Читать книгу Sexual Addiction: Wisdom from The Masters - Carol Juergensen Sheets Juergensen Sheets - Страница 8

“Sex Help with Carol the Coach”

September 30, 2013

Carol the Coach

Carol: This is Carol Juergensen Sheets, aka Carol the Coach, and I am bringing you Sex Help with Carol the Coach, www.blogtalkradio.com/sexhelpwithcarolthecoach. This is the only designated show on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes that talks about sexual addiction. A lot of times we have guests on, who either have experienced the addiction, love someone who has experienced the addiction, or are experts in the field of sexual addiction. It is truly a blessing. It is with huge gratitude that I can bring that to you.

Most of you know if you’re listening to the show that you can catch this on iTunes. I have over sixty-five shows in the archives waiting for you to subscribe for free. You just go to iTunes, and you put in “sexual addiction” or “Carol the Coach” or "Sex Help with Carol the Coach" and it will take you right to the link where you say “subscribe for free.” Then you start downloading all the shows on your computer or on your iPad.

Now I totally get and understand fully that you may not have 100 percent access to the Internet. If you’re listening to the show, it may be that someone has curtailed the use of your Internet, so you only have a specific time that you can get on the Internet or you may only be able to get on the Internet in a specific place or in actuality with supervision. Now I know that this could sound very debilitating to somebody out there who says, “Oh my gosh, there’s that much control in this addiction?” In actuality, as opposed to looking at it as a form of control, I congratulate you for knowing what your boundaries are and getting the help you need to maintain the boundaries.

We’ve talked about it before. If you have a smartphone and it’s in your pocket, the men that I work with call that “porn in the pocket,” because without specialized filters, they can get on the Internet at any time, day or night, and search anything they want to search. That is what will keep you in addiction. I recently had a man relapse. He had a flip phone, because flip phones are not smartphones, so access to the Internet is very difficult. I hadn’t even noticed that he had his smartphone back. Shame on me for not noticing that! I don’t know if he had it in his pocket. I don’t know if he didn’t bring it into the session. I don’t know if I just was not that observant, but had I seen that, I would have immediately known that this man was at risk for relapse and certainly a major slip.

So again, when you have this addiction, there are some things you have to do. There is no doubt about that, but when you do those things, they work. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight. Most of you know that I am a certified sex addiction therapist, and that means that I trained through IITAP, the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. That means I’ve trained with Patrick Carnes. Anybody who is wondering if they have a sex addiction, or anybody who knows they have a sexual addiction, knows that this is the man who started this movement. He’s a genius. He wrote this incredible book called Out of the Shadows. Along with that book comes the workbook Facing the Shadow. If you’re listening to this show for the first time or if you’ve wanted to get a good book and you didn’t know what to get, these are the two books to get you started.

In Facing the Shadow, it talks about seven recovery tasks that help to keep you clean and sober. These tasks are the tools that catapult your recovery and will help you in creating new and healthy behaviors that will replace your addiction. I’m a believer that once you have the addiction, you always have the addiction, but there are certainly things you can do that manage it. It’s important to know what those are, and unfortunately if you are not using them together, it is difficult to get good recovery.

I don’t know if any of you saw the movie Thanks for Sharing. It was certainly poignant and moving. It’s not anything that I would tell an addict to go see, because there are a lot of potential triggers. When I was talking to my husband about this, he said, “Oh my gosh, alcoholics can watch movies with alcohol; drug addicts can watch movies with drugs in them; I’m not getting why sex addicts 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. That’s that addictive cycle that Dr. Carnes talks about in Out of the Shadows and Facing the Shadow. Dr. Carnes says the first task of recovery—and I would really 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 may have taken some sexual risks with employees.

•Did you masturbate in public?

•Did you exchange sex for drugs?

•Perhaps you exposed yourself and took a real legal risk of being discovered.

I remember when I was talking with a woman who thought she was a sex addict. She came to that realization that when she woke up one morning and the man she spent the night with had taken all of her money and her credit cards. He had charged thousands of dollars to her credit card.

Ask yourself:

•Have you ever been arrested for lewd behavior?

•Did inappropriate things in a restroom?

•Made anonymous calls or sent anonymous emails?

•Send pictures of yourself or inappropriate pictures of somebody else?

These are all indicators that your behavior is out of control, and that lends itself to sexual addiction. If any of those things sound like you, you need to get some help. The two most important resources that you can access are starting therapy with a certified sex addiction therapist and joining a Twelve Step program that deals with sex addiction. It may look like Sexaholics Anonymous Step Step groups (SA) or Sex Addiction Anonymous groups (SAA). You can access Twelve Step groups by Googling them. If you no longer have access to the Internet, then you need to talk to your wife, your husband, someone you trust, and say, “Get that information for me.” If there are no meetings in your area, you can always be a part of telephone Twelve Step meetings. There’s no reason you can’t get the help you need.

Granted, I truly believe that if you’re going to use telemeetings as your #1 support for 12 steps, the process is probably going to be slower. It just is, because face-to-face is always more meaningful and does some of the repair work that you need to do. However, I can’t emphasize enough how important seeking a therapist who has expertise in this is, and finding the support group you need to break through the denial by identifying what your problems are, and identifying what the secrets have been and the consequences of your actions. Think about it; that is the start of getting the help you need.

Once you realize you have a problem, you don’t have to call it addiction, but you do have to know that it 100 percent interferes with your functioning. Then we ask you to get a sponsor, because you need specific guidance. You need somebody to help you. I recently had a young man who had done really well for a period of about two months. Then he participated again in some behaviors that were similar to those in Thanks for Sharing. He had hidden cameras and had taken pictures of women without their knowledge. What was the first thing he did? He called me. What was the first thing I did? I connected him to another man in the program. This was a young college-age man, and I knew that truly he needed the guidance of somebody wise, somebody who had been there, and somebody who could encourage him to get involved with a Twelve Step program.

When you’re looking at getting a sponsor, it’s important to find a sponsor who has a lot of recovery time. That can be tough in this field. So ask the guys in your meeting, “Who has the most recovery time in this meeting?” Get the names of five or six people who have years and years of recovery time, because they’re the people you’re going to want to emulate and get some help from. There’s no shame in that. As a matter of fact, you’re more likely to break the denial; share your secrets, your problem, the consequences; and understand your defense mechanisms if you’re with somebody who’s been there, done that. And that is the beauty of having a sponsor.

So that’s the first Recovery Task; it is breaking the denial. It is important to do that so you can recognize that you do have a sexual addiction. We’ll talk more in future shows about tasks #2–7, but right now, I want to make sure that you have understandably worked through the denial and realized that you truly do have a problem. That’s first and foremost on my list.

You can always email me at carolthecoach@aol.com with your questions, your concerns, and your situations. I don’t like to do Skype therapy, because I want you in my office or I want you to see somebody face-to-face. Again, that’s the most intensive treatment, but if you’re in an area where you don’t have therapist access, certainly we’ll consult with you so that you begin to get the proper help you need. If it has to be slower because you don’t have access to Twelve Step meetings, you live in the rural areas or countries that are less progressive, or you’re in an area that’s fairly remote, you may not have those resources. You may need to double up on your reading or do meditation and, of course, spend time praying; but those are other recovery tasks. I will get into those later.

All right, we have to end the show, and as I say on every show, “There will only be one of you at all times, so fearlessly have the courage to be yourself.” But you have to like that self, so it’s important to fearlessly follow through on the tasks to make you the best person ever.

My guarantee is that if you work it … it will work! And you will live a life that you deserve. We’ll see you next week for more Sex Help with Carol the Coach. Make it a good one.