“Learning to slow down,” an image of a snail, a snail is slow… You get it.
Learning to slow down in our fast-paced society is so difficult, but lately I’ve been realizing just how important it really is. Some of the last few posts I’ve written in this blog have been less focused on tips, advice, and other forms of useful content that I’ve always felt a lot of pressure to produce.
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?
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?
“When I was eight, the imposter, or false self, was born as a defense against pain. The imposter within whispered, ‘Brennan, don’t ever be your real self anymore because nobody likes you as you are. Invent a new self that everybody will admire and nobody will know.’ So I became a good boy—polite, well-mannered, unobtrusive, and deferential. I studied hard, scored excellent grades, won a scholarship in high school, and was stalked every waking moment by the terror of abandonment and the sense that nobody was there for me.”
– Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child
ADDICTION AS A “SPIRITUAL MALADY” If you take a look at AA’s Big Book or go to a 12-step meeting of any kind, it won’t be long before you hear about spirituality, and for good reason. One of the first requirements of any 12-step program is for...
Read MoreAfter parking in your driveway, you notice that the walk from your car to the door of your home seems much, much longer today. You’re feeling uneasy about going inside as the going has been rough with your partner lately. It’s a stressful time for both of you, and you’ve been at odds more than usual. While you may not be concerned about the health of the relationship—you’ve weathered storms together before, you’ve understandably been texting and talking with your best friend about it as you’ve needed some support. The calls, the coffee meetings, the texts with your friend have been a breath of fresh air. Without even knowing it, though, the uptick in contact with your friend might be a way you’re avoiding conflict in your relationship.
“What resources can you recommend that will help us with our marriage?” As a marriage counselor, I hear this question a lot, especially from couples I see for the first time. Like so many married partners, these couples quite understandably want to know what they can do to make their marriage better. Of course, a number of books, articles, blogs, and podcasts come to the top of my mind in response, but when couples ask about resources to improve their relationship, my first answer is always the same: you. You are the best resource available for making your marriage sweet.
The novelty of the New Year has not yet worn off, has it? Indeed, today I returned to work and, with awkward, halting penmanship and deliberate thought, wrote “2015” in the date I recorded on some paperwork. It’s this time of year that we are still eagerly embracing our hopes for the year ahead, wanting to make fresh efforts to realize what we long to be in our lives.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve shared with you some of my thoughts about why spending time with our families can be stressful, sometimes enough to leave us feeling a little crazy. Feelings of anxiety, confusion, frustration, guilt, being blamed, and other “crazy” emotions when we’re with our families aren’t uncommon. In Part 1, I described how these feelings can result from relational trauma, which happens when we’re emotionally wounded, blamed for our pain, and shunned when we attempt to reconnect. In Part 2, I explained that we might also see these feelings as the outcome of subtle ways of being with our loved ones; the more discordant notes in a family’s melody, the more intense our crazy feelings often become.
This time of year, as Paul McCartney sings in his classic tune, the mood is right, the spirits are up, but that doesn’t always mean that you’re having a wonderful Christmas time. Indeed, in case you missed it, in Part 1 of this series, I considered what visiting family for the holidays can bring up—anger, sadness, frustration, anxiety, shame, and other “crazy” feelings, other painful feelings that you may even feel guilty about or that cause you to second-guess your emotional experiences. As we saw, one way to make sense of these feelings is to understand them as the result of relational trauma, which happens when someone we really care about hurts you, blames you for being hurt, and rebuffs your efforts to reconnect. These “crazy” feelings become more intense around family as members interact with and hurt each other in familiar ways.