A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (17 page)

If you find yourself thinking the same thing over and over again, feeling the same feeling over and over again, justifying why you are thinking and feeling the same thing over and over again, blaming your partner for making you feel this bad thing over and over again, you can skillfully take that recognition as a clue. The “over and over again” experience is probably an impulse of anger, fear, or pain that you are avoiding.

In general, if you are feeling angry, afraid, or hurt for an extended period of time, it is useful to check and see if you may be circling around the actual feeling and not allowing the wisdom of your thinking brain to tolerate the discomfort of your anger, fear, or pain response. By avoiding the discomfort, you can drag the uncomfortable feeling on indefinitely.

Some people spend a lifetime feeling the same experience of anger, fear, or pain over and over again. They may associate the feeling with an unending parade of events and circumstances, but the feeling is never fully met and experienced.

It is important to note that grief has a long-term signature. This means that grief will come back again and again, in a way that anger, fear, pain, or hurt does not. Grief, a response to a shock, must unwind. It requires you to be patient and allow the unwinding of the pain of the loss to go on for as long as it takes. Generally, a spark of anger, fear, and hurt is more of a momentary flash meant to get your attention instantly.

Once you have met a strong, uncomfortable impulse of anger, fear, or pain, don’t trick yourself into believing this means it will never come back. It will. You, too, are human and will continue to be the beneficiary of the information available from the instinctive messages of your anger, fear, and pain. As you learn to ride these particular waves, however, you will develop the capacity to relate more vulnerably than protectively.

Step Three: Make a Choice from Vulnerability

Once you notice that you are experiencing the imperative to fight, flee, or freeze, you can then make a choice about how you would actually like to respond. You must be willing to directly experience the impulsive feelings you are having. This willingness is the birth of vulnerability. The impulse to fight, flee, or freeze is not being vulnerable; it is protective. Vulnerability is the antidote to the impulse to protect; vulnerability is the basis of creating intimacy first with yourself and then with your partner.

Reflecting on his interaction with Heather, Bryan realized that the irritation he was feeling (and the righteous indignation that accompanied it) was a signal. He could then review and realize that the irritation he had felt was covering up feeling hurt. He was vulnerable enough with himself to recognize the hurt. Because he did not feel that he needed to shield himself from the feeling of hurt, he no longer felt the need to accuse Heather. She had indeed done something that had hurt him, but her intention was not to wound.

When an uncomfortable impulse arises and you are able to recognize it and then experience it without indulging or repressing, greater clarity will be available to you. Remember, you are not meeting the uncomfortable feeling to rid yourself of it. That only creates greater resistance internally. It may help to imagine that you are meeting the uncomfortable feeling to partake of it more fully, to understand it more deeply. Some people have been helped by the image of inviting the uncomfortable impulse to tea. Once the meeting occurs, as we mentioned earlier, your experience of the uncomfortable emotion will be altered. Since you are no longer in avoidance, you become vulnerable.

Vulnerability in Action

Going back once again to the check incident (or shall we say the lack-of-check incident) between Bryan and Heather, when Bryan was able to recognize that he was in reaction, he could simply stop and track his first response of irritation, and recognize it as a cover-up of his feeling of hurt.

That night when Heather and Bryan arrived home from work, Bryan was able to tell Heather that he was sorry he had gotten irritated about the check. He was able to vulnerably share with Heather that he’d realized he had fallen into a moment of hurt because he felt like she didn’t really care for him. This vulnerability on Bryan’s part made Heather smile. She said, “Yeah, I’m sorry I forgot to write the check. I can be such a space cadet about things like that, huh? Sorry I got mad at you when I called at lunch.”

The other part of this story involves Heather’s realization about her reaction on the phone. There is a good reason that she was able to apologize as well. That afternoon as she was working, Heather experienced first her own righteousness because she “didn’t do anything wrong.” She felt anger toward Bryan for hanging up on her. By allowing the anger to wash through her without holding on to the story of her righteousness, she was able to experience the pain of feeling bad for being “imperfect,” because she had let Bryan down by forgetting to write the check. She could see how she had internally leapt to the conclusion that his anger with her meant that he didn’t really care for her.

As they were able to talk vulnerably, both could pretty quickly come to the point of being amused that they both had ended up with the conclusion that the other did not really care. The potential is that either partner or both can back out of “reactive world” by experiencing the uncomfortable feeling and then allowing the more thinking function to be in charge of the communication. We have often said to each other, “If just one of us can stay sane in any given moment (that is, not trapped by our reactive strategies), then we at least have a chance at vulnerability, intimacy, and truly connecting.”

It May Not Be Easy, but It’s Worth It

Compassion for yourself during this process is vital. You are working with a protective system that is hard-wired into your body. Some of us are more sensitive, more reactive, than others. Some of us are more prone to choosing compulsive strategies than others. But we are certain that if you have the capacity to read this book, you have the capacity to bear the discomfort of your anger, fear, and pain responses and bring greater vulnerability into your life. The rewards of building the capacity to make choices, to reconcile conflicting thoughts, to process emotions, to suppress urges, to delay immediate gratification are greater joy, love, and belonging as well as greater vulnerability. We have personally seen how the process of meeting what arises in your relationship may always be challenging, but the intimacy that it brings is ultimately and infinitely rewarding.

Exercise: Shaping Clay

For this exercise, you will need two large handfuls of modeling clay, one handful for each partner.

Put your blob of clay on the table in front of you, and with your thumbs, press as hard as you can into the clay. You will find that the clay resists your penetration.

Now, instead of pressing as hard as you can, press gently, applying constant gentle but firm pressure. You will begin to feel the clay begin to melt beneath your thumbs. The clay will let you into its core.

Allow the experience of feeling the clay yielding beneath your touch to be a metaphor, a direct experience of how you can actually allow yourself to melt, to not resist, at the moment of an instinctive impulse to fight, flee, or seduce, but instead to become vulnerable. We recognize how difficult it can be to resist those instinctive, protective urges. Let the experience of the clay giving way to your gentle pressure begin to create new pathways in your awareness that open up a possibility you may not have been able to find before.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Being able to tolerate and work with your strong reactions and feelings of anger, fear, and pain is not only fundamental to working with compulsive and addictive impulses but also to building greater intimacy.

• If we desire the rewards of intimate human connection, then we must learn to bare ourselves to the hurt, the wounding, that is also a part of our human interaction.

• You can’t (and don’t want to) banish your reactive impulses of anger, fear, or pain. However, when your instinctive responses are creating difficulty, such as when they lead to a cycle of compulsive behavior, it is helpful to learn how to work with these impulses effectively.

• You can learn to build your capacity for choice and decision making in ways that override your instant and instinctive impulses. Once you have taken the very important step of becoming consciously aware of your automatic response, you have the opportunity to make a conscious choice about how to respond.

• The basic steps of using the thinking brain to evaluate and work with the rush of your biological impulses of anger, fear, and pain are:

1. Recognize your instinctive response for what it is.

2. Allow yourself to experience the feeling without indulging or repressing.

3. From this place of inner vulnerability, choose to take action or not.

Looking Forward

In
Chapter 8
, we will begin the investigation of how the capacity to work with your strong feelings and emotions can aid you in deepening your relationship by developing the skill of undefended honesty.

CHAPTER 8

Undefended Honesty

Working with couples who have faced the challenge of rebuilding a relationship that has been injured by sex addiction, we have found a common denominator among those couples who are able to build an even stronger and deeper relationship. These individuals have built their skill and capacity for what we refer to as undefended honesty. This is an honesty that builds on the truth that has been revealed in the disclosure of the sexually compulsive behavior. This kind of honesty is not easy or natural to do, nor is it necessarily easy or natural to receive. But these skills can be developed. This chapter provides a roadmap of the land of undefended honesty.

The partner who has acted out sexually (in whatever way) needs to build his skill at telling the truth about his compulsive behavior. As mentioned earlier, this can be difficult due to the shame factor. Shame leads to the desire to cover up, which leads to lying—outright false statements and lies of omission.

Let the challenge of this difficulty motivate you to find ways to know what you are thinking and feeling and to communicate those thoughts and feelings more effectively. The partner of the sexually compulsive individual also benefits from building her skills of undefended honesty. As the partner of someone who is acting out sexually, she may fall into the trap of focusing on remedying her partner’s compulsion to the detriment of her own wishes and desires. Even though this urge to rescue her partner may arise from a noble motivation, it does not work—for either party involved.

A relationship is a meeting of two partners who can support themselves and provide support for each other. If you do not take care of yourself first, you will not be able to be useful to anyone else. This is not a selfish stance, but a compassionate one. In this chapter, we are encouraging you to take care of yourself and your relationship by deeply, vulnerably, and radically showing up and telling the truth. Again, this may be easy to say but challenging to do.

Why Accept the Challenge of Undefended Honesty?

The impulse to lie is generally an impulse to avoid pain or seek pleasure, to get away from what you don’t want or to get what you do want in any given moment. We all have this impulse; it’s part of our survival mechanism. We all know about the kid with his hand in the cookie jar telling his mom that he’s not taking any cookies—guilty and denying it simultaneously. The problem with denial and lying is that the first person to sense that you are not telling the truth is you.

Sometimes, not telling the truth is exactly what is required to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our community. We are not speaking here about distinctions regarding the morality of telling the truth or lying. We are pointing to the direct benefits you can receive from practicing undefended honesty. This level of honesty is necessary for your relationship with yourself and for your relationship with your partner. Ultimately, undefended honesty can become a cornerstone of rebuilding the trust in your relationship. But let’s start by investigating how undefended honesty is foundational in building internal compassion.

The Importance of Undefended Honesty for You

We have found that both partners benefit from investigating whatever it is they have been hiding from themselves. But the one person who needs your undefended honesty the most is you. Your mind, your being, longs for acceptance. To the extent that you’re denying, you’re not accepting. You may think you are protecting yourself or shielding yourself from having to look at what you have determined is “ugly.” The denial of that not-so-pretty part of yourself is a seed of self-hatred. You can’t have compassion for something while denying that it exists. The denial that something you are thinking and feeling is not there doesn’t make it not there. If an elephant is charging at you, you can close your eyes, but the elephant is still going to run you down.

We have all been taught in one way or another that some of what we think and feel is unacceptable. By believing that, we deny ourselves the direct experience of who we are—in effect, we lie to ourselves.