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

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СКАЧАТЬ encourage you to go ahead and get a piece of paper and a pen, so that you can see if you have had difficulties with some of these issues—clearly, the very first task that Dr. Carnes feels is imperative in working through, when you’re talking about your sexual addiction, is to break through the denial. You break through the denial by following eight steps.

      The first step is to make a “problem list.” When you make a problem list, you’re facing reality head-on. As they say in many programs, you’re facing your fears head-on. You make this problem list and you write down all the ways you can think of that these sexually addictive behaviors have affected your life. What kinds of problems could they have caused? Maybe you spent money that you didn’t have. Maybe you have an unlimited source of money, so therefore you started prioritizing what to spend your money on, and it became first and foremost in your mind to spend money on the addiction. So you make this problem list, and the problems are clearly interruptions in your normal functioning, in your daily functioning, in your relationships with others, in your ability to work.

      Think about it for a minute. We know that your addiction has caused you problems in your life. If so, what are they? How has it affected your relationships? How has it affected your work performance? How has it affected your sense of self? The goal of the exercise is to reveal your current perception of what is happening in your life. It can be very scary when you think of what your problems have been. Maybe you ran up your credit cards for porn videos or lied to your boss about lunchtime liaisons. Maybe you’ve had to get an AIDS test six times in the last eighteen months. Maybe they’re nonsexual. Dr. Carnes says, “Maybe your teenager is having trouble in school. Maybe your car transmission is making funny noises, but you keep putting it off because your addiction comes first.”

      Think about how it has caused a problem in your life, and then I want you to come up with at least ten problems that have recently occurred because of your sexual addiction or because of your sexual behavior. Maybe you’re not really ready at this point to call it sexual addiction; that is normal until you break through denial. I want you to do that so it can help you to work through the denial that we all have whenever we think that a compulsive behavior is manageable or not interfering with our lives.

      You may say it’s not unmanageable yet. Then let’s look at the next list. It’s important for you to create a “secret list.” A secret list is exactly as it sounds. Not only are you being dishonest, but you carry that emotional baggage around of knowing that you’re being dishonest: (1) You know you’re not being transparent and authentic; (2) you’re always worried that maybe you’ll be discovered and found out; and (3) deep down inside, you end up believing some of your own misperceptions and distortions. An addict often tells a story long enough and starts to live the story as reality. For anybody who has relapsed, they have lied to themselves about the amount of time they spend on the illness. They have lied to themselves about their recovery time. They have done whatever it has taken to keep that part of their life in secret. So we want to know, what are your secrets, and from whom have you kept them? Who doesn’t know about your secrets? Is there anybody who knows the truth about your secrets? I want you to think about that. I want you to add that as homework #2. It’s to be followed directly after you write your problem list.

      Addicts use “defense mechanisms” to continue their addictions. Which defense mechanisms do you use to keep your lies, secrets, and excuses going? You know that you use them. You lie to yourself; you tell yourself that the behaviors aren’t that bad. Maybe you tell yourself, “There’s nothing wrong with me joking around about this issue,” or “This is just guys being guys.” If you’re a woman, you may say, “This is what guys want. They want a sexually promiscuous woman.”

      The defense mechanisms that are typically used around addiction are

      •Minimization, which includes minimizing or making small the issue, the problem.

      •Maybe you’re using justification, telling yourself, “If my wife and I had more sex, I wouldn’t have to go to massage parlors or prostitutes.”

      •Maybe you’re rationalizing your behavior. You’re telling yourself, “Everybody does this. This truly isn’t a problem.”

      •Maybe you are displacing your feelings. What ends up happening is instead of dealing with the real problem, you displace your feelings onto something else: “If my boss wasn’t such a tyrant, I wouldn’t look at as much porn as I do at work,” or “If my kids weren’t so tough to deal with, I wouldn’t need to be gone and be away from the house.”

      Okay, we’ve got minimization, we have justification, we have rationalization, and we have displacement.

      •Then, there’s something call suppression. That’s when you suppress your real feelings about something so you don’t deal with them. Suppression means you bury them deep into your subconscious.

      •Or, repression. Here you actually hide your feelings in the unconscious and you don’t even know you have them. People who have been traumatized very severely may repress or suppress their thoughts, their feelings, and their beliefs, because it wasn’t safe as a kid to work them out.

      Again, it is important to know what defenses an addict uses to understand what some of their excuses are about. Next you need to write down what your excuses are, because they actually create more of the problems and the secrets. When you really get to looking at those, then wow, you’re much more able to deal with your secrets, and that is so important. It’s important for recovery.

      Label your excuses to the best of your ability. Then, I’m going to ask you to follow the guidelines in Facing the Shadow because they actually want you to note the date when you realized you were distorting the reality. Now that can be very difficult, but addicts create rationales for their behavior, and they usually blame somebody else for their problems, or they argue to themselves that they have unique circumstances. So, the real issue is coming clean with what’s going on inside, and that’s important.

      Once you start working on those excuses, those rationalizations, those justifications, you may say to yourself, “I use so many of those.” That’s okay. Insight is the first step toward getting healthy. The last thing I want you to look at for this week are the emotional, the physical, the spiritual, the familial, and the career consequences that have occurred because of your sexual addiction. There may be some legal ones. There may have been some consequences to your health. You may have felt suicidal, felt those kinds of emotional consequences. Loss of self-esteem. Loss of goals. Those are all emotional. Clearly, if you’ve lost a job or you haven’t self-actualized and moved up in your work, that may be because your sexual addiction has robbed you of that. When you think about all the different consequences, you are then working diligently on breaking the denial. If you remember, that is task #1 in the series of seven tasks that we are going to be looking at as we break the denial and get you healthy.

      Denial is in itself a defense mechanism. It may have at some point kept you safe, but anytime you use denial to the extreme, you clearly and understandably use it to keep yourself from facing the truth and getting healthy. Okay, think about your level of denial. If you’re listening to this show, I know that you are working diligently on deciding what you need to do to get healthy. If you’re like most addicts, you’re starting to realize how far from reality you have been living.

      Ask yourself how many of these things apply to you:

      •Have you ever ended up in a massage parlor when you promised yourself that you wouldn’t? You were unable to honor your marriage commitment.

      •You may have had sex for money.

      •You may have had sex with people of the opposite sex for the intrigue.

      •You СКАЧАТЬ