Addiction, Recovery, Sex Addiction

Ending Denial and Facing the Grind of Addiction

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aa-wreckedlifeEveryone agrees that whatever addiction you have, it starts out fun. Whether it’s the great taste and comfort of food, the mellowness or rush from a drug, or the excitement and stimulation of something like gambling or sex … there’s a reason we turn to it, and come back to it again and again. It’s exciting, it satiates a desire, and it feels good.

But at some point — usually much earlier than we realize — it turns on us.

Instead of controlling it, it controls us. We find ourselves going back to it even though we promised ourselves we wouldn’t, and the limits we set keep getting violated.

One of my favorite books this year is “Out of the Wreck I Rise,” by Niel Steinberg and Sara Bader. It is essentially a compendium of quotations by literary figures about addiction and recovery. Some are long, some are short … almost all of them are really really good. Not only that, Steinberg and Bader’s writing — which comes in the form of extended introductions for each topical chapter — is interesting and helpful too. Listen to what they have to say about our denial in addiction, and the crucial step of realizing it’s out of control and no longer “fun”:

Fierce denial is common, and so a jarring incident, or, more likely a series of escalating incidents, is usually required before change is contemplated. Those confronting their addiction begin by addressing the crisis and, only then, are forced to understand the routine that led to it. The beginning of a new life is the gradual realization — the honesty emphasized in AA — that there is a sameness to addiction, a dreariness, a drudgery. It is the identical thing happening over and over again, every day, with only one avenue of escape, one possibility of change, an option that, viewed by a person sunk in the routine of dependence, at first seems incredible, unimaginable, ridiculous.

That first step — whether taken on your own or pushed to it by somebody else — is recognizing that you aren’t doing this of your own will. It’s a compulsion. You don’t think using your substance is fun because it’s fun to be constantly scourged with the need for drink or drugs (or sex). You think it’s fun because it’s what you do all the time and you’re secretly terrified at the thought of not doing it, of enduring the awful hunger you suffer when you stop even briefly. It’s like a bad job that you keep telling yourself you must like, because you go there every day and it’s all you’ve got.

Addiction is not a bad choice. It’s an obsession: grinding, dictatorial, relentless. The great thing about recovery is that you don’t have to succumb to your addiction every day. You don’t have to spend your life doing this.

Recovery

Signs You Might be Rushing into a Relationship

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An important part of recovery from any addiction — and especially sexual addiction — is the establishment of healthy relationships. Sometimes this means healing and/or strengthening existing relationships. But sometimes our addiction has cost us relationships, and we need to establish new ones.

Today’s article, by guest writer Anne Loy, has some important wisdom for people in the process of establishing romantic relationships: don’t rush. Here’s Anne …

Sexual addiction interferes with our relationships, friendships and sometimes, even our profession. Those who have managed to start their journey to recovery by attending workshops and seminars and taken part in therapy, however, soon begin to feel more confident about pursuing something they may have always wanted deep in their hearts: a relationship based on trust, commitment and honesty.

While this is undoubtedly a laudable aim, it’s important people in recovery to ensure that they don’t rush into it. It’s difficult for relationships to flourish when we seek them out because of fear, insecurity or the need to evade loneliness. Without a healthy foundation, these relationships can soon become co-dependent. If you have met someone who attracts you physically, mentally and emotionally but you are afraid that you may be moving too fast, be on the lookout for the following signs that you may be replacing your addiction to sex, with an addiction to romance or romantic intrigue:

  • You are rushing in to ‘seal the deal’. If you find that it is very important to establish that your new interest is your ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend’, that it is vital to make it official when you have only been on a few dates, be wary. You could risk entering into a co-dependent relationship, especially if your love interest is also a little too keen on establishing the existence of a relationship. Try to take a more mindful approach to dating, simply enjoying spending significant moments together and trying not to plan out the future of your relationship it is not yet necessary. Try to avoiding using special occasions such as Valentine’s Day or a birthday, for instance, to propose marriage or to officially declare that you are a couple.
  • Your significant other quickly becomes the center of your life, despite the fact you may not know them well. To what extent do your core values and those of your love interest overlap? What interests do you share? What significant events, people and experiences have shaped them into who they are today? Before embarking on a big commitment, you need to be able to answer these questions with confidence. In the first few weeks (and even months) of getting to know someone, they may not have felt confident enough to share vital information and experiences with you. Give them time to do so at their pace.
  • You find that you are allowing your partner to cross boundaries. An important indicator that your relationship may be a co-dependent one is when your love interest or partner constantly crosses boundaries of respect or your personal limits, yet you allow them to continue to do so because you are scared of losing them. This type of relationship eventually burns both parties, so make sure that you assert yourself in a calm but secure way.
  • You’re starting to ignore family and friends. In the beginning stages of a relationship, it is normal to let other relationships slide ‘just a little bit’. In healthy relationships, however, this neglect is not prolonged and it does not seriously affect the quality of your other relationships. Try to think of life as comprising many ‘glasses’ – friends, family, relationships, hobbies, work, exercise – and make sure that none of these glasses are ever empty.
  • Your partner sees your relationship differently. If your love interest is not co-dependent, their opinion on the pace at which you are moving is of great value. If you find that you are not on the same page or they ask you take it a little slower, this does not mean that you cannot move forward. However, it is vital to give them the space they need, as well as the freedom to decide whether or not they see the future of your relationship in the same light.

If you do find that your fear of being alone is propelling you into a relationship and you decide to take some steps back, start working on making yourself happy, supporting yourself and being self-compassionate. Being single does mean being lonely; on the contrary, it can be an excellent time to work on your health and wellness, and on fostering meaningful friendships which do not necessarily revolve around romance or sex.

Meditations Remixed, Recovery

Being a real man in recovery

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how-to-be-a-manIt’s hard to be a healthy man in our culture today. What does it mean to be a “real man?” Or even to be a “good man?” There are the biological realities of being male … the unique brain structure and physiology (eg. the testosterone coursing through our veins). There are also the sociological realities of being male … the constructs and ideals about what a “real man” should be like.

In the process of recovering form any addiction — and especially sexual addiction — coming to terms with the needs of our soul is essential. And this means coming to understand and work with our emotional hurts and needs.

There’s a saying in AA: “You can take the alcohol out of the alcoholic, but you’re still left with the ‘ic.'” In other words, if you take the addictive substance or behavior away from someone without doing the work of deep change, you’re still going to have problems … (the “ick”). And getting at these deeper issues forces us to wade through emotions and experiences that might not seem “manly.”

But we’ve got to do this work. If manliness means being disconnected from our inner life, forget about manliness. That’s a recipe for disaster! The devotional book “Touchstones” has this say about “manliness” and recovery.

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more “manhood” to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.
–Alex Karras

In our culture, being a man often means being tough and not showing feelings. We realize in this life of recovery that those are silly and immature myths, even though we see them repeatedly on TV, on billboards, and in newspapers.

When we are told these things repeatedly, it makes an impact on us. So we need to hear from each other that this is not the way we wish to live. We don’t admire these attitudes, and we don’t believe the stories. Truly courageous men know themselves. They have been around enough to have depth to their souls, to let themselves love, and to feel the pain of life.

Today, I am grateful to know and share my feelings and to have genuine relationships with those I love.

Addiction, Meditations Remixed, Recovery

Recovery skill: being comfortable in your own skin

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11Cool_calm_and_collectedIn order to build an ongoing recovery, we need to establish and maintain emotional and spiritual well-being. If we are constantly experiencing life as a roller coaster, overwhelmed by the stresses and frustrations, we’re going to relapse. It’s as simple as that.

So the task of recovery is really three-fold. The first two are the ones that get the most attention, but the third is essential for the long haul:

  1. Do whatever you can to establish your sobriety. Stop using, so you can think and feel clearly, and work on what is driving the behavior.
  2. Do what you can to minimize the damage of your addiction, including coming to terms with the wreckage in relationships, vocation, and possibly physical health. For many people who’ve had a “bottoming out” crash, this is a huge task … for some fortunate few, there isn’t a lot of damage to undo in their external life, only internal.
  3. Do the work of increasing your resilience, finding healthy ways of coping with stress and nurturing yourself, and establishing a spiritual life that is honest and really works for you (ie. establishing emotional and spiritual well-being).

Unless we can start building a life for ourselves that works, a life that’s not dominated by constant stress, depression, and sense of deprivation, our resolve to live “clean and sober” won’t be enough to resist the pull of our old behavior. This is why we always say, “will power is not enough.” We need the steps, we need the group, we need inner healing … and we also need create a new life for ourselves that is full and rich enough that we don’t need to use in order to “manage” or be happy.

One of the facets of this is the capacity to be comfortable in our own skin. That is, to be comfortable with who we are; not filled with shame and self-loathing, and not desperately needing other people’s admiration or approval. Other people experience this as us having a sense of calm self-confidence, a self-assurance that is different — and much more attractive — than the narcissistic braggadocio that is sometimes mistaken for self-confidence.

The excerpt below come from the daily meditation book “The Promise of a New Day,” by Karen Casey and Martha Vanceburg. It talks about how we deal with other people, and it paints a picture of what life can be like in recovery, as we grow in our capacity to be comfortable in our own skin:

Equality is a state of mind. When we value our own self-worth, we are comfortable with the achievements and the well-being of our friends and associates. The symptoms of a punctured ego occur when we criticize others and make demands we don’t want to fulfill ourselves.

Most of us experience wavering self-confidence on occasion. It may haunt us when a big task faces us. Or it may visit us when we least expect it. It’s a facet of the human condition to sometimes lack self-assurance. At times we need to remember that life is purposeful, and the events involving us are by design.

Almost daily we’ll face situations we fear are more than we can handle, and we’ll hope to pass the task off to another. It’s well for us to remember that we’re never given a task for which we’re not prepared. Nor should we pass on to others those activities we need to experience personally if our growth is to be complete.

I must do my own growing today. If I ask others to do what I should do, I’ll not fulfill my part of life’s bargain.

Addiction, Leadership, Recovery, Uncategorized

What about pastors in recovery?

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RecoveryAnyone living in our culture today is vulnerable to addiction — including pastors. And anyone struggling with addiction needs recovery — including pastors. But recovery is hard for pastors; harder than it needs to be.

Recovery is hard for pastors for many reasons. Because of their position as spiritual leaders, pastors have a hard time admitting to problems in their lives, and reaching out for help. This is partly the result of pride, but it’s also the result of the system we have created in the church today. Pastors aren’t stupid: they realize that being too open about their problems — or open to the wrong people — could get them fired.

So they don’t get the help they need. And more often than not, when they do seek help, they do so in secret, and their fear and shame about discovery often hamper their recovery efforts.

Leadership Journal recently published a great article by Amy Simpson on Pastors in Recovery. She did a lot of research for this article, including reaching out to me, and I’m grateful to be included in the article. There is a lot of good stuff in this article!

Here are some good quotes:

Once an addiction is acknowledged and treated, another danger is naiveté. For churches that don’t understand the disease of addiction, it’s too easy to believe a course of treatment has cured the problem and everything can go “back to normal.”

There’s a tension between ministry expectations and what is necessary for ongoing recovery. “In ministry there’s so much pressure to smooth over one’s life story. But what recovery and what Christianity require are rigorous honesty.” It’s not easy for pastors to be honest about who they really are when their churches ask them to be something other than human.

Addiction lends itself to easy judgment, but it is not merely a moral issue. In fact, (Dale) Ryan says, addictions often start with a perfectionistic desire to do and be better. Seminaries are full of addicts in training, he claims, because seminaries are full of idealistic perfectionists. “Perfectionism leads to compulsive behaviors, and they don’t present themselves as problems initially because you get rewarded for them.”

Once again, here is link to the full article.

Addiction, Recovery, Spirituality

Gratitude: Take This Action Now to Speed Your Recovery

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gratitude1“In our daily lives, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but the gratefulness that makes us happy.” – Albert Clarke

Thanksgiving Day, 2015

As light is to darkness, so gratitude is to addiction. Gratitude chases away addiction. It’s hard for addiction to thrive in the presence of gratitude. While gratitude is not a magic cure-all, it functions like a deep breath of fresh air to the soul.

Whether or not you are reading this during the Thanksgiving Holiday, my invitation/challenge is the same: some time today or tomorrow (it seems to work best in early morning or later at night), sit down with your journal and write down ten to fifteen things you are grateful for. Be specific. I have more to say about this task, but before we get to that, listen to what Alan Cohen has to say about this:

“Gratitude, like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows, and the more power you have to use it on your behalf. If you do not practice gratefulness, its benefaction will go unnoticed, and your capacity to draw on its gifts will be diminished. To be grateful is to find blessings in everything. This is the most powerful attitude to adopt, for there are blessings in everything.” – Alan Cohen

As you think about the ten to fifteen things you are grateful for, be sure to list one or two things that have been hard … things that you would not have considered blessings at first. I will guess that you have had a few “blessings in disguise” this year. What are they? By thinking about the unfolding of your life in these terms, new perspectives can emerge that can really help your happiness — and your recovery.

gratitude2

“If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” – Harold Kushner

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.” – Helen Keller

I love that last quote by Helen Keller! Practicing gratitude, even in the midst of the difficult things in our lives, strengthens us. It helps us to learn contentment, a state of being that addiction robs us of.

So get out your pen and paper (or computer), and make the list. Maybe set a goal for making a list like this once a week, or several times a week. There was a time I did this every night. I did this for a period of several months. It was really helpful, but I found that doing it every night diminished its power. I think it works better if we do gratitude lists once a week or every few days. If you haven’t been doing this regularly … please start! It will change your life.

“Gratitude is a form of wisdom. It is patient, loving, hopeful, and rigorously honest. It denies nothing, and it overlooks nothing. It looks reality full in the face and says, ‘This is true, this is me, this is my situation, and I have the opportunity to build from here. This is my starting point, and I will succeed.” – Phil Humbert

 

 

 

Addiction, Recovery, Spirituality

How memory works — and how memories can be “healed”

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memories
Coming to terms with memories of past trauma is a core challenge for many people — and especially for people in recovery. The more I learn about how the brain works, the more hopeful I am about the prospect of healing in this critical area of life.

Bessel Van der Kolk is medical director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. In a really helpful interview with Krista Tippet in the On Being radio show, he makes the intriguing observation that, while most of our memories change over time (the details get fuzzy, the meanings we make of them change), for some reason, intense traumatic memories stay fixed.

By the way, if you doubt that memories change, just get together with your siblings some time, and start reminiscing about your experiences when you were kids. You will likely notice how differently your siblings remember things that happened than you do. It’s not that they have the same memory as you, but from a different vantage point … they often remember the same “event” very differently, with different details. It might even seem that there were two different events that happened, like you existed in parallel universes.

Over time their memory of that event changed, as did yours. The memories just changed in different directions. It’s likely that if you had captured the event on video camera in its entirety, you’d find that it happened differently than the “exact memory” either of you had.

Why do our memories change … and what does this mean?

Why is this? Why is it that our memories change? And why is it that traumatic memories don’t? And what can we do to “heal from” — or at least come to terms with — these traumatic memories?

This is important because unresolved early life trauma is often a key piece of the addiction puzzle. Many people develop the habit of reaching for what becomes an “addictive” substance or behavior as a way of coping with pain that stems from early trauma. As life goes on, experiences trigger that old pain, and we in turn keep reaching for that old addictive substance or behavior as a way to cope with the pain. Dealing with that unresolved trauma is essential if lasting recovery is going to happen.

Recent brain research offers some interesting insights about memory that may help us understand how healing happens. The most significant is this: Our brains are not computers that file “memories” away in a certain place on a hard drive.

Our brains do not retrieve memories …

our brains reconstruct memories.

They do this by taking fragments of data that we might think of as impressions, sights, sounds, smells, and feelings that are located in various parts of our “brain” (note that neurons are not always located in our head) and then pulling them together to create a memory.

Continue reading How memory works — and how memories can be “healed” →

Pornography, Sex Addiction

Some recent statistics about internet pornography

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I’ve been working on a chapter for the second edition of the book “The Christian Handbook of Abuse, Addiction, and Difficult Behaviour.” This book was published in the UK by Mayhew Publishing, and unfortunately has had zero traction in the US or on amazon.com. Apparently it must be selling in the UK, because they want to release a second edition. Go figure! The first edition came out in 2008, and the publisher wanted updated statistics for each of the chapters.

So I did some checking. I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone that Internet porn use continues to explode in growth. I confess that I was even a little surprised at how much it’s been growing. Obviously, porn use is growing along with the growth of the Internet, but did you know that porn now occupies a significantly larger percentage of web traffic than it did just 10 years ago?

Here’s some quotes from the chapter I’m sending:

Just how prevalent is Internet pornography use? Survey data and Internet use statistics show changing patterns in the past two decades, but high rates of pornography usage have continued. In fact, not only has porn use increased on par with the growth of the Internet, it has grown faster than the Internet and is now a larger part of internet traffic. The previous edition of this book cited data from internet service providers (ISPs) showing that 20% of web traffic was porn related. More recent data shows that currently that number has grown to 30% (source).

In 2013, Google research showed that porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter  combined (source). In the UK, as of 2013, porn websites were being accessed more than all social networks combined, and more than all shopping websites combined (source).

 

In the USA:
64% of American men view porn at least monthly, and the percentage of Christian men is nearly the same as the culture at large
79% of men ages 18-30 view porn at least monthly.
67% of men ages 31-49 view porn at least monthly.
55% of married men view porn at least monthly.
(Digital Journal, August 14, 2014)

 

In the UK:
70% of UK teens say porn is seen as normal by their peers at school.
46% of teens said sexting is a part of everyday life for teenagers.
2/3 of girls and nearly 50% of boys said growing up would be easier if porn was harder to access.
(DailyMail, UK, August 19, 2014)
75% of Christian men view porn at least monthly.
41% of Christian men admit to being addicted to pornography.
30% of church leaders view porn regularly
(The Way, UK, January 20, 2015)

In Ireland:
83% of men and 56% of women have viewed porn.
25% of these watch it weekly.
36% who are not in a relationship view porn weekly.
(Irish News, January 17, 2015)

 

In Australia:
70% of Australian men view porn online (according to research from University of Sydney, but other surveys show the number as high as 90%).
80% of 15 to 17 year olds have had multiple exposures to hard core porn.
(Newcastle Herald, September 12, 2014)

In South Africa:
67% of men view porn several times a week
(New24.com, South Africa, March 19, 2015)

In Trinidad:
79% of men watch porn
52% of women watch porn
Trinidad has one of the highest per capita rate of searches for porn on Google
(Trinidad Express, October 18, 2014)

finding intimacy and freedom from pornography and sex addiction