.
appreciate it.
Carol: All right, we’ll see you at the next conference.
Dr. Carnes: Okay, thanks Carol.
That was Dr. Patrick Carnes, obviously an incredible mentor. I just can’t speak highly enough about him. When I did coaching, I had people who asked me, “What are you going to do next, Carol?” and I said, “I’m going to learn about sexual addiction and provide services to those people who have sexual addictions and also to people who are in love with sex addicts.” The general population said, “Gosh Carol, why would you do that? Here you’re working on coaching—you’re taking people to their highest potential—what would compel you to want to work in that field?”
It’s what Dr. Carnes said today; there’s a lot of suffering in that field, but out of suffering comes growth, and my clients are the wisest, the strongest, and the most compassionate because they’ve been through so much—so much trauma, so much effort, so much work. And I appreciate all my listeners out there who consistently listen to the show and want to learn more about this disorder and, more important, about that recovery movement that is so imperative to taking your life to the next level. As I end the show, I will tell you, “There will only be one of you at all times, so fearlessly have the courage to be yourself.” Keep working on your recovery and being the best person you can be. Again, thank you to Dr. Patrick Carnes, who founded the Gentle Path program at The Meadows, which is a confidential inpatient treatment center for men eighteen and older who battle sexual addiction, relationship addiction, and sexual anorexia. It was a pleasure to speak to him tonight. We’ll see you next week. As I always say, “Have a good one.”
CHAPTER 2
Why Sex Addicts Stay Sex Addicts: Defense Mechanisms
“Sex Help with Carol the Coach”
September 30, 2013
Carol the Coach
Carol: This is Carol Juergensen Sheets, aka Carol the Coach, and I am bringing you Sex Help with Carol the Coach, www.blogtalkradio.com/sexhelpwithcarolthecoach. This is the only designated show on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes that talks about sexual addiction. A lot of times we have guests on, who either have experienced the addiction, love someone who has experienced the addiction, or are experts in the field of sexual addiction. It is truly a blessing. It is with huge gratitude that I can bring that to you.
Most of you know if you’re listening to the show that you can catch this on iTunes. I have over sixty-five shows in the archives waiting for you to subscribe for free. You just go to iTunes, and you put in “sexual addiction” or “Carol the Coach” or "Sex Help with Carol the Coach" and it will take you right to the link where you say “subscribe for free.” Then you start downloading all the shows on your computer or on your iPad.
Now I totally get and understand fully that you may not have 100 percent access to the Internet. If you’re listening to the show, it may be that someone has curtailed the use of your Internet, so you only have a specific time that you can get on the Internet or you may only be able to get on the Internet in a specific place or in actuality with supervision. Now I know that this could sound very debilitating to somebody out there who says, “Oh my gosh, there’s that much control in this addiction?” In actuality, as opposed to looking at it as a form of control, I congratulate you for knowing what your boundaries are and getting the help you need to maintain the boundaries.
We’ve talked about it before. If you have a smartphone and it’s in your pocket, the men that I work with call that “porn in the pocket,” because without specialized filters, they can get on the Internet at any time, day or night, and search anything they want to search. That is what will keep you in addiction. I recently had a man relapse. He had a flip phone, because flip phones are not smartphones, so access to the Internet is very difficult. I hadn’t even noticed that he had his smartphone back. Shame on me for not noticing that! I don’t know if he had it in his pocket. I don’t know if he didn’t bring it into the session. I don’t know if I just was not that observant, but had I seen that, I would have immediately known that this man was at risk for relapse and certainly a major slip.
So again, when you have this addiction, there are some things you have to do. There is no doubt about that, but when you do those things, they work. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight. Most of you know that I am a certified sex addiction therapist, and that means that I trained through IITAP, the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. That means I’ve trained with Patrick Carnes. Anybody who is wondering if they have a sex addiction, or anybody who knows they have a sexual addiction, knows that this is the man who started this movement. He’s a genius. He wrote this incredible book called Out of the Shadows. Along with that book comes the workbook Facing the Shadow. If you’re listening to this show for the first time or if you’ve wanted to get a good book and you didn’t know what to get, these are the two books to get you started.
In Facing the Shadow, it talks about seven recovery tasks that help to keep you clean and sober. These tasks are the tools that catapult your recovery and will help you in creating new and healthy behaviors that will replace your addiction. I’m a believer that once you have the addiction, you always have the addiction, but there are certainly things you can do that manage it. It’s important to know what those are, and unfortunately if you are not using them together, it is difficult to get good recovery.
I don’t know if any of you saw the movie Thanks for Sharing. It was certainly poignant and moving. It’s not anything that I would tell an addict to go see, because there are a lot of potential triggers. When I was talking to my husband about this, he said, “Oh my gosh, alcoholics can watch movies with alcohol; drug addicts can watch movies with drugs in them; I’m not getting why sex addicts can’t watch sex and not be triggered.”
In part he’s right and in part he’s wrong, because that movie has some very graphic sex scenes. We 100 percent encourage … I should speak for myself … I 100 percent encourage people to stay away from sexually explicit scenes, movies, and television shows, because I just feel like it may reactivate the neurocircuitry in your brain. When that occurs, there’s no doubt about it; it can create that cycle again.
Many of my colleagues have sexual addiction in their history. One of my colleagues said, “As a recovering sex and love addict, I went through a painful period of relapse after a number of years in recovery. I was mortified and ashamed to admit that. Now with many years of further work after that experience, I see relapse as my biggest teacher for myself and as a powerful teacher that informs my work with clients.”
Isn’t that a positive spin? This is a person who is in recovery and who treats sex addicts. We were all talking about whether Thanks for Sharing was a healthy movie to see. This therapist was, in fact, referencing the issues in the movie that several of the characters relapsed and how painful that was to watch, but also to know that some of those relapses are such teachable moments. They teach you what you need to do and how you need to do it. This therapist said, “Today, I encourage clients to look at their progress and not their perfection. I think recovering people do best to avoid counting the days and years of sobriety, but instead to focus on continued growth and healing. All the time in the rooms and the work of the healing journey is definitely worth it. We don’t go back to the beginning unless we choose to by abandoning the journey altogether.”
Now I had a client with a lot of recovery—an incredible man who was doing an incredible job and going to ninety meetings in ninety days. At about day sixty, he went off track. He got back involved with the unhealthy behaviors of sexual addiction. When he did that, he thought he could fight the addiction itself, and he kept deluding himself, telling himself, “I am powerful enough to get back on track and keep this slip or relapse a secret. That way, no one will know; I won’t disappoint people in the program; I won’t disappoint my therapist, Carol; I won’t disappoint my