A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (15 page)

In
Chapter 7
, we will begin to look further at building vulnerability and compassion by developing your capacity for working with the strong feelings and emotions that are a part of dealing with any difficult issue.

CHAPTER 7

Working with Strong Feelings and Emotions

How can you move together as a couple from the wounded state of lack of connection and betrayal to the rewards available in relationship intimacy? The difficulties that have arisen in your relationship can lead to greater awareness and understanding and ultimately to a greater connection, but how? When your relationship has been broken by betrayal through sexual compulsivity, however the problem has manifested, no matter which side of the problem you are standing on, you are bound to be experiencing strong feelings and emotions.

Being able to tolerate and work through strong reactions and feelings of anger, fear, and pain can help both partners, as well as their relationship. These capacities and skills are not only fundamental to working with compulsive and addictive impulses, but also are steppingstones on your path to building greater intimacy.

Vulnerability and Intimacy

Humans are wired to need each other. So why is it that we seem to be unable to connect in ways that allow this basic need to be met? In relating with our closest partner, we have an opportunity to learn how to work with our strong feelings and emotions in ways that build vulnerability. This vulnerability is the key to unlocking the door to intimacy and connection.

To be vulnerable means you are willing to be hurt. If we emotionally block ourselves off from being hurt, we also shield ourselves from other feelings. We cannot selectively choose to only experience positive feelings and emotions and do away with the negative ones. If we banish fear, anger, and pain, we cut ourselves off from joy, love, and belonging.

We can be safe behind walls, but then we miss the wonders of visiting the ocean or skiing in the mountains or dining at a wonderful restaurant. In other words, we can give ourselves the illusion of the safety of walls, but at the high cost of walling ourselves off from connecting with others. We could wear a metal suit of armor, as if we were expecting to be called to joust at any moment, and we would feel protected, but the suit of armor would render us unable to feel the touch of others.

To inhibit our vulnerability is also to inhibit the physical and emotional touch of others. The armor makes us feel safer from the expected attacks of others, but at the price of vulnerability. To be sure, there is a place for armor and a place for vulnerability. Your most intimate relationship with your spouse is not the place for armor.

If we desire the rewards of the intimacy of human connection, then we must learn how to bare ourselves to the hurt, the wounding, that is also a part of our human interaction. In order to become vulnerable, we need to learn to work with our survival impulses that urge us to fight, flee, or freeze when faced with what we perceive as potential danger. We need to learn how to negotiate our most primitive human emotions. We need to see that the experience of these emotions will not destroy us. Then, we can learn how to build the emotional muscles needed to be vulnerable.

Heather and Bryan Visit “Instinctive-Reactive World”

When our intimate sexual connection is betrayed, the hurt, anger, and fear that arise can be intense. When faced with a conflict, most of us tend to look to the outside to see what is causing our negative feelings. This is a normal human reaction—an instinct, even.

To show how this mechanism works, let’s look at an example not charged with the elements of sex and betrayal. Hopefully, this method of showing the dynamic won’t cause your protective flags of blame and/or shame to surface.

We first talked about Heather and Bryan in
Chapter 4
. Bryan, you may recall, sought support for his compulsion to view Internet porn. Bryan was able to see that his attraction to and use of porn was actually preventing the closeness he so wanted to have with Heather. He and Heather both began to see how seemingly everyday misunderstandings can lead to the same kind of impulse for protection from shame and vulnerability (as well as avoidance of strong feelings and emotions) that sent Bryan to his computer looking for more porn. They both committed to building their skills of vulnerability to deepen their connection and intimacy.

Bryan and Heather were getting married, and had engagement photos taken. Their arrangement was that they would each pay for half of the photos. Heather was supposed to write a check for her half of the cost and leave it on the kitchen counter so Bryan could deliver both checks to the photographer the next day. But Heather forgot to write her check.

The next morning when Bryan went to the kitchen counter, there was no check. He immediately felt annoyed. He felt that he had been wronged. Heather had said she would write the check, and she did not. He wasn’t fully aware that a whole string of assumptions had begun to flow. Instantly, he was certain that he was in the right. Heather had said she would write the check. He had suggested she do it the moment they discussed it, and she didn’t. He began to think that Heather was being selfish, or she must not really respect him or love him.

By the time Heather called Bryan on her lunch break that day, she had remembered that she had forgotten to write the check. When she called, she said, “Hi, how are you doing?” Bryan, in a peeved voice, said, “Hey, you forgot to leave the check.” Heather then became irritated with Bryan’s tone, and replied, “This is why I don’t like to call you on my lunch break. You just give me a hard time instead of being happy to hear from me.” This further angered Bryan, and he hung up on Heather. Bryan and Heather had both entered “instinctive-reactive world.” This is the place where you instinctively react to the annoying things your partner says or does. Does that sound familiar?

This dynamic goes on all the time. An event occurs that causes you to feel something, and that something feels bad. You might not even totally realize it feels bad because often you quickly justify the bad feeling with the fact that you are in the right. In this case, Bryan interpreted Heather’s actions in a way that he felt hurt.

When Heather called Bryan at lunchtime, she assumed that Bryan’s irritated tone was a rejection of her. She didn’t know that he had misinterpreted her mistake of forgetting to write the check. From the hurt that Heather experienced in feeling scolded by Bryan, she lashed back with her angry comment. She also felt justified in her position. She had made a mistake; she had simply forgotten to do something. She felt that she was being unjustly reprimanded, and that felt bad.

What happened to Bryan and Heather in instinctive-reactive world is similar to what happened with Jeannine and Jay and the infamous saga of the sponge in
Chapter 6
. Underneath the automatic response of anger was hurt. In
Chapter 6
, the focus was on the blame and shame mechanism. In this chapter, we’re noticing when you react to situations on automatic pilot. As you build your skill of being able to tolerate your strong feelings and emotions, you will become more effective in recognizing how your strong feelings and emotions can set the shame-blame cycle into motion.

The Marshmallow Test

In the early 1970s, Stanford professor Walter Mischel conducted a famous experiment with four- to six-year-olds around the mechanism of delayed gratification. Each child was given one marshmallow and told that if they could resist eating the one marshmallow until the researcher returned about fifteen minutes later, they could have two marshmallows. Most of the kids ate the marshmallow before the experimenter came back into the room, many of them right away. Only one-third of the kids could resist eating the marshmallow prior to the experimenter’s return.

When Mischel followed up ten (and then twenty) years later, he found that the now-grown individuals who had been able to resist eating the marshmallow were highly correlated with individuals who had higher SAT scores, more successful marriages, higher incomes, and generally more fulfilling lives.

So what can you do to build the skill of resisting so that you can reap the rewards of the delayed gratification? How do you learn to work with your instinctive impulses? Are you doomed to remain the subject of your impulse to move against, away from, or toward?

Let’s say that you were one of the kids who ate the marshmallow right away. Does this mean that you are condemned to a less fulfilling life than the marshmallow-resisting youngsters? No. We are certain that you can build the mechanism of delaying gratification, of working with your strong feelings and emotions.

We have watched ourselves and others learn to work with the impulses of pain, anger, and fear that propel us into actions that alienate us from the connection with our partner we ultimately desire. We have seen ourselves and others learn to build the muscle of resisting the one marshmallow for the reward of intimacy that comes with the prefrontal capacity to make choices, reconcile conflicting thoughts, process emotions, suppress urges, and delay immediate gratification.

Developing a New Capacity

To be no longer terrorized by fear, anger, and pain is a pivotal movement. We have found that the capacity to fully allow these feelings is actually a long-term (possibly a lifetime) project. When you recognize your response as a survival impulse, you can make an informed choice about how you will respond to the impulse. If you are actually in danger, you will respond accordingly. But if not, you can make a better choice than to give into your automatic impulse.

In the context of intimate relationships, you are instinctively equating the uncomfortable or negative feeling you are experiencing with danger, but there is no actual emergency. This is an important place to start. What happened to Bryan when he looked on the kitchen counter and saw there was no check? If this was a movie and we could internally slow the scenes down and look at what was happening frame by frame, here is what we might see:

Bryan quickly and without thinking interpreted Heather’s lack of action as an affront to him—a lack of respect, a lack of love. Instantly, he experienced hurt, then, just as quickly, he experienced irritation (anger). In the next instant, he believed that Heather was responsible for his anger; if she really loved and respected him, she would have written that check, After all, he had even reminded her to do it.

In your ordinary day-to-day awareness, it is difficult to slow yourself down to notice what is going on internally frame by frame. Your reactions occur so quickly that they can be difficult to recognize. Sometimes, you have a moment for thought. For example, Bryan had a thought about Heather not caring for him. But sometimes your reaction is purely reflexive, and you cannot banish it. Even so, you can begin to recognize that you are having the survival response. The feeling of anger, fear, or pain, of entering the cycle of shame-blame, can become a signal to pay attention. Once you have taken that very important step of paying attention and becoming consciously aware of your automatic response, it is no longer automatic. Then you can make a conscious choice about how to respond.

The Road to Developing Vulnerability and Intimacy

How can you unblock your capacity to be empathic and vulnerable so that you can experience the intimacy and joy of human connection? How can you bring greater awareness, and through this greater awareness build vulnerability and true intimacy? If your anger, fear, and pain are natural impulses, what can you do when you feel them? You can learn to build your capacity for choice and decision making in a way that overrides your instinctive impulses.

You can use the thinking part of your brain to label and evaluate the rush of your biochemical response. Building such skills not only increases your capacity for intimacy, it helps you work with compulsive, addictive impulses. This sounds very simple, and actually, it is. But first you need to believe that you can do it.

In a very simple form, the basic steps on the road to developing vulnerability and intimacy are:

1. Recognize your instinctive response for what it is.

2. Allow yourself to experience the feeling without indulging or repressing.

3. From this place of inner vulnerability, choose to take action or not.

Step One: Recognize Your Instinctive Responses

First, you must be able to recognize when you are having a survival impulse. Then you can experience the underlying feeling. This process is exactly what is meant in the admonition to “count to three” when you feel angry. You try to recognize that you are having an instinctive response of fear, anger, or pain, and then just feel that feeling. This works as a delaying tactic so that the slightly slower part of your brain—the thinking part—has a chance to show up.

Your impulses of fear, anger, and pain immediately compel you to pay attention. As you begin to become more skillful in recognizing that you are having (or have had) an instinctive response, you can let these responses become your allies. You can bring more awareness and consciousness into your life.