The holidays are a season for laughter, merrymaking, time with family, and gatherings with friends—all of which are often accompanied by alcohol.
That’s why for many in recovery the holidays are a tough time. Not only does this time of year bring up a lot of emotional “stuff,” which alone can be triggering, booze is a frequent guest at holiday parties and social gatherings.
Last time, we took a tour of some of my recommended books for those struggling with porn and sex addiction. Today, we’ll consider some books for partners of sex and porn addicts. Fortunately, resources have become more and more available for partners in recent years; the mental health professionals treating sex addiction are recognizing the devastating effects of the addict’s betrayal upon his or her partner. Discovery of the addict’s behaviors is extraordinarily traumatic, so that partners too need supportive care.
As the field of sexual addiction and pornography addiction grows, so too does its literature. It can be a little overwhelming to find trusted resources and books for sex and porn addicts and addiction that might be helpful in your recovery journey, especially if you’re just starting out.
That’s why I wanted to share some books that I use all the time with my clients. The books below are for those struggling with sexual behaviors that have gotten out of hand and are trying to change. If you want to pick these up, try your local bookstore or use the links below. (I’m not an Amazon affiliate and I’m not benefitting in any way by recommending these.) Next time I’ll share some resources for their partners.
If you think you might be struggling with sex or pornography addiction, seeking out a therapist is a wonderful way to care for yourself. Partnering with a therapist means enlisting the help of an experienced guide to help you get to where you want to go. However, the sheer number of therapists in your area often makes the choice more than a little overwhelming. So how can you determine which therapist is the right one for you?
I often meet with individuals in during free consultations who are looking for the right fit. Choosing a therapist is a highly personal decision that should be made with a great deal of thought and consideration.
So how might you determine who is a good fit for you?
This post is the fourth in a series of posts called How Much to Tell and When: Disclosure in Early Recovery. Click here to read part 1, here for part 2, and here for part 3.
One of the most common questions I get from clients struggling with sex or porn addiction is how to respond to their partners when they’re hurting and asking for more details about their previous acting out. “What do I say when she comes at me like that?”
As we’ve seen, the answer isn’t so simple. In part 1, we discussed spontaneous disclosure and a little about how this traumatizes partners. In part 2, we saw how waiting to tell her about all acting out behaviors via formal disclosure can actually be healing to both partners in the long run. In part 3, though, we established that waiting until formal disclosure often sucks. Big time.
All of that was necessary to answer one of the most common questions in early recovery: How should you, a sex addict in recovery, respond to your partner when she asks for more information about your acting out?
Empathy, if you recall from part I, is the ability and practice of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Most simply, empathy is an effort to take the other’s perspective and share his feelings.
We went a bit farther than that, though.
Empathy is not agreeing with the other person (most likely your partner). It’s not sympathizing with her. It’s not just listening like a bump on a log. It’s not sharing “that-time-when-something-similar-happened” to you. It’s not fixing her or making her feel better (although empathy can and will probably make her feel better and more connected to you).
Instead, empathy means that you’re attempting to know and understand the other person’s perspective from within her subjective world. Empathy constantly seeks for avenues into another’s universe, joining her mind, her heart as she feels safe enough to open it to you.
If you’re reading this, perhaps you’re going through a very difficult time in your relationship or marriage. You’ve betrayed your partner in some way, whether it was infidelity, sex addiction, or watching pornography.
In other words, you got caught cheating. Now you’re in the doghouse, and you don’t know what to do. You want to work on the relationship, but you’re not sure how.
You love your partner, but when she’s overwhelmed with her pain about what’s happened, you feel stuck. Maybe she’s raging at you. Maybe she’s flooded by anxiety. Maybe she’s sobbing uncontrollably.
How do you respond in a loving way that helps rebuild intimacy and restore trust in the relationship?
In part I, we reconsidered the arousal neuropathway as the addictive neuropathways have been on our minds of late. We established that the sexual activities that activate the arousal neuropathway, which is about excitement, pleasure, and intensity, can include the exertion of power over another person.
In the last post, we considered the four addiction neuropathways—arousal, satiation or numbing, fantasy, and deprivation. If you missed it, we talked about how addicts tend to self-select the substance or compulsive behavior of choice (there’s usually a primary addiction, even if there are others present) based on how they want to alter their feelings.
In my previous post, we talked briefly about addiction interaction and how addictions can co-occur in different ways. As we saw, it’s crucial to understand addiction interaction disorder because it can pose a danger to recovery as the possibility of one addiction replacing another is very real.
Moreover, addictions can interact with one another at the same time in highly complex ways. So while is always critical to get help for the most life-threatening addiction first, it’s important to be thoroughly honest with oneself while in recovery about all of the addictions present in one’s life.