A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (18 page)

In
Chapter 7
, we investigated the mechanism of directly experiencing the information arising from our internal impulses— even the negative or painful feelings and emotions. It is one thing to work with a painful feeling or emotion because we are directly aware of it. It is quite another to allow ourselves to uncover thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we don’t want to have to admit exist. It requires a leap of courage to look to thoughts, feelings, and emotions that have been labeled “do not enter” or “do not disturb”—the ones that we have learned good boys or good girls do not think or feel.

We are not suggesting indulgence of your impulses or acting anything out. We are merely pointing to the compassionate act of telling the truth to yourself, to ceasing the judgment that does not allow you to admit (at least to yourself) what you are actually thinking and feeling.

Recall any instance in your life in which you were truly honest with yourself (even if you did not like what you found) and we suspect you will remember a moment of relief. That experience of relief is the balm of compassion that comes with letting go of the defense. For example, imagine holding your hand in a tight fist until it begins to ache, then allowing your hand to open. There is a relief in the act of simply letting go.

In addition to the sense of liberation you will feel, telling the undefended truth begins to strip away a layer of defense. It can be painful to give up your armor, but it is also painful to walk around with all that weight of protection. It can feel as if admitting to something that you feel shame about would be the last thing in the world you want to do. It may seem like walking off a ledge. But there is relief in the freefall of telling the truth.

You do not necessarily need to share the truth you tell to yourself with anyone else; the power of simply telling the truth internally provides relief from the pressure of the walled-up denial of the thoughts and feelings you learned were somehow unacceptable. Again, as we mentioned earlier, we aren’t advocating for the acting out of any feeling. We are talking about not indulging and not repressing. We are pointing to nakedly admitting to yourself what you (as a human with the reactions of a mind and body) are experiencing.

That letting go, that undefended honesty with yourself, builds your capacity to tell the truth to yourself again and again. It leads not only to greater compassion for yourself, but for everyone else as well. If you have greater compassion and acceptance for yourself, you can extend that to others—and specifically to your relationship with your intimate partner.

Charlie Finally Tells the Truth to Himself

Charlie had a problem with his temper. In his initial work with us, he began to see how for years of his life he had chosen to live alone, masturbating while looking at porn rather than risk being in a relationship with a live, flesh-and-blood woman who might disappoint him and whom he might disappoint. He eventually met and married a woman who ran her own small business as a graphic designer, but their relationship was troubled. Charlie would fly into a rage and scream at his wife when he felt she was unavailable to him or when he felt she was disapproving.

His wife would periodically stay up at night working on her graphic design projects, particularly when she had a big project with an imminent deadline. When Charlie would wake up in the night and find that his wife was not in bed with him, he would often feel an instant sense of abandonment. And then, just as quickly, he would begin his line of reasoning about how his wife was working too much, was irresponsible in her time management, how she did not care for him, and how he could not stand to remain in a marriage with someone who really did not care for him. He would then come into the room where his wife was working away and begin to berate her for being a bad wife. As you can imagine, these conversations did not go very well.

Finally, one night Charlie woke up and watched himself begin to feel those old familiar feelings of abandonment, of not being cared for. He had investigated his history enough to recognize that these feelings were the same feelings he had felt when he came home from school and found his mother in the dining room with one of her friends, drinking, and oblivious to the fact that he had even walked in the door. In the moment of that remembering, he could tell the truth to himself about where these feelings were coming from. He let the content of those thoughts of abandonment melt like butter in the hot sun. That was step one. And a very good first step. He began to tell the undefended truth to himself. He recognized that he was telling himself a story of abandonment. This did not stop his experience of abandonment, of course. The story, the feelings, were still coming to get him. But he did something he had never done before. Instead of walking into the room where his wife was working and yelling at her, he walked into the room and vulnerably told her the undefended truth.

It was hard for him as a grown man to show his wife that he was having the experience of a young boy and actually just wanted comfort. He had to override the impulse he was having that told him that if he talked about these feelings, if he revealed them, that he would be crushed, and that he would be judged as childish and inferior.

For as long as he could remember, he had not allowed these feelings to see the light of day. To do so would have meant admitting to himself that he was weak. These thoughts and feelings seemed so ugly and selfish. He could remember being told to “be a big boy.” He did not want to have needs, and if he did, he certainly did not want them showing because that would mean that he was deficient. So he had lashed out instead. He had felt like if he just acted as if he was the boss, the man, that he could demand what he needed.

His feelings were so tender and embarrassing to him that the best he could do was walk into the room where his wife was working and say, “I’m feeling panicky and angry. I want to blame you. I can’t see straight in this moment. Help.” As you can probably imagine, this undefended moment of truth telling elicited an entirely different response from his wife than the angry outbursts of accusation. She stopped what she was doing and said, “Come here. Tell me what is going on.” They sat down on the sofa and he put his head on her shoulder. She tenderly rubbed his head while he allowed himself to experience the pain of feeling so utterly unloved. His wife was not fixing this pain for him, but she was helping him create an environment where he could tell the truth about it in an undefended way. This was not the last time Charlie woke up in the night with a sense of abandonment, but the spell of defense had been broken by his undefended honesty.

Working with Compulsive Behaviors

As we discussed in
Chapter 6
, the addictive cycle is fueled by the despair of shame. You may have a natural knee-jerk, lie-telling response to avoid the hopeless feeling of shame. You may tell yourself you do not really feel out of control and powerless, when actually you do. This lying to yourself feeds the addictive cycle of: 1) a preoccupation with the perceived need; 2) a routine that leads up to the compulsive behavior; 3) engaging in the compulsive behavior; and finally, 4) the despair of shame that leads back to the beginning of the cycle with further preoccupation with the perceived need.

We have found that undefended, rigorous honesty is at the core of working with any type of compulsive behavior. If you look closely, you will discover that honesty opens the door to overcoming compulsion or addiction. Some have even dubbed honesty with oneself as the “Step Zero” of the Twelve Steps (see
Chapter 11
). That’s how fundamental honesty is in meeting compulsivity. Being honest with yourself is the foundation, the key to working with the addictive cycle. It is also the key to working with shame and blame, to accepting your strong feelings and emotions, and to creating a foundation for rebuilding your relationship.

Honesty for Your Relationship

In order to rebuild your relationship, you need to rebuild trust. In order to rebuild trust, you must commit to undefended honesty. In a relationship with another, each time you experience honesty from your partner (and time confirms that your partner has indeed told the truth), your trust grows. In the absence of honesty—in fact, in the absence of information or the lie of omission—the partner who has experienced being lied to will fill in the blanks with the imagination of past actions based on history. If the past history includes deception and betrayal, that is what she will use to fill in the blanks.

Your relationship has its own life. There are the two partners, and then there is also the combined energy of the partners. As in the synergist wisdom that speaks to the sum being greater than the individual parts, the combination of the wisdom of both partners can create a knowingness that would otherwise not be available. This new intelligence is born through meeting difficulty and is fostered by the capacity for undefended truth telling. A key to overcoming a time of crisis in a relationship is for both partners to have the willingness to tell the truth (at least to themselves) about whatever it is they are thinking, feeling, perceiving. This can be tricky because, as mentioned earlier, we can hide the truth from ourselves about the parts of us that we feel are wrong, bad, or otherwise unacceptable. As discussed in
Chapter 6
, it is much easier to move into blaming your partner than to stir the monster of internal shame.

Being honest with your partner can actually show how much you care about him or her. The act of undefended and vulnerable sharing with your beloved is like exposing a precious and tender part of yourself. Intimacy invites the sharing of the good in you so your partner can also enjoy it. Exposing your flaws, your “bad” parts, can be a gift, too, because, by not hiding them, they will not be hidden deceptions waiting to come out later to create chaos and hurt. It is the journey of a hero to expose your flaws, to lay your cards on the table, to resist the impulse to defend and protect by telling a lie or attempting to hide.

Making a Safe Place for the Truth

We’ve all had moments of listening to someone’s explanations and having a sense that the person was not being truthful or, perhaps, not fully truthful. In courtroom scenes, we hear the words, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But what can you do if your spouse is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

What you don’t want to do is be a prosecutor, a judge, or a jury. That is not your role. What you can do is try to make it safe for your partner to tell the truth. The person on the witness stand in a legal drama who does not tell the whole truth is typically afraid of something, such as revealing guilt. The intention behind not telling the truth is often fear.

How can you make it safer and less fearful for your partner to tell the truth? One way you can do that is by being clear that your job is not to prove that they are lying or not telling the whole truth. Your job is to make it safe for your partner to admit the truth. To that end, your partner needs to believe that you want to hear the truth, not as an indictment, but for the purposes of building trust in the relationship.

When you are open and vulnerable, and you allow the other person to express himself or herself in an open and vulnerable way, relationship trust can grow. We recognize that you may feel that, given what has previously occurred regarding sexually compulsive behavior, trust in the relationship may seem ill advised and, if even possible, thousands of miles away from where you are now. However, it is possible; it is recommended. In fact, sharing truths creates intimacy. You have probably had a direct experience of this when someone trusted you enough to tell you a personal secret.

How to Work with Undefended Honesty

We all have negative qualities. These negative qualities are also often referred to as the “shadow.” They are the qualities you try to keep out of the light of awareness, and certainly out of sight of your beloved partner.

A folktale tells of a man so frightened by his own shadow that he tries to run away from it. He believes that if only he could leave it behind, he would be happy. He grows increasingly distressed because, no matter how fast he runs, his shadow never once falls behind. Not about to give up, he runs faster and faster until finally he drops dead of exhaustion. It never occurred to him to stop running, to simply look over his shoulder and see that his shadow was only his body blocking the light. If he had stopped and looked back for even an instant, he would have seen the true nature of his own shadow.

This is not to suggest that your negative thoughts and feelings will vanish if you admit them to yourself. But seeing your thoughts and feelings for what they are lessens their power to scare you. What you can finally vanish is that overpowering obsession with the need to run, to hide, to cover up. You can stop running and rest in the shade of telling the truth.

Simple Truth Telling

Undefended honesty begins by telling the truth in small ways, by simply following through on doing what you say you are going to do. If you find you will not be able to do what you have said, you then tell the truth about that. Know that you will make mistakes. You may lose track of time or get distracted, but your intention can be to tell the truth in this simple way.

For example, if you say you are going to take out the trash on Sunday evening, take out the trash before you go to bed on Sunday. If you say you are going to be home at 7:00, get home by 7:00. If you find you have more work than you expected or you are stuck in traffic, call and let your partner know that circumstances have changed. Or if you suddenly look at the clock and see that you have gotten carried away with your work and will not be able to get home by 7:00, call your partner immediately and let him or her know. Apologize.