Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery, BTR.org. I'm Anne. I'm sure you remember what it was like when you were searching for help, maybe for your husband, hoping to find the right program or therapist. That's why I started podcasting. I supported my husband through seven years of pornography addiction recovery and not one therapist during that time told me I was experiencing emotional

and psychological abuse and sexual coercion. I didn't want any other woman on the planet to be in

the dark. If you're like the majority of my listeners, you're experiencing the type of abuse that's

invisible and difficult to wrap your head around. Your husband is using porn or having

affairs or lying to you, and you're getting the same bad advice about how to improve communication

or your relationship. If you need support from women who totally understand, check out our daily

group session schedule at BTR.org slash group. We'd love to see you in a session today. One simple, anonymous way to help spread the word

is to click, follow, or subscribe to the Betrayal Trauma Recovery podcast on your favorite

podcasting app. While you're there, every five-star rating helps make this podcast more visible

and will help save other women from getting the wrong kind of help, like a couple

program that will make this type of abuse worse. For those of you who follow or subscribe to this

podcast, thank you so much. Your support means so much to me. I have Kirsten on the podcast today.

I know her personally, and she's amazing. She's a member of our community. She is a divorced mom of four, and she's also an incredible artist and writer who likes to explore being a real human being, breaking through destructive personal and generational patterns, and how handling hard times with humor can make life more palatable.

Kirsten strives to not take herself too seriously and to help balance out the very serious

things she's been through in her life with humor and art and other modes of coping.

We're going to talk about a phrase that she invented. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag. I'm going to let her set up what this term is and then we'll have a discussion about it. So can you talk about the background of this term, first of all?

So a little bit about my personal backstory. I had been about 17 years into my then marriage, and we were

about a year into an in-house separation and working on him trying to recover from his sex

addiction and me trying to recover from 17 years of long-term premeditated and fairly disturbing mind games and lies and

betrayal. We were doing an in-house separation. And he had said that he would do anything to

fix the damage that had been happening in our marriage. And I believed him. I wanted to believe him.

And one night he came down from his bedroom that he was staying in and asked me when I would drop my boundary of him not being able to initiate any physical touch in our marriage.

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