A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction

The desire for intimacy is a basic human longing. We yearn to belong, to love, to be connected with another. It’s no accident that songs, films, and photos depict stories of love. We are all pulled toward that amazing connection with another human being. And intimacy can be a truly joyful experience beyond anything typically depicted on the screen.

However, in the media that influences us, there has been a blurring of love with sex, and intimacy has been used euphemistically to speak about sexual contact. In this chapter, we are talking about intimacy more fully—as the capacity to reveal ourselves, as the willingness and desire to be completely real with another. The point is that the experience of real intimacy is better than anything you could have ever imagined.

Revealing our hidden inner influences, being real and undefended, can be tricky because we can only be as true with another as we are undefended with ourselves. In addition, to the extent that we allow ourselves to be impacted by our partner, to be more fully aware of our inner workings, we allow ourselves an ever-deepening experience of intimacy. It is a cycle that builds on itself. The willingness to be exposed, to see, builds even greater intimacy both for our own inner workings and with our beloved.

Collusion, Collision, and Collaboration

The vast majority of relationships never attain true intimacy. For many people, the unhappiness they feel about their relationship is similar to having a small pain in the ankle that is not really hurting enough to do something about. Instead, they live with it. However, if the ankle was broken and the pain was excruciating, they would need to address it. Because your relationship has been “broken,” and you are addressing it, you have the wonderful opportunity to rebuild it in a new way, to attain true intimacy.

The collision caused by the revelation of the sexually compulsive behavior has the capacity to lead to a deeper level of collaboration, which can lead to greater intimacy. Each partner will participate in one way or another in the ultimate outcome of the life of your partnership. Moving into deeper cooperation with your partner requires that both of you take full responsibility for yourselves and for the relationship. In a codependent relationship, one or both partners collude by keeping their focus on changing the other rather than on changing themselves and thus changing the nature of the relationship itself.

If your partner is not showing up to take responsibility or to engage with you, you cannot use coercion, or begging, or crying. To attempt to force the collaboration of your partner when he or she is unable to take the step into the realm of collaboration is not a path that will lead to greater intimacy. Greater intimacy requires the willingness of both partners to move into areas that have up to now been hidden.

Collaboration requires commitment from both partners. Although each partner may, from time to time, waver in their desire to remain in the relationship, in order to move past the impasse of a difficult time, both partners need to remain committed to full participation. Although there can be unbearable pain in the process of deepening intimacy, this crisis is transforming both you and your relationship.

Merging and Independence

At times, each partner must leap into new and unknown territory of yielding to the other. Both surrendering control and taking full responsibility are required. It may seem like a paradox, but the two qualities work hand in hand. Intimacy is built through the capacity to maintain a sense of yourself while at the same time being able to have compassion in an undefended way for your partner’s needs and wants. The capacity to reveal the parts of yourself that feel the most ugly, weak, or vulnerable requires inner strength.

Part of the inner sturdiness required is knowing that you are going to be disappointed by your partner and that you can bear the disappointment. Intimacy can be built even in those times of disappointment—if you are able to fully express your hurt and your partner is able to show empathy for your experience.

If your sense of independence is overly threatened by getting close to your partner, then intimacy will suffer. For example, one client reported that he felt that he was “doing as he was told” (and that seemed dangerous) when he experienced that his wife was asking too much of him. He felt like a powerless child who was in danger. In these moments, he would become angry and push his wife’s needs and requests away because his own sense of individual identity or autonomy felt threatened. As he was able to strengthen his own inner sense of satisfaction, safety, and peace in the world, he found he did not need to crumble when he sensed he was disappointing his wife.

The deepening of love and intimacy requires the willingness to make the needs and wants of the other, and of the relationship, just as important as your individual needs and wants. The capacity of surrendering self to other brings with it the benefit of intimacy. We bask in those unguarded moments of sinking into intimacy. We all want to merge, yet we fear merging.

It can be helpful to visualize yourself and your partner as two stable buildings standing side by side, firmly planted in the ground. If one of the structures becomes shaky or destabilized in some way, but the other is still standing firm, it can even prop up the wavering structure temporarily until stability can be re-established. If, however, the two structures have been set up to remain standing by leaning on each other (resting on the ground at the base, but propped against each other at the top), and one structure goes down, then they both go down. Intimacy is enhanced when you know you are firmly supported internally (an inner sense of independence and strength) and you can remain open and supportive to your partner. A sense of independence (I can take care of myself) and a capacity to merge (I can allow myself to feel helpless) are both required for intimacy to bloom.

The Vital Reflection from Your Partner

When you are willing and able to allow yourself to become undefended with your partner, it becomes more likely that you will experience moments of intimacy. It may come as a surprise that divulging what can seem to be your worst and weakest qualities to your partner creates intimacy. Revealing yourself to your partner, and allowing yourself to be impacted by his or her revelations to you, can help uncover the thought patterns, perceptions, and conclusions that you hold about the world that are actually self-defeating. Your normal way of looking at the world is incorporated so unconsciously into ordinary perceptions and conclusions that defenses can remain invisible and hidden. The viewpoint of your partner can help you see more clearly into your individual style of self-protection—a protection that actually keeps you away from intimacy.

The way you perceive your relationship, the way you see your partner, or hear what they have said, is colored by the way you view the world. We described this view of the world in the previous chapter as scaffolding. These perceptions are your filters. These filters can cause your interpreted view of the world, your projections—which could, in reality, be false—to be experienced as perceptions that you believe to be true. The process of becoming intimate with your partner, of allowing yourselves to intimately view the world and yourself through the eyes of your partner, can reveal unseen defenses. When you stretch your immediate view of the world to include your partner’s viewpoint, you are less likely to be blindsided by your unseen assumptions and conclusions, and you bring down your barriers of safety that prevent the experience of intimacy.

Building Safety Through Intimate Communication

Developing deeper intimacy in your relationship requires a sincere sense of safety. When trust has been broken, safety has been shattered. The collision of this crisis has certainly disrupted the experience of safety in your relationship. As trust is rebuilt, safety can also be rebuilt and can deepen. That quality of safety is generated partly internally, by trusting that you can bear any tsunami of your own strong feelings and emotions, and partly by the experience of baring yourself to your partner and being held in that nakedness. It is not a coincidence that we use the words bare and naked here when discussing emotional intimacy: Emotional intimacy fosters sexual intimacy.

Emotional intimacy requires that you put down your defenses. In previous chapters, we’ve looked at developing your capacity for greater vulnerability by working with tendencies toward blame and shame, by sorting out your strong feelings, by building your capacity for undefended honesty, and by looking at how you are being influenced in the present by your past. Now you are being called to bring all those elements into play so you can communicate in a more intimate way. Intimate conversation is built on two skills: reflecting and expressing compassionate understanding.

Reflecting

Reflecting is mirroring. As you know, the best mirror is smooth, clear, and free of distortion. It can be a tall order to be a clear mirror to your intimate partner, to simply repeat or reflect back without distortion exactly what is being said to you—especially when what your partner has to say creates an uncomfortable emotional response in you. As we mentioned earlier, your capacity to stay separate from your partner, to maintain your own inner integrity, is like being a fully rooted structure on the ground. This inner strength will allow you to let your partner’s experience remain your partner’s experience, and not become tangled up with your reaction. You need to be able to keep yourself safe from your partner’s feelings, to put aside your own emotional response, so you can really listen to and hear your partner’s feelings.

Reflecting is simply putting what your partner has said to you in your own words. It can also include asking your partner to explain further. The goal of great reflecting is to help your partner more fully understand what he or she is thinking and feeling. Your part in the investigation is to help your partner be a better detective about what is going on internally. Be interested. Reflect and compassionately understand. You do not have to agree or disagree. This is not the moment for a debate, a weighing of options, or an analysis of the merits of your partner’s conclusions.

It is important to not push or force. That can create defensiveness in your partner. The experience of really being heard by another person who is not trying to change you or defend against what you are saying creates a sense of safety and intimacy.

Reflecting skillfully can be difficult because it requires the partner who is doing the reflecting to—at least for a few moments—put aside his or her own personal defenses and reactions. Don’t expect to be able to reflect without reacting every time your partner speaks to you. Sometimes you will react internally, and can’t put the reaction on pause. In those instances, please remember to forgive yourself and gently admit the truth of your reaction.

Compassionate Understanding

The second step of intimate conversation, expressing compassionate understanding, builds on the skill of reflecting. Compassionate understanding does not require agreement with your partner; it simply requires awareness and comprehension. Try to understand what your partner is experiencing. Try to see the world through his or her eyes just for this moment and see how, from his or her point of view, what is being expressed might make sense.

For your partner to receive the fullness of your empathy, your understanding needs to be communicated in words. Express whatever understanding you can find about your partner’s experience, not to change it, fix it, or correct it, but simply to acknowledge that it exists. “I can see why you felt so hurt when I withdrew from you. I understand how that must have felt like I had abandoned you.” Note that the key to these words is, “I understand why you feel that way.” This is also a good moment to say, “I’m sorry.”

An intimate conversation involves give and take. As each of you finds that you are building your skills of reflecting and expressing compassionate understanding, you will discover that the safety needed for intimacy will naturally begin to flower.

Josh and Lisa

In Chapter 3, you met Josh and Lisa, who had been able to take concrete steps toward a more intimate relationship after Lisa discovered Josh’s secret life and compulsion with online porn. After the initial discovery, explosion, revelation, open sharing, and then the closeness he had felt with Lisa in those first few weeks, Josh felt that she had begun to grow somewhat cold and distant. She had been a bit sharp when he asked her questions. At night, she hadn’t been snuggling up to him as they slept. She was sleeping on her own side of the bed.

He felt those old familiar yearnings to go online. He was able to tell himself that he knew he wanted intimacy with Lisa more than he wanted the porn, but he also realized that he didn’t really know what to do next. So he asked her to go out to dinner with him. The following conversation that unfolded at that dinner was one of the steps Josh and Lisa took toward establishing greater intimacy in their relationship.

Josh waited to talk about what was on his mind until after they had finished eating and had ordered their after-dinner coffee. Although he felt tentative about telling Lisa what he was feeling, he decided to take the risk. He knew he could only start with what he knew in the moment, even though it might upset Lisa.

Josh also knew the alternative was that he was going to go back online and, if he did that, the consequences to his marriage would be severe. He had begun to recognize that the porn was a dead end. He was afraid that Lisa would think he was not a man if he shared with her how weak he felt. But he remembered how she had accepted the facts of his past—facts that he had previously been sure no one would ever accept.

He decided to be totally honest. “Lisa, I’ve been really wanting to go online for the last few days. I feel like maybe you are still mad at me about the porn—or maybe it’s something else. I can’t tell. I’d like to understand what’s going on.”

For a moment, Lisa felt a pang of anger. He was talking about the thing she was the most afraid of—that he would just keep going back to the porn. But here he was, talking to her about it. Then she thought, perhaps this might be a good sign. And since he’d asked the question, she had to stop herself for a moment to see if she might be angry. She realized that she was indeed feeling angry about the porn. She had been feeling angry that she had married someone who was attracted to porn. She hadn’t wanted to talk to Josh about it, because she was afraid it would hurt him or push him back online. Now she realized that since she wanted intimacy, it was important that she find some way to speak to Josh about this thing that was troubling her so much.

She remembered the analogy of what an intimate partnership is—not leaning on each other but still available to each other. She stopped just for a moment to feel her inner sense of strength. “Yes, I have been feeling angry. You’re right. I am angry that this problem is a part of our marriage. I don’t like it.”

Then she paused and realized there was more. “Really, I’m afraid that you will go back to the porn and I will have to go through the pain again that I felt in that moment of opening the spare bedroom door and seeing you in front of those awful images.”

Josh thought about the skill of reflecting. His first impulse was to defend himself, to let Lisa know how wrong she was, but he stopped himself, took a deep breath, and spoke with a skill that surprised him. He was able to reflect Lisa’s words back to her. “You’re angry that I was using porn, and you don’t like it. You’re afraid that I won’t be able to control myself, that I’ll just keep doing it and you’ll get hurt all over again.”

Josh’s reflection was so undefended that Lisa smiled. “Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what I’m feeling. Thank you.”

Josh, with the success of his reflecting, decided he might as well practice compassionate understanding as well. He told us later that when we had first explained these skills to them, he had thought this was something only a saint could do, not a regular guy like him. But we had assured him that it was possible. He had been thinking about how hard it would have been for him if the tables had been turned, and he had discovered Lisa looking at online porn. So that night in the restaurant, rather than defending himself, he decided he would share this understanding with Lisa.

“I can understand how you would feel hurt about what I was doing while I was looking at all those other women online. I can see why that hurt you. And I can understand why you would be afraid that I’d do it again. It makes perfect sense to me that you would feel that way. I’m sorry.”

Just for this moment, he stopped himself from explaining to her about all the effort he had put into converting his urges to go online into something more productive, and about how proud he felt about how he was learning to work with himself. He would save that for a conversation they would have later during which Lisa would reflect his words and offer her compassionate understanding about his struggle with porn and how aware she was of the changes he was making.

That night when they went home, the depth of the emotional intimacy of their conversation, the safety created by sharing and being heard and accepted, opened the doorway to physical intimacy. As they contentedly drifted off into dreamland, Lisa did not sleep on her side of the bed.

Intimate Sexuality

The experience of intimate, connected sex is based on a connection born of vulnerability, trust (built through honesty), and compassionate connection. Intimate, loving sex and compulsive or addictive sex are not the same thing. Engaging in compulsive or addictive sex is not a steppingstone toward intimate, connected sex. You have directly experienced how damaging compulsive sexual behaviors can be to the intimacy you would like to have in your relationship.

When the natural sexual connection you have with your partner is combined with your vulnerable loving connection, it becomes possible for each of you to surrender into giving and receiving the natural pleasure of your bodies. The pleasure and playfulness of connecting sexually inside of your committed relationship can promote the development of a sexual history with your partner that is unique to you as a couple. You both get to make it up as you go. Your bodies and the connection between your two bodies will be your guide.

Compulsive addictive sex can be thought of as simply remaining focused on the sex act itself. Intimate sex brings love, connection, compassion, and intimacy into the picture, that’s why it is called making love. Intimate sex takes your sexual energies and weds them with the forces of empathy, identification, and oneness that you experience in intimately surrendering with your partner. The dance of pleasing your partner and being pleased by your partner deepens as you are able to let go into the safety you experience in intimately revealing yourselves to each other. As your hearts open, the walls come down, and your bodies can respond like an uninhibited, passionate dancer responding to his or her favorite music. In the intimacy of meeting your partner in this way, sexual passion can actually continue to become more fulfilling over time as you mature your intimate connection with your partner.

Forgiveness

In Chapter 5, we discussed the re-establishing of trust as a means to forgiveness. As you build the capacities we have discussed in the preceding chapters, intimacy will be fostered and forgiveness will more gracefully begin to be established. More forgiveness brings more intimacy. Forgiveness in many ways is a byproduct of building intimacy. You have the capacity to block forgiveness or to foster it.

Forgiveness is promoted by many of the same skills that support intimacy. The more you can see the world through your part-ner’s eyes, the more deeply you will be able to bring forgiveness to what has happened. These are not experiences you need to rush yourself into having. All of your anger, grief, frustration, and hurt can still be honored while you intimately explore the world as viewed by your beloved.

You have probably heard that if you are seeking forgiveness, first forgive. Forgiveness begins with forgiving yourself. As you build compassion and empathy for yourself, you will be able to build compassion and empathy for your partner. The wisdom from the beautiful prayer attributed to the thirteenth century Saint Francis of Assisi applies here—it is true that “in giving we receive.”

Monitoring Your Partner

In Chapter 2, we discussed the monitoring of e-mail accounts, computer access, cell phone calls, or other portals that your partner may have used to indulge his sexual compulsivity. Initially, it may create a greater feeling of safety for both partners to use a shared e-mail account, monitoring devices, monitoring software, or blocking software, but in the long run, in order to develop trust and intimacy, the partner with the sexual compulsivity issue must take responsibility for himself. Monitoring or being monitored does not foster intimacy. It is difficult for the partner doing the monitoring not to be cast in the role of parent or be viewed as the “porn police.” Continuing to monitor does not allow your partner to find his own internal observer—a skill that is vital to his personal recovery. Ultimately, if you do not feel you can trust your partner enough not to monitor him, you also do not have enough trust to build true intimacy.

Exercise: Write a Love Letter

As you begin to come through the storm of the crisis of the discovery of sexual compulsivity, it is now clear that your relationship has deeply altered. Although your connection to your partner may still feel a little shaky, if you’re still reading, we can assume you have begun to deepen your intimate connection. This is a moment to reflect on what you appreciate about your partner. What are the qualities you admire? How does your partner support you in ways for which you are thankful? In what ways does your partner bring out the best in you? What do you love about your partner?

Sit down and take as much time as you need to write down the ways in which you feel gratitude for your beloved. This is a moment to remain focused simply on the gratitude, on your appreciation and your acknowledgement of that appreciation.

After you have both written your gratitude notes, your love letters, share them with each other. When you do this sharing, we recommend that you set aside an entire evening to spend time just with each other. This is an evening to simply relax, sit back, and reflect on how far you have traveled together.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Although there can be what seems like unbearable pain in the process of deepening intimacy, this crisis is transforming both you and your relationship.

• The deepening of love and intimacy requires the willingness to make the needs and wants of the other, and of the relationship, just as important as your individual needs and wants.

• The viewpoint of your partner can help you see more clearly into your individual style of self-protection—a protection that actually keeps you away from intimacy.

• Intimate conversation is built on two skills: reflecting and expressing compassionate understanding. Reflecting is simply putting what your partner has said to you in your own words. Compassionate understanding is expressing whatever awareness you can find about your partner’s experience—not to change it, to fix it, or to correct it, but simply to acknowledge that it exists.

• Compulsive addictive sex can be thought of as simply remaining focused on the sex act itself. Intimate sex brings love, connection, compassion, and intimacy into the picture, that’s why it is called making love.

Looking Forward

Chapter 11 will help you determine if you need outside support as you work with the issues of sexual compulsivity in your relationship. There are resources listed for finding help through groups, individual counseling, or further reading.