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

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СКАЧАТЬ can’t watch sex and not be triggered.”

      In part he’s right and in part he’s wrong, because that movie has some very graphic sex scenes. We 100 percent encourage … I should speak for myself … I 100 percent encourage people to stay away from sexually explicit scenes, movies, and television shows, because I just feel like it may reactivate the neurocircuitry in your brain. When that occurs, there’s no doubt about it; it can create that cycle again.

      Many of my colleagues have sexual addiction in their history. One of my colleagues said, “As a recovering sex and love addict, I went through a painful period of relapse after a number of years in recovery. I was mortified and ashamed to admit that. Now with many years of further work after that experience, I see relapse as my biggest teacher for myself and as a powerful teacher that informs my work with clients.”

      Isn’t that a positive spin? This is a person who is in recovery and who treats sex addicts. We were all talking about whether Thanks for Sharing was a healthy movie to see. This therapist was, in fact, referencing the issues in the movie that several of the characters relapsed and how painful that was to watch, but also to know that some of those relapses are such teachable moments. They teach you what you need to do and how you need to do it. This therapist said, “Today, I encourage clients to look at their progress and not their perfection. I think recovering people do best to avoid counting the days and years of sobriety, but instead to focus on continued growth and healing. All the time in the rooms and the work of the healing journey is definitely worth it. We don’t go back to the beginning unless we choose to by abandoning the journey altogether.”

      Now I had a client with a lot of recovery—an incredible man who was doing an incredible job and going to ninety meetings in ninety days. At about day sixty, he went off track. He got back involved with the unhealthy behaviors of sexual addiction. When he did that, he thought he could fight the addiction itself, and he kept deluding himself, telling himself, “I am powerful enough to get back on track and keep this slip or relapse a secret. That way, no one will know; I won’t disappoint people in the program; I won’t disappoint my therapist, Carol; I won’t disappoint my family. I will get back on track. It really will not matter whether I have 55 days or 155 days.”

      What he has learned by getting back on track now is that in actuality, he is going to stop counting his days. He said, “I really need to stay focused on living in the moment, doing it one day at a time.” For many of you sex addicts and/or drug or alcohol addicts, work addicts, food addicts, gambling addicts, spending addicts, you name it—you find that to be helpful too. That’s why they say you have to take it one day at a time. He began to hold that secret about relapse, and once he held that secret, he was no longer able to get back on track and do a good job. When you’re lying about who you are and what’s going on in your life, you oftentimes will stay separate from that authentic self you need to be to work the program. So this email I got from a colleague was really spot on. It really paralleled one of my client’s experiences this week.

      A therapist wrote a commentary on Thanks for Sharing and made the following points, so I thought we’d talk a little bit more about the movie before we go on to the tasks. Certainly if any of you have seen the movie, hopefully I won’t be spoiling it for you. The main character, [played by] Mark Ruffalo, never shared with his sponsor his trouble about dating. He defaulted to the “I’m fine,” and we all know what that means. He was, as we say, “only as sick as his secrets.” So that’s important for you to assess. What secrets do you have in your life? We talk about the recovery tasks. One of the recovery tasks is making a secrets list. It’s not just about the sexual addiction; it may be about something that has to do with paying your taxes, lying to your kids, being late for work, borrowing some money from somebody and not letting them know. When you have a secret, it will really affect your integrity.

      The next observation was the deeper work of healing, of really healing the pain, the trauma, the sadness, the depression, the anger that most people feel prior to sexual addiction and certainly they feel as the result of addiction. Psychotherapy is not an option; it should be mandated. In Thanks for Sharing neither the sponsor, who happened to be [played by] Tim Robbins, or Mark Ruffalo, who was the leading man, appeared to have dealt with their issues. As a result, they both suffered and they hurt others because of it. My belief is that Twelve Step groups are incredible tools but you need a therapist skilled in sex addiction, a CSAT.

      This therapist notes that addiction is a generational phenomenon. You saw many levels of addiction in Thanks for Sharing. It wasn’t just sex addiction. There was drug addiction, alcohol addiction; and you saw it passed on from father to son. Isn’t that very similar to your life? Isn’t there, more than likely, addiction in your family? Sobriety is only the beginning of genuine healing. This therapist says again the sponsor may have been technically sober from alcohol and his bottom-line sexual behaviors, but he was far from healthy or practicing humility or intimacy. That’s why people in recovery are some of the healthiest people in the world if they’re practicing those recovery behaviors. If they’re working on humility and they’re sharing their secrets and they’re working on getting closer to the people that they love, then they really are working a recovery program that makes them a better person.

      In this movie, Gwyneth Paltrow played this young woman who fell in love with the leading man, and she was starting to date him. But prior to her dating Mark, she said, “I do not want to date an addict, so if you’re a drug or alcohol addict, I am not interested.” She thought she knew her boundaries, never even knowing that sexual addiction was an addiction. Let’s face it—don’t we all know people who don’t recognize or acknowledge sexual addiction at all? They really just think it’s bad behavior. They don’t know how compulsive, how cunning, how deceitful it is, and how it can destroy lives. So Gwyneth thought she was going to ask him if he was a drug or alcohol addict, because if he was, she was going to stay clear of him. Of course, he wasn’t, so she thought he was clean. What we see over and over again is that until people get healthy, they are attracted to—almost magnetized to—addiction. It may not be their own, although as I was watching her, I was thinking, “Oh boy, we’ve got a female sex addict on our hands.” Clearly, she was repeating the same patterns over and over again, and expecting a different result. She didn’t know she was repeating them, but she was. So you have this dynamic where Gwyneth is objectifying herself, acting very seductive, but wanting true intimacy with this guy and, of course, isn’t going to get it because he relapsed, which interfered with any potential for intimacy. As a result, when she found out that the man she was falling for was an addict, she felt that layer of betrayal, therefore interfering in the trust and preventing a real relationship from developing.

      The movie is really interesting. There are a lot of movies out right now on sexual addiction. This is what tells me that we are on the cusp of something very big. Any addiction professional knows that this is a huge problem, but society does not necessarily know it, unfortunately, until the media portrays it. That’s the number one way our society gets its information and validates its experience. So I guess the good news is finally there are some movies out that portray this very baffling problem.

      Again, I so appreciate the fact that you are listening to the show. You’re sending me emails, and you’re doing whatever it takes to find out what resources are available out there. Let’s talk resources for a moment, shall we? I can’t say enough about the recovery tasks, because they are really measurable tasks that improve sobriety and recovery, and they put people on the right path. They’re really kind of opportunities to create checklists and then start following through to see if they can change your life. Again, in Facing the Shadow, the first thing Dr. Patrick Carnes talks about is that “Addiction is an illness of escape. The goal is to obliterate, medicate, or ignore reality, and to medicate the feelings of hurt, betrayal, worry, and loneliness.”

      Here you’ve got a behavior that initially medicates those feelings, and then as one might imagine, after it medicates it initially, it creates more loneliness, it creates more isolation, and it actually makes the problem greater. СКАЧАТЬ