Читать книгу Ready to Heal: Breaking Free of Addictive Relationships - Sarah Elisabeth Boggs - Страница 3

When love hurts, you may wonder about your choice of romantic partners or risky sexual behaviors. Perhaps, like many others, you’re experiencing the raw pain of an addictive relationship—the kind that’s painful to be in, yet seemingly impossible to leave. A profound sense of emptiness can result. Repeatedly, you may feel pain, anger, and confusion rather than what you truly desire: closeness, warmth, and security. You may feel broken. The more you search for the comfort of closeness and safety, the deeper you sink into the quicksand of despair.

As you read through the pages in this book, you will discover what happens when love and sex—our most primitive human needs—becomes a drug. This idea may be new to you. If you’re in the midst of recovering from other addictions, the concept may make sense but leave you asking, “What? There’s more work to do?”

Ready to Heal explores how addictive relationship patterns get started and how to heal from the pain of destructive relationships. The phrase “love and sex addiction” will be referenced throughout the book as a way to name addictive patterns. While this term may not be one you would choose, that’s okay. It’s simply a name. Naming a problem is the first step toward healing. For a woman, healing from love and sex addiction requires an understanding of the disease from (1) an early rupture in attachment with your caregivers, and (2) patriarchal norms and expectations in culture. Both will be explored here.

No woman dreams of becoming a love and sex addict. Many women are puzzled why they continually struggle with unmanageable behavior when it comes to sex and love. Shame settles in and refuses to leave. But there is hope and a way out of this shame. As you begin to understand the nature of love and sex addiction— how it forms in infancy and how culturally you’ve been set up for it— shame diminishes, and your spirit is freed up for healing. Are you ready to heal?

Part of healing an addiction involves learning why you needed it in the first place. How did your addiction start? The premise of Ready to Heal is that love and sex addiction is an attempt to re-create your mother’s love. In previous editions of this book, the term “mother hunger” was used to show the importance of a mother’s imprint on her daughter’s brain. Mother hunger is essentially an attachment failure. This means the original bond with your mother didn’t happen or, somehow, it broke. The concept will be explored in much more detail in this newly revised edition.

You were born with all you need—the basic hardware wired into your brain for human love and connection—but a baby can’t use it without a consistent, trustworthy guide. Your relationship with your mother was the earliest foundation for how you formulated a sense of yourself and how you understand relationships. Your mother’s love or lack of it became imprinted on your developing brain and it continues to direct your relational choices today. Your first experience with love and trust was with your mother’s touch, voice, and body. In her arms, early on you formed a belief about whether or not you were lovable. You may have learned that relationships are frightening or painful. These beliefs developed before you could speak or recall what was said or done, so they may not be concrete.

Some of you may have no early memories of your mother. Nonetheless, early experiences with her are stored in your body. In turn, they lay the groundwork for addictive relationship patterns. Unfortunately, a prevalent cultural mythology that all mothers love their children purely and sacrificially makes it difficult to take a close, honest look at the relationship with your mother. Mother-love is supposed to be unconditional, sacred, and instinctual. Our culture holds motherhood as an institution that is supremely fulfilling for women. In service to this powerful cultural ideology, the complexities of mothering are overlooked. As a result, many women come to the experience unprepared for what an enormous responsibility it is to nurture an infant. For these reasons, exploring the concept of mother hunger isn’t about blaming your mother. Most women love their children the best way they know how. Instead, examining and understanding ‘mother hunger’ is a necessary piece required to heal from addictive relationships.

In my clinical practice, I work with women facing love and sex addiction. Frequently, I’m invited to talk to groups about addictive relationships. When I discuss this painful topic, I occasionally get asked, “Are only beautiful women addicted to sex?” The question itself shows a grave misunderstanding of love and sex addiction. It isn’t about being beautiful. It’s not even about liking sex. Most sex and love addicts dissociate during sex. Even if they become aroused and have orgasms during sex, they do it to escape—not to feel intimate with their partner. Romance and love become a way to escape a dark emptiness in the soul. This differs greatly from enjoying a sensual, intimate sexual experience that involves trust, mutuality, and commitment.

Ready to Heal includes the stories of four women who are recovering from love and sex addiction. As you get acquainted with Maria, Heather, Tori, and Barbara, you may notice there are no descriptive physical details of them such as their beauty, hair color, skin tone, or clothing. Typically, case studies include these kinds of details. In a book about addictive love and sex, however, these details are problematic. They serve to titillate or separate. Neither fosters healing. Therefore, I’ve chosen to omit physical attributes from the stories women have shared with me. My hope is that rather than concentrating on how a woman looks, you can focus on how she feels, how she faces this disease, and how she heals. While identities have been altered for privacy purposes, the stories contain universal themes that may help you identify addictive patterns in your own life. Undoubtedly, there will be pieces of your life story not represented here. Your relational patterns are unique to you, as is the story of how you got here: to a place of questioning your romantic behaviors.

The cases and comments shared here are from heterosexual women. Although universal issues arise in addictive relationships for lesbians and heterosexual women, a separate book for lesbians is critical. The shame that lesbians encounter when exploring sexual issues can be more complicated than for heterosexual women. While both heterosexual and homosexual women face self-hatred that comes from our cultural inheritance, heterosexual women do not encounter homophobia when they address this disease. Additionally, the pain a lesbian woman faces when addressing maternal deprivation and loss of mother-love can be compounded by a mother’s homophobia.

Regardless of sexual orientation, I invite you to explore the stories in this book with a kind heart. As you read, you will discover that addictive relationships take many forms. Ready to Heal can help you if you’re struggling in a relationship with a sex addict, facing your own sex addiction, obsessing about someone who doesn’t want you, or if you’re looking for deeper understanding of your romantic patterns. If at any point, you feel overloaded or triggered by what you read, stop and take a break. This material can be difficult to absorb and digest. Exploring addiction brings darkness into the light. Facing this addiction requires compassion, awareness, and willingness to explore the unknown. The good news is that there are unexpected gifts in store for you when you face love and sex addiction. At its core, this addiction is a longing for intimacy. Since love, connection, and sexual intimacy are basic human needs, healing addictive relationships prepares you to give and receive love in healthy ways. Part of being ready to heal is having faith that although you don’t know what will happen, you are prepared to move forward on the journey. You deserve to heal.