SEXUAL ADDICTION

SEXUAL ADDICTION

By Willy K. Mukucha

"We know better than others the limits of our sexual addiction:
That it is solitary, furtive, and satisfies only itself,
That, contrary to love, it is fleeting,
That it demands hypocrisy,
That it enfeebles strong sexual feeling,
That it is humorless and cruel,
That it destroys good feelings about ourselves,
That it is hollow,
That it distances us from our feelings,
That it works to exclude our family,
That it exploits power over others,
That it causes us to abuse our bodies
And
That we end up broken and alone.

An Anonymous Addict


How do persons become sexually addicted? What are the particular vulnerabilities, environmental, developmental, physiological, or psychological that contribute to the addiction?

The answer to this question will be the focus of this research paper.

In his book, Contrary to Love, Patrick Carnes has identified a number of common preconditions which contribute to an individual vulnerability to sex addiction: These risk factors include:

• Hight probability of having been sexually abused as a child, although the addict may not recognize the abuse or see its connection to current behavior.

• A high probability of having been raised in a dysfunctional family in which self-esteem has been damaged, resulting in severe problems with intimacy (how to be close) and dependency (whom to trust).

• A history of emotional and physical abuse, intensifying a sense of unworthiness and fear of abandonment.

• Sex addict or other types of addiction among parents, siblings, and other family members

• An extremely high probability of other addictions and compulsions, including chemical dependency, eating disorders, compulsive gambling, and compulsive spending.


The Addict’s Family and Beliefs:

An old Zen parable describes two monks travelling together. When they came to a river, a young woman approaches and asks for assistence in crossing. The older monk carries her on his back across the river. She thanks him and goes on her way. For the next two days, the younger monk thinks about the obvious temptation his older collegue risked in carrying the woman. Unable to contain himself any longer, he finally confronts the older monk: Do you think it is wise to have carried a young, attractive woman on your back? The older monk responds: I carried her accros the river. You have carried her ever since.

In sexual addiction terms, the difference between this story and the typical scenario of the sex addict’s family is that the family members typically spend much time and energy obsessing about the sex addict’s behavior.

To understand how an individual comes to carry the obsessional burden of sexual addiction, it is necessary to examine the family system which may have helped create that obsession. Because obsession becomes one of the several bonds that tie members of the family system to the addictive system of the addict.

The addictive system becomes an organizing principle in their lives as well and both the family and the addict find stability in the addictive system, even when the family is desperatly trying to eliminate the behavior.

To help understand the dynamics of the addict’s family of origin, some researchers (Olson, Sprenkle and Russel have developed a map called CIRCUMPLEX MODEL.

This model, unlike most linear approaches, which range from good to bad, reflects the reality that there are a number of possible extremes a family can reach. In addition, a family does not move in a line but around a combination of behaviors. The circumplex model provides a means and a vocabulary to examine two essential factors in family dynamics: adaptability and Cohesion.

Figure 5-3


Adaptability

Explanations: Every family has its chaotic and rigid moments, however families that remain in the extremes, damage their members for both rigidity and chaos affect conscience formation (Children struggling with authority and rules…or children who cannot keep boundaries).

Key: a family’s inability to adapt to children’s needs becomes extremely important here because of the close connection between a child’s need to depend on others and addiction. The children need to be able to count on-depend upon families for survival, nurturing, love and approval. If the family doesn’t provide it, they will look for what they can depend upon, and they find it. Drugs, alcohol, food, and sex always produce a predictable high.

If a child develops a reliance on these external sources, pleasurable experiences become the primary relationship upon which he or she relies.

Cohesion .

Besides dependency on external sources for pleasure and nature, the other crucial variables in addiction are self-esteem and the capacity to have intimacy with others. This brings us to the cohesion aspect.

Simply defined, cohesion is how closely a family sticks together. The degree of emotional support available in a family is vital to the development of self-concept. Reciprocally, a person’s self image determines the ability to have relationships.

Cohesion has four levels:

Disengaged: Disengaged family members distance themselves from one another, maintaining extreme separateness and little family loyalty.

Separated: Separated families mix emotional independence with some involvement and joint effort and occasional family loyalty.

Connected: Connected families emphasize emotional closeness, family loyalty, and joint efforts while allowing for some individuality.

Enmeshed: Enmeshed families demand extreme family closeness and family loyalty and allow for little individuality

The Family of origin:

In order to understand sexual addiction we need to connect the extremes of the addict’s family of origin with the addict’s core beliefs, these core beliefs being the foundation of the addictive system. They account for the shame and guilt experienced by the addict, especially sexual shame and guilt.

Four main core beliefs:

1. & 2 Shame and Guilt:

Shame and guilt are qualitatively different. An individual may feel guilty about committing a specific act that he or she knows is wrong. In contrast, shame comes from experiencing oneself or one’s behavior as unacceptable.

Shame is the experience of being fundamentally bad as a person. Nothing you have done is wrong and nothing you can do will make up for it. It is a total experience forbids communication with words.

The logic is simple here: If I cannot accept myself, I am confident others will do the same.

I am a bad, unworthy person and No one would love me as I am. These essentially originate from too little or too much family support and involvement, and as a result, conclusions about self or family members are diminished.

Many people feel shameful, however, but are not seriously addicted. The crucial question is what turns the failure of family intimacy into addiction?

3. Thus, a third core belief: Survivor mentality: My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend on others.
It all depends on how the family handles dependency issues. Children depend upon the family structure to get their needs met. When consistent failure to meet these needs occurs, either because of parental inflexibility (rigidity) or inability to follow through (chaos), the child concludes that to survive one can only count on oneself. Other human beings are unreliable.

This logic obliterates trust and leaves only one option: to survive means to be in control. An equation is established, the distrust/control equation sets the fundamental parameters of addiction. All that is left is to find a source of nurturing over which the addict believes he or she has control - sex.

Since being out of control is perceived as the ultimate defect, addicts will experience a series of alternating cycles of shame and guilt which leave them hopeless. Remorse for what they have done confirms their innate badness, which in turn paralyzes their capacity to relieve their guilt. This despair reaches its highest degree of intensity immediately after the addict has been out of control.

These beliefs about self, relationships, and dependency are shared by all addicts-which helps explain how a person could be addicted to more than one compulsive behavior.

The remaining question is, how does one become a sex addict?

4. The key variable is the fourth core belief of the addict: SEX IS MY MOST IMPORTANT NEED.

In essence, the addict concludes that since no one can be counted on, “sex becomes the one dependable” source of nurturing that will always be readily available.

If the first three core beliefs form the common denominator between all addictions, the factor that separates the sex addiction from other forms of addiction is the addict’s unshakable belief in sex as essential to well-being. Sex is seen as more critical to emotional survival than family, friends, work and values.

How does sex become so important? Again the family of origin plays a key role, especially in how it teaches sexual shame.

• Negative family messages about sex take many forms; some are very indirect such as:
- heavily loaded value labels like good girl and bad boy
- No-talk rules about sexual issues
- Evasive responses to questions about sex
- Inaccurate information given purposely
- Descriptions which do not match reality and are therefore confusing, such as curse, family way or birds and bees
- Lack of physical and sexual affirmation
- Lack of others who get into trouble
- Destructive sexual patterns in marriage like Dad pushes; Mom gives in.

• More direct forms include extensive moralizing about sex as inherently bad, evil or sinful; threats about sexual behavior (“If you ever…”); and description of sex as an awful or degrading experience. By far the most damaging forms are physical or verbal abuse when a child is discovered being sexual.

• Some families will carry sexual shame from one generation to the next…

• Shaming events:
- The most damaging way parents lose control is in sexual abuse of their children (63% of addicted women reported being abused…55% of men who committed incest are childhood victims of incest… Research conducted by Patrick Carnes in Contrary to Love).
- Growing up in a family where parents were out of control sexually. For example parents who are sexually inappropriate in front of their children while intoxicated create confusion….or parents who constantly change sexual partners…


However not all sex addicts come from families of origin as described here. Research data suggest that most do, but they are those addicts whose catalytic events occur entirely outside the blood family, such as being raised in a boarding school…or some other environment later in life.


Catalytic Environments:
Catalytic environments are characterized by extremes. For example, situations that combine high performance expectations with low degree of structure seem to be particularly potent. Addicts who are professionals in various field report that their addictions started and flourished during their training experiences-medical school, seminary, law school, graduate school.
….The demands of the curriculum, the competitive pressure to be one of the survivors and the high expectations of the family were coupled with the lack of structure- a great deal of unscheduled time and only periodic accountability…

Other examples of extremes include:
• The factory worker who spends a highly structured day doing extremely unskilled routinezed labor and who aches for an escape.

• The governement official who has the extremely high expectations of the elected representative and also the total accountability under the uncesing scrutiny of the media and political opponents.

• The professional sports figure who fees the pressure to serve as a model American hero and to be at a peak each season with the off-season requiring nothing.

• The out of work minority individual who has no structure on time and few expectations to do anything about it.

Procrastination: Many addicts talk about being unable to meet productivity expectations at work. Sometimes an addict will go into a last-ditch work binge to save the day, will use a sexual behavior as a reward, and will start procrastination again.

Common to all these extreme environments is a progressive self-doubt. Addicts typically say they never had much faith in themselves. Even those who once were self-confident agree that at the onset of their addiction they were in an environment where they experienced a serious loss of faith in themselves.

Thus Anxiety and control are common aspects of these experiences. The uncertainty of mastering unknown, uncertain or extreme environments and inability to ensure acceptable outcomes are cornerstones of all addictions. The addiction supplies a temporary solution by allying anxiety and giving momentary purpose to the self, but ultimately it compounds life problems.

Catalytic Events:

Catalytic events may be seen as falling into two major categories: abandonment events and sexual events.

• Usually abandonment events involve a significant loss or perceived significant loss (early death of a parent, divorce, extended separation…)

From a child’s point of view, if a parent leaves home, there is only one conclusion: the child was not acceptable, not worthy enough to stay for.

Sexual events: The example of the boy whose dad took him out one evening to purchase the services of prostitutes for both of them. That was the beginning of his addiction…he believed he was doomed to live a life like his father’s.

Or a girl who was proud of the fact that she had had sexual relationships with all every man in her family by the time she was sixteen. …this was a foreshadowing of sixteemn more years of prostitutions. When asked, she identified the first time she had sex with her father, two months after her mother’s death, as a critical event that started the addiction.

Conclusion:

Whether the family has high degree of tension around sexual matters or is out of control, children end up feeling shameful about their sexuality. And when the family is preoccupied with sex, the logic of the core beliefs becomes circular.

Sex addict core beliefs summarized:

1. I am basically a bad, unworthy person
2. No one would love me as I am
3. My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend on others
4. Sex is my most important need
5. I am bad because sex is my most important need.



Question 5:

What spiritual/ theological perspectives emerge from within the addictive experience and how does spirituality engage the addiction in any helpful way? How would you introduce spirituality into the treatment plan for such a person?

Serenity prayer as the essence of new spirituality:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”

The spirituality of admission and acceptance (of one’s limitations) leads to some form of faith. Because I am limited I am not God, I am only a creature. Being a creature, I am in relationship with a creator and other creatures.

My limitations (weaknesses, death…) have some meaning in a greater picture (the design of some creative force).

In his book, The denial of death, Ernest Becker, argues that there is a link between denial of death and sexual compulsivity and perversion. Sex becomes a way to shield the self from the reality of daily limits.

Through this spirituality, the sexual behavior as a mechanism to manage anxiety, may be replaced by faith (in Higher power –whether it is God, goodness, group support. Other…). The addict has a source greater than themselves to draw upon.


Healing power of Rituals:

Ritualization is already an integral part of the addictive system, so replacement of those rituals by positive rituals can be very useful.

In recent years, the power of rituals has been rediscovered, to assist people in recovery, grief, transition…even with dysfunctional families.

The “12 steps” are already a new set of rituals that can enhance the learning of a new culture.

Examples: to use rituals to learn to depend on others…because addicts normally handle things by themselves and use their addiction to get them through.

New rituals could also focus on:
• Nurture oneself
• Involve having fun and leisure
• Center around family life
• Enhanced committed relationships

Spirituality of healthy shame and guilt

If you are hurting others by the foods you eat (your addiction) …. you are not guided by love. Don't let your appetite destroy someone Christ died for. Don't let your right to eat bring shame to Christ. God's kingdom isn't about eating and drinking. It is about pleasing God, about living in peace, and about true happiness. All this comes from the Holy Spirit. Romans 14:15-17
There may be need to restore positive shame and guilt with the support of a caring fellowship.
Shame and Guilt are fundamental to healthy functioning in human beings because they serve as guide to appropriate behavior. We are embarrassed when we act inappropriately. Guilt helps us to know when we have harmed others and we wish to make it up to them when we have done something wrong.
Shame and guilt become distorted in the addictive system:
Addicts feel so bad about themselves that they do not trust that anyone can forgive them. No apology, no forgiveness, and no reconciliation can occur. As a result, the addict becomes progressively even more isolated.
Providing a spirituality of positive shame and guilt as well as a structure (12 steps) that could allow them to share shameful experiences, could decrease excessive guilt and shame as they accept the illness and share their stories with others who have gone through similar experiences.