A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (16 page)

Start by simply telling yourself that you are going to start noticing your instantaneous responses of fear, anger, and pain. The strong intention to notice the flare-ups (even the very tiny impulses) of your instinctive response will build awareness.

Another way is by thinking back to a moment of feeling unsafe in some way, and then recalling your instant and instinctive response. In our example of Bryan reacting to Heather not remembering to write the check, the moment Bryan looked at the kitchen counter and did not see her check he experienced a feeling of annoyance. Just to be clear, we are not suggesting that Bryan stop his feeling of anger. In fact, he can’t. We are suggesting that he become aware that he’s experiencing anger (irritation)—in that moment or as soon as he can—and simply see it for what it is. Then the angry response can become a signal that has his attention.

When you have an experience that you are instinctively labeling as painful, uncomfortable, bad, your survival impulses become activated. It’s similar to when the doctor hits your knee with the little rubber hammer. If your reflexes are operating properly, without any thought on your part, your leg just kicks right out.

Does this mean that you are doomed to reactivity? Luckily, you are not, because you also have a thinking part to your human brain. The dilemma we all face is that the more primitive animal part of our biology creates automatic impulses that fire off quickly.

The Good News Within the Bad News

We’ve heard it said that automatic unconscious responses will continue as long as you have a body. While this might sound like bad news, recognizing this truth is actually the good news. If you know that your survival impulses are going to continue to fire up, creating responses of fear, anger, and pain, you can finally cut yourself some slack. You can begin to work with your responses so you don’t remain like a rat in a maze, subject to the internal, eternal firings of your survival mechanisms.

You are the ruler of the dominion of your body, emotions, and feelings. You can be a benevolent ruler or you can be a tyrant. A tyrant attempts to banish his or her feelings of fear, anger, and pain. A benevolent ruler recognizes that an impulsive response is merely that—an impulsive response.

The Value of Your Instinctive Responses

Still, you would not want to eliminate your fight, flight, and freezing responses even if you could. They are part of your survival mechanisms that help when your life or the lives of those around you are in danger. These responses provide all of us with information that is a part of natural intelligence.

Paldrom was walking home late one night when she was living in New York City. She was almost home, and there was no one else she could see on the dimly lit street. Suddenly, a tall, thin, dark man stepped out of the shadows and grabbed her arm from behind and swung her around. Without any kind of thought, she automatically raised the empty metal cookie tin she was carrying, as if to hit the guy. Her lip literally snarled, and she growled, “Leave me alone.” The guy ran away. Trembling, Paldrom saw a cab turn onto the street, and she stopped it to report what had just happened. In that moment, Paldrom was extremely happy that her survival impulse to fight had done its job.

We have all heard stories about people having the strength and courage to lift a car off a child who was trapped, being able to escape from a burning building, heroically responding to attack in times of battle. These are all the benefits received from healthy survival impulses, and they are an important part of your human biology. They are signals that give you vital information. Without the native intelligence provided by your emotional impulses, your more highly evolved thinking processes don’t have a basis from which to work.

You don’t want to banish your emotional impulses. However, when your instinctive responses are creating difficulty, such as when they are leading you into a cycle of compulsive behavior, it can be helpful to learn how to work with them effectively.

Step Two: Experience Your Instinctive Responses

You don’t want to and can’t rid yourself of the knee-jerk responses of your protective intuition. It does no good to go to war internally with these impulses. But when they cause you to act addictively or in ways that keep you from achieving the human connection you so deeply desire, you need a plan, a way to skillfully work with these natural impulses.

Your closest intimate relationship is the place these negative feelings can come up most frequently and strongly. Since your relationship is the place in which these impulses are arising, your relationship can and must be the very place to work with them.

So how can you more deeply allow your instinctive responses to connect with your reasoning responses? How can you more effectively build the bridge between your instinctive impulse and the more reasoning executive function?

Building the Bridge

Bridging your impulses with your reason is a skill you can develop by allowing yourself to simply and fully experience your feelings. You are attempting to build increased capacity (like the kids who could resist the one marshmallow) so you can gain the rewards that come from making choices, reconciling conflicting thoughts, processing emotions, suppressing urges, and delaying immediate gratification.

In an instant of recognizing that you are experiencing a difficult, uncomfortable, even excruciating feeling or emotion, first check to see if you are actually in danger. If you are not, take a slow deep breath and relax. Do not resist or protect yourself. Let go. Be patient with yourself in this practice. Like anything else, it can take a while to get the hang of it. And even once you begin to develop an understanding and capacity to let go, new and perhaps more subtle incidents that trigger your protector impulses will appear. We have found that the tenacity of the protective instinctive messages to fight, flee, and/or freeze can at times seem to be relentless. The more you are able to make friends with these aspects of your inner functioning, the more you can work with them.

For example, let’s revisit the situation with Bryan and the forgotten check. A good start for Bryan was simply being able to recognize that he was feeling justified. He could see that the “justified” story he was telling himself was woven with righteousness. This recognition of righteousness was a clue to look to what those feelings might be covering. In an instant, he understood that he was actually feeling irritated, and beneath the irritation, he was feeling hurt.

Some people have compared meeting anger, fear, and pain to baring themselves to the rain or diving into the ocean. One lovely description we heard was from a young woman who described it as first stilling her thoughts, and then imagining the space in between the cells of her body. She reported that the uncomfortable waves of emotion had all the space they needed to rage and be free right between her cells. All that force of strong feeling and emotion became a passing wave of energy.

One man described this letting go as similar to playing in the waves at the ocean. He said, “If you fight the wave, it takes you down, but if you dive into the wave, you can ride it.” It is possible to turn and face, to welcome, the very impulse your instinctive biology is urging you to avoid. The instinctive impulse comes more quickly, but the ability to recognize the impulse for what it is isn’t built with greater effort but with greater openness. Being vulnerable is often equated with a sense of letting go.

Avoiding Your Impulses by Indulging Them

If you are like most of us, even when you are able to recognize that you are having a flash of instinctive anger, fear, or emotional pain, you will also feel a strong impulse to do something to get away from the feeling or to get the feeling away from you. You may notice a tendency to attempt to banish your feelings, to avoid them, to deny them, to repress them, or to indulge them by acting on the impulse.

Indulging is simply following the instinctive imperative of the feeling. For example, if you feel angry, an instinctive response would be to yell at someone or to kick something. If you feel afraid, your instinct will tell you to run away or freeze up. If you feel hurt, you might cry. It is normal to cry, to feel pain, to say, “Ouch, stop it” when you are hurt. However, if you find yourself thinking the same painful thought over and over again or repeatedly feeling the same unpleasant reactive response to a particular incident, this is a clue that you are literally in an instinctive mental or emotional spin.

You can begin to recognize that any of the responses of acting against, running away, or internally spinning are simply various ways that we as humans indulge the instinctive imperative. Indulging is a form of avoidance, rather than simply letting go and experiencing the uncomfortable feeling.

To allow yourself to notice and experience your anger, fear, and pain does not mean taking those feelings and throwing them at your partner with the explanation, “I’m only telling you how I feel.” That would not be an expression of vulnerability and will not lead to greater intimacy. In the next chapter, we discuss more fully developing the skill of speaking to your partner vulnerably by telling the truth about your experience using the skill of undefended honesty. And in
Chapter 10
, you will find instructions on developing your skills of intimate communication.

For now, remember that in a moment when you are able to notice that you are in reaction, when you are feeling the impulse to fight, flee, or spin with the same thought or emotion over and over, this is your opportunity to pause. You can begin to recognize that your first impulse to something that registers as dangerous or threatening (even if it is not) is more than likely going to be a survival reaction. Speaking your angry feelings coupled with the exclamation, “This is just how I feel,” is creating an excuse for indulging rather than directly experiencing.

Repressing Your Feelings by Numbing Them

To compensate for unwelcome feelings, many people use numbing diversions. This compensatory numbing activity can become a conditioned response put in place as a strategy to avoid the unwanted feelings. Many things, both positive and negative, can be used to numb—work, exercise, alcohol, drugs, food, and, of course, compulsive sexual activity. However, if you allow the uncomfortable feelings of anger, fear, and pain to become your allies, the uncomfortable impulses become signals indicating, “Attention needed here.” If you can view these impulses as signals, then you do not need to employ the harmful strategies of attempting to get away from them.

In the case of compulsive urges, an individual may use the compulsive behavior to avoid feeling the full impact of the anger, fear, or pain. This sets up the addictive-compulsive cycle. Being able to experience the rush of information being sent by the impulse allows you to go to the next step of taking action (or not) or speaking (or not). From the less reactive place that is not in avoidance, you are vulnerable. And from this vulnerability you can build the intimacy that you truly desire.

Your Patterns of Avoidance

Most of us have built habits of avoidance. You probably began these habits when you were quite young. It can sometimes be helpful to track back and find the seeds of your avoidant strategies. In
Chapter 9
, we will look at how to do that and how this tracking back skill has helped others. While it can be useful, you are not required to trace your impulses back into the past. In an instant, you can simply stop and experience an uncomfortable impulse. In that instant, you will find that it wasn’t such a monster after all. Before you allow the impulse, though, if you are like most of us, the anger, fear, or pain that is chasing you can disguise itself as a monster. How else could this survival impulse do its job of getting your attention?

You may begin to recognize that you have spent much of your lifetime running from sensations of fear, anger, and pain. Many have reported the relief of finally turning and facing the internal monster. In the
The Wizard of Oz
, when Toto revealed the man behind the curtain, the wizard could no longer use his tricks to scare Dorothy and her friends. When a child is afraid of a monster under the bed or in the closet, the skillful parent does not pooh-pooh the child’s fear, but acknowledges the fear and helps the child check it out.

In this way, you can skillfully work with yourself with compassion, by acknowledging the capacity you have had all along (like Dorothy with her ruby slippers in
The Wizard of Oz
) to directly and simply bear the discomfort of your innate intuitive protective response.

Recognizing That You Are Meeting the Painful Experience

How can you recognize that you have actually experienced the uncomfortable feeling? Is there a sign or a clue? Yes, there is. You know that you have really met the uncomfortable impulse because the biochemical instinctive response will change. This is important. You will know that you have brought awareness to the biological impulse because your experience will be different from what it was previously.

In the moment of opening, of letting go, the uncomfortable feeling may not be obliterated. You may still be experiencing it—or not. However, in the openness of vulnerability, the uncomfortable reaction is not resisted and can be fully experienced. The compassion of vulnerability has the capacity to contain the discomfort.