Episode Details

Is infidelity abuse? Has he lied to you? Emotionally manipulated you? Here’s how to know if his infidelity was emotionally abusive to you.

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Transcript: Is Infidelity Abuse?

Anne: It is humbling to welcome Dr. Omar Minwalla on today’s episode. Dr. Minwalla is a clinical sexologist and a licensed psychologist. We’re talking about, is infidelity abuse. Welcome Dr. Minwalla.

You’re careful in how you decide to label and define things. So can you start with some definitions?

Dr. Minwalla: Sure, let’s review how sex addiction is typically defined. Some professionals use compulsive sexual behavior. Some professionals use sex addiction. Either of those terms is used to describe a disorder related to behavior, where significant negative consequences occur.

With addicts, I realized patterns of interpersonal abuse. Another way of saying that is having a secret sexual life or world while you’re in a relationship or family. Is in and of itself, a form of abuse. In many ways, it’s type of sociopathic behavior. And what I mean is it’s a selfish worldview where often the welfare of others is not respected.

There’s often a lack of remorse or guilt. And there’s often an externalization of blame or responsibility. It’s in essence a long-term pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others, particularly family members and your intimate partner. While sex addiction and compulsive sexual behavior focus on the behaviors themselves, they usually don’t have a clear diagnosis or labeling of the integrity, abuse, and relational conduct problems.

Anne: I talk with many people who say abuse is going too far. It’s making it way more serious than it needs to be. And I’m thinking without the label of abuse, it does not correctly express the severity of the situation.

Dr. Minwalla: You brought up a really good point, which is that some people feel it’s going too far. I trained as a clinical sexologist.

Clinical Terminology & Deceptive Sexual Life as Abuse

Dr. Minwalla: My training was in sexual offending and offenders. And one of the first things you learn in training is to use appropriate terms. And so, when there’s emotional abuse or psychological abuse. In terms of what we’re talking about, not using the word abuse is actually clinically inaccurate.

I think many sex addiction professionals receive training from an addiction perspective. And don’t have much training in abuse or how to treat perpetrators of any kind. So I think there is a tendency to consider using the word abuse as somehow overreaching, shaming the addict or demonizing the addict. The minute somebody has a deceptive, compartmentalized sexual life, and they’re in an intimate relationship or in a family system. That, in and of itself, is a form of abuse. Is infidelity abuse? It’s abusive in many ways.

First of all, to maintain a deceptive reality, one has to tell all sorts of lies and must, by nature, be dishonest in the relationship. So there are often patterns of lying or lying by omission. There are often partial truths. One of the most abusive aspects is that there’s often a lot of intentional manipulation of the partner’s reality. Which is sometimes referred to as gaslighting. It’s very damaging in terms of eroding and hurting her relationship with her gut instincts.

Impact on Gut Instincts & Erosion of Relationship Integrity

Dr. Minwalla: