What you're about to hear is an unscripted one-time couples counseling session.

It contains mature themes and listener discretion is advised.

For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed.

But their voices and their stories are real.

From the intake interview, I learn a few things about this couple.

They are in a kind of a talking versus touching battle of sorts.

We are extremely different people and with different communication styles.

So like I'm verbal, he's more communicative through touch, which sometimes can trigger me.

I'm a very touchy, pili kind of physical person that kind of creates that self-feeding loop of neither one of us able to give what he has to need.

There is a longstanding history of cheating described as a sex addiction.

So sex addiction has really been an ongoing issue for me.

Said I was a teenager.

I found out he was cheating on me.

Just random hookups and meeting guys online and doing what guys do.

It was very heartbreaking.

So he found out which, I'm not sure if I was hoping he would because I knew I needed help at that point.

And the revelation of the cheating, which then became a revelation about an out of control sexuality, then became a revelation of an out of control violence in his childhood.

I've been diagnosed with PTSD, I've got a history of trauma.

And for so long, I've been trying to push that away.

It was either counseling and trying to figure it all this out or kind of throw away 14 years.

And so part of what I want to do is to parse out what is what, what intersects with what, what may have led to what, and where can the healing, the change, and the growth come from.

This is where should we begin with Esther Perrell.

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