not being transparent and authentic; (2) you’re always worried that maybe you’ll be discovered and found out; and (3) deep down inside, you end up believing some of your own misperceptions and distortions. An addict often tells a story long enough and starts to live the story as reality. For anybody who has relapsed, they have lied to themselves about the amount of time they spend on the illness. They have lied to themselves about their recovery time. They have done whatever it has taken to keep that part of their life in secret. So we want to know, what are your secrets, and from whom have you kept them? Who doesn’t know about your secrets? Is there anybody who knows the truth about your secrets? I want you to think about that. I want you to add that as homework #2. It’s to be followed directly after you write your problem list.
Addicts use “defense mechanisms” to continue their addictions. Which defense mechanisms do you use to keep your lies, secrets, and excuses going? You know that you use them. You lie to yourself; you tell yourself that the behaviors aren’t that bad. Maybe you tell yourself, “There’s nothing wrong with me joking around about this issue,” or “This is just guys being guys.” If you’re a woman, you may say, “This is what guys want. They want a sexually promiscuous woman.”
The defense mechanisms that are typically used around addiction are
•Minimization, which includes minimizing or making small the issue, the problem.
•Maybe you’re using justification, telling yourself, “If my wife and I had more sex, I wouldn’t have to go to massage parlors or prostitutes.”
•Maybe you’re rationalizing your behavior. You’re telling yourself, “Everybody does this. This truly isn’t a problem.”
•Maybe you are displacing your feelings. What ends up happening is instead of dealing with the real problem, you displace your feelings onto something else: “If my boss wasn’t such a tyrant, I wouldn’t look at as much porn as I do at work,” or “If my kids weren’t so tough to deal with, I wouldn’t need to be gone and be away from the house.”
Okay, we’ve got minimization, we have justification, we have rationalization, and we have displacement.
•Then, there’s something call suppression. That’s when you suppress your real feelings about something so you don’t deal with them. Suppression means you bury them deep into your subconscious.
•Or, repression. Here you actually hide your feelings in the unconscious and you don’t even know you have them. People who have been traumatized very severely may repress or suppress their thoughts, their feelings, and their beliefs, because it wasn’t safe as a kid to work them out.
Again, it is important to know what defenses an addict uses to understand what some of their excuses are about. Next you need to write down what your excuses are, because they actually create more of the problems and the secrets. When you really get to looking at those, then wow, you’re much more able to deal with your secrets, and that is so important. It’s important for recovery.
Label your excuses to the best of your ability. Then, I’m going to ask you to follow the guidelines in Facing the Shadow because they actually want you to note the date when you realized you were distorting the reality. Now that can be very difficult, but addicts create rationales for their behavior, and they usually blame somebody else for their problems, or they argue to themselves that they have unique circumstances. So, the real issue is coming clean with what’s going on inside, and that’s important.
Once you start working on those excuses, those rationalizations, those justifications, you may say to yourself, “I use so many of those.” That’s okay. Insight is the first step toward getting healthy. The last thing I want you to look at for this week are the emotional, the physical, the spiritual, the familial, and the career consequences that have occurred because of your sexual addiction. There may be some legal ones. There may have been some consequences to your health. You may have felt suicidal, felt those kinds of emotional consequences. Loss of self-esteem. Loss of goals. Those are all emotional. Clearly, if you’ve lost a job or you haven’t self-actualized and moved up in your work, that may be because your sexual addiction has robbed you of that. When you think about all the different consequences, you are then working diligently on breaking the denial. If you remember, that is task #1 in the series of seven tasks that we are going to be looking at as we break the denial and get you healthy.
Denial is in itself a defense mechanism. It may have at some point kept you safe, but anytime you use denial to the extreme, you clearly and understandably use it to keep yourself from facing the truth and getting healthy. Okay, think about your level of denial. If you’re listening to this show, I know that you are working diligently on deciding what you need to do to get healthy. If you’re like most addicts, you’re starting to realize how far from reality you have been living.
Ask yourself how many of these things apply to you:
•Have you ever ended up in a massage parlor when you promised yourself that you wouldn’t? You were unable to honor your marriage commitment.
•You may have had sex for money.
•You may have had sex with people of the opposite sex for the intrigue.
•You may have taken some sexual risks with employees.
•Did you masturbate in public?
•Did you exchange sex for drugs?
•Perhaps you exposed yourself and took a real legal risk of being discovered.
I remember when I was talking with a woman who thought she was a sex addict. She came to that realization that when she woke up one morning and the man she spent the night with had taken all of her money and her credit cards. He had charged thousands of dollars to her credit card.
Ask yourself:
•Have you ever been arrested for lewd behavior?
•Did inappropriate things in a restroom?
•Made anonymous calls or sent anonymous emails?
•Send pictures of yourself or inappropriate pictures of somebody else?
These are all indicators that your behavior is out of control, and that lends itself to sexual addiction. If any of those things sound like you, you need to get some help. The two most important resources that you can access are starting therapy with a certified sex addiction therapist and joining a Twelve Step program that deals with sex addiction. It may look like Sexaholics Anonymous Step Step groups (SA) or Sex Addiction Anonymous groups (SAA). You can access Twelve Step groups by Googling them. If you no longer have access to the Internet, then you need to talk to your wife, your husband, someone you trust, and say, “Get that information for me.” If there are no meetings in your area, you can always be a part of telephone Twelve Step meetings. There’s no reason you can’t get the help you need.
Granted, I truly believe that if you’re going to use telemeetings as your #1 support for 12 steps, the process is probably going to be slower. It just is, because face-to-face is always more meaningful and does some of the repair work that you need to do. However, I can’t emphasize enough how important seeking a therapist who has expertise in this is, and finding the support group you need to break through the denial by identifying what your problems are, and identifying what the secrets have been and the consequences of your actions. Think about it; that is the start of getting the help you need.
Once you realize you have a problem, you don’t have to call it addiction, but you do have to know that it 100 percent interferes with your functioning. Then we ask you to get a sponsor, because you need specific guidance. You need somebody to help you. I recently had a young man who had done really well for a period of about two months. Then he participated again in some behaviors that were similar to those in Thanks for Sharing. He had hidden cameras and had taken pictures of women without their knowledge. What was the first thing he did? He called me. What was the first thing I did? I connected him to another man in the program.