A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction

How can you move together as a couple from the wounded state of lack of connection and betrayal to the rewards available in relationship intimacy? The difficulties that have arisen in your relationship can lead to greater awareness and understanding and ultimately to a greater connection, but how? When your relationship has been broken by betrayal through sexual compulsivity, however the problem has manifested, no matter which side of the problem you are standing on, you are bound to be experiencing strong feelings and emotions.

Being able to tolerate and work through strong reactions and feelings of anger, fear, and pain can help both partners, as well as their relationship. These capacities and skills are not only fundamental to working with compulsive and addictive impulses, but also are steppingstones on your path to building greater intimacy.

Vulnerability and Intimacy

Humans are wired to need each other. So why is it that we seem to be unable to connect in ways that allow this basic need to be met? In relating with our closest partner, we have an opportunity to learn how to work with our strong feelings and emotions in ways that build vulnerability. This vulnerability is the key to unlocking the door to intimacy and connection.

To be vulnerable means you are willing to be hurt. If we emotionally block ourselves off from being hurt, we also shield ourselves from other feelings. We cannot selectively choose to only experience positive feelings and emotions and do away with the negative ones. If we banish fear, anger, and pain, we cut ourselves off from joy, love, and belonging.

We can be safe behind walls, but then we miss the wonders of visiting the ocean or skiing in the mountains or dining at a wonderful restaurant. In other words, we can give ourselves the illusion of the safety of walls, but at the high cost of walling ourselves off from connecting with others. We could wear a metal suit of armor, as if we were expecting to be called to joust at any moment, and we would feel protected, but the suit of armor would render us unable to feel the touch of others.

To inhibit our vulnerability is also to inhibit the physical and emotional touch of others. The armor makes us feel safer from the expected attacks of others, but at the price of vulnerability. To be sure, there is a place for armor and a place for vulnerability. Your most intimate relationship with your spouse is not the place for armor.

If we desire the rewards of the intimacy of human connection, then we must learn how to bare ourselves to the hurt, the wounding, that is also a part of our human interaction. In order to become vulnerable, we need to learn to work with our survival impulses that urge us to fight, flee, or freeze when faced with what we perceive as potential danger. We need to learn how to negotiate our most primitive human emotions. We need to see that the experience of these emotions will not destroy us. Then, we can learn how to build the emotional muscles needed to be vulnerable.

Heather and Bryan Visit “Instinctive-Reactive World”

When our intimate sexual connection is betrayed, the hurt, anger, and fear that arise can be intense. When faced with a conflict, most of us tend to look to the outside to see what is causing our negative feelings. This is a normal human reaction—an instinct, even.

To show how this mechanism works, let’s look at an example not charged with the elements of sex and betrayal. Hopefully, this method of showing the dynamic won’t cause your protective flags of blame and/or shame to surface.

We first talked about Heather and Bryan in Chapter 4. Bryan, you may recall, sought support for his compulsion to view Internet porn. Bryan was able to see that his attraction to and use of porn was actually preventing the closeness he so wanted to have with Heather. He and Heather both began to see how seemingly everyday misunderstandings can lead to the same kind of impulse for protection from shame and vulnerability (as well as avoidance of strong feelings and emotions) that sent Bryan to his computer looking for more porn. They both committed to building their skills of vulnerability to deepen their connection and intimacy.

Bryan and Heather were getting married, and had engagement photos taken. Their arrangement was that they would each pay for half of the photos. Heather was supposed to write a check for her half of the cost and leave it on the kitchen counter so Bryan could deliver both checks to the photographer the next day. But Heather forgot to write her check.

The next morning when Bryan went to the kitchen counter, there was no check. He immediately felt annoyed. He felt that he had been wronged. Heather had said she would write the check, and she did not. He wasn’t fully aware that a whole string of assumptions had begun to flow. Instantly, he was certain that he was in the right. Heather had said she would write the check. He had suggested she do it the moment they discussed it, and she didn’t. He began to think that Heather was being selfish, or she must not really respect him or love him.

By the time Heather called Bryan on her lunch break that day, she had remembered that she had forgotten to write the check. When she called, she said, “Hi, how are you doing?” Bryan, in a peeved voice, said, “Hey, you forgot to leave the check.” Heather then became irritated with Bryan’s tone, and replied, “This is why I don’t like to call you on my lunch break. You just give me a hard time instead of being happy to hear from me.” This further angered Bryan, and he hung up on Heather. Bryan and Heather had both entered “instinctive-reactive world.” This is the place where you instinctively react to the annoying things your partner says or does. Does that sound familiar?

This dynamic goes on all the time. An event occurs that causes you to feel something, and that something feels bad. You might not even totally realize it feels bad because often you quickly justify the bad feeling with the fact that you are in the right. In this case, Bryan interpreted Heather’s actions in a way that he felt hurt.

When Heather called Bryan at lunchtime, she assumed that Bryan’s irritated tone was a rejection of her. She didn’t know that he had misinterpreted her mistake of forgetting to write the check. From the hurt that Heather experienced in feeling scolded by Bryan, she lashed back with her angry comment. She also felt justified in her position. She had made a mistake; she had simply forgotten to do something. She felt that she was being unjustly reprimanded, and that felt bad.

What happened to Bryan and Heather in instinctive-reactive world is similar to what happened with Jeannine and Jay and the infamous saga of the sponge in Chapter 6. Underneath the automatic response of anger was hurt. In Chapter 6, the focus was on the blame and shame mechanism. In this chapter, we’re noticing when you react to situations on automatic pilot. As you build your skill of being able to tolerate your strong feelings and emotions, you will become more effective in recognizing how your strong feelings and emotions can set the shame-blame cycle into motion.

The Marshmallow Test

In the early 1970s, Stanford professor Walter Mischel conducted a famous experiment with four- to six-year-olds around the mechanism of delayed gratification. Each child was given one marshmallow and told that if they could resist eating the one marshmallow until the researcher returned about fifteen minutes later, they could have two marshmallows. Most of the kids ate the marshmallow before the experimenter came back into the room, many of them right away. Only one-third of the kids could resist eating the marshmallow prior to the experimenter’s return.

When Mischel followed up ten (and then twenty) years later, he found that the now-grown individuals who had been able to resist eating the marshmallow were highly correlated with individuals who had higher SAT scores, more successful marriages, higher incomes, and generally more fulfilling lives.

So what can you do to build the skill of resisting so that you can reap the rewards of the delayed gratification? How do you learn to work with your instinctive impulses? Are you doomed to remain the subject of your impulse to move against, away from, or toward?

Let’s say that you were one of the kids who ate the marshmallow right away. Does this mean that you are condemned to a less fulfilling life than the marshmallow-resisting youngsters? No. We are certain that you can build the mechanism of delaying gratification, of working with your strong feelings and emotions.

We have watched ourselves and others learn to work with the impulses of pain, anger, and fear that propel us into actions that alienate us from the connection with our partner we ultimately desire. We have seen ourselves and others learn to build the muscle of resisting the one marshmallow for the reward of intimacy that comes with the prefrontal capacity to make choices, reconcile conflicting thoughts, process emotions, suppress urges, and delay immediate gratification.

Developing a New Capacity

To be no longer terrorized by fear, anger, and pain is a pivotal movement. We have found that the capacity to fully allow these feelings is actually a long-term (possibly a lifetime) project. When you recognize your response as a survival impulse, you can make an informed choice about how you will respond to the impulse. If you are actually in danger, you will respond accordingly. But if not, you can make a better choice than to give into your automatic impulse.

In the context of intimate relationships, you are instinctively equating the uncomfortable or negative feeling you are experiencing with danger, but there is no actual emergency. This is an important place to start. What happened to Bryan when he looked on the kitchen counter and saw there was no check? If this was a movie and we could internally slow the scenes down and look at what was happening frame by frame, here is what we might see:

Bryan quickly and without thinking interpreted Heather’s lack of action as an affront to him—a lack of respect, a lack of love. Instantly, he experienced hurt, then, just as quickly, he experienced irritation (anger). In the next instant, he believed that Heather was responsible for his anger; if she really loved and respected him, she would have written that check, After all, he had even reminded her to do it.

In your ordinary day-to-day awareness, it is difficult to slow yourself down to notice what is going on internally frame by frame. Your reactions occur so quickly that they can be difficult to recognize. Sometimes, you have a moment for thought. For example, Bryan had a thought about Heather not caring for him. But sometimes your reaction is purely reflexive, and you cannot banish it. Even so, you can begin to recognize that you are having the survival response. The feeling of anger, fear, or pain, of entering the cycle of shame-blame, can become a signal to pay attention. Once you have taken that very important step of paying attention and becoming consciously aware of your automatic response, it is no longer automatic. Then you can make a conscious choice about how to respond.

The Road to Developing Vulnerability and Intimacy

How can you unblock your capacity to be empathic and vulnerable so that you can experience the intimacy and joy of human connection? How can you bring greater awareness, and through this greater awareness build vulnerability and true intimacy? If your anger, fear, and pain are natural impulses, what can you do when you feel them? You can learn to build your capacity for choice and decision making in a way that overrides your instinctive impulses.

You can use the thinking part of your brain to label and evaluate the rush of your biochemical response. Building such skills not only increases your capacity for intimacy, it helps you work with compulsive, addictive impulses. This sounds very simple, and actually, it is. But first you need to believe that you can do it.

In a very simple form, the basic steps on the road to developing vulnerability and intimacy are:

1. Recognize your instinctive response for what it is.

2. Allow yourself to experience the feeling without indulging or repressing.

3. From this place of inner vulnerability, choose to take action or not.

Step One: Recognize Your Instinctive Responses

First, you must be able to recognize when you are having a survival impulse. Then you can experience the underlying feeling. This process is exactly what is meant in the admonition to “count to three” when you feel angry. You try to recognize that you are having an instinctive response of fear, anger, or pain, and then just feel that feeling. This works as a delaying tactic so that the slightly slower part of your brain—the thinking part—has a chance to show up.

Your impulses of fear, anger, and pain immediately compel you to pay attention. As you begin to become more skillful in recognizing that you are having (or have had) an instinctive response, you can let these responses become your allies. You can bring more awareness and consciousness into your life.

Start by simply telling yourself that you are going to start noticing your instantaneous responses of fear, anger, and pain. The strong intention to notice the flare-ups (even the very tiny impulses) of your instinctive response will build awareness.

Another way is by thinking back to a moment of feeling unsafe in some way, and then recalling your instant and instinctive response. In our example of Bryan reacting to Heather not remembering to write the check, the moment Bryan looked at the kitchen counter and did not see her check he experienced a feeling of annoyance. Just to be clear, we are not suggesting that Bryan stop his feeling of anger. In fact, he can’t. We are suggesting that he become aware that he’s experiencing anger (irritation)—in that moment or as soon as he can—and simply see it for what it is. Then the angry response can become a signal that has his attention.

When you have an experience that you are instinctively labeling as painful, uncomfortable, bad, your survival impulses become activated. It’s similar to when the doctor hits your knee with the little rubber hammer. If your reflexes are operating properly, without any thought on your part, your leg just kicks right out.

Does this mean that you are doomed to reactivity? Luckily, you are not, because you also have a thinking part to your human brain. The dilemma we all face is that the more primitive animal part of our biology creates automatic impulses that fire off quickly.

The Good News Within the Bad News

We’ve heard it said that automatic unconscious responses will continue as long as you have a body. While this might sound like bad news, recognizing this truth is actually the good news. If you know that your survival impulses are going to continue to fire up, creating responses of fear, anger, and pain, you can finally cut yourself some slack. You can begin to work with your responses so you don’t remain like a rat in a maze, subject to the internal, eternal firings of your survival mechanisms.

You are the ruler of the dominion of your body, emotions, and feelings. You can be a benevolent ruler or you can be a tyrant. A tyrant attempts to banish his or her feelings of fear, anger, and pain. A benevolent ruler recognizes that an impulsive response is merely that—an impulsive response.

The Value of Your Instinctive Responses

Still, you would not want to eliminate your fight, flight, and freezing responses even if you could. They are part of your survival mechanisms that help when your life or the lives of those around you are in danger. These responses provide all of us with information that is a part of natural intelligence.

Paldrom was walking home late one night when she was living in New York City. She was almost home, and there was no one else she could see on the dimly lit street. Suddenly, a tall, thin, dark man stepped out of the shadows and grabbed her arm from behind and swung her around. Without any kind of thought, she automatically raised the empty metal cookie tin she was carrying, as if to hit the guy. Her lip literally snarled, and she growled, “Leave me alone.” The guy ran away. Trembling, Paldrom saw a cab turn onto the street, and she stopped it to report what had just happened. In that moment, Paldrom was extremely happy that her survival impulse to fight had done its job.

We have all heard stories about people having the strength and courage to lift a car off a child who was trapped, being able to escape from a burning building, heroically responding to attack in times of battle. These are all the benefits received from healthy survival impulses, and they are an important part of your human biology. They are signals that give you vital information. Without the native intelligence provided by your emotional impulses, your more highly evolved thinking processes don’t have a basis from which to work.

You don’t want to banish your emotional impulses. However, when your instinctive responses are creating difficulty, such as when they are leading you into a cycle of compulsive behavior, it can be helpful to learn how to work with them effectively.

Step Two: Experience Your Instinctive Responses

You don’t want to and can’t rid yourself of the knee-jerk responses of your protective intuition. It does no good to go to war internally with these impulses. But when they cause you to act addictively or in ways that keep you from achieving the human connection you so deeply desire, you need a plan, a way to skillfully work with these natural impulses.

Your closest intimate relationship is the place these negative feelings can come up most frequently and strongly. Since your relationship is the place in which these impulses are arising, your relationship can and must be the very place to work with them.

So how can you more deeply allow your instinctive responses to connect with your reasoning responses? How can you more effectively build the bridge between your instinctive impulse and the more reasoning executive function?

Building the Bridge

Bridging your impulses with your reason is a skill you can develop by allowing yourself to simply and fully experience your feelings. You are attempting to build increased capacity (like the kids who could resist the one marshmallow) so you can gain the rewards that come from making choices, reconciling conflicting thoughts, processing emotions, suppressing urges, and delaying immediate gratification.

In an instant of recognizing that you are experiencing a difficult, uncomfortable, even excruciating feeling or emotion, first check to see if you are actually in danger. If you are not, take a slow deep breath and relax. Do not resist or protect yourself. Let go. Be patient with yourself in this practice. Like anything else, it can take a while to get the hang of it. And even once you begin to develop an understanding and capacity to let go, new and perhaps more subtle incidents that trigger your protector impulses will appear. We have found that the tenacity of the protective instinctive messages to fight, flee, and/or freeze can at times seem to be relentless. The more you are able to make friends with these aspects of your inner functioning, the more you can work with them.

For example, let’s revisit the situation with Bryan and the forgotten check. A good start for Bryan was simply being able to recognize that he was feeling justified. He could see that the “justified” story he was telling himself was woven with righteousness. This recognition of righteousness was a clue to look to what those feelings might be covering. In an instant, he understood that he was actually feeling irritated, and beneath the irritation, he was feeling hurt.

Some people have compared meeting anger, fear, and pain to baring themselves to the rain or diving into the ocean. One lovely description we heard was from a young woman who described it as first stilling her thoughts, and then imagining the space in between the cells of her body. She reported that the uncomfortable waves of emotion had all the space they needed to rage and be free right between her cells. All that force of strong feeling and emotion became a passing wave of energy.

One man described this letting go as similar to playing in the waves at the ocean. He said, “If you fight the wave, it takes you down, but if you dive into the wave, you can ride it.” It is possible to turn and face, to welcome, the very impulse your instinctive biology is urging you to avoid. The instinctive impulse comes more quickly, but the ability to recognize the impulse for what it is isn’t built with greater effort but with greater openness. Being vulnerable is often equated with a sense of letting go.

Avoiding Your Impulses by Indulging Them

If you are like most of us, even when you are able to recognize that you are having a flash of instinctive anger, fear, or emotional pain, you will also feel a strong impulse to do something to get away from the feeling or to get the feeling away from you. You may notice a tendency to attempt to banish your feelings, to avoid them, to deny them, to repress them, or to indulge them by acting on the impulse.

Indulging is simply following the instinctive imperative of the feeling. For example, if you feel angry, an instinctive response would be to yell at someone or to kick something. If you feel afraid, your instinct will tell you to run away or freeze up. If you feel hurt, you might cry. It is normal to cry, to feel pain, to say, “Ouch, stop it” when you are hurt. However, if you find yourself thinking the same painful thought over and over again or repeatedly feeling the same unpleasant reactive response to a particular incident, this is a clue that you are literally in an instinctive mental or emotional spin.

You can begin to recognize that any of the responses of acting against, running away, or internally spinning are simply various ways that we as humans indulge the instinctive imperative. Indulging is a form of avoidance, rather than simply letting go and experiencing the uncomfortable feeling.

To allow yourself to notice and experience your anger, fear, and pain does not mean taking those feelings and throwing them at your partner with the explanation, “I’m only telling you how I feel.” That would not be an expression of vulnerability and will not lead to greater intimacy. In the next chapter, we discuss more fully developing the skill of speaking to your partner vulnerably by telling the truth about your experience using the skill of undefended honesty. And in Chapter 10, you will find instructions on developing your skills of intimate communication.

For now, remember that in a moment when you are able to notice that you are in reaction, when you are feeling the impulse to fight, flee, or spin with the same thought or emotion over and over, this is your opportunity to pause. You can begin to recognize that your first impulse to something that registers as dangerous or threatening (even if it is not) is more than likely going to be a survival reaction. Speaking your angry feelings coupled with the exclamation, “This is just how I feel,” is creating an excuse for indulging rather than directly experiencing.

Repressing Your Feelings by Numbing Them

To compensate for unwelcome feelings, many people use numbing diversions. This compensatory numbing activity can become a conditioned response put in place as a strategy to avoid the unwanted feelings. Many things, both positive and negative, can be used to numb—work, exercise, alcohol, drugs, food, and, of course, compulsive sexual activity. However, if you allow the uncomfortable feelings of anger, fear, and pain to become your allies, the uncomfortable impulses become signals indicating, “Attention needed here.” If you can view these impulses as signals, then you do not need to employ the harmful strategies of attempting to get away from them.

In the case of compulsive urges, an individual may use the compulsive behavior to avoid feeling the full impact of the anger, fear, or pain. This sets up the addictive-compulsive cycle. Being able to experience the rush of information being sent by the impulse allows you to go to the next step of taking action (or not) or speaking (or not). From the less reactive place that is not in avoidance, you are vulnerable. And from this vulnerability you can build the intimacy that you truly desire.

Your Patterns of Avoidance

Most of us have built habits of avoidance. You probably began these habits when you were quite young. It can sometimes be helpful to track back and find the seeds of your avoidant strategies. In Chapter 9, we will look at how to do that and how this tracking back skill has helped others. While it can be useful, you are not required to trace your impulses back into the past. In an instant, you can simply stop and experience an uncomfortable impulse. In that instant, you will find that it wasn’t such a monster after all. Before you allow the impulse, though, if you are like most of us, the anger, fear, or pain that is chasing you can disguise itself as a monster. How else could this survival impulse do its job of getting your attention?

You may begin to recognize that you have spent much of your lifetime running from sensations of fear, anger, and pain. Many have reported the relief of finally turning and facing the internal monster. In the The Wizard of Oz, when Toto revealed the man behind the curtain, the wizard could no longer use his tricks to scare Dorothy and her friends. When a child is afraid of a monster under the bed or in the closet, the skillful parent does not pooh-pooh the child’s fear, but acknowledges the fear and helps the child check it out.

In this way, you can skillfully work with yourself with compassion, by acknowledging the capacity you have had all along (like Dorothy with her ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz) to directly and simply bear the discomfort of your innate intuitive protective response.

Recognizing That You Are Meeting the Painful Experience

How can you recognize that you have actually experienced the uncomfortable feeling? Is there a sign or a clue? Yes, there is. You know that you have really met the uncomfortable impulse because the biochemical instinctive response will change. This is important. You will know that you have brought awareness to the biological impulse because your experience will be different from what it was previously.

In the moment of opening, of letting go, the uncomfortable feeling may not be obliterated. You may still be experiencing it—or not. However, in the openness of vulnerability, the uncomfortable reaction is not resisted and can be fully experienced. The compassion of vulnerability has the capacity to contain the discomfort.

If you find yourself thinking the same thing over and over again, feeling the same feeling over and over again, justifying why you are thinking and feeling the same thing over and over again, blaming your partner for making you feel this bad thing over and over again, you can skillfully take that recognition as a clue. The “over and over again” experience is probably an impulse of anger, fear, or pain that you are avoiding.

In general, if you are feeling angry, afraid, or hurt for an extended period of time, it is useful to check and see if you may be circling around the actual feeling and not allowing the wisdom of your thinking brain to tolerate the discomfort of your anger, fear, or pain response. By avoiding the discomfort, you can drag the uncomfortable feeling on indefinitely.

Some people spend a lifetime feeling the same experience of anger, fear, or pain over and over again. They may associate the feeling with an unending parade of events and circumstances, but the feeling is never fully met and experienced.

It is important to note that grief has a long-term signature. This means that grief will come back again and again, in a way that anger, fear, pain, or hurt does not. Grief, a response to a shock, must unwind. It requires you to be patient and allow the unwinding of the pain of the loss to go on for as long as it takes. Generally, a spark of anger, fear, and hurt is more of a momentary flash meant to get your attention instantly.

Once you have met a strong, uncomfortable impulse of anger, fear, or pain, don’t trick yourself into believing this means it will never come back. It will. You, too, are human and will continue to be the beneficiary of the information available from the instinctive messages of your anger, fear, and pain. As you learn to ride these particular waves, however, you will develop the capacity to relate more vulnerably than protectively.

Step Three: Make a Choice from Vulnerability

Once you notice that you are experiencing the imperative to fight, flee, or freeze, you can then make a choice about how you would actually like to respond. You must be willing to directly experience the impulsive feelings you are having. This willingness is the birth of vulnerability. The impulse to fight, flee, or freeze is not being vulnerable; it is protective. Vulnerability is the antidote to the impulse to protect; vulnerability is the basis of creating intimacy first with yourself and then with your partner.

Reflecting on his interaction with Heather, Bryan realized that the irritation he was feeling (and the righteous indignation that accompanied it) was a signal. He could then review and realize that the irritation he had felt was covering up feeling hurt. He was vulnerable enough with himself to recognize the hurt. Because he did not feel that he needed to shield himself from the feeling of hurt, he no longer felt the need to accuse Heather. She had indeed done something that had hurt him, but her intention was not to wound.

When an uncomfortable impulse arises and you are able to recognize it and then experience it without indulging or repressing, greater clarity will be available to you. Remember, you are not meeting the uncomfortable feeling to rid yourself of it. That only creates greater resistance internally. It may help to imagine that you are meeting the uncomfortable feeling to partake of it more fully, to understand it more deeply. Some people have been helped by the image of inviting the uncomfortable impulse to tea. Once the meeting occurs, as we mentioned earlier, your experience of the uncomfortable emotion will be altered. Since you are no longer in avoidance, you become vulnerable.

Vulnerability in Action

Going back once again to the check incident (or shall we say the lack-of-check incident) between Bryan and Heather, when Bryan was able to recognize that he was in reaction, he could simply stop and track his first response of irritation, and recognize it as a cover-up of his feeling of hurt.

That night when Heather and Bryan arrived home from work, Bryan was able to tell Heather that he was sorry he had gotten irritated about the check. He was able to vulnerably share with Heather that he’d realized he had fallen into a moment of hurt because he felt like she didn’t really care for him. This vulnerability on Bryan’s part made Heather smile. She said, “Yeah, I’m sorry I forgot to write the check. I can be such a space cadet about things like that, huh? Sorry I got mad at you when I called at lunch.”

The other part of this story involves Heather’s realization about her reaction on the phone. There is a good reason that she was able to apologize as well. That afternoon as she was working, Heather experienced first her own righteousness because she “didn’t do anything wrong.” She felt anger toward Bryan for hanging up on her. By allowing the anger to wash through her without holding on to the story of her righteousness, she was able to experience the pain of feeling bad for being “imperfect,” because she had let Bryan down by forgetting to write the check. She could see how she had internally leapt to the conclusion that his anger with her meant that he didn’t really care for her.

As they were able to talk vulnerably, both could pretty quickly come to the point of being amused that they both had ended up with the conclusion that the other did not really care. The potential is that either partner or both can back out of “reactive world” by experiencing the uncomfortable feeling and then allowing the more thinking function to be in charge of the communication. We have often said to each other, “If just one of us can stay sane in any given moment (that is, not trapped by our reactive strategies), then we at least have a chance at vulnerability, intimacy, and truly connecting.”

It May Not Be Easy, but It’s Worth It

Compassion for yourself during this process is vital. You are working with a protective system that is hard-wired into your body. Some of us are more sensitive, more reactive, than others. Some of us are more prone to choosing compulsive strategies than others. But we are certain that if you have the capacity to read this book, you have the capacity to bear the discomfort of your anger, fear, and pain responses and bring greater vulnerability into your life. The rewards of building the capacity to make choices, to reconcile conflicting thoughts, to process emotions, to suppress urges, to delay immediate gratification are greater joy, love, and belonging as well as greater vulnerability. We have personally seen how the process of meeting what arises in your relationship may always be challenging, but the intimacy that it brings is ultimately and infinitely rewarding.

Exercise: Shaping Clay

For this exercise, you will need two large handfuls of modeling clay, one handful for each partner.

Put your blob of clay on the table in front of you, and with your thumbs, press as hard as you can into the clay. You will find that the clay resists your penetration.

Now, instead of pressing as hard as you can, press gently, applying constant gentle but firm pressure. You will begin to feel the clay begin to melt beneath your thumbs. The clay will let you into its core.

Allow the experience of feeling the clay yielding beneath your touch to be a metaphor, a direct experience of how you can actually allow yourself to melt, to not resist, at the moment of an instinctive impulse to fight, flee, or seduce, but instead to become vulnerable. We recognize how difficult it can be to resist those instinctive, protective urges. Let the experience of the clay giving way to your gentle pressure begin to create new pathways in your awareness that open up a possibility you may not have been able to find before.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Being able to tolerate and work with your strong reactions and feelings of anger, fear, and pain is not only fundamental to working with compulsive and addictive impulses but also to building greater intimacy.

• If we desire the rewards of intimate human connection, then we must learn to bare ourselves to the hurt, the wounding, that is also a part of our human interaction.

• You can’t (and don’t want to) banish your reactive impulses of anger, fear, or pain. However, when your instinctive responses are creating difficulty, such as when they lead to a cycle of compulsive behavior, it is helpful to learn how to work with these impulses effectively.

• You can learn to build your capacity for choice and decision making in ways that override your instant and instinctive impulses. Once you have taken the very important step of becoming consciously aware of your automatic response, you have the opportunity to make a conscious choice about how to respond.

• The basic steps of using the thinking brain to evaluate and work with the rush of your biological impulses of anger, fear, and pain are:

1. Recognize your instinctive response for what it is.

2. Allow yourself to experience the feeling without indulging or repressing.

3. From this place of inner vulnerability, choose to take action or not.

Looking Forward

In Chapter 8, we will begin the investigation of how the capacity to work with your strong feelings and emotions can aid you in deepening your relationship by developing the skill of undefended honesty.