Sexual Addiction

Forward Movement Publications in Cincinnati published a pamphlet I was asked to write explaining sexual addiction to the average Christian reader.  You may read part of it here by clicking on Pamphlet.

In 2005, I completed two weeks of training in Arizona conducted in person by Dr. Patrick Carnes.  The 45 in my class were fortunate to be the last group of trainees to be  instructed from start to finish solely by Dr. Carnes in person.  The author of some dozen books in this field, he is universally acknowledged as the founder of the sexual addiction movement, and as its chief expert therapist, researcher, and trainer.  I completed my 30 required hours of post-training supervision, from Judith Matheny, LCSW, LMFT, CSAT, also trained by Dr. Carnes.  In 2006, I became only the third CSAT in KY, and the first male.

I have provided training to those certified for treating sex offenders.  I was hired to address a conference in 2001 given by the Sex Offender Risk Assessment Advisory Board in Louisville.  

I am trained to do task-oriented therapy.  In this I teach my clients why and how to perform the thirty tasks that research has shown to produce recovery that is sober, serene, and lasting.  These tasks are consistent with and yet go well beyond the traditional twelve steps of recovery.  They have been designed to help the addict go through the following phases of recovery:  

    Learning about addictions and denial

    Joining a community of recovering people and principles

    Limiting damage and establishing sobriety

    Creating a healthy, balanced lifestyle

    Restoring broken family relationships

Notice in the outline below there is not a time frame associated with each phase.  The amount of time it takes to work through these tasks depends upon the client's choices, effort, and support.  When recovery is embraced this way, the feelings of being comfortable with personal recovery and marital intimacy are likely to continue to get better throughout the person's lifetime.  Another way to outline the process and show its alignment with the 12 steps would look like this:  

PHASES OF RECOVERY OUTLINE  

PHASE 0                    Learning about addictions and denial

Purpose:  To decide whether to start on this journey of recovery with me.  Procedures:  Talking about what has happened, reviewing the options, managing the current crisis, and learning to trust me.  

PHASE 1                  Joining a community of recovering people and principles

Purpose:  To get the big picture, give up illusion of self-control, choose a new life.  Procedures:  Coming out of denial about reality, understanding how addictions work, committing to recovery, and surrendering to the process:  this is often done in 40 days with a workbook

 PHASE 2                 Limiting damage and establishing sobriety

 Purpose:  To stop the habit, learn to handle stress, and reach out to others for help.  Procedures:  Limiting the damage, establishing sobriety, guarding physical health, and joining the 12-step community:  can be done as quickly as 90 days with a workbook

PHASE 3                  Creating a healthy, balanced lifestyle

Purpose:  To start rebuilding your personal life, get over the humps of greatest pain and highest risk for relapse.   Procedures:  Taking inventory, making amends, examining past trauma, abuse, and neglect to get healing; getting through resentment, fear, shame, grief, despair, and loneliness to find serenity, acceptance, and forgiveness

PHASE 4                  Restoring broken family relationships

Purpose:  To rebuild all your relationships.   Procedures:  Admit the truth to spouse/lover, children, and family members (to the extent they need it); decide who’ll join your new recovering family   

Prodigal Sons:  The Journey Home

           The hallmarks of addiction are:  failed efforts to control or stop the addiction, withdrawal pains, obsessive thoughts about the habit, increasing consumption, continued addictive behavior despite huge costs/problems from doing so, and self-deception about the causes and effects of the addictive behavior.

            A very common cause and effect of addictions are their polar opposites:  compulsive habits of avoidance (aversions, or “anorexias”).  The causes and effects of these aversive disorders are remarkably similar to those for addictions:  both addicts and anorexics were often abused, neglected, or traumatized in their youth; exposed to addictions and enabling co-addicts in their families; and raised in homes that had way too much discipline or affection, or way too little.

            For sex addicts, the best course of treatment is very structured and homework-intensive, so it has a time frame built into it.  It is multi-dimensional, involving 12-step recovery, individual and ideally group counseling, a regimen of physical health, your family (if they will participate), and for Christians, prayer, church and Bible study.  It reflects a structure of 30 tasks that is now emerging from research as the model standard for all addiction treatment programs.  

        I used to include a time line in this outline, but that was designed for hard core addicts who needed an intensive outpatient alternative for residential treatment.  The amount of time to work through these phases, and the number of tasks that will need to be written out vs. discussed, will depend on the severity of your problem, and that really can't be known until the end of the second phase of treatment when you're out of denial.  

        Sexual addiction is not a black and white concept, as if you're either addicted or you're not.  It's more like as infectious disease, and regarding the lust virus, you need to ask yourself, "How bad a case do I have?  How much of my system is infected?  How much damage has it done to my mind, heart, calendar, budget, career, faith, self-esteem, marriage?"  The more extensive the damage, the more extensive the treatment and recovery you'll need to get free of its grip.

        The stages of treatment outlined above are very useful, in that they come in a logical order.  Though you are working on all the issues to some extent all the time, it is best to keep your primary focus on one aspect of recovery at a time.  The later phases require building on the foundation of the earlier.

        Note that many addicts want to put the last phase first, the fix their marriage and family life, and then establish victory over their bad habits.  This effectively would make the spouse a substitute addiction, and it wouldn't work for either of you.  Full restoration of marital intimacy can only come in the final stage of treatment.  

            Because addicts are usually (1) pretty unhappy with their lives due to their addiction, (2) quite injured and misled from their childhood experiences, (3) damaged from trauma, (4) addicted to more than one type of substance or behavior, (5) suffering from losses that haven’t been grieved, and (6) unaware of the existence or relevance of these five things, addicts can’t effectively plan their own treatment.  So this course doesn’t have many optional features.  It works if you work it, and you’re either on board or you’re not. But rest assured that my goal is to phase regular sessions with me out of your life, and turn you over to the guidance, support and accountability of fellow believers and recovering 12-steppers.  

            Addicts are much like the prodigal son, codependents are much like the elder brother, and recovery is much like the father who comes running with open arms.  I am like a fellow traveler who has walked the road of recovery himself, and I am here to lead you to a new home life that is better than you could have ever imagined.

BULLETS OF SEX ADDICTION AND RECOVERY

DSB's:  Dysfunctional Sexual Behaviors may include:  masturbation, pornography, flirting, eyeballing, massage, cheating, chatting, phone sex, role exploitation, buying, selling and trading sex, pain exchange, 800 #s, anonymous (bathroom/park) sex, fetishes, voyeurism, exposing yourself, webcam exposures, and varieties of shutting down:  impotence, anorexia, avoidance of marital love & sex. 

Ten Addictive Signs:  impulse control, broken plans, can't quit, preoccupation (obsession), loss of needed time/money, irresponsibility, social fallout, social dropout, behavioral escalation (tolerance), withdrawal symptoms (mood changes).  3 of these 10 and it's an official addiction. 

Cyberporn seems accessible (but so are you to it!), affordable (it is at first, but not for long!), and anonymous (sure at first, but hey, not for long!).

 Use the right terminology:  lover = hater, affair = trap, porn = poison, (masturbation) = idolatry, fantasy = adultery, "I didn't mean/enjoy it" = minimizing, "I can control it" = denial, ""I wanted to because" = blame-shifting.

Addictions are fueled by (and produce!) trauma/fear, shame, aversions, , and enablers, so learn to break those cycles.  These are both triggers and bullets.  

Bondage will in slow, creepy, one-at-a-time-so-you-don't-really-notice speed also consume your:  mind, freedom, dignity (heart), wife, kids, career, faith, health, and then your life.

Bondage will take from your wife:  her trust in you, respect for you, feeling safe with you, desire for you, mental focus during sex, resistance to reading your mind and taking your inventory, ability to relax, body image, confidence in her future, and all the fruits of the spirit:  faith, hope, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, self-control.

Recovery/Repentance  involves:  people and principles, prayer and Bible study, meetings, readings, sponsors, accountability partners, phone calls, working the steps: admitting powerlessness and unmanageability, surrendering to God, taking inventory, giving character defects to God, making amends, admitting when we're wrong, prayer, service work, decompartmentalizing.

Recovery/Repentance  brings:  restoring the free-flowing of all things consumed above, and what we are all made to crave above all else in this life:  intimacy with God, spouse, self, children and buddies in recovery.  You doubt me?  What good is anything else without these, without loved ones to share it with?  How deep could your joy be, and how long could it last if you don't give it away? 

BIBLICAL INSIGHTS ON SEXUAL SIN

             The Bible gives in rich detail how life unfolds for people who fall into sexual sin.  It was pure visual seduction for David when he laid eyes on his neighbor’s wife Bathsheba  (2Sam 11).  His heart followed his eyes in violating the 10^th commandment, and in short order that act stimulated violations of the 9^th (lying), 8^th (stealing), 7^th (adultery), and when these couldn’t be covered up, he went on and broke the 6^th by murdering her husband.  Previously a man of great virtue, he quickly broke half the ten commandments, and it all started with his eyes.  For her infidelity, Bathsheba  may have gotten a palatial upgrade on her residence, but she had to endure her lover’s murder of her dear husband, feel his remorse expressed publicly in the hit song of its day (Psalm 51), and then like so many adulterers in therapy afterwards, watch helplessly as her children and step-children lived out the generational after-effects over the years to come:  rape, incest, violence, job loss, family disintegration, etc.

            In Genesis 39, we see a strong example of Joseph resisting seduction by Potiphar’s wife, going to jail for it, and then having a wonderful life restored to him because of his obedience.  Hosea gives us a compassionate look into the forgiving heart of God through a broken-hearted victim of his wife Gomer’s infidelity and chronic bondage to sex.  The father of the prodigal son is another (Luke 15).

            We see many successful lives turned around through repentance, confession, and obedient forsaking of sexual sin.  David shows us the way in Psalm 51, and several women in Jesus’ life followed it -- the one at the well in John 4, the one weeping for the joy of her forgiveness and cleansing at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7), and the one caught in the act of adultery, about to be stoned for it (John 8).  From that last example, Paul Tournier in Guilt and Grace teaches both perpetrators and victims that we all need a healthy amount of guilt about our sin, not too much like the woman had, and not too little like the Pharisees had.  Godly sorrow for sin is shown in 2Cor 7: 8-11, which joins Psalm 51 as excellent roadmaps to repentance and restoration for the sexual sinner.  Brokenness will show in a full confession, a broken open heart, and behavior change.

            To prevent or to break bondage to sexual sin, it is necessary to guard what comes into the mind  (Phil 4:8) and heart (Pr 4:23), through the eyes (Mt 5:28-9), through what we touch (v.30), so that unclean acts do not come out from our bodies (Mt 15:18-19), so that we and others are not perverted and ruined by the words coming out of our mouths (James 5:5-6), or what we join our souls to as we unite in a sexual embrace (1Cor 6:15-20).  We find the strength to do all this from our God, embodied in the Holy Spirit (John 14-16) poured out through the church/fellowship of believers (Eph 2:18-21, 4:4-6), the word of God (Heb 4:12-13, 2Tim 3:16-17), friends (John 15:15), people we help (Mt 25:37-40), and small support groups (Mt 18:20).  Computer porn and cheat chat smells badly of  “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1Jo2:16).

            The “word of God” can also be found in Christian writings for the perpetrators and victims of sexual sin.  Though not specifically Christian, Pat Carnes bases his hope on the Biblically inspired 12-step program.  Doug Weiss, Mark Laaser[1] and Harry Schaumburg[2] are Biblically oriented Christian psychologists who are themselves recovering from sex addiction.  They show how sexual infidelity and pornography are twisted perversions of our spiritual hunger for God.  Help Online:

www.sexaddict.com   Doug Weiss’ resources; www.christians-in-recovery.com  is a great website

www.sa.org     domain for Sexaholics Anonymous, the most biblical of the 12-step programs