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“Sex Help with Carol the Coach”

January 6, 2014

Dr. Ken Adams

Carol: Do you want to change? Obviously in January, that’s the question that most people ask themselves. However, if you are a sex addict, you know that you’re always undergoing change. That is what you’re striving for. If you’re somebody who is listening to the show for the first, second, or third time, you may still be wondering, do you really have a problem? I’m the one who is here to tell you that if you’re questioning that, you need to go to www.sexhelp.com, take the test, read the literature, and start doing some heavy-duty work on yourself.

One, you need to meet with a certified sex addiction therapist. Two, start doing some bibliotherapy. I know, you may be one of those people who really doesn’t want to read, but if you have some questions, then you really need to go to my website, www.sexhelpwithcarolthecoach.com, and see what I recommend for reading materials. I recommend only the best, and it can get very confusing what books to read, what’s important, what you should do, and I always say that it is super essential to get support. How do you do that? The easiest way is to contact somebody who is knowledgeable, attend some SAA or SA groups, and take a look at what’s out there to assist you in getting healthy.

You know I have worked with thousands of people with sexual addiction. They participate in a whole regimen of treatment. There is not one size that fits all. Clearly, if you can get to a certified sex addiction therapist, that’s the way to get the immediate resource available and be directed, or redirected, to additional resources. Sometimes when I’ve worked with somebody, or I’ve done an assessment, I realize that they are just banging their head up against the wall; they’re doing the same thing over and over again; they’re hoping that eventually it will be different and it isn’t. When that occurs, I may need to refer them to an intensive treatment program. That may be a two- to seven-day program to jumpstart their success.

Tonight, I’m going to be talking with an expert in the field. This man, Dr. Kenneth M. Adams, is one of the gurus in terms of treatment. He has spent several decades working with sexual addiction and partners of sex addicts. One of the things he found that was incredibly helpful was to create intensive workshops. This form of treatment educates clients and helps them to get the fundamentals. People who took these intensives found that they learned so much so quickly. Instead of going to therapy for a year or two, they learned in four, five, or seven days enough information to access the resources to solidify their recovery.

Tonight, Dr. Adams is going to be talking about two intensive workshops that he has set up for this year. The first is called “The New Intensive Workshop for Mother-Enmeshed Men.” For some of you, you may not even know what the word “enmeshed” means. What Dr. Adams has found is that some clients have particular difficulty in breaking free from unhealthy behaviors and unhealthy relationships. Some men have had an overly enmeshed relationship with their mothers. Enmeshed means overly close, and the relationships that addicts have with their mothers may lack boundaries. Men with enmeshed relationships may feel a lot of underlying anger and guilt. It’s not like these men wanted this close relationship with their mothers. Usually they are a casualty of a mother who wants too much closeness with them, uses them as surrogate husbands, and uses them as surrogate companions. This occurs oftentimes in families that have experienced trauma. So Dr. Adams created this workshop to help participants—through experiential work, artwork, and small- and large-group experiences—to identify the trappings of this kind of relationship and to understand how that actually by default creates an erotic template that is very difficult to change without the help of these intensive workshops or without the help of skilled therapists who understand how tough it can be when you’re in a family without boundaries, specifically between mother and son.

He’s written books on the subject. He is a speaker across the country. This workshop can be instrumental in changing a relationship that is very difficult to change. He also has directed and created a workshop for spouses and partners of sex addicts. He has an intensive outpatient workshop that is being led right now by Judith Trenkamp and Hope Ray. They have studied directly under him and have the same spirit of compassion and attention to detail that Dr. Adams has had in all of his programming, as he created his Life Healing Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. If you’re a partner of a sex addict and you have trouble with boundaries, you have trouble saying no, you have trouble putting yourself on the front burner in creating self-care; if you don’t feel empowered—as a matter of fact, you feel identity-less—and you’re having difficulty figuring out what your feelings are and how to develop your own individuation, you’re so consumed by the sex addict that it’s really hard to know what you need; then you really need to look into this amazing workshop that is going to be March 13–16.

You can contact Dr. Ken Adams and his associates to get more information on that. You can always email me at carolthecoach@aol.com for contact information too. Tonight we will be finding out more about these intensives and why you would want to use them. We will also learn more about the impact on a spouse or partner when you’ve got this kind of relationship with your mother: How do you break the chains of codependency when this occurs?

Now let’s talk about the skill for the week. I hope that you’re all having a successful new year. We’re already into January and I’m a big advocate about not having resolutions, but looking at behavioral change. A “Carol the Coach-ism” that I have is “Don’t create a goal that you really want to work toward; instead find a word that depicts a change you’d like to see in yourself.” Maybe it’s a self-word, such as “fitness,” or a relationship word, such as “communication” or “closeness” or “intimacy.” Perhaps you want to work on something very specific. In that case, find a word that reflects what that is, and then figure out how you can symbolize and identify ways of experimenting with that word throughout the year. My word this year is “service.” If anybody is in a Twelve Step program, they know that the Twelfth Step is about “How can I serve others, how can I serve my community, and what can I do to serve?” When we serve, we do many things, but certainly it takes the focus off of us and it creates a healing for others that ends up coming back and making us feel good too. So service is going to be my word for the year.

One year, it was “inspiration.” Another year it was “boundaries.” Another year it was “self-care.” I am now the queen of self-care, so I don’t need to work on that. I do a really good job of that. I work hard, but I play hard. I would love to know what your word is. I would love for you to email me and let me know what that word is. I cannot say enough about how a word can change your life when you write it on Post-it notes and you put it in your phone and you look for fun ways to demonstrate that word. As opposed to feeling deprived or getting that sense of deprivation, you get excited about what that word has to bring.

Certainly in the recovery field, there are a lot of words that make a difference—“gratitude” being one of them. I do not fall asleep at night without thinking of three things I’m grateful for. When I’m grateful, I’m happier. When I’m happier, I feel better about myself, and I exude something that the world needs. The world needs for us to be positive, but we can only do that after we heal our own wounds, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight: healing the wounds of dysfunctional relationships, whether it’s in our partnerships or in our core relationships with our family of origin. When you look how not to be a victim to that, then you free yourself to be the person you really want to be and you can create the life you deserve, and that’s what counts. So I would encourage you to think about your word for the year and to email me at carolthecoach@aol.com.

So now we are going to hear from Dr. Ken Adams who has a wealth of knowledge in the field of sexual addiction. Welcome to the show, Dr. Adams. How are you tonight?

Ken: I’m fine, a little cold up here in Michigan, otherwise good. I’m excited to be on your show again. I’m looking forward to having a chance to talk with you and your audience.

Carol: Obviously, these are two intensives that you created and saw such a need among a lot of different people, but especially amongst people who suffer from sexual addiction or who love somebody who suffers from sexual addiction. So tell me, what is the focus of your intensive workshops? Why did you create them?

Ken: I think there is a need for short-term intensives and there are a number of those programs throughout the country. I wanted to add our expertise and knowledge base to them. They help people identify problems in a more efficient way and help people get unstuck in the course of their normal recovery and treatment process. We created two. We have other ones coming. We created one for partners of sex addicts, spouses and partners of sex addicts. And we created another one specifically for men who have had enmeshed or covertly incestuous relationship with their mothers. In other words, where there has been a too-close relationship with Mom. We find that to be a dynamic among addicts, particularly sex addicts. Not every addict has that, but we do find that to be an issue, so we wanted to address that. It’s been a topic in a couple of my publications, a couple of my books. I wanted to take what I knew and create an intensive for men. We have a few others coming toward the end of the year.

The folks will come on Thursday night and leave on Sunday. The meals and the lodging are provided. It’s an intensive process from beginning to end, and it’s a therapeutic process designed to help people get unstuck, and identify the issues, and move them along. We’re very excited about that. We’re almost full on one of them. We have some slots left on both, but one is almost full at this point.

Carol: Okay. Who would be most likely to need both of these kinds of workshops?

Ken: Let’s talk first about the spouses’ and partners’ workshops. If someone’s been involved with a person who has been sexually compulsive or addictive, depending on what word you like, those spouses and partners of sex addicts, as it is known, are traumatized by a number of issues related to that: the betrayal of trust, the blaming, the “gas lighting,” which is referring to telling people that they’re crazy—“How could you think that about me?” They suffer from what I’ve heard called almost an existential mistrust. In other words, they come to mistrust the world at large. So there is a tremendous amount of trauma that occurs when somebody is involved with an addict who has repetitive betrayals of trust, violations. There is sometimes physical and sexual abuse, of being ridiculed for not being attractive enough, and so forth.

So we created a workshop specifically for partners and spouses of sex addicts. In this case, this is a workshop for women. It’s not coed at this point. We will create one that’s coed, but this one is for women. You can only do so much in four days, but we were really specific. We want them to feel validated. We want to help them reclaim their own reality, their own feelings, and to have a sense that they can manage and get through this and come to trust themselves. That may or may not mean that they can trust their addict partner again, but we help them in that process to come to trust themselves. That was the goal of our intensives for partners, and we’re very excited to offer that. I feel like it’s a very gentle experience, but steady in terms of helping people stay with it. It’s designed for the majority of partners who have had some trauma, who feel stuck, who need a boost, and who feel they could benefit from an intensive experience.

We have folks who are prepared to do a phone interview to make sure the fit is right, so we screen people. If we feel like it’s not a good fit for them, we tell them up front. We don’t take everybody who comes in, because we want to make sure they have a good experience. I think that says it all.

Carol: That’s great. Let me ask you something. Obviously, partners of sex addicts are in a lot of pain, no matter where they are in their recovery. You used that word “trust.” They have trouble trusting their partner. They actually have trouble trusting themselves, so if they are wondering “Is this the kind of program for me?” that phone interview is an assessment that will actually help them to decide “Would this be worth my while? Am I ready for this now? Am I ready to get unstuck?”

Ken: Exactly. We let people know that we know we can’t create a process that tackles the needs of every single person who falls under the umbrella of a partner of a sex addict, so we’re very careful about bringing people into the process that we think are a good fit. We want to work for them. We want the process to work for the group as a whole. So for the screening, they can contact my office and we will do a phone screening with them. We will talk to their therapists. We prefer they be in therapy with somebody, so we have people coming from all across the country for these workshops, as well as local people. The therapists actually stay on campus for the partner one. We’re very careful with how we match the person with the process, which I think is what makes a process work, frankly, like these intensives we’re creating.

Carol: And the therapists who are running these intensives are?

Ken: Dr. Judy Trenkamp and Hope Ray are the women who are the therapists who are running the partners’ workshop. They are both CSATs, certified sex addiction therapists, and they have also been trained in the new certification for dealing with partners of sex addicts. These two women really know what they’re doing. They have a wide knowledge base, they have good hearts, they’re very skilled therapists, and I feel very fortunate to have them work for me.

The “mother-enmeshed men” workshop is actually run by myself and one or two of my associates, depending on how big we get. Those are male therapists for that one.

Carol: I was going to ask you how many people typically attend an intensive.

Ken: There are two parts to the process. There is a large, sort of educational kind of class didactic period where the larger group comes together, and then there are small groups for the actual processing and therapy work. Then they come back into the larger group to do things that help to move the whole group along. The small groups are kept to approximately six people. The most we will take is probably three groups, so the size of the total group is no more than probably eighteen.

Carol: So that really is very manageable, isn’t it?

Ken: Absolutely. When you’re doing a large lecture, or you’re doing something like a bonfire, we take them through a process where they let go of old wounds and they use the bonfire as a ritual. We have virtual experiences to help move them along. We’re very excited about that. We also have that for the men in the mother-enmeshed men workshop as well. I don’t know if you want to get to that or hold off for the moment for that.

Carol: Let’s go ahead and segue into that, because I think that is probably the workshop that most people would be most curious about. I know that a lot of my listeners don’t necessarily even understand enmeshment in general. Can you explain what that is?

Ken: Sure.

Carol: You used the word “incest.”

Ken: Let me start with “enmeshment,” which is a little more tolerable of a word. Back in the 70s or 80s, 80s for sure, the family therapist at the time began to notice that too much closeness between generations in families was linked to somatic disorders [having a significant focus on physical symptoms — such as pain or fatigue — to the point that it causes major emotional distress and problems functioning] in children. When they began to work with separating the grandparents from the parents and the parents from the children, they began to notice that the somatic symptoms of the children decreased. What they began to postulate was that you can have too much closeness in a family system, where the closeness becomes intrusive and engulfing and guilt-producing and burdensome. It’s the opposite of what we typically hear in dysfunctional families when we think about neglect and abuse. This is where the family appears very close, and in many ways is very close, but oftentimes in some of these close systems, the closeness can be too much. One of the particular pieces of that kind of system can be what we call a “parent-child enmeshed relationship,” in which the parent is overinvolved with the child, at the cost of the child’s own identity, their own separateness, their own individuality—all the way from mothers being jealous of their son’s girlfriends and vice versa with fathers and daughters.

When I talk about “covert incest,” that’s referring to the enmeshed relationship beginning to feel like it’s a romantic relationship. Think about sons and mothers in this case: “Not only is my mother too engulfing and making me feel guilty all the time, but she’s treating me like her boyfriend. That feels terrible to me, icky.” Even though there’s no physical sexual touch, the relationship can feel very much violating sexually. In other words, “I have to be loyal to my mother; my mother is my girlfriend rather than having a girlfriend,” for example.

Sometimes that can occur very innocently, if you will, so anybody who is a parent knows that. I’m a parent and my wife is a parent and we have a son, and I’ve seen this unfold in our family. Any parent has a normal love affair with their child, right? It’s a special kind of love, and it’s very sweet. This concept of enmeshment is not meant to degrade or criticize that kind of relationship, but when the parent uses the child to get their needs met, that’s a problem. This workshop is particularly for men and you see a lot of this issue with men and their mothers, particularly among the sex addict population, but not limited to that group. This workshop is focused particularly on men, because I think there are a lot of men who go untreated around this, and I wanted to create a workshop for them.

What happens when these men and boys are playing the role of their mother’s surrogate husband, listening to their complaints and their sexual frustrations about their father, feeling as if they have to be angry with their dad on behalf of their mother, and they have to declare loyalty to their mom; what occurs is that in adulthood, these men cannot commit. They can’t be committed in a relationship or they’re overcommitted at a cost to their own lives. Most often, the set of symptoms 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 and, if appropriate, they can get into the workshop. If it’s not quite appropriate yet, you refer them to a CSAT or somebody in their area who can actually get them to a place where they can then attend the workshop at a later date.

Ken: There is a lot of therapy that goes on; there’s downtime; there’s homework at night; there are special assignments. The whole process is laid out in a very specific way. We’re also going to be offering workshops for male sex addicts, female sex addicts and love addicts, and couples in recovery as well—couples recovering from sexual addiction as well as couples recovering from other enmeshment issues. I can’t tell you the number of wives and girlfriends who have asked me, “Can you see us as a couple?” So we’re going to offer later in the year some more intensive workshops designed by my associates and me.

Carol: So they really do need to get to your website so they can get on your mailing list and find out what is available. Of course, I’m sure people come from all over the world. It’s especially nice if you live in the Midwest and don’t have to drive as far, but you have people who come from anywhere to these workshops.

Ken: We do, yes. I get calls for assessments from all over the world, particularly around the enmeshment issue. As you noted earlier, there is not a lot of specific work being done around that. It’s sometimes embedded in other more general recovery work, but the workshop we designed here to my knowledge is the only specific workshop for that issue that’s out there.

Carol: Again, Dr. Adams, if someone is not sure they’re quite ready for this yet, they can read your book, and the title of your book is?

Ken: Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners. I’ve also written a book called When He’s Married to Mom: How to Help Mother-Enmeshed Men Open Their Hearts to True Love and Commitment. Silently Seduced is for men and women, because both are on the enmeshment issue. When He’s Married to Mom is more specific to men with that problem, although it’s also written for the spouses of those men. Silently Seduced is written for both men and women, because women also get into struggles with their mothers with enmeshment. The course is a little different, although the symptoms are very similar. We see some women who have been surrogate wives to their fathers, although we see more women who are enmeshed with their mothers and wind up absorbing some of their mother’s anger at men. These women find it difficult to make commitments to men or relationships because of the enmeshed relationship with the mother and absorbing her reality, never getting a chance to have her own identity. We do see that enmeshment issue with women; it’s just that my workshop isn’t for women this time around, but my book is.

Carol: I want to ask you a few questions as we begin to wrap up. You’ve obviously got two very specialized niches for people who are suffering from enmeshment or partners who are suffering with their own sense of identity, because they’ve been so wrapped up and traumatized by being with a sex addict. Do you think it’s truly possible to recover from a sexual addiction?

Ken: Absolutely. We see people do it all the time, but keep in mind there’s this notion that somebody becomes “recovered.” Right? It doesn’t quite work that way. What recovering people learn is that they are like everybody else at some point when they begin to feel they’re on an equal playing field. They have to continue to manage feelings, deal with issues of trust, and learn to contend with conflicts, negative beliefs, urges; so recovery requires an ongoing commitment to a life process that keeps being conscious and learning to live in reality rather than trying to escape it as their priority. We see people all the time who make that commitment, who stay out of relapse because they’re living a life that is a recovering life. We see that with people who are enmeshed. I get asked that around enmeshed men: “Do you think it’s actually possible for my husband or my boyfriend to break free and be committed to me?” I say yes, but he can’t do it if he remains committed to his mother. The caveat is yes, he can recover, but he’s going to have to get his priorities straight.

I get asked that by partners of sex addicts: “Am I ever going to be able to trust him again?” You know, that’s a tough question. You can trust yourself again, and you may or may not be able to trust him again. You can certainly come to trust yourself and learn to sort out other relationships in the world, and then there are ways you can determine whether your, hopefully, recovering addict can be trusted again. I do believe it’s possible. People do it all the time, absolutely.

Carol: And yet, as you indicated, it is a growing process. Addicts are constantly faced with situations that can retrigger them to some degree, and they have to use those skills over and over again and grow stronger. Do you think most people do stay together when faced with a sex addiction in their relationship? What’s your experience there?

Ken: My experience is what I see in the clinic, so I have a skewed population of course. But of the people who come into our practice, when the addict makes an earnest effort to recover because he knows he needs to—as opposed to image-managing for his marriage—we see a strong base of possibility. If he can empathize with the impact on the partner, and then as a couple if they can grieve the fact that their marriage has been impacted by the sexual addiction and come to terms with the fact that, on one level, what their relationship used to be is no longer and they will always have to contend with some level of pain or grief and then make a new commitment … we see more and more couples doing that. It’s a very difficult process, but by all means possible if they are willing to do the work and there is a base of love and respect that can be either rebuilt or further developed.

Carol: I know in your “Spouses and Partners of Sex Addicts” intensive workshop, you talk about how the partner really has to do some grief counseling and move toward empowerment from the grief, because if they stay victimized, they stay stuck. Once they grieve and feel empowered from it, they can move forward.

Ken: That is one of the biggest issues. One of the primary focuses of our intensive is to help them do some grieving. There is sometimes a repetitive refrain with partners because they’re in shock, but one of those is “Why did you do that? I can’t believe you did that.” Sometimes that’s the shock stage. Other times when it’s occurring over the course of two years after the betrayal has been exposed and the addiction has been exposed, sometimes it’s the difficulty with grieving that “OMG, the relationship that I have is just not what it was.” My power comes from facing that reality, grieving it, and making some new decisions for myself.

We gently support grieving. We don’t make any decisions for partners. We don’t have any agenda for partners to do anything at all. This is really their process. We want to make sure people are clear about that. Sometimes therapists will try to decide for the partner: “You shouldn’t be married to him,” or “You should stay with him because of your religious values.” We don’t take any position about that. Our position is to help the partner grieve her losses; reclaim her reality so she’s better able to make decisions for herself.

Carol: I know that with an intensive, there may be some people who say, “I don’t know if I can really put out the money right now,” because in some ways it may be the price of ten sessions with your therapist. But I’ve seen the work that people have done in an intensive, and it can provide ten times the amount of benefit and help that they get from doing individual work on themselves. For anybody out there who worries about the money issue, these are very affordable workshops, and you will benefit tenfold by them.

You’ve done a masterful job of putting these together. Your books are incredible, and I personally have gotten to be a part of Dr. Adam’s teachings. He helped me with my CSAT certification, and he’s one of the finest teachers in the nation on this subject. Kind of what I say about Patrick Carnes, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you wait. Get out there and at least see if it’s the right thing for you.

Ken: Thank you, Carol, for that vote of confidence. I appreciate it.

Carol: You’re very good, very compassionate, and very thorough. I’ve talked to people who have worked with you and they say not only do they feel different internally; they understand the changes that have occurred inside of them. I can’t speak highly enough about any of the trainings that you’ve put together.

Ken: Also, if the clients are feeling a little scared, we’ll be happy to hold hands and get them through the door as well. Thanks for having me.

Carol: There is great power in groups. You’re welcome and good luck to you and the workshops. I look forward to seeing you at the IITAP Symposium this year.

I really can’t say enough good things about Dr. Ken Adams. He’s amazing, he’s compassionate, and he just knows his stuff. If this intensive sounded like it would help you, I can only say that you’re dealing with one of the masters in the field. That’s why I really hope you will consider it. You’re worth it. Again, I don’t want to push you into something you might not be ready for, but they will help you to determine that. As he indicated, they will hold your hand if they decide you’re ready for it and you’re still kind of nervous about it.

I get that. When I run groups, almost every single man in my group says, “I didn’t want to be in this group; I was scared to death to be in this group; I’m really shocked I’m here,” and by the third session they are typically saying, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” It’s one of those “face your fears head-on, and let go and let God.”