A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction

Working with couples who have faced the challenge of rebuilding a relationship that has been injured by sex addiction, we have found a common denominator among those couples who are able to build an even stronger and deeper relationship. These individuals have built their skill and capacity for what we refer to as undefended honesty. This is an honesty that builds on the truth that has been revealed in the disclosure of the sexually compulsive behavior. This kind of honesty is not easy or natural to do, nor is it necessarily easy or natural to receive. But these skills can be developed. This chapter provides a roadmap of the land of undefended honesty.

The partner who has acted out sexually (in whatever way) needs to build his skill at telling the truth about his compulsive behavior. As mentioned earlier, this can be difficult due to the shame factor. Shame leads to the desire to cover up, which leads to lying—outright false statements and lies of omission.

Let the challenge of this difficulty motivate you to find ways to know what you are thinking and feeling and to communicate those thoughts and feelings more effectively. The partner of the sexually compulsive individual also benefits from building her skills of undefended honesty. As the partner of someone who is acting out sexually, she may fall into the trap of focusing on remedying her partner’s compulsion to the detriment of her own wishes and desires. Even though this urge to rescue her partner may arise from a noble motivation, it does not work—for either party involved.

A relationship is a meeting of two partners who can support themselves and provide support for each other. If you do not take care of yourself first, you will not be able to be useful to anyone else. This is not a selfish stance, but a compassionate one. In this chapter, we are encouraging you to take care of yourself and your relationship by deeply, vulnerably, and radically showing up and telling the truth. Again, this may be easy to say but challenging to do.

Why Accept the Challenge of Undefended Honesty?

The impulse to lie is generally an impulse to avoid pain or seek pleasure, to get away from what you don’t want or to get what you do want in any given moment. We all have this impulse; it’s part of our survival mechanism. We all know about the kid with his hand in the cookie jar telling his mom that he’s not taking any cookies—guilty and denying it simultaneously. The problem with denial and lying is that the first person to sense that you are not telling the truth is you.

Sometimes, not telling the truth is exactly what is required to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our community. We are not speaking here about distinctions regarding the morality of telling the truth or lying. We are pointing to the direct benefits you can receive from practicing undefended honesty. This level of honesty is necessary for your relationship with yourself and for your relationship with your partner. Ultimately, undefended honesty can become a cornerstone of rebuilding the trust in your relationship. But let’s start by investigating how undefended honesty is foundational in building internal compassion.

The Importance of Undefended Honesty for You

We have found that both partners benefit from investigating whatever it is they have been hiding from themselves. But the one person who needs your undefended honesty the most is you. Your mind, your being, longs for acceptance. To the extent that you’re denying, you’re not accepting. You may think you are protecting yourself or shielding yourself from having to look at what you have determined is “ugly.” The denial of that not-so-pretty part of yourself is a seed of self-hatred. You can’t have compassion for something while denying that it exists. The denial that something you are thinking and feeling is not there doesn’t make it not there. If an elephant is charging at you, you can close your eyes, but the elephant is still going to run you down.

We have all been taught in one way or another that some of what we think and feel is unacceptable. By believing that, we deny ourselves the direct experience of who we are—in effect, we lie to ourselves.

In Chapter 7, we investigated the mechanism of directly experiencing the information arising from our internal impulses— even the negative or painful feelings and emotions. It is one thing to work with a painful feeling or emotion because we are directly aware of it. It is quite another to allow ourselves to uncover thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we don’t want to have to admit exist. It requires a leap of courage to look to thoughts, feelings, and emotions that have been labeled “do not enter” or “do not disturb”—the ones that we have learned good boys or good girls do not think or feel.

We are not suggesting indulgence of your impulses or acting anything out. We are merely pointing to the compassionate act of telling the truth to yourself, to ceasing the judgment that does not allow you to admit (at least to yourself) what you are actually thinking and feeling.

Recall any instance in your life in which you were truly honest with yourself (even if you did not like what you found) and we suspect you will remember a moment of relief. That experience of relief is the balm of compassion that comes with letting go of the defense. For example, imagine holding your hand in a tight fist until it begins to ache, then allowing your hand to open. There is a relief in the act of simply letting go.

In addition to the sense of liberation you will feel, telling the undefended truth begins to strip away a layer of defense. It can be painful to give up your armor, but it is also painful to walk around with all that weight of protection. It can feel as if admitting to something that you feel shame about would be the last thing in the world you want to do. It may seem like walking off a ledge. But there is relief in the freefall of telling the truth.

You do not necessarily need to share the truth you tell to yourself with anyone else; the power of simply telling the truth internally provides relief from the pressure of the walled-up denial of the thoughts and feelings you learned were somehow unacceptable. Again, as we mentioned earlier, we aren’t advocating for the acting out of any feeling. We are talking about not indulging and not repressing. We are pointing to nakedly admitting to yourself what you (as a human with the reactions of a mind and body) are experiencing.

That letting go, that undefended honesty with yourself, builds your capacity to tell the truth to yourself again and again. It leads not only to greater compassion for yourself, but for everyone else as well. If you have greater compassion and acceptance for yourself, you can extend that to others—and specifically to your relationship with your intimate partner.

Charlie Finally Tells the Truth to Himself

Charlie had a problem with his temper. In his initial work with us, he began to see how for years of his life he had chosen to live alone, masturbating while looking at porn rather than risk being in a relationship with a live, flesh-and-blood woman who might disappoint him and whom he might disappoint. He eventually met and married a woman who ran her own small business as a graphic designer, but their relationship was troubled. Charlie would fly into a rage and scream at his wife when he felt she was unavailable to him or when he felt she was disapproving.

His wife would periodically stay up at night working on her graphic design projects, particularly when she had a big project with an imminent deadline. When Charlie would wake up in the night and find that his wife was not in bed with him, he would often feel an instant sense of abandonment. And then, just as quickly, he would begin his line of reasoning about how his wife was working too much, was irresponsible in her time management, how she did not care for him, and how he could not stand to remain in a marriage with someone who really did not care for him. He would then come into the room where his wife was working away and begin to berate her for being a bad wife. As you can imagine, these conversations did not go very well.

Finally, one night Charlie woke up and watched himself begin to feel those old familiar feelings of abandonment, of not being cared for. He had investigated his history enough to recognize that these feelings were the same feelings he had felt when he came home from school and found his mother in the dining room with one of her friends, drinking, and oblivious to the fact that he had even walked in the door. In the moment of that remembering, he could tell the truth to himself about where these feelings were coming from. He let the content of those thoughts of abandonment melt like butter in the hot sun. That was step one. And a very good first step. He began to tell the undefended truth to himself. He recognized that he was telling himself a story of abandonment. This did not stop his experience of abandonment, of course. The story, the feelings, were still coming to get him. But he did something he had never done before. Instead of walking into the room where his wife was working and yelling at her, he walked into the room and vulnerably told her the undefended truth.

It was hard for him as a grown man to show his wife that he was having the experience of a young boy and actually just wanted comfort. He had to override the impulse he was having that told him that if he talked about these feelings, if he revealed them, that he would be crushed, and that he would be judged as childish and inferior.

For as long as he could remember, he had not allowed these feelings to see the light of day. To do so would have meant admitting to himself that he was weak. These thoughts and feelings seemed so ugly and selfish. He could remember being told to “be a big boy.” He did not want to have needs, and if he did, he certainly did not want them showing because that would mean that he was deficient. So he had lashed out instead. He had felt like if he just acted as if he was the boss, the man, that he could demand what he needed.

His feelings were so tender and embarrassing to him that the best he could do was walk into the room where his wife was working and say, “I’m feeling panicky and angry. I want to blame you. I can’t see straight in this moment. Help.” As you can probably imagine, this undefended moment of truth telling elicited an entirely different response from his wife than the angry outbursts of accusation. She stopped what she was doing and said, “Come here. Tell me what is going on.” They sat down on the sofa and he put his head on her shoulder. She tenderly rubbed his head while he allowed himself to experience the pain of feeling so utterly unloved. His wife was not fixing this pain for him, but she was helping him create an environment where he could tell the truth about it in an undefended way. This was not the last time Charlie woke up in the night with a sense of abandonment, but the spell of defense had been broken by his undefended honesty.

Working with Compulsive Behaviors

As we discussed in Chapter 6, the addictive cycle is fueled by the despair of shame. You may have a natural knee-jerk, lie-telling response to avoid the hopeless feeling of shame. You may tell yourself you do not really feel out of control and powerless, when actually you do. This lying to yourself feeds the addictive cycle of: 1) a preoccupation with the perceived need; 2) a routine that leads up to the compulsive behavior; 3) engaging in the compulsive behavior; and finally, 4) the despair of shame that leads back to the beginning of the cycle with further preoccupation with the perceived need.

We have found that undefended, rigorous honesty is at the core of working with any type of compulsive behavior. If you look closely, you will discover that honesty opens the door to overcoming compulsion or addiction. Some have even dubbed honesty with oneself as the “Step Zero” of the Twelve Steps (see Chapter 11). That’s how fundamental honesty is in meeting compulsivity. Being honest with yourself is the foundation, the key to working with the addictive cycle. It is also the key to working with shame and blame, to accepting your strong feelings and emotions, and to creating a foundation for rebuilding your relationship.

Honesty for Your Relationship

In order to rebuild your relationship, you need to rebuild trust. In order to rebuild trust, you must commit to undefended honesty. In a relationship with another, each time you experience honesty from your partner (and time confirms that your partner has indeed told the truth), your trust grows. In the absence of honesty—in fact, in the absence of information or the lie of omission—the partner who has experienced being lied to will fill in the blanks with the imagination of past actions based on history. If the past history includes deception and betrayal, that is what she will use to fill in the blanks.

Your relationship has its own life. There are the two partners, and then there is also the combined energy of the partners. As in the synergist wisdom that speaks to the sum being greater than the individual parts, the combination of the wisdom of both partners can create a knowingness that would otherwise not be available. This new intelligence is born through meeting difficulty and is fostered by the capacity for undefended truth telling. A key to overcoming a time of crisis in a relationship is for both partners to have the willingness to tell the truth (at least to themselves) about whatever it is they are thinking, feeling, perceiving. This can be tricky because, as mentioned earlier, we can hide the truth from ourselves about the parts of us that we feel are wrong, bad, or otherwise unacceptable. As discussed in Chapter 6, it is much easier to move into blaming your partner than to stir the monster of internal shame.

Being honest with your partner can actually show how much you care about him or her. The act of undefended and vulnerable sharing with your beloved is like exposing a precious and tender part of yourself. Intimacy invites the sharing of the good in you so your partner can also enjoy it. Exposing your flaws, your “bad” parts, can be a gift, too, because, by not hiding them, they will not be hidden deceptions waiting to come out later to create chaos and hurt. It is the journey of a hero to expose your flaws, to lay your cards on the table, to resist the impulse to defend and protect by telling a lie or attempting to hide.

Making a Safe Place for the Truth

We’ve all had moments of listening to someone’s explanations and having a sense that the person was not being truthful or, perhaps, not fully truthful. In courtroom scenes, we hear the words, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But what can you do if your spouse is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

What you don’t want to do is be a prosecutor, a judge, or a jury. That is not your role. What you can do is try to make it safe for your partner to tell the truth. The person on the witness stand in a legal drama who does not tell the whole truth is typically afraid of something, such as revealing guilt. The intention behind not telling the truth is often fear.

How can you make it safer and less fearful for your partner to tell the truth? One way you can do that is by being clear that your job is not to prove that they are lying or not telling the whole truth. Your job is to make it safe for your partner to admit the truth. To that end, your partner needs to believe that you want to hear the truth, not as an indictment, but for the purposes of building trust in the relationship.

When you are open and vulnerable, and you allow the other person to express himself or herself in an open and vulnerable way, relationship trust can grow. We recognize that you may feel that, given what has previously occurred regarding sexually compulsive behavior, trust in the relationship may seem ill advised and, if even possible, thousands of miles away from where you are now. However, it is possible; it is recommended. In fact, sharing truths creates intimacy. You have probably had a direct experience of this when someone trusted you enough to tell you a personal secret.

How to Work with Undefended Honesty

We all have negative qualities. These negative qualities are also often referred to as the “shadow.” They are the qualities you try to keep out of the light of awareness, and certainly out of sight of your beloved partner.

A folktale tells of a man so frightened by his own shadow that he tries to run away from it. He believes that if only he could leave it behind, he would be happy. He grows increasingly distressed because, no matter how fast he runs, his shadow never once falls behind. Not about to give up, he runs faster and faster until finally he drops dead of exhaustion. It never occurred to him to stop running, to simply look over his shoulder and see that his shadow was only his body blocking the light. If he had stopped and looked back for even an instant, he would have seen the true nature of his own shadow.

This is not to suggest that your negative thoughts and feelings will vanish if you admit them to yourself. But seeing your thoughts and feelings for what they are lessens their power to scare you. What you can finally vanish is that overpowering obsession with the need to run, to hide, to cover up. You can stop running and rest in the shade of telling the truth.

Simple Truth Telling

Undefended honesty begins by telling the truth in small ways, by simply following through on doing what you say you are going to do. If you find you will not be able to do what you have said, you then tell the truth about that. Know that you will make mistakes. You may lose track of time or get distracted, but your intention can be to tell the truth in this simple way.

For example, if you say you are going to take out the trash on Sunday evening, take out the trash before you go to bed on Sunday. If you say you are going to be home at 7:00, get home by 7:00. If you find you have more work than you expected or you are stuck in traffic, call and let your partner know that circumstances have changed. Or if you suddenly look at the clock and see that you have gotten carried away with your work and will not be able to get home by 7:00, call your partner immediately and let him or her know. Apologize.

We recognize that you may feel reticent to let your partner know about a change in your plans or a lapse in awareness because of the potential initial unhappy reaction. This will be the moment to apply your growing capacities to bear uncomfortable feelings or emotions (as we discussed in Chapter 7) in relationship to your partner’s reaction.

Revelatory Truth Telling

Telling the truth to another about your “shortcomings” is another form of simple truth telling that can be difficult to do. In the case of your compulsive urges, it means telling the truth about the ways you feel out of control, about the urges you have to soothe yourself with behaviors that ultimately do not serve you—the ways that you sell out on your long-term objectives for momentary relief.

In the bigger picture, it is easier to tell the truth than to lie. Yes, the impulse to protect, to lie, to fabricate, is more instinctive, but think about it. Lying requires much more calculating and strategizing in the long run. Telling the truth is simplicity at its most basic. Ultimately, it requires less energy. Even if you can only tell a small relative truth in the moment about what you are experiencing, you are closer to the seeds of your hidden unconscious motivations that are causing trouble in your life. It is not possible to hold compassion for yourself for something that you are denying even exists. For this reason alone, undefended honesty is vital to living a freer life.

Let’s revisit the marshmallow experiment that we looked at in Chapter 7. A group of four- to six-year-olds was asked to resist eating a marshmallow that was sitting right in front of them. The children knew that if they could manage to resist eating that one marshmallow, they would get two marshmallows when the experimenter returned about fifteen minutes later. It turned out that the kids who could resist, those that had a higher capacity for delayed gratification, grew into adults who had more fulfilling lives.

Undefended honesty is a tool that is helpful in building your capacity for delayed gratification. Just telling the truth about what you are experiencing, especially if it is something you have the impulse to hide, takes all that energy you are using to protect yourself away from the defense mechanism and allows you to use that energy to delay gratification. When working with instinctive mechanisms, you need all the energy, attention, and internal aid you can muster.

Show Up and Tell the Truth

What else can you do while you are in the process of healing your addictive behaviors? Don’t be afraid to tell your feelings and fears. Don’t be afraid to confess your addictive thoughts. Don’t be afraid to admit to fear, anger, and pain, even if you judge them to be the response of a child. Telling the truth leads you to authentic loving kindness. As George tells his clients, “What else can you do but tell the truth? You could buy her a diamond, but trust me, it’s been done before and it doesn’t work. Or at least not for very long.”

William Tells the Truth

William and Betsy had been dating for about a year. William had been divorced for about ten years. His former wife finally had given up on the marriage to William because he had not been able to stop masturbating to Internet porn. The end of that marriage really got William’s attention, and he had sought counseling for what he discovered were his fears of being intimate with a woman. He had begun to see how his addiction to porn was just a cover for his fears. He had come to understand that masturbating to porn was not intimate, was not connected, and he yearned for connection with a real woman. He wanted to be able to let down his defenses of perfection.

In this new relationship, he wanted to be able to connect with Betsy as the partner and equal he knew her to be. In the year they had been together, William’s connection with Betsy had deepened as he slowly dissolved his fears of being run over by a woman if he allowed himself to be seen as imperfect. He had shared with her how he still had times when he felt stressed and wanted to relieve himself by going to the Internet and finding his favorite type of porn. He also told her how lucky he felt to be with a woman who was willing to share her shortcomings with him and with whom he was able to share.

One evening, William and Betsy chose to go to William’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Walking inside, they were greeted by a new hostess, who was young, blonde, and a little flirty. After William and Betsy sat down and began to peruse the menus, William took a long breath and asked Betsy if he could tell her something that was hard for him to talk about. Betsy took a long breath, too, then put her menu down.

William reached across the table and took Betsy’s fingertips in his hands. “I want to share something with you, but please first know how deeply committed I am to being in this relationship with you. This relationship with you is very important to me.” He shared with her the attraction he had felt for the hostess as she tossed her hair when she showed them to their table. He was even able to share that the hostess had the look of the young women he used to prefer for his porn fantasies. Finally, he was able to tell Betsy that even though he had had this familiar hit of attraction, he did not want his old compulsion to get in the way of what he wanted even more—the closeness and safety he felt with Betsy.

William’s words were not easy for Betsy to hear, but she felt strangely empowered by the way William had so undefendedly spoken the truth. She talked to him about what it was like for her to feel that she needed to compete for his attention. She told William that she had noticed the hostess catch his eye, and she appreciated him for “telling” on himself. She noted that his sharing of the truth actually allowed her to trust him more deeply.

William was then able to speak even more skillfully and tell Betsy that he understood how bad it must feel to be compared to other women. He admitted that he did not want to hurt her in this way. He said he was sorry. At least for that moment, he had no need to defend or protect his image.

The victory of William and Betsy’s moment in the Chinese restaurant was born of William’s willingness to tell the truth, to show his imperfection, as well as his willingness to risk Betsy’s rejection of him because he was revealing something that he knew might cause her to feel hurt or angry with him. At the same time, Betsy was also able to openly experience and share her truth about how William’s actions created feelings of inferiority for her. As a result, William and Betsy were both able to be heroes in this story.

Truth Telling Is Not a License, but a Responsibility

Telling the truth in an undefended way is a powerful tool, and, like any powerful tool, it can be misused. We are not encouraging anyone to use telling the truth as an excuse to speak in a hurtful way. Undefended truth telling should be guided by vulnerability. If you are angry, telling the truth means finding the hurt or fear underneath the anger and revealing it. In a moment of anger, it is possible that the best you can do is to say, “I’m too angry to speak right now.” We are not saying there is anything wrong with feeling anger; it is an important and powerful internal signal. But with your beloved partner, you have the opportunity to ultimately undefendedly tell the truth of the fear or hurt that is hiding behind the immediate impulse of anger.

Tolerating the Imperfections

Telling the truth about your perceived imperfections is one of the steppingstones to deepening commitment and safety in your relationship. When you initially come together in a relationship, generally you create an idealized image of your partner. You overlook and smooth over the imperfections. Love seems to have a magical power of allowing you to put yourself into a trance of not noticing. As you spend more time with your partner, his or her imperfections can become painfully obvious. This is often a surprise.

After the disclosure or discovery of sexually compulsive behavior, you can deepen your relationship by allowing the disclosure of this imperfection to lead to the revelation of other imperfections. It is possible to allow this particular cascade of trouble, this tumble from whatever idealization you had of your partner, to lead to a greater capacity to tolerate imperfection in both your partner and yourself. It is possible to begin to build a team, to create a true partnership, that has the capacity to be tender with imperfection. This capacity for tenderness, for being able to tolerate the feelings stirred by imperfections (yours and your partner’s), can begin to build the groundwork for greater intimacy.

In Chapter 9, we will investigate how a collision with truth can lead to an investigation of the past. Such a truthful uncovering is only possible once the idealizations have begun to crumble, once the capacity and willingness to undefendedly tell the truth has been opened.

Exercise: Making a Commitment to Each Other

At the end of Chapter 2, we asked each of you to make a commitment to yourselves. Now that you have begun to reveal yourselves to each other in a new way, now that you are beginning to build the skills of communicating with each other in an undefendedly honest way, you are ready to make a new kind of commitment to each other. This is a commitment between two individuals who have begun to strip away the masks of idealization. You may have experienced moments of being painfully imperfect. This has opened a doorway to making a commitment based on knowing more clearly what you are signing up for in your relationship.

This new commitment to each other can be whatever you as a couple now know is right for your partnership. We encourage you to word this fresh commitment as simply as possible. Write the words as a team. One of you may be the better wordsmith, but as a team, the spirit of what you hold for each other will now become apparent through the practice of undefended honesty.

When you have chosen the commitment you would like to make to each other, create a ceremony to share this promise. Buy two flowers to exchange. Set aside an evening to share a meal, to exchange the flowers, and to exchange this new and sacred promise.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• The first person who needs your undefended honesty is you. It is not possible to hold compassion for yourself for something you are denying even exists. For this reason alone, undefended honesty is vital to living a freer life.

• Undefended, rigorous honesty is at the core of working with compulsive behavior. It is also the key to creating a foundation for rebuilding trust inside your relationship.

• Undefended honesty begins by telling the truth in small ways, by simply following through on doing what you say you are going to do.

• Telling the truth about your perceived imperfections is one of the steppingstones to deepening commitment and safety in your relationship.

• It is the journey of a hero to be willing to tell the truth undefendedly—to expose your flaws, to lay your cards on the table, to resist the impulse to defend and protect by telling a lie, or otherwise attempting to hide.

Looking Forward

In Chapter 9, we will take a tour into your past to see if there may be seeds planted in your childhood that are causing you to respond in ways that are not serving you anymore. We will share some common patterns that may help you unravel these unseen influences.