Adam is in charge

Infidelity treatment relies upon assumptions of asymmetry: you have perpetrator/victim, or wrongdoer/victim, or “survivor”—or the more right and the more wrong. This is why couples therapy, with its hoary repertoire of agreements, homework assignments, “boundaries”, is rife with tacit messages that obviate egalitarianism. The perpetrator owes the victim, not the reverse, so agreements are not symmetrical. Communication? That means inform the victim of what you’re doing and when. The victim or betrayed or impacted partner (whatever?) doesn’t have to inform the acting out partner (perpetrator of infidelity) of their whereabouts or activities.

This arrangement is based on a premise that often collapses in long-term or analytic psychotherapy, which is often why couples might prefer short-term therapy programs. To put is simply, its narratives are simpler.

Sexual betrayal is the most important traumatic betrayal in an adult intimate relationship, second only to violence. Betrayals relating to money or other material matters (i.e: hoarding behaviors) do not cross as high a threshold of moral abhorrence. Likewise, disputes about how or under what circumstances parents discipline children, or political divisions, simply do not register as high on the scale of marital or couples crises. Monogamy is our ego-syntonic signifier of specialness, a vestige of healthy narcissism that a crossection of traditional and progressive society clings to. It’s the bar we’re not meant to cross, the rule we’re not meant to break, and the lies that conceal this violation only compound the problem. Therefore, the perpetrator has no refuge in protesting the rule he implicitly agreed to upon signing up for the game. The eternal bind: if I said I wanted to____, you’d just say no…

The person who utters this line can usually locate its pedigree. They can recall the antecedent messages from childhood, in aggregate if not from specific instances. They learned early to “compartmentalize”: to postpone pleasure but also truth, and therefore plan the escape routes, the opportunities for play, keeping their artifices and desires secret so as not to intrude upon another desire: to not do harm; to stay in relationship with authority, or civil society. See, truth does harm. Desire is harmful, so we—the Superego—forbids. That’s religion, which feels autocratic and thus objectionable to some. It is necessary and benevolent, say its advocates. Regardless, all agree that the containment of desires call for compromises, agreements with varying degrees of importance attached. Some will call these agreements covenants.

Sexual exclusivity, fidelity in body if not mind, is a compromise traditionally agree upon. Secrecy, as in the segregation from awareness, is another idea of compromise, promulgated with less ceremony perhaps, but with more or less equal force. We’d extend this ethic to all matters between people, but on the matter of sex we are more sensitive. So, the sexual wrongdoer is a deviant, a transgressor, and under the protective canopy of sex addiction or infidelity treatment, they are neither rebels nor underdogs. Indeed, they are privileged abusers. And this is why treatment models aim primarily at men. As social underdogs whose sexuality has already been stigmatized by traditional society, women fit progressive society’s paradigm of whom we advocate for, so we’d need to alter the narrative and vocabulary when they present with the more euphemistically termed problem sexual behavior. Consult CHATgbt on trending jargon: “perpetrator” would not make the cut. Exit narcissism also. Enter PTSD or maybe internalized misogyny. Invoke tales of contracting STDs via similarly promiscuous men, unwanted pregnancies for which abortion options are unavailable; suffered violence at the hands of cuckolded men. Recall that in our moral schema, only violence trumps sexual betrayal in the scale of wrongdoing, so break out the apologist arguments, tilt that narrative into sympathy. Or, push it one step further with circular reasoning, unfalsifiable statements: Adam is in charge.