Speaker 1: Topics featured in this episode may be disturbing to some listeners.
Speaker 1: Please take care while listening.
Speaker 2: When I think about him getting out, you know, I'm anxious.
Speaker 2: There's a tightness I get in my throat and in
Speaker 2: my chest. The closer it gets to him getting out.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of at a point where I'm scared.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrea Gunning and this is betrayal Episode seven. Knowing
Speaker 1: we listened to three different stories of women confronted with
Speaker 1: the terrible reality that their partner was mixed up in
Speaker 1: this awful, dark underworld of child sexual abuse material. Getting
Speaker 1: through the arrest, the court system, and sentencing, the whole
Speaker 1: experience has been an emotional to navigate. The other factor
Speaker 1: that weighs on all three families is what happens once
Speaker 1: these offenders are released. As we heard in episode five,
Speaker 1: Mandy Hale was at work when the FBI called to
Speaker 1: tell her that her house was being searched and her
Speaker 1: husband was being arrested as part of an international sting.
Speaker 1: He was involved with one of the worst child sexual
Speaker 1: assault material websites in the world. Now, her ex wants
Speaker 1: to see their daughter, but he has not been forthcoming
Speaker 1: about the rules of probation. In episode six, we met
Speaker 1: erin a woman who felt so unsafe in her home
Speaker 1: she fled with her two kids to another state once
Speaker 1: discovering her military husband was hoarding a stash of illegal
Speaker 1: photos of children. At the time I record this episode,
Speaker 1: Ashley Lynton is starting to face the reality of what
Speaker 1: it means for her soon to be ex husband, Jason,
Speaker 1: to be a returning citizen. Earlier in the series, you
Speaker 1: heard Jason being sent to for two counts of voyeurism
Speaker 1: and one count of sexual exploitation of a minor. With
Speaker 1: his time served applied, he will be back in the
Speaker 1: community soon. Ashley expressed her anxiety to therapist Jessica Boum.
Speaker 1: You're about to hear a part of one of their sessions.
Speaker 1: Jessica and Ashley allowed us to record their conversations for
Speaker 1: the project. Jessica is a psychotherapist and the author of
Speaker 1: Anxiously Attached Becoming More Secure in Life and Love. We're
Speaker 1: dropping into the middle of their session here when Ashley
Speaker 1: is talking about Jason calling his daughter from jail.
Speaker 2: I allow him to call her. I have him call
Speaker 2: my phone so it's on speaker and I can hear
Speaker 2: it and monitor their conversations. But about a month ago
Speaker 2: he told her something and it really really scared me.
Speaker 2: He'd said to her, I now know that God sent
Speaker 2: me here so I can spread the gospel. And I
Speaker 2: was like, what the fuck. No, he's there because he
Speaker 2: chose to be a creeper. That's it.
Speaker 1: What's the fear.
Speaker 2: She just doesn't get it. I feel like he's manipulating
Speaker 2: her to think that, like his time there is for him.
Speaker 2: He'll tell her God's working through me to spread the
Speaker 2: gospel and stuff, and I'm like, no, you're there because
Speaker 2: you're a pervert.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so not taking any ownership or accountability ever. No,
Speaker 3: in denial of his own sickness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I just think that that denial is dangerous. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so dangerous.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean it's so valid. I mean your fear
Speaker 3: and concern makes sense, and whatever you can do legally,
Speaker 3: but also just education wise and awareness wise to stay
Speaker 3: aware and alert is needed to protect your kids.
Speaker 1: Ashley's fears are justified. When I hear them, I start
Speaker 1: to go down a major rabbit hole. Well, these men
Speaker 1: go back to re offending. I'm assuming the system will
Speaker 1: eventually grant visitation of some kind, even if it's supervised,
Speaker 1: Will the children be safe? I have done hours of research,
Speaker 1: reading and interviewing professionals, trying to understand the motivation of
Speaker 1: these offenders and what these women are up against once
Speaker 1: these men are released. I ought to think of what
Speaker 1: Ashley's close friend, Emmy said to me. Her husband and
Speaker 1: Jason were best friends. She was really there for Ashley.
Speaker 1: Before sentencing, Emmy submitted a letter to the judge where
Speaker 1: she expressed fear for the future.
Speaker 4: He is a threat, a danger to everyone around him.
Speaker 4: Each day he is in the presence of what could
Speaker 4: be his next victim, a child walking to her friends school,
Speaker 4: a child at a grocery store, or even a gas station.
Speaker 4: That thought haunts me to my very core every moment
Speaker 4: of my life. Now I have seen the devastation his
Speaker 4: actions have caused. I pray that justice will protect this
Speaker 4: young family and allow them some semblance of peace to
Speaker 4: pick up the pieces of the lives Jason has shattered.
Speaker 1: Today. It's Ashley and Mandy and Aaron's family, but we're
Speaker 1: all living in communities with people looking at seesam do
Speaker 1: a quick Internet search for child pornography and arrest. It's
Speaker 1: a sobering experience. I'm not an expert. I'm just someone
Speaker 1: who wants to root out a growing problem. It starts
Speaker 1: with understanding what drives these offenders, how people access seesam,
Speaker 1: and why our government is struggling to get a handle
Speaker 1: on it. I started by speaking with some people to
Speaker 1: help shed light on the psychology of offenders like Jason.
Speaker 1: Doctor Jonathan Boone has spent years studying and assessing sex offenders.
Speaker 1: For nearly two decades, he has worked for the Federal
Speaker 1: Bureau of Prisons as well as in County Jail. I
Speaker 1: met him in his office in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 5: I'm a clinical psychologist with expertise forensic psychology.
Speaker 1: Doctor Bohone has worked with many child sexual exploitation offenders.
Speaker 1: I asked about the correlation between consuming seesam and pedophilia.
Speaker 5: He could say that somebody who is consuming child pornography
Speaker 5: and masturbating to that and acting on their sexual urges
Speaker 5: and trading that or downloading it, that they could be
Speaker 5: classified as someone who has a pedophilic disorder.
Speaker 1: When I met with doctor Boone, he showed me the
Speaker 1: definition of a pedophilic disorder straight out of the Diagnostic
Speaker 1: and Statistical Manual of mental disorders the DSM, but the
Speaker 1: DSM does not speak to consumption of SESAM specifically. Much
Speaker 1: of the general public assumes that those who watch seesam
Speaker 1: are people with pedophilia, but the dialogue around the topic
Speaker 1: is nuanced and it falls under both psychiatric and behavioral
Speaker 1: and there appears to be a leading school of thought
Speaker 1: about the behavior. So why people consume this material pornography
Speaker 1: and its pervasiveness. Tom Squire is the clinical director for
Speaker 1: the Lucy Faithful Foundation in the United Kingdom. They are
Speaker 1: a charity who saw mission is dedicated to preventing child
Speaker 1: sexual abuse. Through the Foundation, Lucy Faithful runs Stop It Now,
Speaker 1: a deterns campaign regarding the viewing of indecent images of
Speaker 1: children on the internet. Tom is a cognitive behavioral treatment
Speaker 1: specialist who has also work with sex offenders for twenty years.
Speaker 6: Thousands of the people who contacted us at Stop It
Speaker 6: Now have reported that their starting point was accessing adult
Speaker 6: pornography and then from their online behavior and their sexual
Speaker 6: behavior escalated and they cross those thresholds and boundaries into
Speaker 6: abusive behavior involving children. There's also some research about the
Speaker 6: nature of adult pornography which focused upon the way in
Speaker 6: which it was described, so rather than its content, the
Speaker 6: language that was used to describe it. On adult science,
Speaker 6: you know, very common terminology might be for teenagers, or
Speaker 6: might be about kind of incestin pornography, voyeurism, and so forth.
Speaker 1: What was once considered taboo incess pornography, step fantasy, school
Speaker 1: pornography is now readily available and it's free.
Speaker 6: The availability of pornography feels like it's kind of turned
Speaker 6: the dial a little bit within society about kind of
Speaker 6: where the boundary lies between positive and healthy eroticism and
Speaker 6: what I think most of us would view as harmful
Speaker 6: and concerning legal adult pornography. But also there's something about
Speaker 6: that boundary becoming much more porous, and it's that that
Speaker 6: then means that some people's decision making and they're responsible
Speaker 6: for it, but it feels to them like an easiest
Speaker 6: step to take because of the nature of the adult
Speaker 6: pornography that they might have been looking at already.
Speaker 1: And when someone watches a lot of this kind of pornography,
Speaker 1: tomsa's wires can get crossed. School pornography says plus eighteen,
Speaker 1: but most of the girls are styled to look like schoolgirls,
Speaker 1: and with repeated choices like this, interests can start to shift.
Speaker 6: From my experience facilitating groups with men who've offended in
Speaker 6: this way, I would expect perhaps two or three of
Speaker 6: them to say that they'd always struggled with the sexual
Speaker 6: interest in children, and then I would expect most of
Speaker 6: the rest of the groom to say, actually, no. For me,
Speaker 6: my sexual interest always felt pretty normal. I've had kind
Speaker 6: of relationships with appropriate partners. However, in the context of
Speaker 6: the Internet, I started to kind of cross these thresholds
Speaker 6: and to seek out content that held my attentional that
Speaker 6: gave me a stronger emotional reaction, or conversations with children
Speaker 6: where I could feel a sense of kind of influence
Speaker 6: and control in a way that I cliped with adults.
Speaker 6: So our experience at the Foundation and through our work
Speaker 6: suggests that perhaps the more common story is this kind
Speaker 6: of route via adult pornography. But it's not the only
Speaker 6: story by any stretch.
Speaker 1: But doctor Bone sees it differently.
Speaker 5: If a fifteen year old kid starts to look at pornography,
Speaker 5: I don't think that there's going to be this devolution
Speaker 5: of deviance or this evolution of deviants. I think that
Speaker 5: there's something else that's already in there that then we
Speaker 5: have access to all the stuff that's out there that
Speaker 5: gets tripped. I think that for the most part, that's
Speaker 5: more of an urban tail. My theory of pedophilia is
Speaker 5: that there is something biologically crosswired that's going on, either
Speaker 5: through development or genetics or poor evolution, like something has
Speaker 5: occurred that would trick that person into wanting to consume
Speaker 5: that kind of pornography. You then get these other guys
Speaker 5: that just consume everything that there is. A child is
Speaker 5: not a sexual creature in our minds, that some of
Speaker 5: these men and women develop such a distorted way of
Speaker 5: seeing the world and seeing other human beings that they
Speaker 5: either believe or they convince themselves that that five year
Speaker 5: old was coming on to them.
Speaker 1: In Tom's experience, he has found that adult pornography has
Speaker 1: been the gateway for illegal content. But Tom isn't focused
Speaker 1: on the why as much as the how, as in,
Speaker 1: how did you get to this place? And how do
Speaker 1: we stop it before it starts? And you might be surprised?
Speaker 1: Who stop it now? Ask for help.
Speaker 6: Mind Geek are the owners of a number of kind
Speaker 6: of mainstream adult pornography sites.
Speaker 1: Mind Geek owns Pornhub, and Uporn, among many other adult
Speaker 1: porn entities. The team at Lucy Faithful persuaded the biggest
Speaker 1: purveyor of pornography in the world to post a warning
Speaker 1: message when someone searches for video content with children that.
Speaker 6: Might be asking for young teenage pictures. A message would
Speaker 6: then appear on their screen to let them know that
Speaker 6: their search terms were both concerning, but also crucially to
Speaker 6: let them know that confidential help is available through us
Speaker 6: at Stop It Now, and that people could be directed
Speaker 6: to our resources. So for us, that was a really
Speaker 6: attractive option because we're interested in preventing people offending at
Speaker 6: the earliest possible opportunity, and ideally before they have committed.
Speaker 6: In the defense, we want to get the message out
Speaker 6: to this very hard to reach group of people that
Speaker 6: there is help available and that there is a different
Speaker 6: decision that they can make which would minimize the risk
Speaker 6: of children being harmed.
Speaker 1: In In twenty fourteen paper on the Treatment and Management
Speaker 1: of Child Pornography use, the authors Michael Cido and Atticunlei
Speaker 1: Ahmed classify different types of offenders who consume child sexual
Speaker 1: assault material, also known as CESAM. They found that in
Speaker 1: some cases CESAM use might be motivated by hypersexual or
Speaker 1: compulsive sexual behavior. In other cases, its use may be
Speaker 1: a result of reckless or impulsive behavior or accidental access
Speaker 1: or curiosity. This suggests there are different type of c
Speaker 1: SAM offenders. A paraphilic group comprised of individuals who would
Speaker 1: meet the diagnosis of pedophilia, A sexually compulsive or hyper
Speaker 1: sexual group who would need assessment and treatment regarding their
Speaker 1: sexual self regulation, a group of impulsive, risk taking individuals
Speaker 1: who require more general intervention regarding their self regulation, and
Speaker 1: a relatively low need group of accidental or curious users.
Speaker 1: Depending on the classification, different recommendations, assessments, and diagnoses apply.
Speaker 1: I thought about Jason, Michael and Joel husbands and fathers.
Speaker 1: Which type of offender do they fall into? I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting to note they all said it wasn't sexual.
Speaker 1: What else would they say? Maybe by saying that they
Speaker 1: thought it would get them off the hook, maybe make
Speaker 1: them less evil. So I asked Tom, what does someone
Speaker 1: get out of viewing c SAM.
Speaker 6: There are lots of needs at play, and I think
Speaker 6: your audience would assume rightly that a key need that's
Speaker 6: being met through the behavior is a sexual need. One
Speaker 6: of sexual pleasure and arousal, but that's not the only need,
Speaker 6: and in my view, there's almost always some emotional needs
Speaker 6: that are met through the behavior. The examples of that
Speaker 6: might be that it might provide someone with a form
Speaker 6: of escapism from the challenges of their day to day
Speaker 6: life and the difficulties that they're experiencing. Perhaps those difficulties
Speaker 6: generate strong feelings for them of feeling inadequate in some
Speaker 6: way or might be affecting their sense of self worth.
Speaker 6: So engaging with this sexual content adult pornography, or sexual
Speaker 6: images of children or abusive conversations with children online provides
Speaker 6: this kind of solace to people's sense of themselves, their
Speaker 6: sense of kind of worth in many ways, and provides
Speaker 6: them with this escape, and the escape then helps them
Speaker 6: manage their feelings. Other examples might for some people this
Speaker 6: might be the one part of their life where they
Speaker 6: can experience themselves as being influential and potent, where they
Speaker 6: can feel like their decisions and behavior are kind of
Speaker 6: shaping their experience and also shaping the experience of someone else.
Speaker 1: In addition to being convicted on one account of sexual
Speaker 1: exploitation of a minor, Jason was also convicted of two
Speaker 1: counts of voyeurism for filming a veya. I asked doctor
Speaker 1: Bone why someone would engage in that behavior.
Speaker 5: I think that there's an element oftentimes of this sneakiness
Speaker 5: and getting away with and I'm checking you out, and
Speaker 5: that's kind of turning me on because you don't know
Speaker 5: that I'm looking at you and there's like some little
Speaker 5: power there and there's just like sneakiness.
Speaker 1: The Utah prison system has a rehabilitation program that starts
Speaker 1: with one of the toughest things for an offender to
Speaker 1: accept accountability.
Speaker 2: It is a.
Speaker 1: Process of confronting all prior bad acts, even the ones
Speaker 1: nobody knows it was about.
Speaker 5: So they get immunity, but they have to disclose everything
Speaker 5: that they've ever done and they get it out and
Speaker 5: it takes eighteen to twenty four months typically the treatment
Speaker 5: that Utah does, So.
Speaker 1: It's basically this immersive experience where they literally have to
Speaker 1: like confront everything they've done.
Speaker 5: They have to write out their disclosure and then read
Speaker 5: it to their group. That's kind of appear accountability component
Speaker 5: to it.
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure what the point of that was or
Speaker 1: if people would be honest, but doctor Bone sees a
Speaker 1: lot of value in the disclosure.
Speaker 5: Part of any use disorder, so alcohol or porn use disorder.
Speaker 5: There's a tremendous amount of guilt and shame. But I
Speaker 5: think that divesting oneself all this stuff in a forum
Speaker 5: where you know you're not going to get into trouble
Speaker 5: is probably very relieving for them.
Speaker 1: The statistics are staggering. According to the National Center for
Speaker 1: Missing and Exploited Children, there are more than twenty nine
Speaker 1: million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation annually. That is
Speaker 1: over half a million reports. When we started the series,
Speaker 1: we were appalled at what we perceived as short prison
Speaker 1: sentences Joel and Michael's case, they did not serve their
Speaker 1: full time, and Jason's was comparatively low. I spoke with
Speaker 1: former You tell Us attorney John Huber about what he
Speaker 1: was up against when he was in office.
Speaker 7: The problem with child pornography is it is improper in
Speaker 7: our social mores, if not the law and regulations, to
Speaker 7: talk about it for what it is. I mean to say,
Speaker 7: rape of a child, sodomy of a child. That's really gruesome,
Speaker 7: and yet it doesn't capture the impact of that offense
Speaker 7: on that child, and it's an impact that that child
Speaker 7: and their family live with for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 7: You can't race that experience from a child, and we
Speaker 7: know from social studies that that child will have a
Speaker 7: very very difficult time in life. Why because someone stole
Speaker 7: their childhood from them?
Speaker 1: I asked John what he would like to see happen
Speaker 1: legislatively in Utah. Where could they do better.
Speaker 7: In Utah. It's not like the legislature is taking a
Speaker 7: pass on holding child offenders accountable. In fact, let me
Speaker 7: give you an example. If a person videos themselves or
Speaker 7: has someone else film them in the act of sexually
Speaker 7: abusing a child, those people directly involved in that crime
Speaker 7: face twenty five years to life in prison minimum mandatory
Speaker 7: penalty into Utah State prison under Utah law. That surpasses
Speaker 7: the possible sentence that you could get in federal court
Speaker 7: for that same offense. So they take this very serious,
Speaker 7: as anyone would and should. My concern is with the
Speaker 7: run of the meal cases. This goes on constantly, dozens
Speaker 7: upon hundreds of cases where you have these images and
Speaker 7: collections and trading images and bartering them like their baseball cards.
Speaker 7: It's those offenders that I am so concerned about because
Speaker 7: they're not getting the attention in court or according to
Speaker 7: state law that I believe they should.
Speaker 1: When he says run of the mill, he's referring to
Speaker 1: cases like Jason Joel and even the one his office prosecuted, Michael.
Speaker 1: Individuals who aren't necessarily hands on are creating their own content.
Speaker 1: But these offenders are perpetuating the trade and production of
Speaker 1: seesam by consuming the content. By doing so, they are
Speaker 1: sustaining and promoting in every growing market, which means more
Speaker 1: sexual exploitation, more child abuse.
Speaker 7: You think about the world of child pornography and the
Speaker 7: waves of offenders that are sweeping through our courts across
Speaker 7: all the states. Do we say, well, there's so many,
Speaker 7: we can't do anything. Do we need to think of
Speaker 7: a different way to handle these offenders because there are
Speaker 7: so many, or because some view it as an addiction problem.
Speaker 7: To me, there's a huge difference between someone who gets
Speaker 7: caught in a cycle of addiction and abuse of drugs
Speaker 7: and their life spirals out of control and they make
Speaker 7: very poor decisions. The risk associated with that person, even
Speaker 7: if they succumb to overdose and they pass away, that
Speaker 7: price seems different than shifting the risk onto the community
Speaker 7: to say, we'll do our best on this vector of
Speaker 7: child pornography, and we'll try to give them chances to rehabilitate.
Speaker 7: And such the risk there is to their next child victim,
Speaker 7: how can we say we can absorb that risk as
Speaker 7: a community or a family. The price is too high,
Speaker 7: because the price is a child's life and their family
Speaker 7: and their friends, and that burden that they're going to
Speaker 7: have to carry because an adult took their innocence away
Speaker 7: from them.
Speaker 1: The price is high, and there is trauma all around.
Speaker 1: While no damage can possibly compare to the victims of
Speaker 1: sexual exploitation, the women we've met really are victims themselves.
Speaker 6: There's a growing body of research that perhaps the majority
Speaker 6: of partners in this situation would make the diagnostic threshold
Speaker 6: for post traumatic stress disorder, That the impact of police
Speaker 6: investigations has huge detrimental effect potentially on all aspects of
Speaker 6: their life, their employment, they're you know, kind of their
Speaker 6: family relationships, where they're living, and so forth, and that
Speaker 6: family members to share this fear of public exposure and
Speaker 6: stigma and shame by association because in the majority of cases,
Speaker 6: there is no reason why other family members ought to
Speaker 6: have known or ought to have suspected this absolutely.
Speaker 1: I'm sure Erin, Mandy, and Ashley would all love to
Speaker 1: hear someone say it out loud. On this side of
Speaker 1: the pond, I don't think any of them felt that
Speaker 1: they were treated as victims with PTSD.
Speaker 6: This kind of metaphorical bomb going off in people's lives,
Speaker 6: and this moment of discovery that the person who was
Speaker 6: their partner, their husband, their adult son, their father has
Speaker 6: been behaving in a way which typically they'd never imagine
Speaker 6: and their wildest dreams might be the truth of the matter,
Speaker 6: with devastating consequences for them. So there's a recognition in
Speaker 6: recent years, and we're keen to kind of promote that
Speaker 6: awareness about the impact and needs of these people in
Speaker 6: their own right.
Speaker 1: I hope, in the spirit of recognizing those impacted, family,
Speaker 1: friends and children continue to be a focus of support.
Speaker 1: Like Tom said, a bomb went off in Ashley's life
Speaker 1: and she has been left picking up the pieces. She's
Speaker 1: been doing a lot of work in therapy in an
Speaker 1: effort to not let this whole experience break her. She
Speaker 1: can't change what happened, but in this session with Jessica,
Speaker 1: they talk about what she has learned I.
Speaker 2: Think I decide that's what life is. It's just a
Speaker 2: series of fires that we just constantly put out really
Speaker 2: really hard lessons.
Speaker 3: I'm like, okay, at the School of Life, I've taken
Speaker 3: enough lessons for a little while and need a little break.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, Universe, give me a week, like one week,
Speaker 2: just let everything go smooth. Yeah. I realized that I
Speaker 2: really don't let myself cry because I think in any
Speaker 2: moment in my life when things have been really hard,
Speaker 2: I'm able to disassociate a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and someone that dissociating is healthy in order to
Speaker 3: get through life, and then in the right environments with
Speaker 3: the right people, it's okay to let that down because
Speaker 3: it's not about feeling sorry for yourself. It's about forming
Speaker 3: compassion and empathy and understanding.
Speaker 1: But there is one area where Jessica noticed Ashley would
Speaker 1: get emotional when it came to Jason.
Speaker 3: One of the things that came up for me was
Speaker 3: when he was in the bedroom and kind of distancing
Speaker 3: himself from you for months, and you were just trying
Speaker 3: harder and harder and harder to get back into connection.
Speaker 3: That's where a lot of the suddenness came up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because I was like,
Speaker 2: what's wrong with me? Like what am I lacking that
Speaker 2: he doesn't want anything to do with, you know? And
Speaker 2: so I did a lot of like self hate and
Speaker 2: really not good self talk and things like that. But
Speaker 2: I was just like, you need to be kinder to me. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so when we're being rejected, instead of seeing a
Speaker 3: problem with what's going on in their world, we internalize
Speaker 3: it and it can be called developmental shame. But then
Speaker 3: this inherent sense that something is wrong with me has
Speaker 3: actually been there our whole lives, and it shows up
Speaker 3: in our romantic bonds. When we don't get the love
Speaker 3: and exchange that we want, we make it about us
Speaker 3: and we turn it inwards.
Speaker 1: And there was a lot going on in Jason's world
Speaker 1: that Ashley was internalizing. We heard about the drawings, missing work,
Speaker 1: and sitting out of family parties.
Speaker 3: How many years of disc an action was there.
Speaker 2: I feel like it was kind of off and on.
Speaker 2: It started when I was eight months pregnant and he
Speaker 2: had an affair. That's when I really took those rose
Speaker 2: colored glasses off and just started noticing things. But that's
Speaker 2: when I really started to see things changing and then
Speaker 2: the last three years of our marriage he was a
Speaker 2: completely different person. He's always played on flag football leagues
Speaker 2: and he was a gamer, so he had game and
Speaker 2: like all that stop. Every season for the University of
Speaker 2: Utah football games. We had season tickets with all of
Speaker 2: our friends. All of a sudden he sold our tickets
Speaker 2: off and he's had him for like twenty years. And
Speaker 2: then there was no adulting, Like I couldn't have a
Speaker 2: conversation with him about anything serious I don't know, like
Speaker 2: teenager responses and behavior and everything. If I found out
Speaker 2: on a Tuesday that that following Saturday we were going
Speaker 2: to be going to didn or with our family or something,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't tell him and till maybe the morning of
Speaker 2: because he just could not handle the anxiety of it,
Speaker 2: and he would make my life hell. Also, he'd started
Speaker 2: taking a lot of baths and would like be in
Speaker 2: the bath for hours. And then we weren't intimate at
Speaker 2: all at this point. And then I started serving him
Speaker 2: like his dinner in bed, like he'd just be in
Speaker 2: the room, so I'd bring it to him in the
Speaker 2: room and that was it.
Speaker 3: So he's completely isolating himself with that.
Speaker 2: I feel embarrassed almost because I was giving it all
Speaker 2: in those moments. I feel foolish, like I was on
Speaker 2: a whole different planet than he was.
Speaker 1: Nothing would have been enough.
Speaker 3: I'm so happy that you can see that now. And
Speaker 3: the experience of giving, giving and self abandoning is an
Speaker 3: adaptation that we learn to get into connection when we're
Speaker 3: terrified of losing connection to someone that we've been relying on.
Speaker 8: I think you're helping women by doing your own work,
Speaker 8: looking at your fears, looking at your trauma, understanding your
Speaker 8: adaptive strategies, the denial system that you had in place,
Speaker 8: what you were really scared of facing all of us,
Speaker 8: myself included. We stay in situations sometimes longer or longer
Speaker 8: than our intuition is letting us because there's an underlying
Speaker 8: fear around losing our life or losing that attachment.
Speaker 3: That's very valid.
Speaker 8: So a lot of these women, while the behavior out
Speaker 8: there is obvious, the fear of facing ourselves and starting
Speaker 8: over and facing our fears. It takes a courageous person,
Speaker 8: and sometimes it takes a really horrific event how to say, Okay,
Speaker 8: enough is enough, this is my bottom. I need to
Speaker 8: move forward and detach.
Speaker 2: And it can be very hard. Yeah, I'm so proud myself.
Speaker 1: Yes, you should be on the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 1: A teacher in one of the country's best school districts.
Speaker 1: It's composing as a teenager online to solicit sexually explicit
Speaker 1: videos from an underaged girl. If you would like to
Speaker 1: reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayal
Speaker 1: Pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. To report a case of child sexual exploitation,
Speaker 1: called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's cyber
Speaker 1: tipline at one eight hundred the Lost. If you or
Speaker 1: someone you know is worried about their sexual thoughts and
Speaker 1: feelings towards children, reach out to Stop It Now dot org.
Speaker 1: In the United Kingdom go to stop it now dot
Speaker 1: org dot UK. These organizations can help. We're grateful for
Speaker 1: your support, and one way to show support is by
Speaker 1: subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget
Speaker 1: to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a
Speaker 1: long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners.
Speaker 1: Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of
Speaker 1: Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show
Speaker 1: was executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted
Speaker 1: and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by
Speaker 1: Kerry Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman and associate producer
Speaker 1: Chris and Melcury. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and
Speaker 1: Jessica Crincheck. Special thanks to our talent Ashley Linton and
Speaker 1: production assistant Tessa Shields. Thank you to Jessica Baum, Doctor Boone,
Speaker 1: Tom Squire and the Lucy Faithful Foundation. Audio editing and
Speaker 1: mixing by Matt do Vechio. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains.
Speaker 1: Music library provided by my Music and For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts,