Face Your Feelings

In my last post I promised to address, among other things, how addicts must broaden the focus of their recovery to include temptation management but emphasize emotion management and overall personal growth. Research has shown that those addicts who focus primarily on trying to avoid returning to their unwanted behavior are actually more prone to relapse. On the other hand, those who recognize the important role that overall personal growth plays in their recovery tend to do better. 

Staying in recovery requires the capacity to face our own uncomfortable feelings. But what if we don't yet have this capacity? There is only one way to develop it: by spending time actually facing our own uncomfortable feelings. Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D., has written a great blog post on this topic entitled "Avoidance, Sobriety and Reality: The Psychology of Addiction." Here are a couple of excerpts:

"Psychologically speaking, addiction is all about escapism. Avoidance. Denial. Addicts run from reality, and, in some cases, have been running all their lives. The addict cannot tolerate reality and its vicissitudes. Neither internal nor external reality. They find reality repugnant, uncomfortable, overwhelming, and prefer, like the psychotic, withdrawal into fantasy, bliss or oblivion over reality. They seek constantly to alter subjective and objective reality to their own liking. For one thing, reality--the existential facts of life--can be both painful and anxiety-provoking. Like all of us, addicts don't like confronting pain or feeling anxiety. That's human nature and comports with Freud's "pleasure principle": we all tend, whenever possible, to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Addicts prefer the pleasure of intoxication, the bliss of oblivion to the suffering, banality, ordinariness and difficulty of mundane day to day reality. Of course. Reality inevitably includes suffering, pain, loss. Reality entails consciously acknowledging, not just intellectually but emotionally, both what was hurtfully done to us in the past (by parents, peers or others) and what we have hurtfully done to others. Who wants to experience (or re-experience) that? But the problem is that to avoid this reality the addict has to keep getting high, because these "demons" never go away. They're always there, lurking, waiting to bite them in the ass as soon as they start coming down. And what goes up must always come down. So this is the psychological problem of addiction. And when it (consciousness) comes crashing back to earth, reality and withdrawal from fantasy painfully set in. The psychological and emotional demons and demands of reality return with a vengeance. Reality cannot be run from indefinitely. A major part of addiction treatment entails acknowledging, confronting and experiencing reality. In most cases, the addiction has permitted the patient to keep outer reality and his or her inner demons at bay. Sobriety forces the addict to face reality, motivating the addict to want to find some way to avoid or alter it again. Breaking this vicious, sometimes fatal cycle of avoidance of inner and outer reality is the key to treatment....

"The antidote to addiction is learning to tolerate reality. Little by little. That is what sobriety really is. This is what the recovering addict needs the most assistance with: soberly dealing with inner and outer reality. And part of existential reality involves personal responsibility. We are responsible for consciously facing and dealing with our inner demons as constructively as possible. And we are responsible for dealing maturely with the outer world. It is clear that...sobriety (be it from alcohol or other substance abuse or compulsive sexual behavior) demands accepting the same reality we all deal with every day: being responsible for ourselves; making choices that are in our own best interest; tolerating tedium, frustration, anxiety and life's inevitable physical and emotional suffering. Addiction is the habitual avoidance of reality. What the addict needs to discover is that reality is bigger than we are. A devastating blow to one's narcissistic grandiosity, to be sure. But the beginning of healing wisdom and willingness to accept and embrace reality-including both its negative and positive aspects--on its own terms."

You can check out Dr. Diamond's entire article here.

I think of emotion avoidance as one of the key links in the chain of addiction. Facing our feelings, our voluntary immersion in emotion, is one of the key tools for breaking that chain. Thanks Dr. Diamond for making such a great case. This is one of the ugliest and most difficult aspects of recovery, but the results in our lives are beautiful and so worthwhile. 

          - - -

Funny how it goes. After finishing this post yesterday I came upon this very fitting quote from M. Scott Peck: 

"Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

“In Recovery” ≠ “Not Tempted”

What was Calvin hoping to accomplish in therapy? He pressed his clenched his fist into his thigh and said, “I want to get to the point where temptation doesn’t even faze me.”

Wrong goal.

There may be men who “aren’t even fazed” by sexual temptation. I’m certainly not in that elite club. I only know one or two men who claim to be. I dare say very few—if any—of them are recovering sex addicts.

I let Calvin know immediately that I wouldn’t be trying to help him with that. I know better. I’ve seen too many people bang their head against that wall.

In fact, I talk all the time to new clients who’ve been trying for a long time to get to that magical point on the horizon. It goes worse for them than staying just as far from their goal as when they started trying. Unfortunately, they continue to find themselves ever further from it.

They’ve tried to clamp down on all thoughts and urges, and they find the task maddeningly difficult. They can’t even go to work without finding their eyes drawn to body parts, their minds drawn to sex acts. It’s never been this bad at work before! They can’t go to church without struggling. So much for having a spiritual experience! They can’t go to the store. And we’re not talking about the mall with the Victoria’s Secret displays and the sexy cosmetic counter attendants—we’re talking Sam’s Club. What should they do, become hermits?

One way to gauge the effect of an addiction in your life is to assess the “size of the footprint” of the problem. How much of your time, energy, and focus is consumed by it? Consumed by lusting—or fighting lust? Spent looking for ways to act out sexually or spent feeling guilty about what you’ve done in the past and fearing that you'll screw up again in the future? How much of the pie chart of your life is taken up by all the various aspects of this problem?

The footprint of addiction for men who have adopted a zero tolerance policy toward sexual thoughts tends to be up in the 70-80% range. They may not be acting out very often, but their life remains dominated by the struggle. Given the heart and soul they’re putting into their struggle against it, you’d think the footprint would be shrinking. And yet it keeps growing.

Calvin said to me, “The harder I try to get rid of sexual thoughts, the worse it goes. Now it’s like a grizzly bear on my back. I go around with the hope in the forefront of my mind that I won’t see an attractive woman. I’m living in fear.”

Hellish way to live.

Fortunately, it goes far better once we 1) understand the power of the “resist/rebound effect,” 2) accept the way the sexual brain operates, 3) adopt more realistic and helpful goals with regard to sexual temptation, and 4) broaden the focus of our recovery to include temptation management but emphasize emotion management and overall personal growth.

In the coming weeks I’ll discuss these issues in greater detail. Stay tuned!

Feed--REALLY Feed--Your Craving Brain

We can certainly feel hungry for sex. But as hunger pangs go, our addictive urges and cravings are terrible predictors of what will actually "hit the spot" and leave us feeling full and satisfied. We may feel like we need a sexual release. But after acting out we are left feeling empty, guilty, ashamed. 

It turns out that we as humans can be lousy predictors of what will make us feel good. George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University calls this the "Intrapersonal Empathy Gap." When we don't know others as well as we think we do, there's a gap in our inTERpersonal empathy. But we don't even know our future selves as well as we think we do--hence the inTRApersonal empathy gap. 

When you're in hot pursuit of an opportunity to act out, if feels like you're sneaking your future self a delightful, forbidden gift. "Look what I'm working really hard to get for you!" Once you've acted out, you sneer at your past self and say, "How could you imagine I'd want more of that crap in my life?!"

Try out this exercise. It can help provide you with alternative activities at those moments when you're vulnerable to acting out. It will also illustrate some of the gaps in your empathy for your future self. Hopefully it will make you more willing in the future to try constructive activities that don't seem very appealing in the heat of the moment.

In the middle of a page, make a list of possible activities you could turn to when you're at risk of relapsing. Then, in a column to the left, rate each activity from 1-10 according to how satisfying you think the activity will be. For example, here's Paul's list:

Projected

Satisfaction                 Activity

6                     Browse news websites

7                     Listen to music

7                     Talk with coworkers

5                     Work hard

7                     Lunch with family

8                     Play football on Wii

7                     Volunteer at church

8                     Sub for Santa

7                     Caroling with neighbors

7                     Lunch with coworkers

8                     Browse entertainment websites

4                     Go running

Then create a right hand column where you can rate actual satisfaction from 1-10. Throughout the coming week or two, right after you engage in each of the activities, rate how satisfied you feel. Here is the completed assignment Paul showed me two weeks later:

 Projected                                                            Actual

Satisfaction                 Activity                          Satisfaction

6                     Browse news websites                     2 (ugh!)

7                     Listen to music                                 9

7                     Talk with coworkers                        8

5                     Work hard                                       8

7                     Lunch with family                             9

8                     Play football on Wii                          6

7                     Volunteer at church                          8

8                     Sub for Santa                                   10

1                     Caroling with neighbors                    9

7                     Lunch with coworkers                      8

8                     Browse entertainment websites         2

4                     Go running                                       7

Notice the gaps--some of the huge!--between how satisfying Paul thought these activities would be and how much he actually enjoyed them. 

It has made him rethink all the time he spends online and playing video games. And has made him more willing to try things that sound challenging (working hard) or even miserable (Caroling with a group of neighbor families)

Try out this exercise for yourself. And stop ingesting poisonous activities--they make your future self sick every time!