A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction

An issue with sexual compulsivity has caused a disruption in your relationship. If you’ve made it this far, the sexually compulsive partner has admitted to the problem and is working to find ways to replace the impulse for compulsive sexual behavior with the desire for intimacy and connected sex. If truth telling and willingness are here, as a couple, you now have a lot of ground to stand on. This is something to celebrate—you now have the possibility to deepen your relationship. Now is the time to explore more deeply how your past is influencing your partnership and to discover what it will take to move this relationship out of crisis mode and onto a path not only of repair but of deepening intimacy.

A relationship is a dance in which the movements of one partner influence the movements of the other. We have yet to see a troubled relationship where one person is totally the “good” party and the other is “bad.” This is because both partners bring their past into the union and none of us received perfect training in how to be in a relationship.

That is why it can be helpful for each of you to question: “How did I get here?” “What is this relationship for me?” “How is my partner mirroring me and how am I mirroring my partner?”

Your Relationship Is a System

Your relationship has a life of its own. As a couple, you are both part of the system. The healing of difficulties will come at least partially through this relationship system, through the dynamics of the two of you together. As long as you both have chosen to stay in the relationship, then each partner is fully responsible for those dynamics. It’s important to look at the system of the couple, and how the dynamics of the partnership are playing out in your particular challenges.

When a couple is working with an issue like sexual compulsivity, they tend to focus on “the problem,” which means that the relationship dynamics might not get the attention that will ultimately help both individuals. That is why the partner with the issue of sexual compulsivity must take responsibility and make a commitment to working with the addiction.

In directing you away from focusing solely on the issue of sexual compulsivity, we’re not condoning any sexual acting out. We are suggesting that, in addition to that individual attention, the couple place their focus on the dance of the relationship dynamics as well.

The Past Is Impacting the Present

How did you get to this moment? Looking to your past can provide clues. As human beings, everything we do is influenced by what we have previously learned, by the conclusions we have made about what has happened to us. Those deductions create the basic structure of our response—of how we experience the present moment. We are all more comfortable with what seems familiar than with the unfamiliar.

When you experience something new or different, you naturally attempt to classify the new experience based on what you have previously learned. You can trick yourself into thinking that something new is “just like what happened before,” when it is not. That mechanism of immediate classification can cause you to overlook, misclassify, mislabel, or misinterpret a new experience by throwing it into your mind’s “pile of experiences” that appear to be similar.

This does not mean you are doomed to repeat the painful experiences of your past. It is possible to bring awareness of the past into the present in a way that allows you to “rewire” or “reprogram” the past difficulties. With new awareness, the present experience that seems so reminiscent of something painful from the past can be viewed as coming back around for a “do-over.”

Experiences with the Greatest Impact

As children, we depend on our caretakers. In fact, as babies, we don’t even recognize that we are separate from those caretakers. We don’t yet have the capacity to distinguish self from the other. As we begin to formulate a sense of self, a sense that “I exist,” a sense of “me,” we quite naturally identify with our caregivers. Being taken care of without having to do anything in return is a healthy part of our experience of being a baby. Brain science has determined that the internal scaffolding we create in our minds about how the world works is deeply patterned by the time we are six or seven years old.

When your experience from the past comes from a time before you had language, the impact to your view of the world can be difficult to recognize or understand. These early experiences are so familiar that they seem “normal.” This doesn’t mean that experiences that happen after you can understand words don’t create an imprint that also deeply influences how you interpret the present moment.

However, early experiences form a view of the world in ways that ordinarily go unquestioned because they are so deeply a part of the inner landscape, your undisputed view of reality. The present moment is seen through the lens of this unquestioned internal scaffolding.

In addition to experiences that happen to the child before he or she has language, events that are more prolonged, that occur over a greater span of time, have a great influence on his or her view of how the world works. Also, any particularly traumatic event will be deeply significant. For example, physical or sexual abuse, even if it were to happen only once, would be extremely impactful.

Patterns That Affect Our View

Because these patterns of thinking, of viewing the world, have become so deeply a part of your internal landscape, it can be difficult to notice how you might be responding instinctively in ways that are not really helping you get what you want. To recognize these unseen influences, it can be helpful to learn about some basic patterns of personality put in place in the earliest years. Think of these internal influences as gremlins that are running around inside of you, causing you to respond in ways that are creating suffering and separation rather than greater connection.

Three basic patterns of survival influences that can be playing behind the scenes are issues of trust, control, and self-esteem.

• Trust: How safe do you feel in the world? How safe do you feel in allowing yourself to be impacted, influenced, vulnerable to another?

• Control: How do you prioritize your perceived needs and the needs of your partner? What are your requirements for independence and autonomy? How do you react to separation?

• Self-Esteem: Do you feel you matter in the world? Do you feel you have a right to exist?

As a child, given the best information and support that you had at the time, you came to conclusions about trust, control, and self-esteem. Allow yourself to look at the patterns of suffering in your life and relationship. Allow the observer within you to see how you are being impacted in the present by the scaffolding of conclusions or assumptions that you made in response to classifications that may have been faulty conclusions.

The Roots of the Past Are Woven Into the Present

The origins of many behaviors that show up in the present, including sexually compulsive behaviors, can be found in the past. You might visualize the present as being like a large oak tree in the front yard of an old house. The roots of the tree are not seen, but they are there, buried beneath ground level. In fact, the roots can grow underneath the sidewalk leading to the front door, causing the sidewalk to buckle. This affects anyone walking on it now, in the present. Or a root can grow into a drainage pipe, obstructing the flow and causing a bathtub to not drain properly. The point is that these unseen “roots” representing the past impact what is happening now. In that sense, they are not “just” the past; they are also living as part of the present. They are both.

This is the case with sexually compulsive behavior. For the man who has a pattern of sexually compulsive behavior, it’s time to both accept how he is behaving in the present and search for the specific roots of this behavior in the past. By first stopping the sexually compulsive behavior and then exploring the roots of that behavior, he can ensure those roots no longer have the same unseen impact.

If a boy grows up in a family where the father was focused on money and saw the wife and mother as a means for sexual pleasure and home-cooked meals, that boy will not have a model for healthy intimacy. Instead, as an adult, that man might seek virtual “relationships” with women on porn sites. Such relationships are, in fact, a version of what he knows from childhood where his father also had essentially virtual, rather than real, relationships. This is the past having a strong impact on the present (or the past and present overlapping as one).

Correspondingly, the wife may have grown up in a family where the father was more interested in his work than in having a close, intimate, relationship with his wife. The little girl also learns from her family, and her past impacts her present when she chooses a man. She will most likely not make this choice consciously. Yet unconsciously, she may have been drawn to a man who does not seek intimacy. She may not be happy with the choice, but like the man she chose, she, too, is entangled in the roots of the past and has yet to break free. Although she may not act out sexually, her past has impacted her present through her choices.

As children, we yearn to behave in a way that will make our parents love us. If our parents are uncomfortable, they push us away and shame us with their stern looks or reproachful words. Thus, we learn to behave in ways that do not make our parents ill at ease. To adapt ourselves to the needs of our parents, we may hide our true feelings and learn to repress and avoid. As we grow more distant from our own true feelings, we are no longer able to connect with others from a place of what we truly feel. We are entangled in the roots of the past, which strongly influence our actions in the present.

Similar to how he felt shamed in childhood, a man who is now married may again feel shame for his sexually compulsive behavior. He may feel this shame both from himself and from his spouse. In effect, he is repeating the past. One way to stop repeating the past is to uncover and acknowledge your feelings from the past, and embrace whatever has happened to you in the past along with what is happening now. This is how you can be truly aware of your feelings and thoughts as well as your impulses to sexually act out, to feel shame, and to shame others.

By following the directives of the previous chapter on undefended honesty, a man can begin to disentangle the roots of the past he is reacting to with his sexually compulsive behavior. Next, as he disentangles himself from the stranglehold of the roots of the past, he can allow his healthy impulses to emerge, impulses such as the desire for true connection and intimacy with a real person.

Steven and Emily

Steven and Emily came to us after they had been married for twenty years. Emily had inadvertently discovered evidence on Steven’s computer of his activities with prostitution and other kinds of meetings for sex. She knew that she hadn’t felt connected with Steven for a long time, and this was the final straw for her. She reported that Steven had seemed totally consumed with his trips around the country to play golf. Since their three boys were now grown and had left home, she felt that she had tried every way she knew to get her husband’s attention, to interest him in their marriage and partnership again, to allow her to be a part of his life.

Steven admitted that he had gotten involved in looking for companionship online. He was embarrassed that he had allowed himself to get caught in what he felt was a pretty seamy world of what he labeled “casual hook-ups.” He couldn’t really understand why he had felt so compelled to keep going back to these sites. He admitted that he really wanted to make his relationship with Emily work, but that he didn’t know how. He could see that he was somehow pushing his wife away. He was able to admit that the golf with his buddies and the Internet dating seemed to require so much less effort than trying to please Emily. He said he felt like she had left him long ago. They both felt they had been abandoned by the other. Steven had acted out sexually and needed to admit that and atone for those actions. They both needed to see how the seeds of their past were playing out in the present.

Steven and Emily’s Past

Steven and Emily had been high school sweethearts. They grew up in a small town, and went away to college together. Steven studied business and Emily studied to become an elementary school teacher. They both always knew that they wanted to get married and have a family together. So when they graduated from college and Steven got a great entry-level position at an investment bank, they felt they were on their way to living out their destiny.

But they each had experiences from their growing-up years, some scaffolding of their view of relationships that had been put into place in their earliest years, that came back to haunt them as their relationship matured. As much as they loved each other, as much as they held a shared vision of being together, these unseen influences were waiting for them.

Steven’s father had walked out when Steven was three. Steven never really knew the whole story about what had happened. As he looked back on it after he was grown, he suspected that maybe his mother had been having an affair with a neighbor. His mother always told the story that his father “went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.”

When Steven was five, his mother married a man who was a long-distance truck driver. Steven felt close to his new father figure. He liked him. But Steven remembers how his mother would frequently wonder aloud when his stepfather went out on the road whether or not he would come back. His mother would say, “He could always turn out to be just like your father,” and she would retell the story of the trip for cigarettes that ended in abandonment.

Whenever Steven’s stepfather was away, Steven’s mother would tell him how he was now the “man of the house.” Steven remembers how his mother would have male friends in to spend the night when his stepfather was away. His mother told him he could never tell his stepfather about these visitors. As her man of the house, he was in charge of guarding her secret.

Emily brought her own history to the relationship. Her father ran an insurance agency and her mother was a high school teacher. Emily’s father was a quiet, unassuming kind of guy. Her mother ran the household—she was gregarious, outgoing, and liked to be involved in every aspect of Emily’s life.

From as early as she could remember, Emily reported that she felt like her mother never “left her alone.” Emily said that she always had the feeling that her mother had to know everything about her. She had memories from her early teens of her mother standing in the next room to listen in on her phone calls. Since her mother was one of the teachers at the school where Emily went to high school, she felt that there was no escape from her mother’s ever-present oversight. Emily responded by being a perfect daughter and a perfect student. She was even the valedictorian of her graduating class. Since she felt like she was being monitored all the time, she chose to be as good as possible. By being perfect, her mother wouldn’t have anything to worry about and Emily could feel safe.

The Past Is Affecting Your Relationship

Neither partner has come to this relationship as a blank slate. You bring everything you have learned about love and relationship both consciously and unconsciously with you into the relationship. We all bring the past to life in our present relationships. We can’t help it.

Ordinarily, your first relationship was with your parents. Your mother was probably your primary caregiver during your most formative years. The nature of that relationship has been shown to set the template for your unconscious expectations, especially in your closest, most intimate relationship. You are quite likely unaware of the ways that past influences can invade your intimate partnership. Present experiences appear as a version of the past returning so that you can redeem or rework the unfinished business. You return to what is familiar precisely because it is known rather than unknown. Even an uncomfortable known interpretation feels more “natural” than an interpretation that is unknown, potentially threatening, and thus scary.

Your intimate relationship brings these past influences into the present in a way that, try as you might, you cannot ignore. When you re-experience a desirable quality of relationship from the past, your current relationship is enhanced. However, when your past (and early) unfilled needs for trust, control, or self-esteem are activated by a current situation, you have the opportunity to recognize the experience for what it is—and then learn from it. That allows you to reclaim and rework these past difficulties. The container of relationship allows you to bring new awareness to situations that seem to be a replay of something from the past. The information and feedback that is available in undefended truth telling with your intimate partner brings with it the capacity to reveal your blind spots, the conclusions from your past that you cannot recognize are acting as your filter of how you view the world.

Steven and Emily’s Marriage

During the first years of Emily and Steven’s marriage, the focus was on their growing family and their three little boys. Steven devoted much of his time to earning a good living, while Emily was dedicated to being a good mother. Emily felt that Steven was not as connected to her as he used to be. He seemed so focused on becoming successful that he didn’t seem to notice the times that Emily tried to get his attention, made a special dinner, or attempted to engage him sexually.

Both Steven and Emily later recalled moments during these first five years of their marriage when they wanted to talk, but the other seemed preoccupied with either job or family. Steven recalled a moment of rushing home to tell Emily he had landed a big new account, but when he got home that day all three boys as well as Emily had bad colds, and Emily was not available to listen to him.

Emily had her own memories of Steven’s unavailability. She recalled cooking special birthday meals for Steven on nights when he ended up not coming home until very late. He had been so focused on his work at the office that he had forgotten the birthday meal. Each of them could recall moments big and small when they had experienced disappointment and disconnection. Both had given up on reaching out to the other for companionship.

The moment of Emily’s discovery of Steven’s online activities was a moment of collision for their marriage. Emily was ready to leave the marriage, but they both felt the pull of that original connection to each other. They felt there was something here to save. This required Emily and Steven to each be 100 percent responsible for the success or failure of the marriage.

The first step was for Steven to commit to ceasing any sort of sexual activity outside of the marriage. He was deeply aware that those ventures lacked intimate connection. Using terminology from the financial field in which he worked, he told us how his investment in that type of activity did not have the payoff he ultimately desired.

Steven and Emily both agreed to look at their unseen past influences to see what might be driving their feelings of distance and protection. Steven was able to understand his desire to protect himself from the hurt he felt whenever he reached out to Emily and she responded in a way that he thought was angry or disapproving. His dislike of feeling rejected by Emily caused him to be constantly on guard, and his first impulse was to blame Emily for “making him feel rejected.”

Then Steven was able to remember how he had that same feeling as a boy when his stepfather would go away and his mother would speculate that he might not come back. He could remember deciding as a young boy to never allow anyone to abandon him. He concluded that he could take care of himself by meeting his own needs. His mother’s example of looking for men outside of the marriage had become Steven’s model of how to act inside of a marriage. He saw that now, as an adult, he had the opportunity to make a different choice.

When Emily reached back into her past, she clearly saw how she felt she needed to protect herself from her mother’s invasiveness. She began to see how angry she had felt about it and how she still had that anger. She saw how she had chosen to make herself “good” rather than have to experience what she thought was bad—being angry with her mother. She began to see how she had felt angry with Steven for what she perceived as his abandonment of her. Rather than openly expressing her anger with Steven, however, she had gotten busy doing what she knew how to do. She became good. She became the best mother she could be, focusing her attention on making sure her children were cared for while withholding her attention (and anger) from Steven.

She began to understand how she had walled herself off from Steven. With this knowledge, she then recognized that in her relationship with her husband, she no longer needed to repeat the past by recreating the wall she had built to protect herself from her mother. She really did not want to keep Steven away.

Emily had to clearly experience and speak with Steven about her anger. And Steven had to listen to Emily’s anger and tell her how he understood why she was angry with him. Steven’s willingness to hear her anger, and his sincere regret at having hurt her, created a new experience for Emily. She was able to see how she did not have to be “good” to be loved. Steven began to see that he was not being abandoned by Emily. Even if Emily was unhappy with him, he did not have to relive the abandonment of his father walking out. As a result of their realizations about the past and making new choices in the present, Emily and Steven’s behavior was forever changed.

The Transformative Power of Relationship

If and when you and your partner can gain even a small amount of perspective about how the past is impacting your present, this awareness has the potential to transform and enhance your relationship. If you simply replay your past without recognizing and understanding it, your relationship will be troubled. Even a small amount of willingness to uncover and look at the beliefs and images, the scaffolding that you have brought to your union, can lead to worthwhile results. The power of your connection, the desire that you feel to be with your partner, can act as a carrot to a horse, leading you to investigate areas that you would otherwise internally label “do not disturb.”

When you allow your partner to really matter to you, you allow new experiences to help you rebuild your relationship scaffolding. You can create a new view. With this view, you can look to the ways you have come together with your partner so you can rework the past.

I’m Not Getting My Needs Met

At times, one partner or the other can become focused on “my needs.” If you are demanding that your partner meet your needs, you are possibly overlooking your responsibility to the relationship itself. The relationship needs to be a container that allows the past to live in the present in a way that encourages the reworking of your negative (and probably unseen) views of how relationships work. If either party remains solely focused on their individual needs, the relationship will stall. The needs of the relationship, as well as the frailties of each partner, need to be held tenderly and put on an equal footing with the needs of the individual.

Being in a relationship requires a balance of placing value and priority on your individual desire for feeling safe, being in control, and experiencing value (self-esteem), while at the same time placing value on providing safety, yielding control, and supporting the self-esteem of your partner. To the extent that you do not have healthy internal structures in one or more of these areas, you may experience the impulse to demand repayment from your partner for internal structures not properly created when you were very young. But your partner cannot rebuild these structures for you.

You can, however, give and receive support in finding the internal strength, courage, and compassion to face what can feel like overwhelming impulses. Some of these may be:

• You may experience an uncomfortable sense that if your partner gets what he or she wants, then you will not get what you want.

• It may be tempting to make your partner wrong, so you can feel right.

• It can be difficult to allow your beloved to just be as he or she is or to allow the situation to just be as it is.

• It can be difficult to allow your partner’s view of reality to be as true as your view of reality.

But it is possible to permit seemingly contradictory viewpoints to both be “correct.” The solution, the way out of a perceived impasse, can come from broadening your perspective to include what seems to be the opposite point of view. As strange as it may sound, you and your partner can both be right; you just have different viewpoints based on the particular perspective of your past influences.

How the Relationship Can Support You

Each partner in the relationship needs to feel honored in a way that he or she feels safe. To get a picture of this primary need for safety, imagine a two-year-old child who is venturing away from mother, and in the next instant turning back for reassurance that mother is still there. In the same way, in our most intimate relationships, we have the need to feel accepted while we also express our individuality. To the extent that your structures of safety, dominion, and self-esteem were not adequately put in place when you were young, you will need to rebuild them now. A relationship is quite often the arena where the absence of these structures becomes uncomfortably obvious. Your partner cannot prevent you from having an experience of vulnerability. Particularly in intimate relationships, all of us can experience a terrifying sense of vulnerability that we try to hide from ourselves, and certainly from anyone else.

In our most intimate relationships, we unknowingly allow our partner to “step into the shoes,” both positively and negatively, of the people, such as parents, who helped formulate our original structures of self-esteem. To the extent that our parents were wounded, incapable, damaged, or just too young, they were not capable of allowing us to safely attach in a way that we could build functional structures of safety, dominion, and self-esteem. This is not an excuse to blame your parents for their shortcomings; undoubtedly, their early life experience taught them how to parent.

When you can see how the past is impacting your present, you have a chance to rebuild your structures of trust, control, and self-esteem. Your intimate relationship is the place you can rebuild, cooperatively, as loving witnesses to each other.

When either partner’s past wounding comes to visit, if both partners can find ways to be especially tender and attentive, healing can occur. This is not to keep the wounded state in place or to coddle it. The intention is to cooperate tenderly with each other, not to meet the unmet needs, but to help each other find internal tenderness.

Generally, we all desire freedom. In intimate relationships, our wounded places can scream out to be met. Willingness from both partners in the relationship can create a tender space for re-examination of early conclusions that have created faulty structures of trust, control, and self-esteem. What is needed is not getting your way or “being right,” but internally allowing the uncomfortable experience of your perceived need to be met with loving kindness and awareness.

A Cautionary Note

Both partners must agree not to use what they have learned of the other’s past as a way to make a point or “win” an argument. Even when you can clearly see an underlying pattern in your beloved, it is not your place to become the therapist. An example of the way you would not want to talk with your partner is, ”Clearly you are seeing me as your mother. If you could just see this pattern as clearly as I can see it, then you would stop treating me so badly.” Without an agreement to refrain from “helping” in this way, each of you will not be able to create the container of safety necessary to venture into the territory of the past with your partner.

In working with wounds from the past, it is important to tread gently and respectfully, with yourself and with your partner. This is not an area to use the force of your will, your sense of knowledge, or any sense of superiority. Neither partner gets to be more “expert” in the relationship. You are finding your way with each other through uncharted territory. By tenderly honoring your partner’s needs, you can help create a ledge of safety from the abyss of past wounds. Judgment, being right, or seeing your partner’s faults and pointing them out does not foster respect and does not create a ground of safety. Sometimes wounds from the past are so tender they need to be protected from the slightest breeze of harsh judgment. Caring and compassion can coax even the most wounded parts of ourselves out of the deep dark cave in which they may have taken refuge.

Steven and Emily’s Discoveries

Individually, as Steven and Emily began to take 100 percent responsibility for the dynamics of their relationship, they began to be able to soften to the other. The first big breakthrough came when Emily suggested that she accompany Steven on one of his golfing trips. In the past, she had not wanted to go on these trips. She felt left out when Steven went to play golf, but she decided she would go along and enjoy herself by sitting by the pool and doing something she loved to do—read. Because the golf courses were located at lovely resorts, she could even treat herself with a massage.

In the evenings, they went for quiet dinners together. One night, Steven began to talk with Emily about their mutual investments. She felt included. In return, Steven began to feel her acceptance of his special skills in being able to make and manage money. They both began to understand how they had been able to bring the past into the present in a way that healed old patterns and replaced them with care and kindness for each other.

You Can Limit the Scope of Your Investigation

If your view of the present is being obscured by past assumptions or scaffolding from your history, it will leave clues that you can recognize. This is another helpful time to think like a detective, to round up your clues. Look for patterns. Pay particular attention if you find that more than one person has a similar suggestion, complaint, or piece of advice for you. Notice if you are having an experience that feels like a repeating pattern. Check to see if, over and over again, your life seems to be a story with a vaguely familiar plotline or ending.

It may help to imagine that your clear experience of the present moment is like standing in a beautiful field. If you somehow find yourself in a dense forest, with the trees being the influences from your past that are blocking your clear view, you still know the sunny meadow is out there somewhere. However, the only way to reach the clarity of the beautiful field is to travel through the forest. The only way out of the forest is through it.

This doesn’t mean you need to stop and investigate every tree in the forest. Your investigation of the past does not need to be a major research project. You don’t need to uncover your entire past or every incident that may be impacting you today. You don’t need to move boulders, when all that is required is to move a couple of stones. If you have a leak in your bathroom, you don’t need to tear up your entire house.

In looking to the past, start with the present. What in the present is creating difficulty? From that point of entry, you can begin to ask yourself how you may be making assumptions and conclusions in the present that keep you reacting in the same old ways, rather than creating a fresh moment for you and your partner.

Exercise: Blazing a Trail Into the Past

To discover the most pertinent influences from your past, the best place to start is with whatever is troubling you in the present moment. In particular, bring to mind the thing about your partner that is the most troubling to you. As an example, “I feel like my husband/wife is not willing to take responsibility.”

Now take that particular problem or issue and turn it around. Make yourself the problem; make the complaint about you. We recognize this will probably seem like the last thing you would want to do, but you won’t have to tell your partner or anyone else how you have tried to explore this issue by turning the complaint back around to you.

As difficult as it may seem, this technique is invaluable in revealing a view of the world that you might not be able to see in any other way. As unlikely as it may seem to you, much of the time, a complaint you have about your partner is in some way similar to a complaint your partner has about you.

In the example above, you might attempt to turn this complaint around in a couple of ways. You might contemplate (as impossible as it may initially seem) a thought like, “I do not want to take responsibility for something I have done.” You also might find that the reflected feeling on the other side of this complaint might be something like, “I haven’t been able to see how I feel responsible for something my father/mother did to me.” Or perhaps, “I haven’t been able to see how I feel responsible for how my father/mother felt about me.”

What we have seen, again and again, is that a shortcoming you perceive in your partner that continues to irritate you is generally a clue that an assumption from the past is affecting some part of your view of the present. Let’s take another example. Say your complaint with your partner is, “My partner does not meet my needs.” To flip that around for further investigation, you might ask yourself, “How do I not meet my partner’s needs?” Or you may ask yourself, “How am I not willing to pay attention to or provide for my own needs?” Again, we recognize that it will not feel natural to look at the opposite side or the flip of your complaint. It is much more natural to want to stick with your ordinary view about this complaint about your partner. But because this is an investigation designed to reveal how the past is playing in the present, it will be extremely helpful for you to put aside your natural defenses.

Let this grievance in the present lead you into your past. Does this thought, this way of thinking remind you in any way of something familiar? How does this remind you of how you felt when you were small? If an answer does not immediately come to mind, don’t force a conclusion. Allow yourself to come back to this investigation as many times as you feel may be necessary to allow your native intelligence to provide the information that will help you see what you need to see.

Finally, whether or not you have found some clue to the past, take your complaint about your partner, as well as its reverse, and just for this moment allow all of these hurts and complaints to dissolve into nothing. Give yourself and your partner just a momentary reprieve. Let all those hurts and accusations turn into smoke and be blown away with the wind. Anything that needs to return will come back when required. We promise, you will not need to go looking.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Your past is impacting your present. When you experience something new or different, you naturally attempt to classify the new experience based on what you have previously learned.

• The origins of many behaviors that show up in the present, including sexually compulsive behaviors, can be found in the past. In the same way, you bring everything you have learned about love and relationship both consciously and unconsciously with you into your relationship.

• A relationship is a dance in which the movements of one partner influence the movements of the other. As a couple, you are both part of the system. The healing of difficulties will come at least partially through this relationship system, through the dynamics of the two of you together.

• When you can see how the past is impacting your present, you have a chance to rebuild your structures of trust, control, and self-esteem. Your intimate relationship is the place you can rebuild, cooperatively, as loving witnesses to each other.

• One way to stop repeating the past is to uncover, acknowledge, and embrace whatever has happened in the past as well as what is happening now. This is how you can be truly aware of your feelings and thoughts as well as your impulses to sexually act out, feel shame, and shame others.

Looking Forward

Now that you have begun to take the necessary steps to rebuild your relationship, we begin Part 3, “Moving Forward,” with a look at strengthening your intimate connection. In the next chapter, we explore building sexual intimacy by developing skills of intimate communication.