Sexual Addiction: Wisdom from The Masters. Carol Juergensen Sheets Juergensen Sheets

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СКАЧАТЬ and problems that we see with these men who as boys played the role of surrogate husband to their mothers is that they struggle to commit; they have sexual difficulties; they have a lot of guilt and anxiety, sometimes depression; they have tremendous problems around loyalty issues. In other words, they declare loyalty to the wrong people and have a difficult time setting boundaries and saying, “No, I don’t want to do that.” They put their mothers before their wives and their girlfriends, or their partners if they happen to be gay. Their loyalty is to their parent rather than to themselves or their partner or spouse.

      I got a letter today in the mail when I got into the office this morning. It was from a woman from Arizona and her name was Danielle. I won’t say her last name, but she wrote to me and said, “I read one of your books.” I have two books on this topic. One is When He’s Married to Mom, and the other is Silently Seduced. She said, “I blamed myself for the breakup of the relationship with my boyfriend, who I thought was the love of my life, but I could never compete with his mother. I read your book, and it was the first time that I felt understood by somebody who knew exactly what I was going through. This man would never commit to me, and I was always in competition with his mother. I lost him to his mother. I had many well-meaning friends who told me I should hang in there, and I did hang in, but to no avail. His loyalty will always remain with his mother.”

      I created this workshop so that these men can begin to identify that issue and begin to separate and unhook from their mothers, so they are free to commit to a romantic relationship of their choice. I’m very excited about it. It’s the first time I’ve ever created a workshop of intensives. “Workshop” is the wrong word. Workshop implies it’s almost an educational format. I don’t want to misstate it. It’s very much an intensive therapeutic process.

      Carol: Obviously, the partners of these men realize they can’t compete, and there is this unusual bond and Mother comes first. Yet if you’re a man, you may feel … I think the word you actually used was “icky.” You may feel like it’s too close, and you’re never enough, and you’re like a surrogate spouse and companion, that kind of thing. So are men able to talk about this? It would seem almost taboo for a man to talk about this kind of relationship with his mother.

      Ken: Well, you know, that’s a good question. First of all, he’s not likely to talk about it. Oftentimes these men are seen as weak or soft, and they’ve been ridiculed as good boys, so they’re not likely to talk about it. Boys are not likely to even be aware of it. They almost normalize it, right? “What I’m doing is normal. You don’t understand, honey; this is my mother. You just have to be patient.” The spouse or partner always feels like they’re in the backseat of the car, always the one witnessing the relationship. Often I will have women, girlfriends or spouses of these men, who actually claim that they feel like the other woman. They feel like the affair partner. Not surprising, these men can have affairs, because they can be free in an affair, an uncommitted relationship, because it’s no threat to Mother.

      Carol: Makes sense.

      Ken: They can be free with pornography. They can be free to see prostitutes, but they often shut down sexually and emotionally with the primary partner, because it feels so disloyal. Most of these men do not talk about it. Many aren’t even aware of it. They might be aware that they are angry and frustrated. They get tired of their mother calling all the time or asking them to change a lightbulb on Saturday night. “Can’t you do it yourself?” you think. Or they tire of their mothers “calling up and talking to me about your fight with Dad; I don’t want to be involved.” They may be very well aware of feeling frustrated, but they wouldn’t necessarily identify the relationship as dysfunctional or enmeshed or inappropriate or icky. They may have forgotten as a boy those moments that felt too close and too icky. They may have suppressed that or more than suppressed, they may have disassociated it, removed themselves, put into another compartment those feelings, only to act them out with pornography or prostitutes or affair partners.

      Carol: Explain that almost eroticized rage, if you will, that may be occurring because of that relationship with one’s mother.

      Ken: There is a lot of anger in these men, a tremendous amount of anger. The biggest source of anger is that they are always feeling obligated and guilty to the parent, so never quite feeling free. One of the ways they can act out their anger is they find a way to force themselves to get married only to begin to feel torn between the demands of the wife and the demands of the mother. Yet in their anger, they say, “The heck with both of you; I’ll go be free with Susie across town or the prostitute or the pornography.” It’s a sort of angry retaliation, an angry attempt to separate, and it’s fusing anger and sex together. Very much that’s the case. Of course, it doesn’t work, right? They wind up creating more guilt and more disloyalty issues and more problems with feeling that “Now I have to commit even more to somebody I may be ambivalent about.” There’s a lot of ambivalence in these men. Ambivalence meaning that they’re uncertain and unable to know where they stand on issues; they’re ambivalent in their attachment styles, meaning that on one hand “I desperately need to be close to somebody, but when I get close to somebody I feel like you’re smothering me and I push away from you.” They’re kind of back-and-forth ambivalent. They can’t make up their minds about dinner plans or which movie to go to sometimes. That all comes from this loyalty to the parent at a cost to themselves, never gaining a sense of who they really are. Yes, they’re very angry about that.

      One of the things we’re going to work on in the workshop is trying to reduce or make direct attempts to reduce the anger, so that it doesn’t come out inappropriately at the spouse or partner or sexually. Our workshops are not an addiction workshop. This workshop for mother-enmeshed men is very specifically a workshop designed to get at the dynamic that is between mother and son. This can be the case if Mother has been dead for ten years. Sometimes at that point, the damage has already been done. Certainly if she is still alive and there is still too much closeness, too much demand, it can continue to be problematic, but even when a parent is dead, sometimes the legacy continues.

      The workshop is going to assist these men to identify what happened to them, what the consequences are; to de-stress or decompress some of the anger and other feelings; and then to make some commitments to themselves about where they want their lives to go, and to be able to make a commitment to somebody in a romantic relationship based on their choosing. That’s going to be the focus of our workshop. The value that these men are going to have in doing this is they are going to be able to come together to hear other men say the same story.

      Carol: That’s exactly what I was going to say. I can’t think of any other treatment center, any type of intensive out there, that would provide this kind of work for men who have grown up like this. This sounds like such a novel intensive workshop for men who may not have any other opportunity to be with experts who know how to get to the root of the problem, how to jumpstart the progress, create a safe place for them to feel this. That’s what I think is so phenomenal. There just is not a safe place to talk about this, to feel the feelings, and to deal with the core issues. This is so therapeutic.

      The office number to contact you about that is 248-398-0740. If they needed to go to a website, what website would provide more information on this intensive workshop?

      Ken: They would go to www.sexualhealth-addiction.com or they can go to www.drkenadams.com. That will get them to the same website; go into “workshops” and they can get our phone number. We will do a phone screening for both the mother-enmeshed men workshop and the partners’ workshop. Just so you know, we try to include everybody, but if we feel like it’s not a good fit, then we invite them to do some therapy on their own and come back and see us again. We’re very careful about the fit. We make this a very positive and effective experience for everybody there.

      Carol: So they are then assessed over the phone СКАЧАТЬ