Did you know that according to Patrick Carnes, Sex Addiction Expert, he reports that relapse happens for most individuals who struggle with sex addiction in the second six months of recovery? Most individuals gain traction in recovery through counseling, support groups and establishing strong boundaries. It is very important that individuals who struggle with sex addiction stay proactive in their recovery and the journey to having healthy and satisfying relationships.

These are three effective ways to avoid relapse in a sexual addiction recovery program:

1. Be humble:

For many individuals who struggle with sex addiction the first six months to a year is the first time in a long time that their mind and actions are not filled with double mindedness including acting out, lying, etc. When individuals start to feel good about their progress, there can be a temptation to loosen their established boundaries. This can be dangerous which is why most individuals who struggle with sex addiction relapse in the first year (second six months) of recovery. It is imperative to stay on a plan that they review with accountability partners especially early in the recovery process. Being humble recognizes that this will be an ongoing battle and that they will need to stay sharp every day to stay consistent and free. By staying humble, one will recognize when temptations or compromise is coming and be willing to take an even stronger stand rather than backing off! If they want to continue their journey, they must stay humble and they will stay on the right path! (more…)

Depression varies from person to person and episode to episode, not only in its degree of intensity and disability, but also by which types of symptoms the depressed person experiences. Some people experience most or all of the symptoms of depression during depressive episodes, but many people experience only one or a few.

It always amazes me how some people with depression can obsess about suicide, but be compassionate, forgiving, and non-judgmental about themselves, while others can attack themselves viciously and yet never find any appeal to suicide. Others feel like they are weighed down by a thousand pounds of bricks when they try to get out of bed, or brush their teeth, or do the dishes, but be able to feel joy. And some can be negative about every aspect of the future, but have no trouble motivating themselves to get their chores done. Some people never get suicidal, no matter how depressed they get. Others never get irritable, or never turn to addictions.

The Cluster View

This is why I developed the “cluster view” of depressive experiences. Generally, a cluster of five depression symptoms is required for a depression diagnosis, but many people experience a cluster of one to four of the symptoms, often in ways that vary widely. Usually, each person has a fairly consistent and characteristic profile for which of these symptoms attack them when they get depressed. This is why I think it’s important to talk separately about each of the ways people experience depression, or depression-like symptoms.

The Low Ambition Experience

One of the experiences of depression is the lack of physical and/or emotional energy to motivate and function. People with this type of depression feel overwhelmed by life—sometimes constantly and by everything. They just don’t have the ability to motivate themselves to do what they need to do. This is very disabling, even in milder forms.

[fat_widget_depression_right]This experience is often misunderstand and called procrastination, irresponsibility, attention-deficit, laziness, passive resistance, sloppiness, incompetence, disorganization, and more. But when someone is missing “that thing” that makes people get up and go do something, life is constantly overwhelming. The depressed person may be constantly failing and can easily lose control of the functionality of their life. Most people take this ability to motivate themselves to do things for granted. They just have it—after their morning coffee, at least—and don’t have to think about it. But for those who suffer from the lack of that ability, life can be Hell.

People experiencing this type of depression may find they have trouble motivating themselves for certain chores or parts of their lives, or that the problem extends to everything they need to do. It’s very disabling to have to talk to yourself like a coach for an hour just to get up the energy to get out of bed, even more so if you can’t motivate yourself to take care of things you have to do—like your job, parenting, or self-care—no matter how hard you try.

Understanding Emotional Energy

I believe that the motivation center that depression attacks is our “emotional energy,” which is separate from physical energy. Emotional energy is hard to describe, but if you want to do something and your body has the physical energy and you’re not scared to do the thing, but you still can’t get yourself to do it, it’s probably because you have very low emotional energy.

People with this low emotional energy cluster are not necessarily without drive or ambition to succeed. People with low emotional energy can be very ambitious, driven, and able to fulfill their ambitions when they are not experiencing this symptom. But having low emotional energy is like wanting to run a marathon when your legs are tied together. Sometimes this symptom comes in people who have been very ambitious and worked so hard they burned themselves out. Even more confusingly, people can sometimes have enough physical energy to act, but still not have the emotional energy required to act.

Listening to Emotional Energy Communications

If you have low emotional energy symptoms, try listening carefully to your “ambition system” messages. Sometimes this depressed lack of motivation is simply due to brain chemistry—in which case, the message is about doing something to alter brain chemistry. But often, the message is related to how you feel about the things that you can’t get yourself to do. Could it be that you’re dissatisfied with your job, your partner, or something else in your life that you’d have to deal with if you got up and functioned? That could be what your lack of emotional energy is telling you.

Or is there something about your life you feel helpless to change? Research has repeatedly shown that helplessness causes depression, and feeling helpless can drain people’s emotional and physical energy. If feel like you can’t have an impact, no matter what you do, then why try to do anything?

Repressing feelings of anger can also drain people for different reasons. If you think that letting yourself be angry will be destructive and you suppress it, there are two consequences: it takes a lot of energy to suppress those feelings, and you are suppressing a great deal of life-force and energy that come with anger. Your system might also know that if you have no energy, you can’t get very angry, so it cuts off your energy to protect you from perceived negative consequences of getting angry.

Living the Reality of Low Ambition

When people listen to the communications that their low emotional energy is telling them, they often find that the problem is trying to get themselves to do things because they “should” or because someone else wants them to: they try to force themselves to do things. I have found that if you wait and watch carefully, there may be moments when you feel like you can do something, or even want to. You may have to wait minutes, hours, days, or months before that moment happens, but if you can possibly afford to wait, listen, and seize the moment when you feel it, then suddenly something that felt impossible can feel easier, or even a little exciting. Noticing those moments of energy and acting on them is very important. It’s easy to ignore these moments and let things get worse.

Sometimes altering your expectations can shift your emotional energy as well. Like, what would actually happen if you didn’t fold your laundry—just stuffed it in drawers, or left it in the laundry basket? Would that make doing the laundry feel more achievable? The rules we carry about how things “should” be done can make them unachievable when you’re depressed. If you can give yourself permission to do whatever is absolutely necessary for you, it can allow you to continue to function in the world. If you can’t bear to do something, put it off, or get help—as much as possible. Make sure you get enough rest and are not trying to do too much. Make sure you have enough pleasurable activities, rest, and unstructured time. Ambition grows in certain environments and wilts in others—learn what these are for you.

This article is part II of a three-part series. Part I introduced the first phase of healing, the safety phase.

As you pass out of the first phase of healing, you may feel as though you have a new lease on life and want to step out of your healing journey.

While you have more than every right to do this, the first phase is ultimately not sufficient to bring whole and complete healing. The real and perceived safety that you established within the first phase of healing—within yourself, with the people in your life, and in your physical environment—becomes the foundation that allows you to grow into the second phase of healing. In this second phase of healing, the actual traumatic experience is grappled with through remembering and mourning.

Integrating Traumatic Events into Your Personal History

Remembering allows you to address your trauma story by placing the event, or events, into your life history. This is giving your memories temporal dimensions. Due to the physiological processes that are “online” during a traumatic experience, the subsequent memories can seem to float outside of time and space rather than being rooted in the timeline of your life. To truly heal and integrate the reality of your traumatic event, the experience needs to settle into your life history.

To achieve this, a therapist can work with you to review your life before the traumatic event, the circumstances that led up to the trauma, and life after the trauma. Such a life review includes looking at others’ reactions, as well as acknowledging and healing from secondary wounding experiences.

By engaging in this emotional work, you transform the traumatic event from something that was done to you into something that is a part of your life experience. Rooting the traumatic event into your collective life history enables you to reclaim yourself—not the trauma—as the main character in your life, and allows your personal meaning of the trauma to come to the surface.

Reconstructing Trauma Memories

Once the experience of trauma is rooted as a part of your life experience—as an event that has a sense of time and space—the next step is to reconstruct the traumatic event. This is not memory recovery work: no memory is created where there is none. Instead, your therapist will work with whatever memory you have, regardless of length or detail. The purpose is to transform the trauma memory from a frozen moment of terror into a memory that reveals your feelings about and interpretation of the event.

This work is done one small piece at a time, with the guidance, support, and assistance of a competent professional. Despite the therapist being “the expert,” you, the survivor, have the final say about the pace of this work. The end result for most survivors is that their trauma story is no longer one of humiliation and shame, but rather one of virtue and dignity.

Remembering the traumatic event or events and connecting them to words and emotions enables you to mourn what you have lost. While trauma may or may not result in physical loss, it always results in psychological losses. Emotionally connecting with your losses is a courageous act. It can feel scary or even terrifying, because this acknowledgment can confirm the finality of the losses.

Moving Beyond the Second Phase

For many, the work of remembering, mourning, and grieving feels endless, regardless of the actual amount of time this phase encompasses.  Keep in mind that there is no set time limit to this phase. Every survivor spends a different amount of time in this second phase of healing, but it cannot be skipped nor rushed.

Survivors will know that they are nearing the end of the second phase of healing when, as Dr. Judith Herman states, “It occurs to the survivor that perhaps the trauma is not the most important, or even the most interesting, part of her life story…when the patient reclaims her own history and feels renewed hope and energy for engagement with life. Time starts to move again…the traumatic experience truly belongs to the past. At this point, the survivor faces the tasks of rebuilding her life in the present and pursuing her aspirations for the future.”

“For years it lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was. I knew it carried slippery, combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. … I saw things I knew no little girl should see. Blood and shattered glass. Piles of skeletons and blackened barbed wire with bits of flesh stuck to it…The iron box contained a special room for my mother and father, warm and moist as a greenhouse. They lived there inside me, rare and separate from other beings. … I knew my parents had crossed over a chasm … The box became a vault, collecting in darkness, always collecting; pictures, words, my parent’s glances, becoming loaded with weight. It sank deeper as I grew older, so packed with undigested things that finally it became impossible to ignore.”
-Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust

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Last month we looked at why it’s important to let ourselves “wallow” in our feelings; it helps us know ourselves better and get over difficult patches faster. It also helps us to reintegrate the parts of us that had to be cut off in order not to hurt so much. Once we’re whole, we can enjoy the self-esteem that comes from knowing and respecting ourselves.

As a therapist, I often hear variations on the following from clients: “I’m sick to death of wallowing in my feelings. How do I let this go and move forward?”

Have you ever had a similar thought? Has it ever seemed to you that if you could just handle your emotions better, you wouldn’t feel so bad?

Do you sometimes consciously let yourself wallow, only to find you just feel worse? If so, you may not be wallowing constructively. Truly constructive wallowing always leads to relief.

The hardest part of wallowing is the part after the initial “w”: the allowing.

When you say you’re “wallowing,” are you allowing yourself to truly and simply just have your feelings? Are you avoiding self-criticism – avoiding kicking yourself when you’re already down?

Here are some behaviors that torpedo the healing power of wallowing:

• You set a timer, either literally or in your head, after which you think you should be done.
• You dislike yourself while doing it.
• You ruminate, turning thoughts about the problem over and over in your mind, instead of simply feeling.
• You try to figure out whether your feelings are justified.
• You act out your pain through destructive behaviors that only leave you feeling worse.

If you are wallowing constructively, you will feel better afterward. When your unedited, no-need-for-justification feelings are allowed to be inside you without interference, they will move through you smoothly of their own accord.

What a lot of people call wallowing is really either distraction or rumination.

Distraction comes in the form of using substances like food or alcohol or drugs, or performing obsessive behaviors like exercising or worrying, having sex, shopping, cutting, reading, or even doing housework instead of sitting with your feelings and tolerating them.

Whenever we “do” instead of “be,” we run the risk of shutting the door on feelings that need us to listen to them. Sitting with, and witnessing feelings is the only constructive way to wallow.

Rumination is a kind of repetitive thinking. Instead of having our feelings about something, we think about the situation, the other person or people involved, what happened or didn’t happen, etc. in an effort to make sense of, or talk ourselves out of our feelings – instead of just having them.

We turn the situation over and over again in our minds, concocting plans designed to shield us from further harm; the problem is, we haven’t acknowledge the actual harm done so far.

True wallowing, which is constructive and healing, is what’s left after we remove all distractions and all obsessive behaviors, and all rumination in our minds. There is nothing left but to feel our feelings in our hearts. To tolerate them patiently. And to do so with compassion for ourselves, rather than judgment.

If you have a big backlog of uncomfortable feelings to feel, it will take longer for them to dissipate. Have patience with yourself during this process. You may experience waves of uncomfortable feelings off and on over time. This is normal when you have a backlog of  feelings you haven’t felt yet. Embrace each feeling in your heart as it presents itself, and know you’re doing something positive for yourself.

One of the most arduous decisions you may ever have to make is whether to stay married to someone who has cheated on you. For many people, the decision to not stay in the marriage is pretty straightforward, most often due to moralistic views about infidelity and the covenant of marriage. More often than not it’s complicated, and deciding whether to divorce or salvage a marriage can be heartbreaking and confusing. Marriage is a huge investment for many people, and as with anything in life, the greater the investment, the greater the loss. Marriage is tied up with many dreams, expectations, and fantasies, so divorce is a hugely difficult decision that should be taken very seriously.

Here are some issues that can get in the way of making a sound decision about whether to divorce:

Fear
Fear is at the core of most bad decisions. When we make choices in life based on fear, we are using the most primitive part of the human brain, a part designed to help us respond to dangerous situations for survival purposes. Human beings are the only species with a more evolved part of the brain that allows us to assess, reflect, and consider a situation before acting on it. This is the part of the brain we want to be using when making decisions about whether to divorce. Slowing things down, not acting hastily, and talking with a professional will help you achieve this goal.

Having Children
Many divorcing couples base their decision to stay in a marriage on their children. While it is extremely important to consider the impact of divorce on your children, it is helpful to not make them the determining factor. Children can easily be used as scapegoats to help parents avoid looking at all the options, even if those choices do not offer the most ideal consequences. There are many divorced households in which the children actually do better, so staying together for the children is not always the only and best solution. Meeting with a child therapist and reading up on the impact of divorce on children will help you make an educated decision.

Low Self-Esteem
Staying in a marriage because you are afraid there is nothing better out there is an issue of low self-esteem. Not feeling worthy of something better leads people to stay in bad marriages at the expense of their own happiness. Working on building your self-esteem and being clear about your value will help you make a proper decision about staying or leaving. Feeling empowered and complete with yourself is a valuable goal regardless of where you are in life, so use this opportunity for personal growth.

Black-and-White Thinking
Thinking in terms of right and wrong is the most obvious form of black-and-white thinking. It is easy to slip into a moralistic or righteous place after an infidelity, but it’s just a way of coping with the painful truth. Black-and-white thinking is very limiting and can lead to making a decision that is not founded on the whole truth. It is important to approach the decision to divorce with flexibility and openness to all options. Staying in the gray, as opposed to rigidly clinging to the black or white, allows for a more efficient and genuine decision.

Anger
Anger, not unlike fear, is not the best state of mind to be in when making a decision about your marital situation. Anger is a defense mechanism we use to gain control in a powerless situation, and it can cause us to make rash decisions that are not based on fact. If you respond to the circumstances of your marital conflict with anger as opposed to a calmness and clarity, you become blind to the possibility of potential solutions or answers. While the anger you feel may be justified and expected, it does not serve you in dealing with this important decision.

Uncertainty
Uncertainty breeds the tendency to cling to what we know. When it comes to the unpredictable future that is inherent in divorce, the first instinct is to hold on to the past because it’s familiar. The decision to stay or leave a marriage can be clouded by the unpredictable nature of your future without your partner, but the truth is that your future is unpredictable whether you are married or not. However, it is important to remember that the best predictor of the future is the past, so use your past experiences, successes, and failures to provide you with an accurate assessment of what you are capable of doing going forward. This will help you make a choice that is founded on the realities of who you are.

Deciding to stay in or leave a marriage can be torturous. Often, the heart and mind are conflicting when it comes to marriage and divorce, so it is normal to feel confused and uncertain about what to do. It can also be confounding to make a decision about something that doesn’t appear to have any positive consequences. Consulting a professional, becoming aware of your thinking and feelings, and taking the proper amount of time and space is integral to making the best possible decision for your future.

Communication and trust are key ingredients in any relationship, yet are often negatively impacted by the effects of a traumatic experience.

Trust
The very nature of trauma can shatter an individual’s trust in the world and fellow human beings. A survivor’s reduced level of trust can also make communicating difficult and even damage the foundational fabric of a relationship. Many a survivor believes, “I once trusted and I got hurt, therefore I will protect myself by never trusting again.” After trauma, the world and people in general can seem to be completely unpredictable. Danger seems to be everywhere and so a survivor of trauma may feel that they can never put their guard down in order to relax, feel safe, or trust.

These false beliefs about the world—that no one, including oneself, is worthy of trust and that one can never be safe—can be clung to and reinforce each other. Unfortunately, these beliefs are often expressed via impulsive, mean, or aggressive behaviors towards the people closest to the survivor. While the individual may often feel self-hatred or shame for acting in harsh and distrusting manners, to discuss the reality of these behaviors and the impulsiveness and fear behind them would require open communication that may be difficult or impossible at the time.

Listening and Communication
Survivors of traumatic events often struggle with both expressing themselves and listening actively. Active listening requires a certain amount of concentration and can be made more difficult by the presence of  hypervigilance. After experiencing trauma, most people’s concentration levels are lower and their levels of hypervigilance higher than their pre-trauma baseline. It can be difficult, if not impossible, for survivors of trauma to process significant chunks of information, making complex or lengthy conversations a significant challenge.

In addition to a potential decline in listening abilities, people who have experienced a traumatic event often shy away from openly communicating. Open and forthcoming communication may be avoided for two types of reasons:

• The individual may want to avoid certain internal experiences. It is common for an individual to not want to experience the emotions, thoughts, or memories that go along with talking about the trauma or to share their internal distress with others because of shame about this this distress.

• The individual may want to avoid certain reactions from their listener. The survivor may choose not to share the horror of the traumatic event out of fear that the listener will become traumatized or not believe them. This fear of being toxic often silences a survivor. A survivor may worry about burdening loved ones with information about the trauma or how the survivor has been impacted. Many individuals also do not communicate about the traumatic life event for fear of judgment and rejection: the worry that by sharing information others will think that the survivor is “going crazy,” overreacting, weak, or should be “over it by now.”

Emotional Bonding
These deficits in trust also negatively impact the opportunities for appropriate emotional and physical closeness, which, like open communication, are an imperative component of any relationship. A survivor of trauma often feels emotionally dead inside. This internal deadness can prevent the individual from experiencing emotions for friends and loved ones and can make it incredibly difficult to receive care, support, and nurturing from these loved ones. Feeling and being emotionally bonded or close is not really feasible.

The absence of a strong emotional bond and the survivor’s heightened state of physiological alertness can negatively impact the physical closeness in a relationship. In a state of hypervigilance and presumption of danger, being touched can set off the person’s safety—fight, flight, or freeze—reactions. The friend or lover who inadvertently triggers the safety response by physically touching the survivor quickly learns to avoid physical contact at all cost. Unfortunately, loved ones often stop trying to connect with the traumatized individual, emotionally or physically, since it can feel like the survivor is actively rejecting the loved one.

Authors Herbert & Wetmore phrase it well when they state that, “It is usually not the case that trauma survivors cease to love the people who were close to them before the trauma, but rather that, for the present, they can’t respond to those people normally, because they have lost access to their capacity to love.” Yet an important distinction to make is that even though a survivor may not be able to feel love, they can still act in a loving manner.

The good news is that these difficulties do not need to be permanent. It is possible, through the slow work of healing,  for the survivor to relearn how to trust and feel safe, and for these disturbances or difficulties in emotional and physical closeness to recede. This slow but entirely do-able process is best engaged in with a trained professional. May those of you who are the friends and family of a trauma survivor find an extra ounce of patience and fortitude, and may those of you who are healing from a traumatic life event find validation and the courage to keep growing.