Sanctuary for the Abused
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Sex & Porn Addiction
What you are looking for is a "sex addiction therapist" from any of the mental health healing disciplines who has a good track record in treating this problem & personal values that are reasonably congruent with the patient's values. Suggestions will be given shortly on how to find such a therapist.
In addition to having a competent, qualified sex addiction therapist, the patient will also need to attend regularly - (90% of the time) for two years or longer - weekly meetings of Sexaholics Anonymous (or other similar 12-step support group). These groups (free of charge) meet in nearly every fair sized city in America & their address & location can be found in the business pages of the phone book or by contacting Alcoholics Anonymous, who can give directions to the caller on location & time of meetings of the sexaholic group. It will be at these meetings that patients can inquire of fellow members or attendees the names of competent therapists they are individually meeting with & have found helpful & competent in receiving their own treatment. Another source of referrals is to call the National Council of Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, who have a register of most therapists in the U.S. doing treatment in this area: 770-989-9754.
In my experience of 25 years in treating approximately 350 of these patients I find, if married, nearly universally the wives are traumatized by the husbands lies, deceptions, and-out-of-bounds sex behavior, and need treatment, too.
If the wife decides to stay in the marriage for a while longer, I engage her in joint treatment with her husband. I have found that if I successfully heal the husband of his addiction but have an angry, hostile, wounded wife who can never trust or forgive her husband even though she remains in the marriage, it greatly increases the risk of relapse in the husband as he attempts unsuccessfully to placate & deal with major marital turmoil. The wife's wounding has to be addressed as well as have both parties participate in marital therapy. Thus I nearly always attempt to have the wife join with the husband in our therapy sessions. This usually predicts a successful outcome if both stay in the healing program. This program works & is successful if both parties stay with it.
Sometimes the husband will find himself with years of sobriety & feel he's all "cured" & doesn't need to still attend his group meetings or therapy sessions anymore. Why waste time & money when he's doing so well? This can be very risky. And it greatly increases the chances for relapse. What I do when patients start experiencing long-term sobriety is gradually lengthen the time interval between therapy sessions. So eventually we may be meeting once every month, or six to eight weeks or longer.
The specifics of treatment by the therapist will not be presented in detail here other than to mention that we do marital therapy, put the couple in marital communication workshops (such as Marriage Enrichment), do a lot of work with relapse prevention, identify the triggers to acting out & develop strategies to protect them from the triggers, fortify them to deal with the "wave," and help them reduce & eliminate masturbation to pornography, since this increases the power of their addictive illness over them & is the royal road to acquiring new sexual addictions or paraphilias which might be acted out. We also strongly emphasize a "no secrets" rule, and how vital this is to healing.
We treat concomitantly any other addictions which they might have. All have to be treated together, otherwise the patient just shifts back & forth between addictions with no real long-term healing. We teach them the three-second rule to manage & control intrusive thoughts & imagery. We give them a lot of reading to do in the sex addiction area (like the Carnes' books, and the "white book," created by S.A. & filled with successful recovery biographies, plus monographs on many other related topics). We want them to be "world experts" on the nature of sex addiction, its genesis, its course, and helpful treatment procedures.
We also find it most important that they have hope & assured knowledge that the illness is treatable & they can get their free agency back again & have rational control over their previously driven irrational behavior. They see how this is possible as they attend S.A. & see & hear the testimonies of other people who now have long-term sobriety. These were people who were in much worse shape than they when entering treatment.
We deal with spiritual issues in therapy when this is appropriate to the unique circumstances & values of the client. We also deal with deep woundedness arising out of early life traumas which now make them vulnerable to seeking out quick-fix sexual acting out as a solution, which really doesn't work in the long-term. I also give a lot of verbal praise & genuine appreciation in response to even their smallest gains & good behavior. I never criticize or put them down when there are relapses. I just say, "This is exactly why we meet in therapy - to strengthen you & develop new strategies to deal with temptation. Now if this situation were to occur again, what might be a more powerful way to deal with it? To resist it? To remain sober? …etc.,"
Male teenage patients can be quite challenging. Many deny that it is a problem & consistently lie about the details of their involvement with it. Their motivation to change may be nonexistent. They are usually brought in for treatment by an angry and/or sorrowful parent & often tend to be uncooperative & passive/aggressive in dealing with the problem. It may be helpful to consider family therapy & be therapeutically confrontive in dealing with the issues that arise. Fairly drastic limitations on home computer/Internet use may be necessary. If 17 or older, I put them into a regular S.A. group with, possibly, the father also attending to be a support to the son & be someone he can talk with about the various issues as they arise.
Permission to reprint granted by Mark B. Kastelman. Excerpt taken from "The Drug of the New Millennium, The Science of How Internet Pornography Radically Alters the Human Brain & Body" Chapter 30, pages 308-311. Click the articles to the right to view more writings on sex & porn addiction topics from Mark Kastelman.
Labels: abuse, acting out, anxiety, compulsivity, denial, porn, secrets, sex addiction
Thursday, October 15, 2009
In Nicole Brown Simpson's Words
By Andrea Dworkin
Words matter. O.J. Simpson's defense team asked Judge Lance A. Ito to order the prosecution to say domestic discord rather than domestic violence or even spousal abuse--already euphemisms for wife-beating--and to disallow the words battered wife and stalker. Ito refused to alter reality by altering language but some media complied--for example, "Rivera Live," where domestic discord became a new term of art. The lawyer who successfully defended William Kennedy Smith on a rape charge also used that term systematically.
Where is the victim's voice? Where are her words? "I'm scared," Nicole Brown told her mother a few months before she was killed. "I go to the gas station, he's there. I go to the Payless Shoe Store, and he's there. I'm driving, and he's behind me."
Nicole's ordinary words of fear, despair and terror told to friends, and concrete descriptions of physical attacks recorded in her diary, are being kept from the jury. Insignificant when she was alive--because they didn't save her--the victim's words remain insignificant in death: excluded from the trial of her accused murderer, called "hearsay" and not admissible in a legal system that has consistently protected or ignored the beating and sexual abuse of women by men, especially by husbands.
Nicole called a battered women's shelter five days before her death. The jury will not have to listen--but we must. Evidence of the attacks on her by Simpson that were witnessed in public will be allowed at trial. But most of what a batterer does is in private. The worst beatings, the sustained acts of sadism, have no witnesses. Only she knows. To refuse to listen to Nicole Brown Simpson is to refuse to know.
The law, including the FBI, and social scientists used to maintain that wife-beating did not exist in the United States. But in recent years, the FBI acknowledged that wife-beating is this country's most commonly committed violent crime.
Such a change happens this way. First, there is a terrible and intimidating silence--it can last centuries. Inside that silence, men have a legal or a tacit right to beat their wives. Then, with the support of a strong political movement, victims of the abuse speak out about what has been done to them and by whom. They break the silence. One day, enough victims have spoken--sometimes in words, sometimes by running away or seeking refuge or striking back or killing in self-defense--that they can be counted and studied: Social scientists find a pattern of injury and experts describe it.
The words of experts matter. They are listened to respectfully, are often paid to give evidence in legal cases. Meanwhile, the voice of the victim still has no social standing or legal significance. She still has no credibility such that each of us--and the law--is compelled to help her.
We blame her, as the batterer did. We ask why she stayed, though we, of course, were not prepared to stand between her and the batterer so that she could leave. And if, after she is dead, we tell the police that we heard the accused murderer beat her in 1977, and saw her with black eyes--as Nicole's neighbors did--we will not be allowed to testify, which may be the only justice in this, since it has taken us 17 years to bother to speak at all. I was a battered wife; I had such neighbors.
Every battered woman learns early on not to expect help. A battered woman confides in someone, when she does, to leave a trail. She overcomes her fear of triggering violence in the batterer if he finds out that she has spoken in order to leave a verbal marker somewhere, with someone. She thinks the other person's word will be believed later.
Every battered woman faces death more than once, and each time the chance is real: The batterer decides. Eventually, she's fractured inside by the continuing degradation and her emotional world is a landscape of desperation. Of course, she smiles in public and is a good wife. He insists--and so do we.
The desperation is part fear--fear of pain, fear of dying--and part isolation, a brutal aloneness, because everything has failed--every call for help to anyone, every assumption about love, every hope for self-respect and even a shred of dignity. What dignity is there, after all, in confessing, as Nicole did in her diary, that O.J. started beating her on a street in New York and, in their hotel room, "continued to beat me for hours as I kept crawling for the door." He kept hitting her while sexually using her, which is rape--because no meaningful consent is possible or plausible in the context of this violence.
Every battered woman's life has in it many rapes like this one. Sometimes, one complies without the overt violence but in fear of it. Or sometimes, one initiates sex to try to stop or head off a beating. Of course, there are also the so-called good times--when romance overcomes the memory of violence. Both the violation and the complicity make one deeply ashamed. The shame is corrosive. Whatever the batterer left, it attacks. Why would one tell? How can one face it?
Those of us who are not jurors have a moral obligation to listen to Nicole Simpson's words: to how O.J. Simpson locked her in a wine closet after beating her and watched TV while she begged him to let her out; to how, in a different hotel room, "O.J. threw me against the walls . . . and on the floor. Put bruises on my arm and back. The window scared me. Thought he'd throw me out." We need to hear how he "threw a fit, chased me, grabbed me, threw me into walls. Threw all my clothes out of the window into the street three floors below. Bruised me." We need to hear how he stalked her after their divorce. "Everywhere I go," she told a friend, "he shows up. I really think he is going to kill me."
We need, especially, to hear her call to a battered women's shelter five days before her murder. In ruling that call inadmissible, Ito said: "To the man or woman on the street, the relevance and probative value of such evidence is both obvious and compelling . . . . However, the laws and appellate-court decisions that must be applied . . . held otherwise." The man and woman on the street need to hear what was obvious to her: The foreknowledge that death was stalking her.
When I was being beaten by a shrewd and dangerous man 25 years ago, I was buried alive in silence. I didn't know that such horror had ever happened to anyone else. The silence was unbreachable and unbearable. Imagine Nicole being buried alive, then dead, in noise--our pro-woman, pro-equality noise; or our pro-family, pro-law-and-order noise. For what it's worth--to Nicole nothing--the shame of battery is all ours.
Labels: abuse, battered woman syndrome, emotional abuse, nicole brown simpson, O.J., verbal abuse
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Sex Addict? 20 Questions to Ask and Recovery
Do you frequently experience remorse, depression, or guilt about your sexual activity?
Do you feel your sexual drive and activity is getting out of control? Have you repeatedly tried to stop or reduce certain sexual behaviors, but inevitably you could not?
Are you unable to resist sexual advances, or turn down sexual propositions when offered?
Do you use sex to escape from uncomfortable feelings such as anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, guilt, etc. which seem to disappear when the sexual obsession starts?
Do you spend excessive time obsessing about sex or engaged in sexual activity?
Have you neglected or used your family, friends, spouse or relationship because of the time you spend in sexual activity?
Do your sexual pursuits interfere with your work or professional development?
Is your sexual life secretive, a source of shame, and not in keeping with your values? Do you lie to others to cover up your sexual activity?
Are you afraid of sex? Do you avoid romantic and sexual relationships with others and restrict your sexual activity to fantasy, masturbation, and solitary or anonymous activity?
Are you increasingly unable to perform sexually without other stimuli such as pornography, videos, "poppers," drugs/alcohol, "toys," etc.?
Do you have to resort increasingly to abusive, humiliating, or painful sexual fantasies or behaviors to get sexually aroused?
Has your sexual activity prevented you from developing a close, loving relationship with a partner? Or, have you developed a pattern of intense romantic or sexual relationships that never seem to last once the excitement wears off?
Do you only have anonymous sex or one-night stands? Do you usually want to get away from your sexual partner after the encounter?
Do you have sex with people with whom you normally would not associate?
Do you frequent clubs, bars, adult bookstores, restrooms, parks and other public places in search of sexual partners?
Have you ever been arrested or placed yourself in legal jeopardy for your sexual activity?
Have you ever risked your physical health with exposure to sexually transmitted diseases by engaging in "unsafe" sexual activity?
Has the money you spent on pornography, videos, phone sex, or hustlers/prostitutes strained your financial resources?
Have people you trust expressed concern about your sexual activity?
Does life seem meaningless and hopeless without a romantic or sexual relationship?
The Twelve Suggested Steps of SCA
We admitted we were powerless over sexual compulsion -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed (either in deed or with lies), and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it and were honest about it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to sexually compulsive people and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The Twelve Steps are reprinted and adapted with permission of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. Permission to reprint and adapt does not mean that Alcoholics Anonymous is in any way affiliated with this program. AA is a program of recovery from alcoholism. The use of the Twelve Steps in connection with other programs which are patterned after AA, but address other problems, does not imply otherwise.
http://www.sca-recovery.org/20questions.htm
Labels: cheating, coercion, depression, misogyny, narcissist, prostitution, psychopath, sex addict, sex addiction, sexual abuse
FRAUD WARNING: SANDRA BROWN MA
