The relapse journey

Posted on May 16, 2012
Filed Under Pornography Addiction, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The relapse journey
By Geoff Steurer, MS, LMFT

I once spoke with a man who had a serious setback in his sexual addiction recovery about the events of his relapse. As we talked about the details, he said something that caught my attention. He said, “it’s amazing how far you can go in just a few minutes.”

Now, on the surface, I understood what he was trying to say. He recognized that in the few minutes acting out sexually, he crossed lines he never intended to cross. However, after working with men in recovery from sexual addiction for years, I knew that his relapse didn’t begin and end in a few minutes.

The shame and denial that follows a relapse can be compared to an aggressive public relations campaign following a disaster. The horror of seeing the consequences from acting out is more than most individuals can tolerate. So, the whole event gets reduced to a minimum and then the addict doesn’t have to feel like he was really out of control or, worse that he failed. But, like actual damage control campaigns corporations engineer to save their image, attempts to reduce a significant relapse to a simple “whoops” only kills credibility.

To say that a relapse simply lasted a few minutes is technically true when you count the actual minutes it took to cross the final boundary. However, I’ve never seen a relapse that began and ended in a few minutes. Most relapses begin days and weeks before the more serious lines are crossed.

A relapse is a long journey that begins by ignoring warning signals in the following areas: Physical, emotional, relational, sexual, and spiritual. These warning signals are often subtle and easily rationalized, or worse, ignored. However, they serve an important purpose for the recovering individual. The feedback from these warning signals provide direction for the constant course corrections needed in long-term recovery.

For example, Paul hated the stress of his commission-only job as a car salesman. Even though he was a natural at sales, the constant worry about how much his check would be every month was taking its toll on him. He didn’t want his wife to worry about their financial security, so he would confidently report on a daily basis that work was going great. It was tough for him to keep up the façade. In fact, he actually would work longer hours in an attempt to scrape together more income. He became more moody at home as he began to crack under the pressure. Eventually, he began having more conflict with his wife who didn’t understand why he was being so negative. The isolation and disconnection opened him up to more opportunities to view pornography and escape into a world of mind-numbing fantasy.

Let’s review how Paul’s relapse developed. First, he ignored the emotional signals from the stress at work. He felt overwhelmed, inadequate, afraid, and powerless. His relational dishonesty with his wife created more distance and didn’t allow her to be a support to him in his struggle. He ignored physical signals that he was wearing himself down by overworking.

These three sets of warning signals were providing Paul with an opportunity to make the necessary adjustments to avoid a relapse.

It would be easy for Paul to decide that his relapse was really about being stressed out in the very moment he turned to pornography as a stress reliever. He could tell himself that this was only a small moment of viewing pornography and that he wouldn’t do it again.

The problem, of course, is that because he isn’t aware of the journey he’s been on for months, he will end up back in the same spot again. Paul won’t turn around his direction unless he can acknowledge how many areas are out of balance for him and then take the necessary steps to correct them.

When these early indicators are taken seriously, it’s easy to make corrections and move toward a more congruent and balanced life. An active addiction cannot exist when there is physical, emotional, relational, sexual, and spiritual balance.
Think back to your last setback in your recovery. Which of these five areas were out of balance? Are any of these areas still out of balance? What steps can you take today to begin making the necessary corrections?

 Geoff Steurer is a licensed marriage and family therapist and is the founding director of LifeSTAR of St. George – a three-phase recovery program for couples and individuals impacted by pornography and sexual addiction. He is also the co-author of “Love You, Hate the Porn: Healing a Relationship Damaged by Virtual Infidelity.” You can follow Geoff on Twitter: @geoffsteurer or on Facebook: facebook.com/geoffsteurerMFT

Restoring trust after betrayal

Posted on May 16, 2012
Filed Under Pornography Addiction, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Balanced recovery

Posted on April 16, 2012
Filed Under Pornography Addiction, self-care, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Geoff Steurer, LMFT, co-author of “Love You, Hate the Porn: Healing a Relationship Damaged by Virtual Infidelity” and founding director of LifeSTAR of St. George discusses how to create a balanced recovery. Healthy recovery from pornography and sexual addiction requires a healthy balance of education, therapy, group support, and self-care. Proper balance ensures that individuals and couples will have the ability to do long-term recovery.

Healthy sexual intimacy in recovery

Posted on March 14, 2012
Filed Under Couples Pornography Addiction Recovery, Pornography Addiction, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

New LifeSTAR Phase 3 Women’s Group

Posted on February 14, 2012
Filed Under Partners of pornography addicts, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment | Leave a Comment

Why is Sexual Addiction an Intimacy Disorder?

Posted on February 14, 2012
Filed Under General Sexual Addiction, Pornography Addiction, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment | Leave a Comment

Todd Frye, Ph.D., runs a sexual addictions provider certification program at MidAmerica Nazarene University. In this video he gets to the heart of the matter: porn addiction is an intimacy disorder.
Here are a few of the insights he shares:
“Most people who struggle with intimacy struggle with the capacity to acknowledge what’s going on inside of them and share that. Intimacy in Latin is intimus, which means innermost. They don’t have the capacity to be reflective enough to know what is going on inside them and share it in a way in which someone else can connect with that, relate to that, and respond to that. [Intimacy] also has components of empathy, the capacity to give comfort, protection, and attunement to someone else….
“They don’t learn how to take their pain, their sadness, and their joy to someone else and share it with them and experience it with them so that in turn that person can in turn offer a response that is a natural antidote to how they feel, that’s validating and creates connection. They tend to isolate more, they tend to withdraw. The way to lower their anxiety is to isolate themselves and pull away….
“Just because I isolate myself, the need to connect with people doesn’t die, doesn’t just go away. So they position themselves to need something that’s non-relational to feed this inability to connect or manage their mood. They use sexual addiction as a way of doing that.”
Thanks Dr. Frye, for articulating these truths so well!

Book Review: The Porn Trap by Wendy and Larry Maltz

Posted on February 14, 2012
Filed Under Pornography Addiction, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment | Leave a Comment

By Mark Chamberlain, PhD
Clinical Director, ARCH Counseling

Back in the 1980s, Wendy Maltz and her husband and fellow therapist, Larry, were not that concerned about pornography. Like most in the field, they thought it was essentially harmless. The use of porn was even promoted at professional trainings as a way to help couples reinvigorate their sex lives. Then the authors noted a trend: porn was moving couplesaway from being sexually intimate with each other. For too many of their clients, porn itself had become the object of desire. They wrote Porn Trap because “We believe you have a right to healthy, love-based sexual expression, and that today’s multi-media driven pornography is interfering with that right” (p. 8).

The authors share this gem of a line from the 14th Century Sufi poet, Hafiz:

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
that may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
but then drag you for days
like a broken man
behind a farting camel.

The Maltzs’ case material was gleaned from interviews with those whose lives have been depleted by porn. ”While pornography may promise sexual freedom, it can eventually deliver a form of sexual oppression–robbing people of sexual innocence, sexual self-determination, and the skills to experience healthy relationships based on a loving connection with a real partner” (p. 8). The cases in the book make real the suffering, but also help illuminate the way out. And that’s one real value of the book: if you’re stuck, you read of others who have been, too, but have made their way out. When you’ve been stumbling in the dark, such rays of hope are precious.

Here’s what I appreciate most about the book: the authors back up their compassion and optimism by providing practical tools. They suggest steps for deciding whether porn is hampering your happiness and relationships, tactics for quitting porn if you decide it is a problem, and in-the-bedroom practices for turning your sex life around so that it can build closeness and fulfillment in place of the separation and depletion that pornography fosters. Wendy Maltz’s expertise in healthy sexuality and some great material from her previous books are distilled into the chapter entitled “A New Approach to Sex.”

Of the many tools the authors share, I’ll highlight a couple I find particularly helpful:

When you feel the gravitational pull of porn, here’s something you can do to literally come to your senses. It’s an exercise they entitle Shifting Your Attention. “A simple sensory awareness exercise can help you shift your attention away from what you’ve been thinking about and on to something else in your environment. For example, ‘Now I’m aware of the sun coming through the window.” Repeat and complete the phrase ‘Now I’m aware of…’ until you have identified five different things that you see. Continue the exercise stating five different things you are aware of hearing, then five different things you are aware of touching or feeling inside your body. This exercise can help center you sensually in the reality of your present environment and take you farther away from the fantasy world of porn” (p. 195).

This is a theme throughout the book: real life–everything from real events to real emotions to your flesh-and-blood lover–are antidotes to the unreal world of porn. This theme reaches its pinnacle in one of the final skills they cover, Involving Your Heart in Sex, which is needed because porn-informed sex is all about stimulation rather than heartfelt connection. When you are engaged in sexual activity:

Thank you Wendy and Larry for this invaluable book! Your deep care for those caught in the porn trap shines through. Your work is helping make that group smaller–one person, one couple at a time!

 

Being there on Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 14, 2012
Filed Under Marriage | Leave a Comment

by Geoff Steurer, MS, LMFT
Founding Director LifeSTAR of St. George, UT

I don’t know if there is another holiday in our calendar year that creates the types of polarized responses I see during the week leading up to Valentines Day. Comments range from “It’s fun to celebrate love and relationships” to “It forces men to either be romantic or look like jerks.” Valentine’s Day is a loaded holiday, to say the least.

Truth be told, I’ve had my own mixed reactions about this holiday. There were years where I resisted celebrating Valentine’s Day for a variety of reasons. However, over the last few years I’ve made peace with February 14th and resolved that I’m not going to turn down any chance to celebrate my relationship with my wife.

I think the cultural expectation to do something over-the-top romantic often creates so much pressure for couples that they end up shrugging off Valentine’s Day. While I certainly wouldn’t set limits on how far a couple can go to celebrate Valentine’s Day, I will encourage you to at least do something in your own personal way to acknowledge the important relationships in your life.

Most individuals in long-term relationships can remember when romance came naturally, especially in the early years. Living in a committed long-term relationship isn’t easy and romance is usually one of the first things to go. However, I don’t believe that Hollywood’s version of romance needs to be the only marker of a good relationship. I bet there are plenty of little indicators in your relationship that show how much you both care for each other.

Nancy Shulins, in her book “Every Day I Love You More”, shared a great example of the transition from early romance to long-term romance. She talked about how her husband’s love notes from their dating years in 1985 are some of her most treasured possessions.

She continues: “There are three letters in all, enough to last me a lifetime—a good thing, considering he hasn’t written one since. In all fairness, though, that’s not entirely true. It’s not that husbands stop writing love letters, it’s that they tend to look somewhat different from the kind that boyfriends write.

Take one I found on the table last week: ‘Hon: Please be very careful driving to the barn. The roads could be slippery. Me.’

Or how about this one, penned in green on the back of a Chinese menu left by the phone: ‘Started the laundry and took videos back. Here’s some $$$. Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll pick something up.’

They don’t have quite the same ring as ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’

On the other hand, when you come right down to it, aren’t they basically saying the same thing?”

While there is nothing wrong with pulling out the stops by showering your partner with roses, fancy food, and gifts on Valentine’s Day, there is also great power in affirming the ways in which you are there for your partner. When we let our partner know that we hear them, we see them, and reassure them that we’re committed to them (and we back it up with our actions, of course), it creates a deep security that outlasts any other gift.

You can write these thoughts in a note, block out time for your partner and offer to do something they love, or share your feelings for them face to face over dinner. When it really comes down to it, it’s just the two of you reaffirming your commitment and love to one another. No large-scale production needed.

Robert Karen said it best: “In love, you don’t need to be rich, or smart, or talented. You just have to be there.”

Recovery Apps

Posted on January 17, 2012
Filed Under Partners of pornography addicts, Pornography Addiction, self-care, St. George Utah Pornography Addiction Treatment | Leave a Comment

Even though smartphones and tablet devices are capable of delivering harmful content, such as pornography, they can also arm recovering men, women, and couples with powerful tools to help them along in their journey.

We recognize that many individuals in early recovery choose to rid themselves of smartphones and tablet devices to reduce accessibility to pornography. This article in no way suggests that these apps (or the devices  that run them) are necessary for successful recovery.

If you’re already using a smartphone or tablet, then we want to give you more tools and resources to help strengthen your efforts.

There are thousands of apps to help you enhance your recovery goals. Recovery categories can include: fitness, reading, healthy eating, money management, and so on. Here are a few of our favorites:

My Fitness Pal is a calorie tracking program that makes losing weight a lifestyle change instead of a passing fad. Using MyFitnessPal is very simple. Here’s how their basic process works: Based on your fitness profile, they will recommend a daily net calorie target for you to achieve your weight loss (or gain) goals. As you eat and exercise throughout the day, you need to log your meals and exercise in the Food and Exercise diaries. MyFitnessPal will calculate the number of calories you’ve consumed and burned from exercise and let you know how many calories you have left to eat for the day. If you stick within your calorie limits, you should achieve the weight loss you’re looking for. The best part of the system is that logging gets easier the more you do it. MyFitnessPal remembers the foods and exercises you like most and makes it easy for you to add those items to your diary. In just a few days, logging can be as fast as 30 seconds — it’s literally that easy. That’s it! Just a few minutes a day can show you so much about what you’re eating and how that impacts your health.

 

With Hazelden’s mobile applications, you’ll find the instant motivation you need to strengthen your recovery and inspire personal growth no matter where you are.  From apps based on their best-selling books that feature special enhancements like texts and video messages from the authors to those based on their best-selling meditation books, Hazelden mobile applications are there when you need them most, at the touch of your fingertips. Some of their most popular apps include Brene Brown’s “Gifts of Imperfection”, their daily affirmation books for both men and women, and their day at a time series.

 

 

Dr. John Gottman is known as one of the preeminent researchers on marriage and family relationships. He has developed a series of apps to help strengthen marriages and families. Some of our favorites include: “Your Child’s Love Map“, “Fun and Play“, “Open-ended Questions“, and “I Feel.”

These applications are based on more than 30 years of research on strengthening marriages and families. Learning how to access the emotional world of yourself, your partner, and your children is one of the most satisfying parts of life!

 

There are several apps designed to help provide spiritual strength on a daily basis. There are apps for members of the LDS faith, Protestant faiths, and so on. Reading scriptures, sermons, and listening to sacred music has never been more convenient. Many individuals in recovery report that having regular access to these spiritual resources helps them get refocused on what’s most important in their lives.

 

 

S-Recovery helps you recover from sex addiction or porn addiction. This is an added tool to help you live your life without addictive sex or pornography. What’s more, S-Recovery was created by two therapists who specialize in treating sex and porn addiction. With S-Recovery, you can…
• Easily track your number of days in recovery, reminding yourself of your progress.
• Set recovery goals for yourself that are easy to record and track.
• Graphically see patterns and correlations between your healthy activities, your moods, emotions, and desire to engage in addictive or compulsive behavior.
• Learn how healthy activities improve your mood and decrease triggers.
• Set attainable goals.
• Stay in recovery by reminding yourself why you are doing it and what you have to lose.
• Allow technology to help with recovery, rather than making it more difficult.
• Help protect your confidentiality with password protection.
• Easily keep track of your recovery time and navigate to daily logs.
• Rate your mood and emotions daily. Also rate your acting-out risk level.
• S-Recovery’s Graph function enables you to see connections between your mood, emotions, and risk level over time.
•Enter a picture of someone who inspires you to be in recovery. Also enter names, goals, ideas of other inspirations.

The North Face® Trailhead App finds trails, hikes, bike routes and more based on your location. You can even search by activity and length. Whether you’ve selected an existing trip or started a new one, Trailhead tracks your route, distance, speed and elevation in real-time.
•Search from over 300,000 trails, hikes and bike routes.
•Find trips by activity, length and location
•Track your route with a real-time interactive map via GPS
•View your distance, speed, elevation and more

Shamed – Help Make this Documentary a Reality!

Posted on January 17, 2012
Filed Under In the news/media, Pornography Addiction | Leave a Comment

For those of you who are personally, or through the life of a loved one, struggling with pornography or sex addictions in your lives, you understand the power of shame. You know how incapacitating it can be. You understand that until you can remove the shame from what you are going through, you cannot heal.

Jessica Mockett, a filmmaker based in Utah, is producing and directing a documentary feature film entitled Shamed. After nearly two years of research and study she has concluded that in conservative Christian cultures, shame is what keeps so many good people who would be righteous, faithful followers of Christ tethered and strapped to an addiction that leaves them feeling hopeless, unlovable, and unworthy of God’s protection and blessings.

Unlike guilt, shame tells us that we are bad people. But we are not. We are always worthy of love, though sometimes our actions or behaviors need to be curbed and changed. That is what life is for, it is an opportunity to be challenged and to embrace our weakness and make them strengths.

Shamed will look at how to remove the debilitating personal and group shame that exists around pornography and even healthy sexuality in conservative Christian communities. Those of us who would preach a balanced life of fidelity and healthy sexual appetites, are being drowned out by the pervasive messaging of an over-sexualized world. Our best protection is open, honest, healthy communication on pornography and sexual addiction, empowering the people we love to “SPEAK, LISTEN, and HEAL.”

Jessica and her very talented, experienced team are raising funds for this amazing project. They have begun a campaign on the site Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a platform that allows for a lot of people to donate small amounts of money to a creative project. Kickstarter’s rules are such that you must set a financial goal and a deadline. If the project does not meet its goal by the deadline it does not receive any of the money raised, and consequently, anyone who donated will not be charged.

Shamed set an ambitious goal of $40,000 with a deadline of Feb 14, 2012. The team felt confident that there were at least 400 people in the world who would each donate $100 to this great cause. At 8 days into the campaign they are at about $8,000. The response is such that everyone is adamantly agreeing that a message like this is needed and important, yet few are putting forth funds. The film will not happen without reaching this goal.

The team is asking for those of you who know what the struggle is like, who know very well that thousands and thousands of people are still suffering in silence, to take action and donate to this film. It will not happen without generous support. And it needs to happen. We need to get the message out to a broad Christian audience that shame is holding people back, to educate them on the subject, teach them to remove the shame, give them tools to communicate honestly about it, arm them with confidence that recovery is so very possible, and that life is so much happier on the other side of the addiction.

Do not fear that you can’t give very much. $25, $50, or $100 is a wonderful contribution, but any sized contribution gets Shamed closer to the goal. If you can afford more, please, give more.

Please visit the film’s Kickstarter Page to learn more about the project, the crew, and view a teaser trailer. Or visit the Shamed website. Feel free to email the filmmakers to ask them questions or to tell them if you want to share your personal story of dealing with a sex addiction in your life on film.

Your support is needed. Please share this information with everyone in your life who would be able to support this endeavor.

 

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