Would you like to find a way to get the message to people in your church or community about victory over sexual struggle? “Reclaiming Sexual Sanity” is a new four-part telephone and web-based seminar that is coming in May. Right now we are looking for churches who want to work with us to promote this seminar to people in their congregation.

The “Reclaiming Sexual Sanity” seminar is way for people to get information and help about sexual struggles in a safe and confidential way. Rather than attending an event at one’s church - where people might fear the scrutiny and judgment of fellow church-goers - people can access the information and get questions answered from the privacy of their own home.

Check out our new website with information for pastors about this new program:

http://reclaimingsexualsanity.com

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The purpose of forgiving is to release our own minds from the pain of held resentment. We do not forgive others because that’s what nice people do. We forgive because it sets our minds free for other things - like living happily in the present.

This is not to say that in forgiving we do not acknowledge a painful relationship or past abuse. Forgiving is not suppressing our emotions or denying unpleasant realities. We have a right and a responsibility to set healthy boundaries for ourselves. Further, forgiving doesn’t mean being close to someone we need to keep our distance from or trying to return to the past to rework it.

Forgiving simply means that we are willing to live our lives from today forward without unwittingly recreating and replaying old scrips that we hold in our unconscious. We forgive ourselves and others with deliberate understanding. It means letting go of our attempts to hurt the person who hurt us. It is our quickest road to freedom.

(Remixed from “Forgiving and Moving On,” by Tian Dayton)

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At the moment sex addiction is not recognised by any official diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), considered the definitive word on psychological disorders.

However, the term “hypersexual disorder” is being proposed for the fifth edition of DSM, due out in 2012.

The controversial proposal has critics worrying that the criteria are too vague, and the chances for misdiagnosis and bogus pharmaceutical treatment are too great.

To be diagnosed with the disorder a patient would have to meet four of the following five criteria:
•    Spending a “great deal of time” consumed by sexual fantasies and urges,
•    Using sexual behaviour to deal with stressful life events (or anxiety, depression, boredom or irritability),
•    Disregarding the “physical and emotional harm” to those involved,
•    Patients must have tried but failed to curb the behaviour, and/or
•    Patients must have suffered distress and harm to their everyday life.

The proposal is being put forward by Dr Martin Kafka, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in the US, who says the disorder has been neglected for years.

He says it causes everything from marital dysfunction and divorce to increased risk of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

“By the time people come to me, they’re very distressed,” Dr Kafka said of the patients he sees at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. At the moment they are diagnosed with “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” which he says is “a diagnostic wastebasket”.

Dr Dan Zucker, of the University of Toronto, heads a working group dealing with the next edition of DSM and he expects “hypersexuality disorder” to be listed. He admitted the proposal was controversial but said the issue was about where to draw the line on what was normal and what was not.

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One of the key steps to developing a safe environment that supports our recovery is to develop emotional awareness. As part of our recovery, we seek to grow in our ability to identify and tend to our emotions. If we don’t, we’re setting ourselves up for relapse.

The Habit of Emotional Ignorance
Many of us have developed the habit of ignoring and suppressing our emotions. We needed to do this when we were growing up, because the emotions we felt were overwhelming and debilitating. To cope, we learned to ignore these emotions, put on a happy (or at least neutral) face, and move on. But these negative emotions have a way of catching up to us. If not dealt with, our emotions lurk under the surface, building up into a grey cloud that fills our souls.

Even though it’s important to acknowledge the range of emotions we experience, these emotions don’t need to run our lives. Remember that all emotions pass eventually. We are not our emotions. The key is to accept and understand — not suppress — these emotions as they come up … knowing that they will come and go, while we remain in our essential personhood.

Addicts know all about using addictive behavior to mask pain, feel pleasure, and relieve boredom. If we feel too much or too little, we may be tempted to act out in an attempt to control the way we feel.

Using sexual behavior to cope with negative feelings only creates a vicious cycle that feeds itself. We feel bad, so we turn to addictive behavior. We may feel a short term rush of exuberance and pleasure, but then our emotions will drop into despair. Then we will then turn to other behaviors down the line to distract or pull ourselves out of that place of despair.

Being comfortable with “negative” or challenging feelings is not easy for anyone. It’s especially hard if you have denied, ignored, hid from, or lied about them for years. How do we do this?

How we Develop Emotional Awareness
It helps to describe the way you feel by writing in your journal each day. This helps us to get clear about what we’re feeling.

Of course it’s also helpful to talk through our feelings with other safe and supportive people. This may be your spouse, a counselor, or a recovery buddy. Talking through what we’re feeling and why can not only help us to clarify what we’re feeling — it can also help us to work through that feeling, and start to see things (and therefore start to feel) differently.

Free teleseminar on Personal Environments will talk more about this
I’m going to be doing a free telephone seminar on February 18 on “Personal Environments: the secret of success in recovery.” What this article talks about — emotional awareness — is a key part of the environment we need to create for ourselves if we’re going to have sustained recovery. I hope you’ll join us for this teleseminar. Click here for more information.

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“Personal Environments: The secret to success in recovery”

Thursday February 18

7:00pm, central time

click here for more information

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Couples in recovery need to stay connected emotionally, and addicts’ spouses need to get consistent updates about sobriety. People struggling with sexual addiction/dependence often have a hard time with this — they resist the accountability of regular sobriety updates, and they struggle to know how to build emotional intimacy in general. On top of this, most couples - even when addiction is not present - find that in the busyness of a typical week, this emotional connection gets easily lost.

Over time, my colleagues Mark and Debbie Laaser have developed an acronym for couples to use as a guide for regular “check in” conversations. These conversations can be long or short, it’s up to you. We use the acronym FANOS - from the Greek word phainos which means “to bring to light” - to guide the conversation:

• Feelings - Describe what / how you’re feeling
• Affirmations - Find one or two things you want to affirm about your spouse. This could be something you want to thank them for, or some kind of praise or affirmation you want to extend.
• Needs - Something you need today, not necessarily from your spouse. (Hint to the sexually addicted  spouse: saying “my need to today is to have more sex with you” is not recommended.)
• Own - Something you’ve done or said that you take responsibility or apologize for. This could be something you’ve done wrong, or some way you hurt your spouse, and you need to ask forgiveness. It could also be something you recognize is hard for your spouse, or something you’re doing what - while not wrong - is making things unpleasant (eg. snoring, or being moody, or working late).
• Sobriety - Give a report on the status of your sobriety.

To go through the conversation, one person goes through all five “questions” or topics in a row. Then it’s the other spouse’s turn. I suppose it’s obvious, but the spouse of the addict does not check in about sobriety. Depending on how much detail you want to go into, the conversation can last 5-10 minutes, or over an hour.

My wife and I have used “FANOS” conversations for over five years. Early on, we tried to do these conversations every day. Now we do them several times a week. We find that when we go through this conversation, if there is time, we wind up asking each other clarifying questions, or thinking of other things to say beyond a strict answer.

Try using this acronym as a guide for a conversation with your spouse every day or every few days. You will be amazed at the sense of ongoing intimacy you experience.

One husband says: “FANOS conversations have been a key part of re-building intimacy and trust in our marriage. Sometimes we go through them quickly, and just give short updates, other times the questions open up issues that we spend more time on. They’ve been really helpful for my recovery, and great for our relationship.”

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Most of the men I work with have a long history of failed attempts at overcoming sexual temptation. One of the most common strategies people in churches use is having an accountability partner. I have nothing against accountability partners … they just don’t work.

Listen to this recording - a short excerpt from an audio program called “The Spiritual Questions and Challenges of Recovery” - to find out why:

Show me a pornography or other type of sex addict who has an accountability partner - and is doing little else for his recovery - and I will show you someone who is struggling. Either acting out with whatever behaviors he’s dealing with, or hanging onto his sobriety with his fingernails and really struggling. Church leaders, spouses of strugglers, parents … please hear me on this … accountability is over-rated! It’s only part of the solution.

If you want to hear more about this and other subjects related to dealing with sexual struggle, check out this audio program

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To live in recovery, we must be willing to take responsibility for the anger that we carry within us. We are not bad people because we feel angry. No one wants to think of themselves as an angry person, and we are no exception. But when we refuse to acknowledge the anger and resentment that we have stored within us, two things happen:

(1) we turn our back on ourselves and refuse to accept a very important part of ourselves
(2) we ask the people close to us to hold our feelings for us, to be the containers of our unconscious, or the feelings inside of ourselves that we do not wish to see.

Because we deny our anger to ourselves does not mean that it goes away. We must be willing to consider that there might be something more to it, that we may be carrying feelings of anger that we need to accept.

Dealing with the anger inside us does not mean we need to act on it, and do or say things that might hurt others. Owning it and working through it could be accomplished by taking a walk, or meditating, or journaling, to sort out what we’re feeling and why. It may also be helpful to talk through our feelings with a safe and trusted friend or counselor, rather than rushing to confront the person we’re angry at.

Are we willing to own our anger?

(This is a meditation remix … adapted from Tian Dayton’s wonderful book “Forgiving and Moving On“)

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Date: January 21 (Thursday)
Time: 7:00pm, central time

now available for purchase on the Recovery Remixed site

When we were young, we took in messages about ourselves and the world that powerfully shape who we are and how we live today. Because these messages were taken in at a young age, we weren’t developmentally able to rationally reflect on or evaluate them — we simply internalized them.

This conditioning powerfully affects our attitudes and actions related to sexuality. To move forward in our recovery from any kind of sexual struggle, we need to understand the messages we’ve internalized about sex, and learn how to “recondition” ourselves.

Click here for more information

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An emotional affair happens when a person invests too much emotional energy with someone outside their marriage, and in turn receives too much emotional support and companionship from that relationship. How much is “too much?” There aren’t black and white rules for when a relationship moves from innocent friendship to an emotional affair … but there are patterns, and signs to watch for. In an emotional affair, people often feel closer to each other than their spouses, and often experience increasing sexual tension.

In fact, emotional affairs are often the gateway leading to full blown sexual infidelity. “About half of such emotional involvements do eventually turn into full-blown affairs, sex and all.” (Source: MSNBC) Viewed from another perspective, most sexual infidelity happens between people who were in relationships that were already in - or edging into - emotional affair territory. Infidelity researcher Shirley P. Glass reports that “82 percent of affairs happen with someone who was at first ‘just a friend.’”

In a marriage, time together and emotional energy is limited, and so if one spouse is sharing intimate thoughts and feelings with someone else, this time and emotional energy is not available to their spouse. People in emotional affairs often don’t feel guilt about what they are doing, because there is no sex involved. But their spouses don’t see it that way.

Many marriage experts view emotional affairs to be as damaging as sexual affairs. A common characteristic of emotional affairs is dishonesty with one’s partner about the relationship. People in emotional affairs often deny and deceive their partners about how much time is being spent with the “affair partner,” and/or how much emotional intimacy is being shared. Much of the pain and hurt from an emotional affair is due to this deception, and the consequent feelings of being betrayed.

Some guidelines*:

You’re in danger of crossing the line if you…
1. Touch your friend in “legal” ways, like picking lint off his blazer, or putting your hand on her shoulder as you walk through a door.
2. Pay extra attention to how you look before you see him / her.
3. Think crush-like thoughts like “She’d love this song!”
4. Tell him / her more details about your day than you do your partner.
5. No longer feel comfortable telling your mate about this person and begin to cover up your relationship.
6. Experience increasing sensual tension; you admit your attraction to him/her but also insist to yourself that you would never act on it.

It’s about to get physical when you…
1. Find yourself feeling vulnerable and turn to the other person for support rather than to your mate or a trusted relative or friend.
2. Accelerate the level of intimacy through sensual or suggestive talk over email or the phone.
3. Put yourself in a situation where the two of you could be alone.

You can avoid the potential affair if you…
1. Stay honest with your partner. Share with him / her all your hopes, triumphs, and failures — as well as your attractions and temptations, which will help keep you from acting on them.
2. Stay honest with some close recovery friends. Telling them about your attractions and temptations will also help keep you from acting on them.
3. Make sure you have “couple time” with your spouse on a regular basis — away from the kids, your friends, and family. Given today’s busy schedules, this often requires commitment and planning.
4. Surround yourself with happy couples who don’t believe in fooling around. Having positive, emotionally connected role models will help you stay on track.

Some quotes about emotional affairs:

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