A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (19 page)

We recognize that you may feel reticent to let your partner know about a change in your plans or a lapse in awareness because of the potential initial unhappy reaction. This will be the moment to apply your growing capacities to bear uncomfortable feelings or emotions (as we discussed in
Chapter 7
) in relationship to your partner’s reaction.

Revelatory Truth Telling

Telling the truth to another about your “shortcomings” is another form of simple truth telling that can be difficult to do. In the case of your compulsive urges, it means telling the truth about the ways you feel out of control, about the urges you have to soothe yourself with behaviors that ultimately do not serve you—the ways that you sell out on your long-term objectives for momentary relief.

In the bigger picture, it is easier to tell the truth than to lie. Yes, the impulse to protect, to lie, to fabricate, is more instinctive, but think about it. Lying requires much more calculating and strategizing in the long run. Telling the truth is simplicity at its most basic. Ultimately, it requires less energy. Even if you can only tell a small relative truth in the moment about what you are experiencing, you are closer to the seeds of your hidden unconscious motivations that are causing trouble in your life. It is not possible to hold compassion for yourself for something that you are denying even exists. For this reason alone, undefended honesty is vital to living a freer life.

Let’s revisit the marshmallow experiment that we looked at in
Chapter 7
. A group of four- to six-year-olds was asked to resist eating a marshmallow that was sitting right in front of them. The children knew that if they could manage to resist eating that one marshmallow, they would get two marshmallows when the experimenter returned about fifteen minutes later. It turned out that the kids who could resist, those that had a higher capacity for delayed gratification, grew into adults who had more fulfilling lives.

Undefended honesty is a tool that is helpful in building your capacity for delayed gratification. Just telling the truth about what you are experiencing, especially if it is something you have the impulse to hide, takes all that energy you are using to protect yourself away from the defense mechanism and allows you to use that energy to delay gratification. When working with instinctive mechanisms, you need all the energy, attention, and internal aid you can muster.

Show Up and Tell the Truth

What else can you do while you are in the process of healing your addictive behaviors? Don’t be afraid to tell your feelings and fears. Don’t be afraid to confess your addictive thoughts. Don’t be afraid to admit to fear, anger, and pain, even if you judge them to be the response of a child. Telling the truth leads you to authentic loving kindness. As George tells his clients, “What else can you do but tell the truth? You could buy her a diamond, but trust me, it’s been done before and it doesn’t work. Or at least not for very long.”

William Tells the Truth

William and Betsy had been dating for about a year. William had been divorced for about ten years. His former wife finally had given up on the marriage to William because he had not been able to stop masturbating to Internet porn. The end of that marriage really got William’s attention, and he had sought counseling for what he discovered were his fears of being intimate with a woman. He had begun to see how his addiction to porn was just a cover for his fears. He had come to understand that masturbating to porn was not intimate, was not connected, and he yearned for connection with a real woman. He wanted to be able to let down his defenses of perfection.

In this new relationship, he wanted to be able to connect with Betsy as the partner and equal he knew her to be. In the year they had been together, William’s connection with Betsy had deepened as he slowly dissolved his fears of being run over by a woman if he allowed himself to be seen as imperfect. He had shared with her how he still had times when he felt stressed and wanted to relieve himself by going to the Internet and finding his favorite type of porn. He also told her how lucky he felt to be with a woman who was willing to share her shortcomings with him and with whom he was able to share.

One evening, William and Betsy chose to go to William’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Walking inside, they were greeted by a new hostess, who was young, blonde, and a little flirty. After William and Betsy sat down and began to peruse the menus, William took a long breath and asked Betsy if he could tell her something that was hard for him to talk about. Betsy took a long breath, too, then put her menu down.

William reached across the table and took Betsy’s fingertips in his hands. “I want to share something with you, but please first know how deeply committed I am to being in this relationship with you. This relationship with you is very important to me.” He shared with her the attraction he had felt for the hostess as she tossed her hair when she showed them to their table. He was even able to share that the hostess had the look of the young women he used to prefer for his porn fantasies. Finally, he was able to tell Betsy that even though he had had this familiar hit of attraction, he did not want his old compulsion to get in the way of what he wanted even more—the closeness and safety he felt with Betsy.

William’s words were not easy for Betsy to hear, but she felt strangely empowered by the way William had so undefendedly spoken the truth. She talked to him about what it was like for her to feel that she needed to compete for his attention. She told William that she had noticed the hostess catch his eye, and she appreciated him for “telling” on himself. She noted that his sharing of the truth actually allowed her to trust him more deeply.

William was then able to speak even more skillfully and tell Betsy that he understood how bad it must feel to be compared to other women. He admitted that he did not want to hurt her in this way. He said he was sorry. At least for that moment, he had no need to defend or protect his image.

The victory of William and Betsy’s moment in the Chinese restaurant was born of William’s willingness to tell the truth, to show his imperfection, as well as his willingness to risk Betsy’s rejection of him because he was revealing something that he knew might cause her to feel hurt or angry with him. At the same time, Betsy was also able to openly experience and share her truth about how William’s actions created feelings of inferiority for her. As a result, William and Betsy were both able to be heroes in this story.

Truth Telling Is Not a License, but a Responsibility

Telling the truth in an undefended way is a powerful tool, and, like any powerful tool, it can be misused. We are not encouraging anyone to use telling the truth as an excuse to speak in a hurtful way. Undefended truth telling should be guided by vulnerability. If you are angry, telling the truth means finding the hurt or fear underneath the anger and revealing it. In a moment of anger, it is possible that the best you can do is to say, “I’m too angry to speak right now.” We are not saying there is anything wrong with feeling anger; it is an important and powerful internal signal. But with your beloved partner, you have the opportunity to ultimately undefendedly tell the truth of the fear or hurt that is hiding behind the immediate impulse of anger.

Tolerating the Imperfections

Telling the truth about your perceived imperfections is one of the steppingstones to deepening commitment and safety in your relationship. When you initially come together in a relationship, generally you create an idealized image of your partner. You overlook and smooth over the imperfections. Love seems to have a magical power of allowing you to put yourself into a trance of not noticing. As you spend more time with your partner, his or her imperfections can become painfully obvious. This is often a surprise.

After the disclosure or discovery of sexually compulsive behavior, you can deepen your relationship by allowing the disclosure of this imperfection to lead to the revelation of other imperfections. It is possible to allow this particular cascade of trouble, this tumble from whatever idealization you had of your partner, to lead to a greater capacity to tolerate imperfection in both your partner and yourself. It is possible to begin to build a team, to create a true partnership, that has the capacity to be tender with imperfection. This capacity for tenderness, for being able to tolerate the feelings stirred by imperfections (yours and your partner’s), can begin to build the groundwork for greater intimacy.

In
Chapter 9
, we will investigate how a collision with truth can lead to an investigation of the past. Such a truthful uncovering is only possible once the idealizations have begun to crumble, once the capacity and willingness to undefendedly tell the truth has been opened.

Exercise: Making a Commitment to Each Other

At the end of
Chapter 2
, we asked each of you to make a commitment to yourselves. Now that you have begun to reveal yourselves to each other in a new way, now that you are beginning to build the skills of communicating with each other in an undefendedly honest way, you are ready to make a new kind of commitment to each other. This is a commitment between two individuals who have begun to strip away the masks of idealization. You may have experienced moments of being painfully imperfect. This has opened a doorway to making a commitment based on knowing more clearly what you are signing up for in your relationship.

This new commitment to each other can be whatever you as a couple now know is right for your partnership. We encourage you to word this fresh commitment as simply as possible. Write the words as a team. One of you may be the better wordsmith, but as a team, the spirit of what you hold for each other will now become apparent through the practice of undefended honesty.

When you have chosen the commitment you would like to make to each other, create a ceremony to share this promise. Buy two flowers to exchange. Set aside an evening to share a meal, to exchange the flowers, and to exchange this new and sacred promise.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• The first person who needs your undefended honesty is you. It is not possible to hold compassion for yourself for something you are denying even exists. For this reason alone, undefended honesty is vital to living a freer life.

• Undefended, rigorous honesty is at the core of working with compulsive behavior. It is also the key to creating a foundation for rebuilding trust inside your relationship.

• Undefended honesty begins by telling the truth in small ways, by simply following through on doing what you say you are going to do.

• Telling the truth about your perceived imperfections is one of the steppingstones to deepening commitment and safety in your relationship.

• It is the journey of a hero to be willing to tell the truth undefendedly—to expose your flaws, to lay your cards on the table, to resist the impulse to defend and protect by telling a lie, or otherwise attempting to hide.

Looking Forward

In
Chapter 9
, we will take a tour into your past to see if there may be seeds planted in your childhood that are causing you to respond in ways that are not serving you anymore. We will share some common patterns that may help you unravel these unseen influences.

CHAPTER 9

Facing the Past: Taking a Sobering Look at How You Got Here

An issue with sexual compulsivity has caused a disruption in your relationship. If you’ve made it this far, the sexually compulsive partner has admitted to the problem and is working to find ways to replace the impulse for compulsive sexual behavior with the desire for intimacy and connected sex. If truth telling and willingness are here, as a couple, you now have a lot of ground to stand on. This is something to celebrate—you now have the possibility to deepen your relationship. Now is the time to explore more deeply how your past is influencing your partnership and to discover what it will take to move this relationship out of crisis mode and onto a path not only of repair but of deepening intimacy.

A relationship is a dance in which the movements of one partner influence the movements of the other. We have yet to see a troubled relationship where one person is totally the “good” party and the other is “bad.” This is because both partners bring their past into the union and none of us received perfect training in how to be in a relationship.

That is why it can be helpful for each of you to question: “How did I get here?” “What is this relationship for me?” “How is my partner mirroring me and how am I mirroring my partner?”

Your Relationship Is a System

Your relationship has a life of its own. As a couple, you are both part of the system. The healing of difficulties will come at least partially through this relationship system, through the dynamics of the two of you together. As long as you both have chosen to stay in the relationship, then each partner is fully responsible for those dynamics. It’s important to look at the system of the couple, and how the dynamics of the partnership are playing out in your particular challenges.