A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (20 page)

When a couple is working with an issue like sexual compulsivity, they tend to focus on “the problem,” which means that the relationship dynamics might not get the attention that will ultimately help both individuals. That is why the partner with the issue of sexual compulsivity must take responsibility and make a commitment to working with the addiction.

In directing you away from focusing solely on the issue of sexual compulsivity, we’re not condoning any sexual acting out. We are suggesting that, in addition to that individual attention, the couple place their focus on the dance of the relationship dynamics as well.

The Past Is Impacting the Present

How did you get to this moment? Looking to your past can provide clues. As human beings, everything we do is influenced by what we have previously learned, by the conclusions we have made about what has happened to us. Those deductions create the basic structure of our response—of how we experience the present moment. We are all more comfortable with what seems familiar than with the unfamiliar.

When you experience something new or different, you naturally attempt to classify the new experience based on what you have previously learned. You can trick yourself into thinking that something new is “just like what happened before,” when it is not. That mechanism of immediate classification can cause you to overlook, misclassify, mislabel, or misinterpret a new experience by throwing it into your mind’s “pile of experiences” that appear to be similar.

This does not mean you are doomed to repeat the painful experiences of your past. It is possible to bring awareness of the past into the present in a way that allows you to “rewire” or “reprogram” the past difficulties. With new awareness, the present experience that seems so reminiscent of something painful from the past can be viewed as coming back around for a “do-over.”

Experiences with the Greatest Impact

As children, we depend on our caretakers. In fact, as babies, we don’t even recognize that we are separate from those caretakers. We don’t yet have the capacity to distinguish self from the other. As we begin to formulate a sense of self, a sense that “I exist,” a sense of “me,” we quite naturally identify with our caregivers. Being taken care of without having to do anything in return is a healthy part of our experience of being a baby. Brain science has determined that the internal scaffolding we create in our minds about how the world works is deeply patterned by the time we are six or seven years old.

When your experience from the past comes from a time before you had language, the impact to your view of the world can be difficult to recognize or understand. These early experiences are so familiar that they seem “normal.” This doesn’t mean that experiences that happen after you can understand words don’t create an imprint that also deeply influences how you interpret the present moment.

However, early experiences form a view of the world in ways that ordinarily go unquestioned because they are so deeply a part of the inner landscape, your undisputed view of reality. The present moment is seen through the lens of this unquestioned internal scaffolding.

In addition to experiences that happen to the child before he or she has language, events that are more prolonged, that occur over a greater span of time, have a great influence on his or her view of how the world works. Also, any particularly traumatic event will be deeply significant. For example, physical or sexual abuse, even if it were to happen only once, would be extremely impactful.

Patterns That Affect Our View

Because these patterns of thinking, of viewing the world, have become so deeply a part of your internal landscape, it can be difficult to notice how you might be responding instinctively in ways that are not really helping you get what you want. To recognize these unseen influences, it can be helpful to learn about some basic patterns of personality put in place in the earliest years. Think of these internal influences as gremlins that are running around inside of you, causing you to respond in ways that are creating suffering and separation rather than greater connection.

Three basic patterns of survival influences that can be playing behind the scenes are issues of trust, control, and self-esteem.

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Trust:
How safe do you feel in the world? How safe do you feel in allowing yourself to be impacted, influenced, vulnerable to another?

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Control:
How do you prioritize your perceived needs and the needs of your partner? What are your requirements for independence and autonomy? How do you react to separation?

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Self-Esteem:
Do you feel you matter in the world? Do you feel you have a right to exist?

As a child, given the best information and support that you had at the time, you came to conclusions about trust, control, and self-esteem. Allow yourself to look at the patterns of suffering in your life and relationship. Allow the observer within you to see how you are being impacted in the present by the scaffolding of conclusions or assumptions that you made in response to classifications that may have been faulty conclusions.

The Roots of the Past Are Woven Into the Present

The origins of many behaviors that show up in the present, including sexually compulsive behaviors, can be found in the past. You might visualize the present as being like a large oak tree in the front yard of an old house. The roots of the tree are not seen, but they are there, buried beneath ground level. In fact, the roots can grow underneath the sidewalk leading to the front door, causing the sidewalk to buckle. This affects anyone walking on it now, in the present. Or a root can grow into a drainage pipe, obstructing the flow and causing a bathtub to not drain properly. The point is that these unseen “roots” representing the past impact what is happening now. In that sense, they are not “just” the past; they are also living as part of the present. They are both.

This is the case with sexually compulsive behavior. For the man who has a pattern of sexually compulsive behavior, it’s time to both accept how he is behaving in the present and search for the specific roots of this behavior in the past. By first stopping the sexually compulsive behavior and then exploring the roots of that behavior, he can ensure those roots no longer have the same unseen impact.

If a boy grows up in a family where the father was focused on money and saw the wife and mother as a means for sexual pleasure and home-cooked meals, that boy will not have a model for healthy intimacy. Instead, as an adult, that man might seek virtual “relationships” with women on porn sites. Such relationships are, in fact, a version of what he knows from childhood where his father also had essentially virtual, rather than real, relationships. This is the past having a strong impact on the present (or the past and present overlapping as one).

Correspondingly, the wife may have grown up in a family where the father was more interested in his work than in having a close, intimate, relationship with his wife. The little girl also learns from her family, and her past impacts her present when she chooses a man. She will most likely not make this choice consciously. Yet unconsciously, she may have been drawn to a man who does not seek intimacy. She may not be happy with the choice, but like the man she chose, she, too, is entangled in the roots of the past and has yet to break free. Although she may not act out sexually, her past has impacted her present through her choices.

As children, we yearn to behave in a way that will make our parents love us. If our parents are uncomfortable, they push us away and shame us with their stern looks or reproachful words. Thus, we learn to behave in ways that do not make our parents ill at ease. To adapt ourselves to the needs of our parents, we may hide our true feelings and learn to repress and avoid. As we grow more distant from our own true feelings, we are no longer able to connect with others from a place of what we truly feel. We are entangled in the roots of the past, which strongly influence our actions in the present.

Similar to how he felt shamed in childhood, a man who is now married may again feel shame for his sexually compulsive behavior. He may feel this shame both from himself and from his spouse. In effect, he is repeating the past. One way to stop repeating the past is to uncover and acknowledge your feelings from the past, and embrace whatever has happened to you in the past along with what is happening now. This is how you can be truly aware of your feelings and thoughts as well as your impulses to sexually act out, to feel shame, and to shame others.

By following the directives of the previous chapter on undefended honesty, a man can begin to disentangle the roots of the past he is reacting to with his sexually compulsive behavior. Next, as he disentangles himself from the stranglehold of the roots of the past, he can allow his healthy impulses to emerge, impulses such as the desire for true connection and intimacy with a real person.

Steven and Emily

Steven and Emily came to us after they had been married for twenty years. Emily had inadvertently discovered evidence on Steven’s computer of his activities with prostitution and other kinds of meetings for sex. She knew that she hadn’t felt connected with Steven for a long time, and this was the final straw for her. She reported that Steven had seemed totally consumed with his trips around the country to play golf. Since their three boys were now grown and had left home, she felt that she had tried every way she knew to get her husband’s attention, to interest him in their marriage and partnership again, to allow her to be a part of his life.

Steven admitted that he had gotten involved in looking for companionship online. He was embarrassed that he had allowed himself to get caught in what he felt was a pretty seamy world of what he labeled “casual hook-ups.” He couldn’t really understand why he had felt so compelled to keep going back to these sites. He admitted that he really wanted to make his relationship with Emily work, but that he didn’t know how. He could see that he was somehow pushing his wife away. He was able to admit that the golf with his buddies and the Internet dating seemed to require so much less effort than trying to please Emily. He said he felt like she had left him long ago. They both felt they had been abandoned by the other. Steven had acted out sexually and needed to admit that and atone for those actions. They both needed to see how the seeds of their past were playing out in the present.

Steven and Emily’s Past

Steven and Emily had been high school sweethearts. They grew up in a small town, and went away to college together. Steven studied business and Emily studied to become an elementary school teacher. They both always knew that they wanted to get married and have a family together. So when they graduated from college and Steven got a great entry-level position at an investment bank, they felt they were on their way to living out their destiny.

But they each had experiences from their growing-up years, some scaffolding of their view of relationships that had been put into place in their earliest years, that came back to haunt them as their relationship matured. As much as they loved each other, as much as they held a shared vision of being together, these unseen influences were waiting for them.

Steven’s father had walked out when Steven was three. Steven never really knew the whole story about what had happened. As he looked back on it after he was grown, he suspected that maybe his mother had been having an affair with a neighbor. His mother always told the story that his father “went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.”

When Steven was five, his mother married a man who was a long-distance truck driver. Steven felt close to his new father figure. He liked him. But Steven remembers how his mother would frequently wonder aloud when his stepfather went out on the road whether or not he would come back. His mother would say, “He could always turn out to be just like your father,” and she would retell the story of the trip for cigarettes that ended in abandonment.

Whenever Steven’s stepfather was away, Steven’s mother would tell him how he was now the “man of the house.” Steven remembers how his mother would have male friends in to spend the night when his stepfather was away. His mother told him he could never tell his stepfather about these visitors. As her man of the house, he was in charge of guarding her secret.

Emily brought her own history to the relationship. Her father ran an insurance agency and her mother was a high school teacher. Emily’s father was a quiet, unassuming kind of guy. Her mother ran the household—she was gregarious, outgoing, and liked to be involved in every aspect of Emily’s life.

From as early as she could remember, Emily reported that she felt like her mother never “left her alone.” Emily said that she always had the feeling that her mother had to know everything about her. She had memories from her early teens of her mother standing in the next room to listen in on her phone calls. Since her mother was one of the teachers at the school where Emily went to high school, she felt that there was no escape from her mother’s ever-present oversight. Emily responded by being a perfect daughter and a perfect student. She was even the valedictorian of her graduating class. Since she felt like she was being monitored all the time, she chose to be as good as possible. By being perfect, her mother wouldn’t have anything to worry about and Emily could feel safe.