The Unconscious and Sexual Acting Out

The Use of Psychodrama in Treating Sexual Addiction
By Tian Dayton Ph.D., TEP
Note: This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

It is the body’s natural mandate to act; we are beings designed for movement and expression. It’s how we get around the world, communicate our feelings and thoughts, eat, sleep, cry, wail, kiss, dance and sing! We are conceived, carried, born and die all through our bodies. We feel our emotions physically; feeling, in fact, comes first. Before words enter the picture we are engaged in what Stanley Greenspan refers to as a “rich tapestry of gestures” and expressions that communicate our desires and feelings to others. Hopefully, there is a reciprocal response from another caring person so that we feel seen, heard and responded to. This is what lays down the fabric neurologically, emotionally and psychologically that maps our inner world and our capacity for intimacy, communication and connection.

These maps function both within and outside of our conscious awareness. They are part of how we learn to attach to another human being. One of the things that happen when we’re deeply distressed or frightened by less than satisfactory interactions with significant others is that we go numb inside. The child who reaches out for comfort and connection and receives instead of warmth and a friendly expression a sort of coldness, disinterest or rejection grows up feeling like a stranger in a strange land. It is as if their needs and desires are somehow invisible or inscrutable to those they depend on; or worse, that there is something wrong with having them at all.

The word “trauma” has a big ring to it. But in my own practice what I find is that the larger more visible traumas that everyone agrees are wrong or hurtful can actually be easier to treat than the constant drip, drip, drip of feeling alone in the presence of another. These emotional deficits or these empty spaces in our inner world, become a part of what we learn to expect when we look to fulfill our very human need to be intimate with another person.

Sexual Addiction As A Result of How We Learned to Connect

So when we talk of sexual addiction we need to go back into the root system of how we learned to connect and/or compensate for a feeling of disconnection— What we do to fill the empty/anxious hole inside of us.

Sexual acting out that is unconscious might be seen as both a way to self medicate unhealed, unconscious emotional and psychological pain and as a way of trying to finally get the closeness that we have longed for, for a lifetime. But as with any form of acting out, it keeps pain unconscious. Rather than feel the vulnerability and fear that accompany our desire to connect, to love and be loved, we use the excitation of the chase, the deliciousness of secrecy or the body chemicals themselves that are part of the sexual experience to override feelings of anxiety around intimacy.

One of the more poignant examples of how this gets set up is illustrated by a psychodrama— well, many psychodramas I have done with “Pete.” It is a “model scene” from his childhood home, one that incorporated the relational dynamics from childhood that are core to his acting out in adulthood. We have done many versions of this but here is one capsule. We begin with his walking home from school. As he comes down the sidewalk to his home he feels exited to see his mother after a long day away from her. His father has gotten him off to school again that morning; mom was “tired,” she was “sick.” I ask him to soliloquize as he walks, to narrate the goings on inside his mind:

“I am so excited to tell mom about my “A” on my science project. She’ll be so proud of me. Maybe we’ll go out for a walk together.”

Pete’s childlike grin betrays an innocence that belongs to childhood and an ability to hope against hope again and again and again.
“Mom, I’m home!”
“Mom, I’m home!”
“Mom, I’m…”

Pete goes up the stairs now again narrating his walk.
“I hope she’s home, where is she, was she sick this morning? Why is she always sick? I want to show her my paper with the “A” on it.

“Mom,” Pete knocks on the door, “Mom, I’m home, I’m here, open your door please.”
“Mom, open your door, Mom I got an “A”, Mom, come on open the door, come on, come on, come…..”

A look of confusion and hurt comes over Pete’s face, it is the look of a child on the face of a man. His shoulders slump and he draws his chin in.
P: “Well maybe it doesn’t really matter, maybe it’s not a very big deal. Maybe…”
Pete falls to his knees in front of her door.

“I might have fallen asleep, I don’t know, sometimes I did, I think I am crying, I am…” At this point, the pain Pete felt over and over again while collapsed in a heap in front of a door that would not open, became excruciatingly evident. He let it in in fits and starts, squinting, holding back tears then suddenly belching a little, crying, then nothing, dissociating. Keeping him engaged in the drama was challenging. Once he’d gotten some real emotion out, I decided to let him reverse roles with his mother, to enter the forbidden space and inhabit, for a moment this inaccessible world that he so longed for. I “interviewed” Pete in the role of his mother.

Tian: “Your son is crying, he wants to come in.”
Pete in the role of his mother: “What?”

T:“I said your son is crying outside your door, he desperately wants to come in.”
P:“Do you have a light, I can’t find my cigarettes.”
Pete describes that his mother was always sitting in a cloud of smoke, that she used one cigarette to light the other.

T: “Your son, are you drunk, can’t you hear me?”
P: “Oh there they are, no I never drink.”
T: “I don’t believe you.”
P: “I never drink, Pete is always ….is school out already?”
T: “He is home and wants to be with you.”
P: “Have you read this new National Geographic Magazine, it’s wonderful, all of these pictures of other countries.”
T: “Your son, he wants you to open your door.”
P: “Right here, look at this one…”
T: “Are you drunk?”
P: “No, I never drink, why do people say that? I never drink.”
At this point I knew that Pete was stuck forever in the reciprocal role with his mother, he was being true to his memories, true to his traumatized mind, to the truth he’d internalized as a boy.
T: “I think you may be drunk right now”.
P: “No, I told you, I don’t do that”.
T: “Where do you keep your bottle?”
P: “Right here, under the bed,” “mom” reached down under the bed and pulled out a bottle of gin.

Pete learned to fill his empty afternoons with a neighbor boy who initiated him into the secrets of sexual play. At the very most basic level, he found somewhere to go on these searingly lonely afternoons. He also began a life of using sex to medicate loneliness. As an adult, his trigger for sexual acting out remained loneliness and rejection, he could be sexually sober for a long time, but if he felt rejected by his wife, he acted out sexually to medicate the unconscious pain it triggered from his childhood.

Seeing Trauma in Three Dimensions Through Psychodrama

Putting this kind of confusion, this weird mix of love and lies out into the here and now through psychodrama, allows us to look at it in three dimensions. It brings what lies in our repeated past out into the present in concrete form where we can observe it and deal with it. To actually stand in the shoes of the hurting child that we were, and feel their loneliness and pain brings self compassion. Then to reverse roles with the parent and more often than not feel their pain, confusion, or inability to feel and focus because they were lost in a world of addiction, loosens up the memories that have laid petrified in the unconscious.
The relief and release involved in these simple role-plays is quite profound. Not only do we get to feel our own pain and finally make some sense of it, we feel our parents immaturity and confusion and often this serves to reveal to us that they too were lost, that their inability to give us what we needed was not personal. We were not in other words bad or undeserving, we were more or less just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can gain compassion for ourselves and for the other and this compassion lights a path to awareness and emancipation from a past that has its grip on our throat.

Meadows Senior Fellow Bessel van der Kolk, while being interviewed by Tami Simon of Sounds True explained, “When you get traumatized you have a breakdown in your imagination that anything can ever be different than the way it was, that anyone will ever love you or care for you. …you don’t know what it feels like to be held and loved. In our field we tend to be very passive, we reflect. We focus on the bad things that happen, but we don’t focus on what is missing. But moving on with life, is to take new actions.”

In other words, traditional psychotherapy tends to reinforce the block. By focusing constantly on the past trauma, we strengthen the block against trying new things.

“A very powerful point in getting over trauma,” continues van der Kolk, “is to act in ways that are different from the way you have acted. We are a symbolic species and we live by our imagination…we continuously imagine in our minds what outcomes will be...if I do this, then this will happen. What you do in so many of these psychodramatic therapies is you explore…let’s see…what will happen if we do that….let’s see what it’s like to explore… what it feels like to try something else.”

Exploring new ways of being, is part of what heals us in psychodrama. I often invite protagonists to choose new parents, or their own parents the way they wished them to be, or to rearrange the family as they wish it had been; to experiment in other words, with different ways of relating, to experience getting what they didn’t get and giving what they felt too blocked to give. It is often in these moments of finally getting what they longed for that the pain of not having it emerges. Working through this pain is what gives them the ability to be vulnerable to new feeling.

Role-play allows us to practice new behaviors, to “role train.” Trauma tends to lock us into behaviors that become repetitive and rigid. J.L. Moreno, the father of psychodrama, put it this way in a brief conversation with Freud:
He was attempting to explain the difference between psychoanalysis and psychodrama; “Dr. Freud, you analyze their dreams, I give them courage to dream again.”

References

Greenspan, Stanley, 2000, Building Healthy Minds, De Capo Press, Boston, Mass.
Moreno, JL, 1973 Psychodrama Volume One, Beacon Press, New York, New York.
Simon, Tami, Sounds True, An interview with Bessel van der Kolk

content source

Is My Porn Use Normal?

The question of whether any amount of porn use is acceptable is a divisive topic in our culture. It’s difficult to answer with any level of certainty. How much porn use is “safe” or “healthy” depends largely on a person’s individual circumstances, beliefs, and choices. 

 

A question that we can answer with some certainty, however, is whether people - generally speaking- watch a lot of pornography. The answer is a resounding, “Yes.” In 2016, people spent more than 4 billion hours watching porn on just one website alone.

A group of researchers in Canada recently set out to determine how often all of this porn-viewing proved to be problematic. They found that there are basically three different types of porn users: recreational, compulsive, and distressed.
According to an article about the study published in New York Magazine’s “Science of Us” blog:

“After doing cluster analysis — where participants are, true to the term, clustered into groups — the researchers found some interesting breakdowns. A full 75 percent of participants fell under the recreational grouping, with low scores on all porn use dimensions, an average of 24 minutes of viewing per week. Women and people in relationships were overrepresented in this group.
The “highly distressed non-compulsive” profile (12.7 percent of the sample) had low compulsivity and intensity scores, but lots of emotional distress, and watched for an average of 17 minutes a week.

The “compulsive” profile fit 11.8 percent of participants, marked by high scores on intensity and compulsivity, and moderate scores on distress. They averaged 110 minutes a week.”

If you feel that your use of pornography falls within either the “highly distressed non-compulsive” profile or the “compulsive” profile, you should consider talking to a counselor or Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (C-SAT) about it. In fact, if you find that you are regularly engaging in any sexual behaviors that cause you shame or distress, or have brought on some adverse consequences in your life, it’s important that you reach out for help. There’s no reason why you couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to discover and define a healthy, nurturing, and relational sex life for yourself.

Help is Available

At The Meadows, we offer several opportunities for interested individuals to explore the root cause of their problematic sexual behaviors and make a positive change in their lives.

Sexual Recovery Workshops

For individuals seeking personal growth and understanding of their sexuality, we have two 5-day workshops available. Men’s Sexual Recovery helps men address sexual obsession and compulsive sexuality, and to learn how to build a sex life that is fun, fulfilling, and deeply meaningful.
Journey of a Woman’s Heart: Finding True Intimacy helps women explore unhealthy sexual patterns that interfere with their ability to form truly intimate relationships.

Inpatient and Outpatient Sexual Recovery

For those who need more intensive, long-term care The Meadows offers two gender-specific inpatient treatment programs for sex addiction as well as a comprehensive outpatient program.
Gentle Path at The Meadows provides an intensive, experientially-based 45-day treatment program for men struggling with sexual addiction, love addiction, intimacy disorders, or sexual anorexia and concurrently addresses complex addiction, disordered attachment, and trauma.
Similarly, Willow House at The Meadows offers to help women with relationship and intimacy disorders, including sex and love addiction, in a nurturing environment where they can rebuild their confidence and develop relationships that will empower their recovery.
The Gentle Path Outpatient Program offers the same high quality of care that exists on our main campuses in a comprehensive outpatient program setting where individuals can start or continue their recovery from sexual addiction and intimacy conditions with a flexible schedule that accommodates work and school whenever possible.
All of our workshops and treatment programs are located in Arizona. For more information about our sexual addiction workshops and treatment options, please call 866-240-4931 or send us an email.

Content Source

3 Myths about Sex Addiction Treatment

Alexandra Katehakis, Senior Fellow at The Meadows, is one of the lead authors of an article titled, “Sex Addiction is NOT a ‘MYTH’ when Neuroscience Keeps the Score” featured in the January/February 2017 issue of The Therapist. The article is endorsed by several experts in the fields of trauma, addiction, and mental health including Dr. Claudia Black and Dr. Stefanie Carnes, both Senior Fellows at The Meadows; Dr. Jon Caldwell, Medical Director at The Meadows; and Dr. Monica Meyer, Clinical Director at Gentle Path at The Meadows.

In the article, Katehakis and her co-authors set out a convincing case for treating sex addiction as a chronic brain disease, much like other dependencies and process addictions. They also lay to rest many of the prevailing myths about the sex addiction model for treating compulsive sexual behaviors, pointing to evidence that the sex addiction theory offers neurologically-informed, sex-positive, and relationally-based therapeutic protocols.

Myth #1: Sex addiction treatment is a really just “reparative therapy.”
Reparative therapy (also known as conversion therapy) is a type of counseling that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual or bisexual to heterosexual. It has been widely discredited by mental health professionals and is illegal in several states.

Unfortunately, some therapists and counselors have misleadingly used the term “sex addiction” to lure clients into reparative therapy. Some also shame people who engage in what they see as non-conforming sexual behaviors. These practices are not considered ethical or appropriate within the sex addiction model of treatment. Expert, credentialed, Certified Sex Addiction Therapists (CSATs) do not use, support, condone, or respect the destructive practice of reparative therapy; and, their aim is to help clients move beyond shame, not to intensify the shame they are often already feeling.

Individuals should not be classified as sex addicts based on their sexual orientation. Individuals of any sexual orientation may display symptoms of sexual addiction and be diagnosed based on self-reporting and a comprehensive assessment process conducted by a trained and knowledgeable sex addiction professional.

Myth #2: Sex addiction treatment shames people for enjoying nonconforming sexual behaviors.

Certified sex addiction professionals do not shame or scold individuals who struggle with sexual preoccupation and/or compulsivity or on the basis of their sexual preferences. The goal of sex addiction treatment is to guide clients toward a sexuality that feels right for them—a sexuality that is pleasurable, creative, and relational. Sexual compulsivity and/or preoccupation is marked by moderate to severe dissociation that is often accompanied by impulses that are destructive to the client’s sense of self and lead to feelings of dysphoria and isolation. According to the authors:

“CSATs are educated about alternative sexual lifestyles which include ‘nonconforming’ behaviors such as kink/fetishes, BDSM, or other practices. Only if a client presents with sexual behavior—alternative or ordinary—that troubles him or her are practices explored and assessed. More importantly, this investigation aims to measure the problematic nature, not of the sexual acts themselves, but of their compulsive use. Recovery from sex addiction never means ‘repairing’ erotic minorities from their sexual preferences.”

Sex addicts expend most of their energy replaying past traumatic sexual experiences and/or repetitively fantasizing about future ones. These preoccupations and impulses are often overwhelming and severely disrupt their professional and personal lives. The disorder has no resemblance to even the most robust, healthy sexual interest and behavior.

Myth #3: Sex addiction treatment is just another 12-step program.
Sex addiction therapists do not see the 12-step program as the be-all and end-all of treatment. 12-step programs are valuable in that they can help participants increase their relational skills and ability to connect with others through regular interaction with a caring group. But sex addiction therapy does not end with 12-step work.

The most effective treatment for sex addiction is based on a well-designed, multi-faceted, comprehensive plan that is tailored to the client’s goals. The treatment provider also must help the client to develop support structures—like a 12-step program—that facilitate long-term and meaningful recovery.

For example, at Gentle Path at The Meadows and Willow House at The Meadows, treatment plans focus on trauma resolution and include neurofeedback and neuriobiofeedback techniques, EMDR, experiential therapies, individual counseling, mindfulness practices, yoga, acupuncture and more, in addition to 12-step work.

It’s a holistic approach that treats the whole person, focusing on the mind, body, and emotions of the client. Its goal is to help clients resolve past trauma and discover—sometimes for the first time—pleasurable, self-nurturing, and relational sexuality.

What is Sex Addiction Treatment Really About?

The sex addiction model of treatment is not sex-negative, puritanical, or anti-pleasure. It also does not disapprove of or try to discourage sexual expression outside of narrowly-defined, normative, heterosexual sex. Sex addiction treatment, when conducted by well-trained, caring professionals, is sex-positive. Its goal is to help each person discover, delight in, and fully express his or her preferred sex life.

For more information on sex addiction treatment for yourself or your partner or spouse, please give us all call at 800-244-4949. Our Intake Specialists are happy to talk to you about whether one of our 5-day workshops, inpatient sex addiction treatment, or outpatient sex addiction treatment may be right for you.

Content Source

Difference between porn addiction of a married and an unmarried…

Gentle Path at The Meadows carried out a survey on porn addiction where approximately 500 males were interrogated about their addictions and most were the victim of pornography addiction.

We divided them into 2 parts: Married and Unmarried

As a part of confidentiality, we do not reveal their name so we call all the married men John and unmarried ones Edward.

John's wife, after several attempts of explaining, got tired of him and their marriage was at stake. This addiction not only destroyed his marriage life but destroyed his physical and financial self also. John was so much obsessed with pornography that he could not finish his chores, meet his office targets and enjoy his family life. Here John was a family man, but this addiction is seen mostly in teenagers.

Teenage males are very much addicted to pornography because they are newly exposed to this and they want to explore themselves. Like John, I came across teenage male (Edward). Edward was being exposed to pornography by his friend and he got so much obsessed with it that he stopped attending functions and fulfill his other duties. Edward was so addicted that sometimes, by mistake he sexually molested girls. Once, he was so disgusted with himself that was about to commit suicide.

Pornography watched more could deteriorate your life and hinders the progress. Any addiction is fatal for human’s physical and mental life which also leads to adverse effect on an individual's social life. As shown in porn videos, we expect our partner to enact accordingly but this is real world and some things are impossible in real life.

Thus, The Meadows is your solution. We at The Meadows, provide pornography addiction help. Be it porn addiction or any other addiction, we are there to help. People like Johns and Edwards are normal and need not feel disgusted with them. Just seek the help from correct source and you will get your life back on track by overcoming pornography addiction.

 Content Source

3+1 home remedies for porn addiction

Pornography Addiction can happen to any male at any time. It may be the result of stress, to divert the mind of physical injury, restlessness of hormones, etc. We think watching porn could help solve all the problems, but that is not the case. Porn addiction could damage a lot than expected. Releasing a stress with watching porn and masturbating could adversely affect health. Many of us are Addicted to pornography in such a way that when it comes down to making love our expectations, ruins everything. The addiction takes us to such a level of fantasy world that we come far away from ground reality making our partners unhappy. So, how to get back to pavilion?

There are 3 ways one can free himself from this addiction:

1. When you have the urge to watch porn, do not hesitate or avoid it, instead, watch it but restrict yourself with a certain time limit. Do not do anything and as urge increases, workout or talk to a friend or go for a walk. This practice will help you overcoming pornography addiction.

2. Not thinking about porn is also about porn so that option is to guide and direct your mind in such a way, make it busy that you will not think about porn at all. Enhance your talent, join a class, create a hobby, and learn something new. These all things will give you Pornography addiction help.

3. Addiction to porn will give you unrealistic expectations so think that if you will get addicted to porn and addicted to sex, you will upset your partner. This will result in breaking of relationship. We certainly don't want that right?

4. The fourth step, well above mentioned title suggests only 3 step then, what is 4^th? The fourth step is to take your phone from the pocket or receive a receiver and call The Gentle Path at The Meadows. We have been treating all kinds of traumas, disorders, and addictions since last 35+ years. So, do not hesitate to come seek help from us. We will be happy to help you 24*7.
   
   
   Content Source