Please shed whatever lowly vestments you're currently using to hide your disgusting body, and slip into one of these pre-shrunk cotton miracles.

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2. DJ Peace

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3. DJ Caesar

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4. Boxer Rocky

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25. My personal favorite (SOLD OUT!!!)

Risks in Loving Men Who Can’t Commit

Commitment phobic men are not wounded birds waiting to be nursed to health.

Should women spend time, energy, and emotion on a man who may never be a part of their future? All too often women say to themselves or their friends: “Well, he wouldn’t commit in the past, but I’m different.  I have more patience than the other women he dated, and I am more understanding than most women. I can help him.” 

 

If you have heard yourself saying the words “I can help him,” think of yourself as being trapped in the “wounded bird syndrome”  in which your desire to nurse someone back to health is so strong that it clouds your logical thinking.

Before getting too involved with a commitment phobic man consider asking yourself  these 20 Questions to Finding New Love and Marriage.  And then make a conscious effort to understand what is most important to you. 2 Virtues Enhance Falling in Love Forever. Also watch his body language and his actions towards you. If you are jumping through hoops for the commitment phobic man and thinking you can nurse him back to love – think again. Many commitment phobic men are reliving a dysfunctional family role (in fact, some women are in this trap as well.)

self-compassion consists of three components:

• Self-kindness: Being kind, gentle and understanding with yourself when you’re suffering.
• Common humanity: Realizing that you’re not alone in your struggles. When we’re struggling, we tend to feel especially isolated. We think we’re the only ones to experience loss, make mistakes, feel rejected or fail. But it’s these very struggles that are part of our shared experience as humans.
• Mindfulness: Observing life as it is, without being judgemental or suppressing your thoughts and feelings.

I know I’ve been in sick relationships, but I don’t know what a healthyrelationship looks like.

In the years I’ve been counseling and coaching, many people say, “I know I’ve been in sick relationships, but I don’t know what a healthyrelationship looks like.”

There are many long and complicated answers to this, but there is also a simple one: healthy relationships make your life larger and happier; unhealthy relationships narrow your life and make you crazy.

Healthy relationships do not include mind games, mixed messages, or control.  There is not a back and forth or continual makeup and breakup, or “I’m sorry, please forgive me” every week or so.

 

In healthy relationships, there is a partnership and a nurturing by both parties of that partnership.  At the same time, each person recognizes the need to have interests and time away from their partner to nurture themselves. They don’t need to have the same interests, but rather the same view of life. Healthy love is about taking care of yourself and taking care of your mate… and those things are in balance to the point where they seldom collide.

What is Real Love?

Healthy people lead to healthy relationships and healthy relationships lead to real love.

Real love does not seek another person to fill up what we are lacking. It takes a complete, whole person to really love and overly needy people cannot do it. Real love is balanced. Both partners love in fairly equal amounts. While the balance may shift back and forth, it is not lopsided. If you love someone who is not loving your back, or not loving you the way you love them, then it’s not real.

When you place expectations on people to fill your empty places, that is not healthy. It’s nice to have a partner, a companion, someone to help you weather life’s storms, but it is not okay to look for someone to complete you or fix your broken places. That is not real love; that is dependence, co-dependence, and unhealthy neediness.

Real love does not play games, cause us to lose sleep, friends, jobs, money, time and value in our lives. Real love is an enlarging and not a narrowing experience. And finally, real love does exist. But it is true that in order to find the right person, you need to be the right person.

To be the right person you have to do your work, examine your failed relationships and, find the patterns. Go to counseling if you have historical issues. Find out why you are attracted to a certain type that is not good for you. And, at the same time, build your life so that you are an independent, interesting, and attractive person.  You will attract other independent, interesting, and attractive people who are capable of good and loving relationships.

As I say over and over again, water seeks its own level. If you are attracting and attracted to unhealthy and dysfunctional, you are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Do your work so that real love andlasting love has a chance to walk in.

How to Keep Your Balance When There’s No Place to Stand and Nothing to Hold On To

Know you what it is to be a child?… it is 
to believe in belief….
– Francis Thompson, 19th c. British poet

We don’t forget our first ah-ha experience any more than we forget our first kiss. The difference is we have some idea of what to expect from a kiss, but we don’t know what to make of an enlightening incident. The experience lingers in memory as something special, but since we can’t account for it, we’re apt to keep it to o urselves.

Only in my thirties did I realize that an experience I’d had in my teens was the analogue of that first kiss. About six years after discovering that our third grade science book contained mistakes, it struck me that anything could be wrong. There were no infallible truths, no ultimate explanations.

 

In high school we were learning that science theories and models were not to be regarded as absolute truths, but rather taken to be useful descriptions that might someday be replaced with better ones. I accepted this way of holding scientific truth—it didn’t seem to undercut its usefulness. But I still wanted to believe there were absolute, moral truths, not mere assumptions, but unimpeachable, eternal verities. My mother certainly acted as if there were.

 

But one day, alone in my bedroom, I had the premonition that what was true of science applied to beliefs of every sort. I realized that, as in science, political, moral, or personal convictions could be questioned and might need amending or qualifying in certain circumstances. The feeling reminded me of consulting a dictionary and realizing that there are no final definitions, only cross references. I remember exactly where I was standing, and how it felt, when I discovered there was no place to stand, nothing to hold on to. I felt sobered, yet at the same time, strangely liberated. After all, if there were no absolutes, then there might be an escape from what often seemed to me to be a confining socialconformity.With this revelation, my hopes for definitive, immutable solutions to life’s problems dimmed. I shared my experience of unbelief with no one at the time, knowing that I couldn’t explain myself and fearing others’ mockery. I decided that to function in society I would have to pretend to go along with the prevailing consensus—at least until I could come up with something better. For decades afterwards, without understanding why, I was drawn to people and ideas that expanded my premonition of a worldview grounded not on immutable beliefs, but rather on a process of continually improving our best working assumptions.Science Models EvolveIt’s the essence of models that they’re works in progress. While nothing could be more obvious—after all, models are all just figments of our fallible imaginations—the idea that models can change, and should be expected to yield their place of privilege to better ones, has been surprisingly hard to impart.Until relatively recently we seem to have preferred to stick to what we know—or think we know—no matter the consequences. Rather than judge for ourselves, we’ve been ready to defer to existing authority and subscribe to received “wisdom.” Perhaps this is because of a premium put on not “upsetting the apple cart” during a period in human history when an upright apple cart was of more importance to group cohesiveness and survival than the fact that the cart was full of rotten apples.Ironically, our principal heroes, saints and geniuses alike, have typically spilled a lot of apples. Very often they are people who have championed a truth that contradicts the official line.A turning point in the history of human understanding came in the seventeenth century when one such figure, the English physician William Harvey, discovered that the blood circulates through the body. His plea—“I appeal to your own eyes as my witness and judge”—was revolutionary at a time when physicians looked not to their own experience but rather accepted on faith the Greek view that blood was made in the liver and consumed as fuel by the body. The idea that dogma be subordinated to the actual experience of the individual seemed audacious at the time.Another milestone was the shift from the geocentric (or Ptolemaic) model (named after the first-century Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy) to the heliocentric model (or Copernican) model (after the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Copernicus, who is regarded by many as the father of modern science).Until five centuries ago, it was an article of faith that the sun, the stars, and the planets revolved around the earth, which lay motionless at the center of the universe. When the Italian scientist Galileo embraced the Copernican model, which held that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun, he was contradicting the teaching of the Church. This was considered sacrilegious and, under threat of torture, he was forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, making further astronomical discoveries and writing books for posterity. In 1992, Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Roman Catholic Church had erred in condemning Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolves around the Sun.The Galileo affair was really an argument about whether models should be allowed to change without the Church’s consent. Those in positions of authority often deem acceptance of their beliefs, and with that the acceptance of their role as arbiters of beliefs, to be more important than the potential benefits of moving on to a better model. For example, the discovery of seashells on mountaintops and fossil evidence of extinct species undermined theological doctrine that the world and all living things were a mere six thousand years old. Such discoveries posed a serious challenge to the Church’s monopoly on truth.Typically, new models do not render old ones useless, they simply circumscribe their domains of validity, unveiling and accounting for altogether new phenomena that lie beyond the scope of the old models. Thus, relativity and quantum theory do not render Newton’s laws of motion obsolete. NASA has no need for the refinements of quantum or relativistic mechanics in calculating the flight paths of space vehicles. The accuracy afforded by Newton’s laws suffices for its purposes.Some think that truths that aren’t absolute and immutable disqualify themselves as truths. But just because models change doesn’t mean that anything goes. At any given time, what “goes” is precisely the most accurate model we’ve got. One simply has to be alert to the fact that our current model may be superseded by an even better one tomorrow. It’s precisely this built-in skepticism that gives science its power.Most scientists are excited when they find a persistent discrepancy between their latest model and empirical data. They know that such deviations signal the existence of hitherto unknown realms in which new phenomena may be discovered. The presumption that nature models are infallible has been replaced with the humbling expectation that their common destiny is to be replaced by more comprehensive and accurate ones.Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many physicists believed they’d learned all there was to know about the workings of the universe. The consensus was that between Newton’s dynamics and Maxwell’s electromagnetism we had everything covered. Prominent scientists solemnly announced the end of physics.There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.– Lord Kelvin (1900)

Then a few tiny discrepancies between theory and experiment were noted and as scientists explored them, they came upon the previously hidden realm of atomic and relativistic physics, and with it technologies that have put their stamp on the twentieth century.

Albert Einstein believed that the final resting place of every theory is as a special case of a broader one. Indeed, he spent the last decades of his life searching for a unified theory that would have transcended the discoveries he made as a young man. The quest for such a grand unifying theory goes on.

Being and Flowing is a good place to begin Healing Your Thoughts.

 

The first part of the Being and Flowing Sequence is a basic relaxation session where some (or several) of the techniques of guided imagery or meditation can be used. In fact, for this type of relaxation, you can use new techniques or techniques that are familiar to you and that have worked for you in the past. If you do the sequence regularly, you can switch between techniques if you like.

One caveat: We find that general medical/therapy techniques, specifically those that are not associated with a particular spiritual path, work best for the Being and Flowing meditation in this context. (We link to some general relaxation techniques from the University of Maryland Medical Center, below). 

Being and Flowing First Step: Basic Relaxation Session

One: Position

If you are outdoors, find a quiet, safe place in a garden, park, beach or woods. Remember, safety comes first. If you are indoors, find a place where you won’t be disturbed. Sit on a floor cushion or in a chair with your feet on the floor, or lie down in a comfortable position. Whatever position you choose, try to remember, you might choose not to move or shift while being and flowing, so make sure it’s really comfortable.

Two: Watch Your Thoughts

Once you are comfortable, the first thing to keep in mind: Don’t worry about your thoughts. Allow them to come and go as they wish. Give them their freedom to come and go as they like. Don’t try to control them. Just observe them. 

Three: Watch Your Breath

Don’t try to control your breathing. Just observe your breath. If you are familiar with breathing techniques and want to try them, you could, but to forge a new path it’s sometimes good to let go and experience non-familiar meditative pathways.

Four: No Goal

If you feel stressed or anxious, remember: there is no goal here. Just passively watch where your thoughts and breath take you. If after a few tries anxiety (or boredom, which can be a symptom of anxiety during meditation) feels overpowering, take a break.

Five: Far Away

At some point, your thoughts may seem to “melt away”. They may feel far away; you know they’re there, but they don’t seem to touch you, or you don’t really touch them. There is a gulf between you and your thoughts, including your less-than-helpful ones. When they are so far away, their ability to control you is greatly diminished.

Help!

If you need help we recommend you try music. We really like (and recommend) Dr. Harry Henshaw’s relaxation music. (Last year, we interviewed him, here.)

Dr. Henshaw’s audio tracks of free-floating music are really de-stressing. We can best describe them as providing a musical pathway on which your thoughts can flow. His music doesn’t restrain or confine your thoughts as much as gently supports them. We really liked the ones on these pages; so far, we’ve sampled the uplifting music of Clarity, the gentle vibrato of Cosmic Reflection, the sweet tones of Equilibrium and the progressions of Inner Peace.*

If you want more concrete help the techniques of progressive relaxation (and toe tensing) can be very helpful. The University of Maryland Medical Center has clearly outlined them. They recommend the techniques for sleep disorders, but they are also helpful for tension and anxiety. One quibble: they don’t mention that slightly tensing each area of the body (not just the toes) before you relax that part, can be even a more powerful path to relaxation.

We’ve made our own relaxation recordings at home. We record our soft, slow voices giving a step-by-step progressive relaxation session. You might enjoy making your own recordings, too.

Being and Flowing Second Step: Journal

If you are in therapy, or even if you’re not, it’s a good idea to do a Being and Flowing journal. Some people like to share this with their therapist, others don’t. It’s up to you.

You might consider doing an audio or video recording if you don’t like to write. Writing or otherwise recording your general experience with your relaxation session, is a good starting point. Then, if you like, continue to write or otherwise comment on your experience of your thinking process. What were your thoughts? Were you able to let them drift by? Did any thoughts “stick” more than others? Did new thoughts, thoughts you never “thought” before, pop up?

Also, you might explore the self that observed the thoughts. And so on. If you don’t like to write and don’t want to do an audio or video recording, you can try illustrating your experience by drawing, painting, collage (found objects, fabric, and so on), photography, etc.

Once you have a sense of Being and Flowing, you’ll might find yourself being able to step back, even in a non-relaxing session, from your thoughts that are not beneficial. You might find it easier to dispassionately examine your thoughts (and beliefs, which are a type of thought often mingled with emotion) and see if they are really beneficial to you.

In fact, a very important, even central, part of therapy is examining thoughts and beliefs that hamper or are openly damaging to: your personal growth, relationships, mental health, and physical health. Therapy, in part, teaches you how to “rethink” things, even changing your most closely held beliefs, if they don’t serve your growth. Healing your thoughts is central to healing your life.

How do you treat yourself

How do you treat yourself?     How should you treat yourself? What should you think about yourself? How should you feel about yourself? Well..... how do you treat your best friend? What do you think about them? How do you feel about them? Now take that and multiply it by 10, multiply it by 100. Imagine how you would feel about somebody you were completely in love with, that you loved more than life itself, but it was an unconditional, open, free, healthy love, and not a needy, posessive, jealous, conditional love. Your eyes are wide open and you see all their faults and yet you love them despite their faults, perhaps because of them. Now perhaps you are getting close to how you should feel about yourself..........Simon Meadowcroft

Sex addicts, like many in early addiction recovery, are often highly resistant to the idea of attending 12-step recovery meetings.

Stepping It Up in Treatment

Sex addicts, like many in early addiction recovery, are often highly resistant to the idea of attending 12-step recovery meetings. Their reasons are myriad and usually without merit, though they sure can sound convincing on first listen.

Basically, it boils down to this: individuals who hang out in adult bookstores, cruise local red light districts looking for prostitutes, download hard-core pornography on work computers and masturbate in their office during business hours, post hi-definition photographs of their exposed genitalia on dating websites, and openly announce their extramarital availability on Ashley Madison (with a face photo but without a second thought) are the same folks who become very concerned about being “spotted” at one of “those” meetings.

“What if someone sees me there and thinks I’m a pervert?” they fret. Never mind the fact that these meetings usually take place in churches, school classrooms and local businesses after hours with no neon signs announcing what’s going on. Resistance to change is what it is, and even though sex addicts invite risk when acting out, they arerisk averse in terms of being seen in 12-step sexual recovery meetings like SAA, SLAA, SCA, SA, and SRA.

It is therefore up to the addiction therapist, when working with a 12-step-averse client, to bring the themes, neurobiological rewiring, and experience of 12-step recovery into the treatment arena—especially in a group therapy setting. Once the sexual behavior problem has been clearly assessed and client/treatment goals and expectations aligned, sex addiction treatment is well served by the therapist initiating discussions on themes like surrender, feeling out-of-control/powerlessness, developing personal integrity, asking for help, accepting responsibility, turning it over, establishing accountability, etc., all within the framework of cognitive behavioral treatment.

This work can be achieved either as homework or within the sessions themselves—knowing that the individual’s chances of finding and maintaining sexual sobriety will increase, probably significantly, with these themes in place. And should that person later decide to attend 12-step meetings, all the better. In nearly every case, concurrently working in therapy and in a 12-step milieu provides a mutual reinforcing. After all, the social support and shame reduction that occurs in a good “S” meeting strongly mirrors therapeutic goals.

To support client/treatment goals, what follows is an adaptation of steps 4 through 9 (of the 12-steps) into therapeutic tasks specifically designed to address sexually addictive and impulsive sexual behaviors. These six steps are generally referred to as the action steps of recovery, because this is where the addict does most of the actual “work” of understanding, surrendering, and coming to terms with his or her addiction.

These actions are, in recovery parlance, a way of getting right with yourself, with your higher power, and with the world. In steps four and five, the addict deals with his or her own issues; in steps six and seven the addict deals with his or her higher power (God); and steps eight and nine help the addict begin to clean up the wreckage of his or her past interactions with the world at large. A client who diligently and honestly completes these six steps—even within a therapeutic context—is likely to be well along the path toward lasting sexual sobriety.

Adapting the Steps

STEP FOUR: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
STEP FIVE: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

All addicts need to take a good look at their side of the street. They need to find out how far off their intended path they may have traveled, and it is imperative that they understand for themselves the role they have played in their behavior choices and the outcome thereof. Sex addicts need to learn that their adult sexual behavior (even if they think no one knows about it) does have an effect on both their lives and the lives of those around them.

Regardless of early life trauma or abuse, sex addicts need to take responsibility for their behavior, accepting that they are not victims of their adult choices (even if those choices were misguided or maladaptive). The client then needs to share that information withanother human being, and, in whatever way works for them, with their higher power (God). For clients with the ego-strength for this type of task, sharing that information, especially in a clinical group context, profoundly moves forward the process of behavior change and healing past shame.

Tasks Related to Steps 4 and 5

1)     Have the client write down and bring to therapy a list of people, institutions, and ideas he or she has resentments against, along with the reason (or reasons) for each resentment and an assessment of what part of the client’s life (pride, finances, self-esteem, personal relationships, sexual relationships, etc.) is affected by their anger and disappointments. Then discuss in detail with each example:

• What the client’s part is in the formation of each resentment
• What the client could have done differently (if anything) to avoid the event that precipitated the formation of each resentment

2)     Have the client write down and bring to therapy a complete history of his or her problematic sexual behaviors broken down by year, with as much detail as to time, date, person, sexual activity, etc. as possible without using graphic descriptions. Ask the client to list the reasons they have viewed these behaviors as acceptable within their particular life context (married, single, gay, etc.). Then discuss each behavior and rationalization, dissecting them until the client can see and understand:

• The lies the client has been telling to himself or herself to justify problematic sexual behaviors (denial)
• How those sexual acting out behaviors are abnormal and/or destructive to both self and others (challenge to denial)

STEP SIX: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
STEP SEVEN: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Steps six and seven are the logical progression from steps four and five. By this point in treatment, the client has a more rounded view of the extent of the behavior problem and his or her role in that problem. Once this is established, the client needs to utilize a larger context for help, support, and change than the self (sheer willpower and/or fear of escalating consequences).

This change begins as the client recognizes and accepts responsibility for the mess that his or her life has become as a direct result of addictive sexual behavior, and becomes willing to identify and work to eliminate the character flaws (arrogant, fearful, judgmental, manipulative, etc.) that have served as the psychological underpinnings of his or her addictive behaviors.

As with steps 2 and 3, it is not necessary (or even useful) to engage clients in lengthy discussions of God/religion/spirituality, as understanding God, per se, is not necessary to successfully engage in the recovery process. All the addict need acknowledge is that he or she needs and will continue to need help—which most often takes the form of other individuals (the therapist, group members, a sponsor, etc.) who are willing to aid in the client’s recovery.

Tasks Related to Steps 6 and 7

1)     Have the client write down and bring to therapy a list of “character defects,” taking particular note of the kind of misguided thinking that supported problematic patterns of sexual behavior. The client’s step 4 inventory (see above) is typically useful in identifying the client’s most glaring character flaws.

2)     Select a few of the client’s more distressing character defects, and discuss regarding each:

• What it would be like to live without acting on that defect, and whether the client is prepared to do that
• Interventions the client can utilize when that character defect arises to prevent him or her from going down the same old road of “feeling victimized by XX” and therefore “entitled to YY”

3)     Have the client journal about whether and how well the interventions are working, and what effect the interventions are having on his or her life.

STEP EIGHT: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
STEP NINE: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

To this point, the client has been comfortably ensconced on the therapy couch. But now this individual, armed with a little bit of knowledge about what he or she has done, needs to go out into the world and make amends. Often, the client will be over-eager, ready to run out willy-nilly to “make things right” but lacking the empathy required to not hurt others.

Imagine the damage this person could do without proper guidance! It is very important to slow this client down and make sure he or she understands which amends should be made, and when and how. It is equally important that the client understand which amends should not be made, and why. In other words, it is not acceptable to unburden oneself of guilt at the expense of another human being!

Tasks Related to Steps 8 and 9

1)     Have the client write down and bring to therapy a list of interpersonal harms for which the client is responsible. This should be specific to his or her sexual acting out history, though it also can be viewed in a broader life context. Again, work done in conjunction with step 4 will be helpful. In session, review the details of each example BEFORE the client goes into the world to make amends. Under consideration are:

• The impact of the client’s actions, how others may have felt or may still feel
• Whether making an actual an amends should (or should not) be made, and, if so, how that can most empathetically be handled

2)     Discuss the order in which amends should be made, and assign the making of certain amends.

3)     Have the client journal about his or her emotions prior to and after making the amends.

4)     Have the client use therapy to discuss his or her shame, fear, embarrassment, and hopes for the outcome of the amends process.

The above lists are of course incomplete, as every client’s path to long-term recovery is different. However, the well-worn, trusted concepts integrated into all 12-step recovery programs are extraordinarily useful therapeutic tasks for sex addicts. Remember too that each of the 12-step sexual recovery programs has its own “Big Book” much like the AA Big Book, and all of these can be purchased online and utilized without ever having to go to a meeting.

There are also many printed 12-step guides in booklet or book formats, many of which are either specific to sexual addiction or can easily be adapted to sexual addiction. Patrick Carnes’s book, A Gentle Path through the Twelve Steps (www.gentlepath.com), is one such example. Other excellent material is available through Hazelden Publishing (www.Hazelden.org).