Author Archives: Michael

Understanding Love and Romance Addiction: Part One- By Robert Weiss,LCSW, CSAT-S

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Michael

Welcome guest blogger, Robert Weiss and this two part series on love and romance addiction. Robert is the Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Centerand Promises Treatment Centers. These centers serve individuals seeking sexual addiction treatment and porn addiction help. Follow Robert on Twitter @RobWeissMSW. Enjoy his blog:  Sex and Intimacy in the Digital Age at: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex

Understanding Love and Romance Addiction: Part One

When love and sex become a means to distract or escape from emotional pain, partner choice becomes skewed. Compatibility becomes based on “whether or not you will leave me,” “how intense our sex life is” or “how I can hook you into staying,” rather than mutual compatibility or whether we might truly become intimate and healthy peers, friends and companions.

It can be difficult to understand how the gifts of love and romance can evolve into painfully destructive and compulsive patterns. Yet for the love addicted, romance, sexuality and emotional closeness are experiences more often beset with painful emotional highs and lows than graced by genuine intimacy. Living in a chaotic, desperate internal world of need and emotional despair, romance addicts –these men and women, straight and gay – fear both of being alone and rejected or trapped and stuck in an unhappy relationship.

He or she lives in fear of never finding the one or worse, afraid that when they finally do meet, they themselves will be found unworthy of love. No matter how clever, how smart, how physically attractive or successful, the love addict feels incomplete and haunted by a desire for a fantasy partnership that if fulfilled, would make them complete. In order to achieve their goal relationship addicts will seduction, control, guilt and manipulation to attract and hold onto a romantic or sexual partner, even when unsure whether it is a good match.

Janis, a 27-year-old film student had this to say about her desperate search for love –

Eventually I began to hide my dates. I didn’t want friends to know that I met someone new because so many past times I had said, “he’s the one” and had it not work out that I thought they would laugh at me if I brought yet another guy to the table.

In my desperation I tried dating clubs, speed dating, Internet dating and church dances. Just like the dating books say-I asked everyone I knew to introduce me to someone they could see me dating. And then there were the hobby and recreation groups I joined, ones I didn’t even like, desperately hoping to find him making ceramics, hiking, welding or playing tennis.

When I found someone who felt right I would either have sex right away hoping that would bond us more deeply or avoid sex until we knew each other better thinking that would keep them around. For a while I thought maybe I wasn’t cute or smart enough, later I just blamed the men I dated for being too screwed up. Ultimately it seemed no matter how hard I tried or where I put the blame, I ended up alone.

Over time, my life became more and more about looking for the right guy and less and less about enjoying myself and doing things to make me happy.

Caught up in a constant search for someone to love, the addict’s endless intrigue, flirtations, sexual liaisons and affairs often leave a path of destruction and negative consequences in their wake. Ironically many love addicts have likely already had more than one opportunity for the love and commitment they claim to desire, but in their desperation and narcissism will mistake the intensity of “falling in love” or the drama of problem relationships, for love itself.

Even when dating someone who is safe, stable and appropriate, love addicts can become dissatisfied and anxious.  Appearing bored or unhappy but underneath fearful of an emotional trap, he or she may shove aside a perfectly acceptable mate and/or or start cheating while in perfectly good relationship – looking for yet another new intensity or “love” experience. Therein lies the addictive component of their problem. Struggling to have the relationship that everyone else seems to have and he or she does not, love addicts attempt to resolve these painful circumstances by engaging in even more searching dating and sex.

Addictive relationships are characterized by unhealthy dependency, guilt and abuse. At times despairing of her cycle of unhappy affairs, broken relationships and liaisons, the romance addict may try a “swearing off” period, not unlike the anorexic stage of an eating disorder. She may for a while decide that “not being in the game at all” will solve the problem, only to later find the same issues reappearing whenever reattempting intimacy.

Her denial of the problem can be seen her externalization of the problem, blaming boyfriend after boyfriend for being problematic rather than looking at herself. Like the alcoholic who offers up stressful jobs or financial problems as justification for his excessive drinking, the love addicts’ cycle of dramatic and empty relationships keeps them ever distracted from really taking stock of themselves (or potential partners), making it impossible to gain the insight required for change.

The next part of this blog will be published on Saturday, February 11, 2012

Robert Weiss is Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Centerand Promises Treatment Centers. These centers serve individuals seeking sexual addiction treatment and porn addiction help. Follow Robert on Twitter @RobWeissMSW. Enjoy his blog:  Sex and Intimacy in the Digital Age at: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex

 

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Top 10 relapse prevention strategies

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Michael

How can you prevent releapse?

The Top 10 relapse prevention strategies

Guest post by Dr. Henry Steinberger Dr. Steinberger, Psychologist, MSSW, PhD , APA-CPP,

Fellow of the Albert Ellis Institute for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy since 1991, holds the Certificate of Proficiency in the Treatment of Alcohol and Other Psychoactive Substance Use Disorders from the College of Professional Psychology of the APA.  Dr. Steinberger is the editor of The SMART Recovery Handbook and maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Madison WI.

Relapse prevention is essential in recovery from chemical and behavioral addictions. Why? Addiction has been found to reoccur more often when steps are not taken to cope with the cravings, urges, peer pressures, situational cues, bodily discomforts, neuro-biological changes, and other factors which pave the way for slips and relapses. Therefore, we regard relapse as a “normal” (though distinctly undesirable) possibility on the road to recovery. When you choose to view a relapse as a mistake, grist for the mill, a learning opportunity and a discrete single event rather than viewing it as a total failure and as evidence predictive of failures, then your chances for success increase greatly.

“The person, who really thinks, learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – John Dewey

Top 10 relapse prevention strategies

1. Learn to willingly accept your mind – The first step to preventing relapse is to understand and accept your mind. The presence of whatever your mind produces such as thoughts, beliefs, images, memories, feelings, or sensations is temporary. Even if you don’t like them, if you understand that the ideas your mind creates will change, you do not need to act on what your mind is thinking. This goes for urges and cravings. Note how they simply come and go. They may seem like a problem, but avoiding them through addictive behavior appears as the real problem in the long run. Consider learning and practicing “Mindfulness” to increase your ability to “sit with” or “ride out” urges without acting on them.

2. Get psychological and medical help when needed – When needed, seek and get psychological and medical help for psychiatric illnesses and to learn better ways of coping with life events. Treatment options for addiction are not limited to psychotherapy or support groups. Consider using medications like Disulfiram (Antabuse®), Naltrexone (ReVia®), Acamprosate (Campral®), etc., as a sign of positive action and never as a mark of failure or inadequacy. Take your medications as prescribed.

3. Stimulus control – Begin to understand and practice stimulus control. Change the “activating events,” cues or “triggers” which can be changed. Accept those which can’t be changed. They can cue you, but they don’t rule you.

4. PIG Awareness – Live with awareness of the PIG (Problem of Immediate Gratification). Learn about the PIG concept and of natural penalties for slips, lapses and relapses. Carry, review and update a Cost-Benefit Analysis or list of reasons for sticking to your change plan.

5. AID’s Awareness – Beware of Apparently Irrelevant Decisions (AID’s) that lead to high risk situations and using. Recovery requires living with greater awareness or mindfulness.

6. Beware of the “Abstinence Violation Effect” (the use of a small slip as an excuse for a major relapse). Carry your how-to-cope reminder instructions. Remember: “One ‘swallow’ does not make a summer, nor a relapse.”

7. Find valued directions for your life – Develop a balanced life with healthy indulgences and activities that can substitute for unhealthy and undesirable addictive behaviors is a good start. But in the long run we each need to decide what is really important to be doing and commit ourselves to acting on those values, taking us in our own valued life directions.

8. Take better care of you – TLC stands for Therapeutic Lifestyle Change . Staying clean from drugs and alcohol or abstaining from unwanted behaviors like gambling, compulsive over spending or sex is part of living a balanced life. Ample evidence exists that you can improve your mental health through exercise, better diet and nutrition (including Omega-3 found in fish oils), getting out in nature, developing and maintaining good human relationships, engaging in recreation and vital absorbing activities, relaxation, meditation, and altruistic involvements like volunteering service in one’s community.

9. Learn and apply any recovery program such as the program featured in the end notes of this blog – Read, study, learn and apply what you learn. If you don’t help yourself, who is going to help you? Self-help requires determination and work on your part. That’s why it’s called self-help.

10. Reward yourself – Be sure to celebrate successes and reward yourself for successful abstinence, compliance with treatment and follow up.

Dr. Steinberger, licensed psychologist since 1987, Fellow of the Albert Ellis Institute for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy since 1991, holds the Certificate of Proficiency in the Treatment of Alcohol and Other Psychoactive Substance Use Disorders from the College of Professional Psychology of the APA, and uses Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in his private practice, Henry Steinberger PhD LLC. This blog was reprinted from on the Smart Recovery Blog:http://www.addictionblog.org on January 5, 2012.

End Notes:

1) The ideas summarized as: Willing Acceptance and Mindfulness, mentioned in item 1, and finding valued life directions, also mentioned in item 7, can be found in the self-help literature of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT). You can learn more with a web search.

2) The PIG and Abstinence Violation Effect were suggested and researched by the late Alan Marlatt

3) Apparently Irrelevant Decisions and Absence Violation Effect are discussed in The SMART Recovery Handbook (Henry Steinberger, editor, 2004) and the SMART Recovery website

4) Finding valued life directions can be found in the self-help literature of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT). You can learn more with a web search.

5) The extensive research supporting Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, mentioned in item 8, is summarized in an article by Roger Walsh (“Lifestyle and Mental Health” in American Psychologist, Oct. 2011

6) Other non twelve step programs of recovery: www.RacingforRecovery.com., www.smartrecovery.com, www.rationalrecovery.com, www.womenforsobriety.com, www.super-health.net

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“Gift of Desperation or G.O.D.” A guest blog by Janet Surrey, PhD

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Michael

Janet Surrey is a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the Harvard Medical School, she is a founding scholar and board member at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Dr. Surrey is a co-author of Women’s Growth in Connection and the Psychology of Peacemaking. She is co-editor of Mothering Against the Odds: Diverse Voices of Contemporary Mothers. Along with her husband, Stephen Bergman and Samuel Shem, she has co-authored the book “We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Men and Women”. Dr. Surrey is the author of numerous articles and papers. She has written and spoken widely on many topics, including gender issues, mother-daughter relationships, addictions, couples therapy, empathy, adoption, and peacemaking.

Janet was interviewed by Christopher Kennedy Lawford for Mr Lawford’s book “Moment of Clarity”. In this book Janet describes her moment of clarity and calls it her “gift of desperation” or G.O.D.

Who knows why those moments come when they do? Or why they come at all? It’s a mystery. I remember seeing this with an anorexic I was treating. She’d look in the mirror a billion times and saw herself as fat, and suddenly she looked in the mirror and saw she was thin, and everything changed. I’ll never forget that. I saw before me the mystery of that moment when something important gets reorganized, and it’s not under our control. It’s just a complete mystery, and it’s transformative. And it’s also truth.

That’s the gift of desperation. Where you are is so bad, you have nothing left to loose, so why not try recovery? People tell that it will be hard, but you can get through it. People try by their human example to show you that you can lose and you gain things beyond your wildest dreams.

When someone needs help, I tell them my story. I try to get them to talk with someone. If not me, then someone else. And I try to carry the message in a quiet way. It doesn’t always work, so I have to be very humble and not push. I have to find the right way to share and try to be sensitive, but not to expect much. Just trust you don’t know where the seeds are going.

And if it helps, I tell people not to worry about “God.” I mean I have so much trouble with the word God. So I think of it as G.O.D., the gift of desperation, because desperation brings us to the point where we can relate to the universe in a different way. It pushes us out of ourselves, makes us ask for help in a really fundamental way. Ask for help, and have something answer you. I don’t believe it’s a being, but I think you experience the aliveness of the universe in that moment.

 

Reprinted from:  Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s 2009 book, Moments of Clarity, published by Harper Collins Books, NYC, NY, this excerpt is found on page 97

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