boundaries that somebody is supposed to be following. We might see an inability or unwillingness to be accountable or an inability to provide care and support. There may be sexual entitlement or demands assumptions or expectations of forgiveness that we should just be able to move on from this. And this really links with this bigger picture of victim blaming that might occur. Something I've spoken about in previous episodes, but attitudes like she's just as sick as he is. She has her own issues. Maybe this just amplified her own wounds, her existing wounds. The idea that he's getting better and she's still stuck in the past. She needs to stop dwelling on it so we can move forward. Statements like you just love being miserable all the time. You're playing the victim. You need to stop trying to control my recovery. You need to stop playing detective. You need to stop pain shopping. All of these kinds of things where a partner's understandable trauma responses are then used to pathologize them. And so once again we need to consider that all of the other ongoing traumatic impacts are potentially happening within this context, within this ongoing pattern of harm. And we can consider how complex trauma shaping is continuing. So even in what should hopefully be the recovery phase moving towards safety and healing, how is complex trauma shaping still occurring if these kinds of behaviors are still coming up. They might be coming up less, but we still need to be very aware of it. Room 16 then refers to reality ego reconstruction. And as I mentioned in the intro, this really follows on from room seven in the exposure phase, which was reality and ego fragmentation. So we're now looking at the traumatic impact of having to rebuild those things. And again, we can't lose sight of the fact of what I've just said that this rebuilding is happening so often in the context of ongoing harm. Those patterns of abuse that are still potentially continuing. Remember that in many ways that ego is the foundation of our psychological health and our stability. So when that ego has been fragmented and when the world around us, our reality has been fragmented, can almost think of it like those elaborate scaffoldings of beliefs, assumptions, thoughts, feelings, all of the expectations we have about our self and how the world is supposed to work that is developed over a long period of time. So much of that can be lost and that is why there can be such a lack of feeling safe in that environment. So in terms of the ego, we might see things like a sense of helplessness or being paralyzed by situations, preoccupation with the secret sexual basement with the acting out, maybe a lack of trust in the self, mentioned in the previous episode there might be an aversion to the self and aversion to the symptoms, the reactivity, there might be shame guilt, self blame, there might be feelings of being dirty or defiled or stigma attached to being in a relationship with someone that was unfaithful to me. And of course the way of seeing the world, so the external, the way of seeing the partner that betrayed me. The way of seeing my family and maybe the efforts and responsibilities I've put into my family, which I felt were being reciprocated, or I assumed were being reciprocated. Perhaps my ways of seeing men and women in the world in general, institutions, whatever it might be, that idea of my beliefs about the world, about reality being shattered, because there is so much to rebuild there. We can bring in another metaphor now of this idea of DST glasses or DST lenses. So we can imagine that for a partner who's experiencing this kind of trauma, they are now seeing the world through this DST lens. They are seeing the world through a different lens. Everything is shaped by what has happened. And as we know from the trauma symptom rooms in the exposure phase, the brain is now filtering for survival-related information. It is hyper-vigilant to any threat, so that's another way that the world is being seen through a different lens. And so this rebuilding process, rebuilding the ego or sense of self and rebuilding the reality, a new reality, is a very slow and very delicate process. That is why there should be so much patience with somebody going through this kind of trauma. And that is why the reduction of the integrity abuse and the presence of positive things like empathy, like support, like following boundaries to build safety all become so critical in this phase. We then move on to these triadic core rooms, starting with room 17 and sexual symptoms, or the impact on one's sexuality because of this kind of betrayal. So we need to remember that the obvious point here as the betrayal is of a sexual nature, it almost certainly directly impacts the sexuality of the victim. And actually, sexual symptoms of many partners in this post-exposure phase are often similar to those of women who have been sexually traumatized. We might see things like a complete shutdown of someone's sexuality, a sexual constriction. We might see the opposite at times one of the responses is a hypersexuality, a hypersexual response as a way of almost trying to prove the self to their partner who has betrayed them, or as a psychological coping mechanism. There might be a sexual aversion or an aversion to physical touch in general. There might be body image issues to the way of valuing the self sexually, might be incredibly impacted because of the betrayal that's occurred. There may be intrusions and disturbing thoughts about sex and sexuality. If the partner is continuing to be sexual within the relationship, for example, intrusions, triggers during sex can be an extremely destabilizing thing. The person's sexual ego in a sense can be devastated as well, feelings of not having been enough, or a sense of being dirty or contaminated if I find out that my partner has been with others without me knowing. And actually, for many partners that I've spoken to, this feeling of having been robbed of a healthy sex life can be very impactful as well. So often, for men who have engaged in a secret sexual basement, there's actually been sexual withdrawal within the relationship. And so the partner might feel now like I was actually robbed of a healthy sex life because it was expressed elsewhere. It was expressed outside of our relationship. Many partners might also experience the shame of having to be tested for sexually transmitted infections or fear of what might have happened, what might have been caused because of the situation that they didn't even know about. So we can see that there's a wide array of deeply traumatic, deeply impactful things here that are touching one of those core things of what it is to be human, our sexuality. That then links into room 18 and the gender wounds, and of course our gender and our sexuality hugely overlap. But we need to recognize, first of all, that in many ways the secret sexual basement is a form of gender-based harm. I hope it goes without saying that, of course, anybody can build a secret sexual basement. Any gender can engage in infidelity. And I know that certainly at the start of this podcast series, I really named that the language I use represents the fact that I work with men who primarily have caused harm to women and their family systems through the construction, the maintenance of a secret sexual basement. So I'm very clear in my gendered language, but I never want to lose sight of the fact that it can happen to anyone. It can be caused by anyone. At the same time, naming it as a gender-based harm is important, I think, through the lens of this model, because secret sexual basements are built more often by men, than by women, and the harm tends to be caused more often to women and to children. So that is why I think we can consider deceptive sexuality as a form of gender-based violence and a masculinity problem. It's one of the reasons that in this model, we talk about complex gender shaping, the man box, all of these things around masculinity that contribute to the construction of secret sexual basements. We shouldn't shy away from the fact that male entitlement, power differentials and privilege are often significant factors in the abuse-fictim trauma reality that we are naming here. That can be very uncomfortable for lots of people to speak about, particularly men, but again, we should have the courage to confront that. Now, if we start thinking of specific gender impacts for women who have been victimized by these patterns of harm, we can think of the diminished sense of gender or gender roles or the decrease in gender-esteem. Women obviously fulfill all sorts of different roles, but there can be specific valuing for many women I've spoken to around the role of being a mother, the role of being a wife, the way that the relationship the family system was invested in for such a long period of time. There can be this assumption, as I said a little bit earlier, that that was reciprocated, that both primary people in the relationship were investing in valuing the relationship in the same way. And when we find out that that development of the family system, the family structure was happening above a secret sexual basement, again, that can lead to such a sense of diminishment of the valuing of those roles. And again, I can say that so many of the women that I've spoken to doing this kind of work have realized just how disempowered they were, so often without even realizing, they're now recognizing that there was this total power differential that was being taken advantage of, that they perhaps hadn't even considered was there. And so that can bring up all sorts of feelings, even resentments around gender, around the bigger pictures of gender even on a societal level. A general lack of trust in men might develop the idea that they're all the same. We can also flip that and think about the relationship to other women how that might be impacted. Victims of this kind of harm might become suspicious of other women, might become wary around other women. There might be comparisons to other women. And again, that links to these ideas of body image and gender esteem. And so massive shifts can happen here in terms of how one relates to their own gender and their own relationship with their gender, but also on that societal level, the way one might connect with men and women, the way one might reflect on power structures, power differentials, gender in this bigger general sense throughout society, throughout community. And then for the third part of this triadic core, we move to room 19 and impacts to the physical body. Again, this overlaps so much, it is hard to separate our body, our gender, our sexuality because the three so into link. But we can say specifically when we're thinking about body, we've already spoken about body image, relationship to that comparison. But we also know that at this point, very well established trauma directly impacts the physical body. Many people might be familiar with the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Randakolk and this idea of the depth of impact, the way trauma is stored in the body, we can think about [BLANK_AUDIO] conditions that might develop. There seems to be strong evidence for correlation between autoimmune diseases, stress disorders that correlate with trauma. And of course, someone experiencing trauma might also require medication, other things that might have physical side effects for them. And of course, throughout these three rooms, I've named some things like sexual aversion or aversion to physical touch. That is also an impact on the physical body. If there is now an aversion to physical touch, my relationship to my body, my partner's body might be completely changed. There might be physical changes like weight gain or significant weight loss because of the trauma and because of changes in patterns or changes in the rhythm of how I'm living my life. Again, things that might have been healthy for me that I used to do might no longer be things I'm able to engage in for various reasons. And changes in that way obviously then link to some of those things we talked about around body image, around comparison to other people. So you can hopefully see over these three rooms, there is so much depth there, but that maybe gives you an idea. And we are talking here about core wounds. Remember that idea of the triadic core is that the overlap of sexuality, gender and the physical body are the parts of us that are most susceptible to harm, to violence, to humiliation, to trauma. So these are in some ways the deepest, most difficult wounds to work through and process when we're thinking about deceptive sexuality. We can now move on to the final three rooms, which really focus around this idea of the attachment and the ongoing attachment impacts that so frequently occur because of deceptive sexuality trauma. Room 20 names this idea of persistent negative relational patterns. And this in many ways seems the most obvious and almost an understatement for pretty much anyone I've worked with walking this path, recovering from the impacts of the secret sexual basement and still in the relationship. There are intense negative relational patterns, consistent negative patterns occurring. And it can feel like in many ways this is the hardest thing to overcome, this negative cycle of triggers, ruptures falling out and really difficult pain coming up within the relationship. And it could just feel like it's happening over and over again on almost like an infinity loop. And there's no big mystery to why this is the case because what do we have in this situation? We have a betrayal that has occurred. We have significant acute and complex trauma on the one side. And we have almost always high levels of defenses and shame and all of those things that come up that cause so much of the integrity abuse and the inability to attend well to this type of trauma, to this type of situation. We need to remember that this sudden and severe attachment injury, this fracturing that has happened is experienced by both people in the relationship. And we are naming that one person has caused that and one person is the victim of that. So it's not about equalizing the blame or anything like that, but we do need to remember that both people have experienced that ego fragmentation, that reality fragmentation. And going back to room eight where we initially talked about the attachment injury, we had this metaphor of the tightrope, the safety net and the go-to person. So we named this idea that the partner is walking on this tightrope and has no safety net underneath them. And they've lost their go-to person. And we can remember that in a sense both people are in that situation. One person caused it, but both people might feel like they haven't got their go-to person, they haven't got the safety net anymore. So both people are trying to survive without these fundamental sources of safety in place. So it makes sense that there is constant rupture. There isn't that feeling of stability within the relationship. There are almost certainly going to be increases in arguments, in fights, in disagreements. Maybe that sense of interpersonal hyper vigilance from both people, there can be a feeling of walking on egg shells, waiting for the next explosion to happen, the next thing to go wrong. So even when things are a bit more stable, it can feel like it's only a matter of time until it's not again. It's normal, as we know, for highly distressing responses to be common, driven by rage, by anger, by fear, we know that extreme defensiveness, shutdown, stone-walling are very likely to occur. And when this is the case, and we're seeing these constant ruptures, constant triggers, anger, rage, defences, shame, all of these things coming up, is that in many ways the relationship itself, as a separate entity, becomes a further source of complex trauma shaping. So we're thinking particularly the partner, but again, both people are receiving this form of drops of water on the rock complex trauma from the distress within the relationship itself. And then a final thing to really name here for this room, which I think is very important is this unique challenge that is presented when we're thinking about relational recovery in the context of betrayal or deceptive sexuality trauma. When we think of trauma in general, we are usually thinking about something that happened in the past that is somewhat consigned to the past. So maybe there was a car accident or there was an assault or someone experienced being in a war zone. So it happened in the past and the reverberations of that, the triggers, intrusions, the re-experiencing is happening in the present, but the actual thing itself is consigned to the past. Whereas in the context we're talking about here, recovery from the trauma is happening when the cause of the trauma is still somewhat in the present. I'm still with the person that caused the harm in the present, and there is likely to still be ongoing integrity abuse happening, as we've named in room number 15. And so because it isn't simple, this thing happened in the past, and now I'm dealing with these consequences in the present, becomes a lot more confusing. I am trying to heal from betrayal that happened in the past while still living with the source of that betrayal in the present. If we simplify it down, we can say that the partner is essentially tasked with rebuilding trust with somebody that deceived them and harmed them by breaking trust. And so another source of these ongoing relational ruptures is that especially if we're seeing the partner that built and maintained the secret sexual basement, genuinely working on recovery, genuinely stopping the acting out, significantly reducing the integrity abuse, increasing the ability to attend, developing the skills they need to be doing, even when that is happening. The victim's reactivity and fear of what might be happening is likely to remain very high, and of course that is completely understandable. I hope everyone can hear that, completely understandable, given all of these rooms we've named, all of these impacts that we've named here. So you can again end up with one of these loops where the man perhaps thinks I'm doing the work I'm supposed to be doing, I'm not acting out anymore, I'm showing up better, I'm moving forward, and yet the relationship still feels stuck. For the partner, there is that great challenge, even if she is seeing changes in him, even if she can see the work that he's doing, very, very hard to override all of that hike of vigilance, that fear, that scanning for threat, that grieving anger rage about what happened in the past. And I believe that this unique challenge, this situation is why recovery is so incredibly difficult, why I think that the relational recovery is the hardest part of this, seeing the two individuals do their own work is hard enough, but we can certainly see progress there. Sometimes, particularly with the men I work with, we can see change relatively quickly in terms of their behaviors at least. But this part about the relational healing and the ongoing persistent negative relational patterns becomes a great challenge, the central challenge in many ways of this work. Continuing our attachment theme into room 21 now, and the idea of the ripple effect on other attachment relationships. So room 21 is called family, community, and social impacts. And we need to always keep in mind that attachment injuries are one of the most significant impacts when we're thinking about deceptive sexuality trauma. It starts in that room number eight where we're talking about not just what happened or what was done, but who it was done by, but now we think of the ways that it extends beyond that primary attachment into other areas of life. So that's this idea of the ripple effect. If you think of a completely flat still body of water, and then a drop in the middle of that, you see the ripples move outwards. And first of all, we might think about impacts on children. So children are likely to notice these significant changes in the parents, in the dynamic within the home. And this can sadly lead to their own forms of avoidance or dissociation to cope. Children might be directly impacted by the trauma that's occurring. And we can think about the legacy of deceptive sexuality in the family system. How does that impact those children and the family moving forward long term? The family team in general, this idea of it being a sacred unit, a sacred team where we have each other's back. That can be shattered by this kind of betrayal. We also have the idea of should we disclose as parents to our children, maybe depending on age, depending on situation, how much do we tell them? If we do tell them, are we risking family alliances or triangulations forming? Might we start using the children as a coping mechanism in a way? Might we perentify the children somewhat because of the distress that we're feeling? So there's all sorts of ways that the family unit beyond just the intimate relationship itself might be impacted. As the ripples continue outwards, we can then think about impacts on relationships with extended family and friends. And one of the big things here is that initial decision about who do we disclose to? How much do we disclose? And we know that there are risks either way. It's something I talked about previously. This might lead to avoidance. So I might feel the need to avoid people if I'm not able to disclose to them because the pain of pretending everything's okay if playing happy families is too much. Or if I do tell people, might they avoid me because they're uncomfortable with it. They don't know what to say. Might they be tempted to take sides? There's all sorts of things that might occur there that can break these attachment relationships or at least strain them. And we know that because of the constriction that occurs, because of the avoidance of trauma-related stimuli that we looked at in the exposure phase that there might be lots of social relationships that become triggering for various reasons. That I actually want to avoid now in general. And once again, depending on whether I can or can't or want to or don't want to disclose to those people, that can have different impacts on how that person might perceive that avoidance. And in regards to extended family and friends, particularly devastating impact to consider is if the victim might discover that actually there were friends or family that colluded with the deceptive sexuality or maybe knew some of the things that were going on and were part of the mechanism by which it was hidden. We also know that for many women who decide to stay in a relationship after betrayal and disclose this to their friends, maybe go to friends, go to family for support, can actually be shamed. That stay-shaming idea shamed for staying in a relationship where someone betrayed you. So that can make it even more difficult again to speak openly about these things and to get any kind of connection or support that you desperately need in those moments. And as this ripple effect moves out, still further, we can think about community or institutional impacts. We talked in those triadic call rooms, particularly around gender and alterations of perceptions of the public or people in general. I might be wary or avoidant of men or women. I might feel a general sense of alienation in the community. It might be a persistent lack of faith or trust in others that makes it difficult to form or maintain social relationships or, again, to go to places within the community that I used to go to and perhaps find support from. We can think of things like churches or similar places that perhaps were a place of support, a place of connection, a place of deep meaning that, again, for various reasons might no longer feel safe or might be places where if I go, I can't really be honest or I can't really find my voice or tell my story. And from that point, we can also consider existential impacts, maybe someone's relationship with God or their faith or their religion or their way of making meaning in their life is fundamentally changed. Maybe there were assumptions about how life was supposed to go. The relationship, the family system was supposed to go because of what I put into that that now brings into question significant ways of how a person made meaning, how a person chose to live their life. So you see here how the scope for attachment injuries is so large. Yes, we start with the primary attachment. The attachment injury that occurs upon the discovery of the secret sexual basement. But as we think about this symptom progression phase and the way the ripples move out from there, it really can affect pretty much everything, pretty much every attachment relationship in life has the potential to be tainted, to be strained or impacted by this story of deceptive sexuality trauma. And we can now finally move to the final room, room 22. Once again, thinking about attachment, a unique aspect of it now, and we're going to talk about treatment induced trauma. And this is really an appropriate place for us to come to a conclusion on these rooms and on this short series I've been doing because treatment induced trauma is one of the main reasons for me doing a podcast like this, one of the main reasons for trying to get this DST model, this understanding of integrity abuse and deceptive sexuality trauma out there because misunderstanding these things unfortunately leads to a great deal of harm that comes from the very people who are supposed to be providing a place of support, a place of healing. And that is the treatment field. And the sex addiction field in general has a significant legacy of victim blaming, particularly in the form of labeling partner's reactions as codependency or co-addiction, where those symptoms that we've talked about, the understandable trauma symptoms, the high reactivity, all of those things are seen as part of their own disease or their own dysfunction. And so some of those things we talked about in the room 15, the symptom progression phase integrity abuse patterns. Things like she needs to stop trying to control his recovery, she needs to stop interfering, she needs to stay in her lane, that would actually come from the treatment field from the treatment professionals. And so much of this has been based on these significant blind spots, things like no mention of the word trauma to describe the impact on the partner. No mention of the word abuse to describe the patterns of harmful behavior by the addict. No mention of the word victim or victimization to describe the reality of the partner's experience. And you'll know that in this model that is one of our phrases, AVT abuse victim trauma reality deliberately trying to name those things. And if we have those blind spots, not only are we going to victim blame potentially or contribute to victim blaming. But we're likely to see this as a couple's issue. So we straight away want to go to the relationship. It takes two to tango. How are you both contributing to these issues? Premature couples therapy flowing from that premature sexual interventions. So maybe coming up with a sex plan or physical intimacy plan far, far earlier than anything like that would be remotely appropriate. We might miss the abuse and actually start aligning with the abuser in the room. Because if we don't have a language for integrity abuse, we're not able to see the power dynamic that is actually at play in that relationship. And the reason that the traumatic impacts are so significant, then it is very easy to think, well, he is getting better. He is not acting out anymore. He's been sober for a few years, whatever it might be. And she's the one that stuck, therefore she is the problem. And so this implicit or sometimes very explicit partner blaming is part of that very, very tainted legacy of this field, which I really hope and believe we are starting to move forward from. And so the specific traumatic impacts here in room 22 treatment induced trauma are those times where a betrayed partner, a victim of deceptive sexuality has gone for support and has actually been harmed further. So it's not even just to say that the support wasn't effective or wasn't helpful. It's often certainly in the past and, unfortunately, still often in the present. It's actually caused additional harm. It's brought additional trauma to the partner. I do want to add an important caveat here, which is that in any relationship, both people have things that they contribute in positive sense, but also things they contribute in a negative sense. Everybody has flaws. Nobody is perfect. So again, any relationship we're looking at, we can look at dynamics that both people are contributing to. So what we're saying here is not a sort of patronising or infantilising view where the partner is perfect and every issue is caused by the guy. The key point is that if we're talking about an abuse victim trauma reality, we cannot possibly skip over that to start looking at relational issues. We are going to cause significant harm if we do that. So it is not about pretending that there might not have been relational issues that perhaps both people have contributed to, but that is so far down the line looking at that stuff if we are able to see this abuse victim trauma reality. There are significant behavioural changes that need to occur in terms of the CES and IAD behaviours for the person that built the basement. There are significant attending skills that need to be developed. There is a lot of pain and trauma that needs to be processed, a lot of safety that needs to be built, a lot of communication that needs to be developed, a lot of grieving of the past reality that no longer exists and rebuilding of a new reality. So many things which should be clear to you now as we've gone through these 22 rooms that need to be looked at before we are thinking about couples issues. So it is very important to keep that in mind as we do this work. We don't want to skip over all of these things we need to do and make it a couples issue. That is going to create a great deal of additional trauma. But we do want to always humanise both people in this work. Everyone we work with therapeutically should be humanised within the process. As I bring this episode to a close today and also come to the end of this three part series where we've been looking at the 22 rooms. My hope again is that it's given you a language, a way of understanding the experience, whether you're the person experiencing the trauma, or the person that caused the trauma through the secret sexual basement. And really being able to name these things to develop some understanding of these things isn't the heart of what it is to heal. Until we can illuminate what has really happened, we cannot start attending to it better. We cannot start that healing journey or we will certainly get stuck on that healing journey without being able to really spend the time we need to to process these things. 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.