About

Our Story

APSATS is an organization that was created to provide the type of treatment partners need in the face of their spouse’s sexual addiction or serial infidelity. APSATS developed a treatment model that depicted “partners of sex addicts” in a new and different way recognizing the trauma they faced as a result of their spouse’s behaviors and betrayal.


APSATS created the Multidimensional Partner Trauma Model (MPTM), which supports working with the partner and the person with addictive behavior using a new orientation that dramatically shifts the perspective of how partners and addicts are viewed in the coupleship. 


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Our Goals

  • Provide certification in the trauma treatment model for Certified Clinical Partner Specialists (CCPS) and Certified Partner Coaches (CPC), who meet APSATS’s training and supervision requirements.
  • Serve as the leading organization partners turn to for resources.
  • Seek to improve the quality of care given to partners of sex addicts, and thereby decrease the incidence of secondary trauma.
  • Provide education, advocacy and seek to increase public awareness of the needs and traumatic effects experienced by partners of sex addicts.
  • Secure funding to meet these objectives.

Our Beliefs

APSATS believes that those in relationship with someone with out of control, problematic sexual behaviors or “sex addiction” can and often do experience symptoms of post traumatic stress in response to the discovery of the sexual acting out, dynamics in relationship with this person, and disruption of the individual’s sense of their own history.


APSATS has developed a treatment model that conceptualizes the partner as someone who has experienced great trauma.


“The partner of a sex addict has responses that serve as reactions to a stressor that is traumatic in nature, in predictable emotional, behavioral, and physiological ways. She seeks what she cannot find: safety in an unsafe situation.” Dr. Barbara Steffens (APSATS founding President).


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