Today in Recovery
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 . . .
Continue reading...
Because shame is such a pervasive emotion before and during recovery, I’m dedicating another post to this universally-challenging experience.
Here are some examples of shame messages you might remember from childhood:
• Am I wearing the right clothes?
• How come they live in a bigger house?
• My parents drive old cars. Wouldn’t I look cooler in a new one?
• Why do I go to public school instead of private school?
• Wouldn’t I be more attractive if I had blonde hair instead of brown hair?
Because shame starts early, it takes lots of disentangling . . .
Continue reading...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 . . .
Continue reading...
Shame gets in your way if not processed fully. It registers as something wrong with you, rather than an action that was wrongful. Beginning as a painful event, it is stored as a character defect. So although shame can be experienced as an emotion or thought, it leaves its imprint in your body, as trauma specialist Babette Rothschild noted . . .
Continue reading...
Fantasy is defined as imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained (www.dictionary.com), and it can also be a liberating exploration of your wants and desires, both sexual or romantic. Is it possible that fantasy gets a bad rap? Can your imagination, even if extravagant or unrestrained be useful and safe? The answer is . . .
Continue reading...Now that you’ve identified the necessity for Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) in your recovery, how do you integrate these ideas . . .
Continue reading...
Brokenheartedness is often the cause, and compulsive sexual behavior is one of the effects. Of course there is much more nuance to this equation; however, healing the heartbreak requires self-compassion to ease the shame, hurt, self-loathing . . .
Continue reading...
Hurt is a designer emotion. It’s the hub of the wheel surrounded by anger, sadness, disappointment, disillusionment and shame. When you feel deeply hurt, it leaves you with an emotional wound that requires close attention. Putting a band-aid on it won’t heal it. You need to keep it clean, change the emotional dressing daily and give it oxygen until the healing process unfolds. Sometimes hurt doesn’t go away entirely, but instead, it offers perspective and less acute pain eventually. But what does hurt have . . .
Continue reading...
Recovery from compulsive sex is an imperfect road, and we have to embrace a paradigm shift to believe that relapse is a growth opportunity. Practicing imperfection requires a mindful approach to implementing helpful and sustainable healing strategies. Try not to follow these ideas too perfectly, but instead, consider which ones . . .
Continue reading...
I was a child perfectionist. Not your average version of perfection, but a card-carrying, practicing, CEO of childhood perfectionism. If I didn’t understand instructions given to me by my Hebrew teacher, I would have a meltdown. If my t-shirts were not hung up neatly on matching hangers in my closet, I would get anxious. If I didn’t finish everything on my to-do list, I would go into a shame spiral. It wasn’t classic . . .
Continue reading...