Resilience

Entering the Here and Now (Now What? Life After Sex Addiction, Part 2)

Sometimes you’ll hear an old-timer at a twelve-step meeting tell a newcomer, “Do what’s in front of you and let go of the results.” This age-old advice is about taking things one moment at a time when life feels overwhelming. It removes future expectations, to focus on the here and now.

What’s so great about living in the present? It’s where your life force is most accessible—an oasis of emotional sobriety is available there. In fact, resiliency and buoyancy only exist in the here and now. But it takes mental muscle for you to breathe into each moment, and until now that muscle has been only infrequently used. Later on, we’ll take a deeper look at . . .

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Turning Down the Volume on Shame (Part Four)

Learn how shame lives inside you, as well as your shame patterns. It’s a complicated emotion, but therapy and twelve-step work provide fertile ground to identify and heal these wounds. Read books about shame resiliency, too, and start a conversation about shame with confidants. By breaking out of isolation, you’ll take some of the power away from the shame and move toward more vulnerability and connection.

The language of shame can also be liberating. Begin to use . . .

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Turning Down the Volume on Shame (Part Two)

Healthier shame is like an internal alarm bell that lets you know when you’ve crossed a boundary or are too walled off. Ideally, it’s part of your broader conscience that keeps you out of trouble. Unfortunately, a hallmark of sexual compulsion is the inability to know your limits, or a tendency to reject them. When you started to realize your sexual behaviors were unmanageable, you likely wanted to stop them but couldn’t. Crossing boundaries, intruding . . .

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The 3 R’s: Regulation, Resilience, Resourcefulness (Part Two)

Compulsive sexual behavior can be the cause and the effect of a dysregulated nervous system, but what do you do to regulate yourself more efficiently? In order for balance and regulation to become a familiar internal state, you’ll need to integrate a self-regulation or co-regulation practice into your daily lifestyle. This can only occur, though, when you’ve learned . . .

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The 3 R’s: Regulation, Resilience, Resourcefulness (Part One)

When I went to graduate school at UCLA in the early ‘90s, there was no mention of the nervous system in any of my classes. The mind-body-spirit connection may have been a brief footnote, but all I learned about the nervous system was the fight-or-flight response, a survival instinct mentioned in my undergraduate psychology classes. Three decades later . . .

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