A childhood trauma led to adult grief and a ruined relationship for this couple

Horse riding, motor vehicles, country life. 

“He was my cowboy,” Jane says.

What followed was the gradual revelation of her husband’s childhood suffering, his growing addiction to pornography, and her own grief and trauma as Jane realised she was being shut out of a relationship in favour of online satisfaction.

*names have been changed.

Introduced to each other by Jane’s then-partner and girlfriend, Jane says they spent a couple of weeks discovering each other, and realising they wanted to be together.

“I broke my then-partner’s heart to be with him, and I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life,” Jane says.

Jane and her cowboy John* remained married for the next 13 years. During that time he revealed he had been subjected to sexual abuse as a child. He reassured Jane it was all in the past; he had dealt with the trauma and the offender was dead.

“He never really told me the nature of the abuse, just that it was one ‘gentleman’ in the valley who was preying upon families whose parents were having to work numerous jobs.

“This ‘gentleman’ would befriend the parents of these families, and he would make himself indispensable: ‘Oh the kids need running to school; oh the kids need this, the kids need that.’

“And it was only at the end of our marriage that John started to divulge a little bit more.”

That ‘little bit more’ included the devastating revelations of John’s anal rape at the age of 6, lured into the perpetrator’s panel van; and the fact the abuse continued for another decade, until the age of 15.

John’s parents remain adamant they had absolutely no awareness of what had taken place. The assailant had good friends in the Australian Football League world, and used his connections to bring boys to Melbourne where he would abuse them on the pretense of meeting footballers.

There’s no suggestion anyone at the AFL had knowledge of what was taking place. 

When John, his brother and the friends he grew up with got together for a few drinks in their late teens, they realised the extent of the crimes committed against them, and the numbers of boys abused and assaulted. They went to the police, charges were laid and a date in court was set.

The day before the perpetrator was due to appear, he took his own life.

This is the tragic, daunting prelude to Jane’s story. It’s an awful coda to how one person’s trauma leads to devastating complications across many people’s lives.

Jane says while the real problem of what happened with John didn’t come out in its entirety until the collapse of their marriage, she had seen signs all the way through.

“I’d be cleaning up and I’d come across his porn stash, and we’d have a bit of laugh,” she recalls.

“Look I’m aware that males are males; some of them have high libidos. I’m not a prude. It was his attitude when I’d confront him and try and lead him to a conversation, you know, ‘perhaps we could watch it together,’ and I’d get shut down.”

Jane says she began to analyse what led to John’s reactions – was it guilt or shame? Had being forced to watch pornography with the man who had assaulted him ruined his development?

She thinks that’s the case in her husband’s story.

“It was shown to him at such a young age, it became his default,” Jane posits.

“Whenever he was challenged or feeling sad, or feeling anxious or depressed or nervous, that was his go to, to watch porn and have a wank to release the dopamine to make him feel good. He had issues with alcohol and issues with drugs, but he could manage those to continue to fit into society.

“The porn – it was his. It was his darkness, his shame, his guilt. I could sense things were falling apart, so I booked a hotel room in Melbourne for a dirty weekend away. Flicking through the telly, there was an adult movie so I suggested we watch it together.

“And he basically dismissed me and said he was going to hang out in the bar.”

Jane says her husband’s desperate need for pornography  – just a few minutes of masturbation a day – became a kind of brutal addiction. If he was unable to get the privacy he wanted to complete the act, he became abusive and dismissive.

His needs were very straightforward. Anywhere between 90 seconds to a maximum of five minutes, says Jane, just enough to get an erection and reach a climax. It was soft-core, mostly women with other women, where they rapidly achieved a mutual climax.

“That produced an unrealistic expectation for me,” says Jane, “where I was supposed to climax in 90 seconds as well.

“I’m sorry, it takes a bit more work than that.”

She noticed ebbs and flows in John’s ability to get and maintain an erection throughout their marriage, and says she tried to be compassionate about his needs. Eventually they both developed performance anxiety, and sought counselling.

John, says Jane, simply denied watching porn, denied it repeatedly until in a final session he admitted he watched it ‘a couple of weeks ago’.

Pressed on the question, his answers became ‘a week’, ‘a couple of days ago’, and then ‘OK, this morning’.

“It was like peeling layers of an onion to get to the truth,” Jane recalls.

“The hurt I felt over him watching a screen and choosing that over connecting and being intimate with his wife is going to hurt forever. I’m not a prude: I worked at a brothel in Western Australia; I have a cousin-in-law who makes ethical porn; I was in a female relationship when I met him. I’m pretty cool.

“For 15 years I was committed and I was monogamous, and I got to the point where I finally suggested he might need to go out and get whatever he need to get out of his system, and he denied that too. It was just a complete disconnection.”

In the end, Jane says, she can’t find where her husband is going inside himself, beyond a dark, inaccessible place she can’t fathom or recognise.

“This is what hurts the most. I want to be angry and I want to be furious at this man for the lying and the deception and the betrayal and the disrespect. But then I just want to hold him, because at his core he didn't do any of this to hurt me; he just did it because he didn't know what else to do.

“His abuser killed himself, and for those boys to never get their day in court, they carry that for the rest of their lives. It's awful, it's just awful.”

Despite her understanding, the marriage dissolves. John’s anxiety becomes overwhelming. He waits for Jane to leave the house so he can look at porn, frets about when she’ll return in case he’s discovered.

He became, essentially, a stranger to her, no longer able to read her body or lead her to pleasure. “That man,” Jane says, “was lost, and I was left with a brute.”

Jane sought treatment for her own burgeoning anxiety at The Melbourne Clinic. Left feeling inadequate and with a borderline personality disorder, she discovered that her husband of 15 years had left her for a schoolmate and girlfriend of 20 years earlier.

Desperate to make a last gesture of kindness,and reconciliation, Jane gave John her engagement ring when she next saw him, for him to consider their future.

She told him to take it with him back to the country when he left.

“Think about what it represents, about the man you were when you gave it to me, about where you want your future to go,” she told him.

“I want this to work out, I want to be here for you and I want to get through this. Here’s this engagement ring; think about things, please, and bring it back and put it on my finger. But if you go back there and f**k her, you might as well just throw it off the bridge.

“And he came back, and I asked where the ring was, and he said, ‘I f**kin threw it off the bridge.’”

Dr David I. Smith is a clinical and forensic psychologist specialising in sexual dysfunction and other sexual issues. He wrote a paper in 2015 entitled Pornography: Pleasure or pain? which explored the issues surrounding the use of pornography and the treatment of people who regard themselves as having an addiction to pornography.

He says while proportionally the number of patients he treats for pornography addiction is small, there is a problem for people to address.

“A small percentage (of people using pornography) would move to addiction, just the same as people getting addicted to gambling or people getting addicted to alcohol or substances,” says Dr Smith.

“Not the majority of people, but there is a significant minority of people who do become addicted.”

He says while proportionally the number of patients he treats for pornography addiction is small, there is a problem for people to address.

Dr Smith says addiction to the use of pornography can be damaging or disastrous for relationships, as evidenced in Jane and John’s case, but it’s not necessarily related to user trauma. Often addiction is caused by repeated use. He has seen adolescents addicted to gambling who began because they were doing it for fun with friends, and it is same with the use of pornography.

In the case of people who have been abused as children, Dr Smith observed that they often end up in difficulty in their lives generally, and becoming addicted to pornography is just one expression.

He says in John’s case, from what he read he seemed to have a ‘desperate sense of self’ which had become overwhelming. 

He says while John’s use may have given him some temporary relief, for Jane the outcome is she may feel unattractive and can’t compete with the pornographic images

“Often people see actions and behaviours in pornography that in real life they don’t particularly want to recreate, but their partners do,” Dr Smith says.

“In some cases people can prefer pornography over the relationship, and that seems to be the case here.”

He says treating couples involves getting their individual views about where porn sits in their lives, how the narrative of porn fits into their life, where their sex life is, in order to get to a shared understanding about pornography is doing, and where it should fit in their lives.

“In all addictions there are only two choices: abstinence models and controlled usage models,” Dr Smith says.

“Whichever works for a person, you have have to get the couple to agree on a model. And that is a difficult conversation. But talking about sex is generally.”

If you or somebody you know are suffering mental health problems you can:

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