SEXUAL ADDICTION BLOCKS PAUL’S TRUE NATURE

Paul is a successful and attractive 48-year-old businessman—and a sexual addict. For most of his adult life he has been unable to stop his habit of visiting prostitutes, despite the risk of losing his marriage to a woman he loves very much, and at one time was spending time almost every night on pornographic sites on the Internet. He has participated in SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) and SAA (Sex Addicts Anonymous), and has significantly lowered the frequency of his addictive behavior but cannot let it go.

Because he is very intelligent and psychologically oriented, Paul has pursued an understanding of why he continues this behavior despite the risks to his relationship, his professional life, and his health. In therapy he discovered that casual or anonymous sexual activity, whether online or with a partner, provides relief from the constant tension of needing to perform well in every aspect of his life. We worked with a variety of stress management tools but these interventions only reduced the time spent on the Internet. Paul began to recognize that without anonymous erotic stimulation (meaning that he was not required to be emotionally vulnerable) he experienced a deep emptiness in his belly that he believed he could not tolerate. Despite his determination to change his sexual behavior, his willpower would always collapse in the face of that gaping inner hole.

Finding the hole was a big milestone. He learned to breathe slowly when he began to sense the hole. He developed a method of self-talk to encourage himself to stay focused on the experience of emptiness even though his first reaction was to remove himself from it. This self-talk included statements like: “I have the courage to face my inner emptiness” “If I avoid this hole, I will never find true happiness” “Some part of me fears annihilation in the hole, but a deeper part of me, my true self, will just experience the emptiness” “I will keep breathing and pay attention to what I am experiencing in this moment.” Little by little, he has been able to tolerate the emptiness for longer periods of time.

I cannot report on the outcome of Paul’s transformational process because he is still learning to initiate contact with the hole on a regular basis. We anticipate that soon he will be able to consciously connect his urge for anonymous sex with the fear of emptiness. As he digests the fear of emptiness, he will find an increasing capacity to open to spaciousness instead of always filling the emptiness with sex. Strength, true fulfillment, and joy await him as he begins to fill instead with Essence.

VALERIE STRENGTHENS HER SEXUAL INSTINCT

Because Paul’s story is about sexual addiction, it seemed worthwhile to write about the difference between compulsive sex and the development of the sexual instinct in the process of transformational change. Ichazo wrote about the three basic “intelligences” in human beings: cognitive or thinking intelligence, feeling or emotional intelligence, and instinctual intelligence. He named three fundamental instincts that mirror the three lower charkas in the body. The Self-Preservation Instinct is related to the chakra at the base of the spine that regulates the flow of life force into the body’s energy field. People who have a well-developed Self-Preservation instinct are naturally oriented toward behavior that fulfills human needs for survival, comfort, and security. The Sexual Instinct relates to the sexual chakra and traditionally is connected with creativity and the power of attraction. People with strong Sexual instinct naturally are attracted to people and situations that allow them to feel whole and complete through interaction and intimate involvement with the other. The Social instinct relates to the solar plexus chakra and the ability to express oneself and to relate to the energetic power in community. People who have a well developed Social instinct naturally understand and respond to the dynamics of power and relationship within a group or network.

Valerie is a Social Three, meaning that she has a type Three personality—she is an Achiever—and her Social instinct is the best developed of the three instincts. It is important to her to be recognized within her community and she has a strong desire to make a contribution to the world. She is a good writer and has published a book, but this is not what she does professionally because writing, for her, is too challenging. She describes the process of writing as deeply intimate, as she opens herself emotionally to the material and shares her experiences and reflections on the world. It is difficult for her to sustain this level of intimate sharing, even though it is with her computer and an imagined audience rather than in direct exchange with another person. An important insight for her is the realization that in interpersonal interactions she is constantly aware of the subtle feedback she is receiving from the other person and adjusts herself to fit the flow of communication with the other. Very typical of a Social Three. Without the presence of another person, she is challenged to write the truth of her own experience, and that leads her to her confrontation with emptiness.

Valerie recognizes the experience of emptiness in her lower belly, near the sexual charka. When she is engaged in creative writing, she notices that she has an anxiety reaction in her stomach that acts as both a precursor to and a distraction from the emptiness. Her unconscious belief has been that if she expresses herself without regard for the people who comprise her world, she will offend or disgust them and they will abandon her, leaving her to fall into the lonely darkness of the hole. Using the same technique that Paul employed, breathing with the first perceptions of anxiety, she is learning to investigate the hole. She reports a warm and stimulating sensation, not unlike the early stages of sexual arousal, filling up the region around her sexual center. While it is a pleasant feeling, it is unfamiliar to her outside the context of sexual intercourse. While Paul fills this hole with sexual contact and intended erotic arousal, Valerie tries to avoid too much arousal because it triggers her feelings of emptiness.