Distraction
Distraction provides a relaxing interruption when we intentionally utilize activities that distract our minds from our pain, knowing the business at hand will still be there when we get back to it. Like self-soothing, distraction gives us a break, but it’s more like a relaxing recess for adults. “Relaxation,” the Mayo Clinic Web site tells us, “is a process that decreases the wear and tear of life’s challenges on your mind and body.” As we learned in chapter 5, dealing with sexual betrayal can take a terrible toll on both our minds and our bodies, so we have good reason to use distraction as often as possible.
To gain the most benefit from distraction, choose activities that you enjoy or that you’ll find absorbing enough to take your focus off your pain. The following list provides some examples.• Reading
• Watching a movie
• Enjoying a comedy
• Attending a play
• Dancing
• Exercising
• Taking a walk
• Participating in a group sport
• Biking
• Doing an activity with friends
• Being around people/children/animals
• Spending time in nature
• Playing a musical instrument
• Attending a church service
• Visiting a nursing home or a shut-in
• Swimming
• Hiking
• Cleaning
• Cooking or baking
• Organizing your closets, kitchen, photos, etc.
Use these and add other forms of distraction that work for you to help you reconnect with life and to remind yourself that a better future will be waiting for you when this season of pain is behind you, which we promise will come one day.
Processing
Another way to let go, though we don’t pretend it to be “fun,” is to process what’s happening in your life and how you feel in response to it. We think of processing as a way to “empty” ourselves of all the emotion of the day, whether we write in a journal, call a friend, attend a partners’ group or go online and empty our feelings in a forum for partners.• Journaling: If we use journaling as a “processing” method, as we might use a counselor, writing or typing what’s happening in our lives and what we feel and think in response to it, this practice can become a powerful resource. During the darkest year of her life, Marsha journaled 160 single-spaced typed pages to cope with and process the events, the pain, the losses and her reaction to it all. “I really don’t know how I could have survived without that no-cost, instantly-available therapeutic resource,” she says looking back on that time in her life.
• Talking: When we can talk out our feelings with someone we trust who listens without giving unwanted advice or share our feelings in the safety of a partners’ group, we feel understood; we relieve the inner pressure produced when our thoughts race round and round in circles without resolution. As we talk it all out, we often discover the next step we need to take, simply because we were able to process our pent-up emotions. Fortunately, even if we don’t have a person to share with face-to-face, we have other options that can provide a similar effect.
• Partners of Sex Addicts Online Forums: Many partners have discovered a way to “vent” their pressured feelings and access support by joining online forums where partners can write and respond to one another’s “posts.” This free or low-cost way to combine talking and journaling remains available day or night; something most friends and counselors are not.
There’s one additional detail to remember as you consider using distraction to your benefit: Distractions that involve exercise offer physical ways to vent the mental pressure that ties knots in your stomach and neck and back muscles. It will also make it easier to sleep at night. Lastly, exercise elevates your mood by temporarily increasing the circulation of endorphins. We’ve talked to many partners who swear by their favorite physical activities.
Build the Quality of Resiliency in Your Personality
Each of these methods for countering overwhelming fear and grief produces a bonus gift you can draw on for the remainder of your life. When practiced regularly, they build into your character something called resiliency.
Resiliency, according to Edward Creagan, M.D. of the Mayo Clinic, is a “bounce back factor” or “emotional buoyancy.” People with resiliency have a rich resource to draw upon anytime life throws them into painful circumstances. But how did they get that “bounce back factor” in the first place?
Most resilient people gained this trait by utilizing forms of self-soothing and renewal to navigate challenging rapids earlier in their lives. And they know they can do it again if and when they need to. That self-knowledge produces strength and provides an insurance policy of confidence that covers the future in their minds. By learning to face our pain with these same resources, we too can develop a resiliency that will give us that durable edge.
Understand and Conquer Dissociation Dissociation
Learning to self-soothe and renew ourselves produces multiple benefits for partners, none of them more important than the ability to keep from slipping into a dissociative state.
Those who’ve struggled to stay present when dissociation’s trance casts an isolating veil over their senses of time, space and reality know only too well how dissociation feels. Others may not know exactly what we mean by this term. Author Katherine Hannigan describes the feeling well in her children’s book Ida B. and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World:And then everything went dark. My body was still sitting there, and my eyes were wide open, but the real me that feels things and talks and makes plans and knows some things for absolute one hundred percent sure had instantaneously shrunken and shriveled up and gone and hid way deep down inside me. I couldn’t see anything except blackness, or hear anything except a kind of ringing, and all I felt was emptiness everywhere around me.
I don’t know how long I sat there like that, but it felt like years and years of being alone, huddled up and hiding in the darkness.3
Perhaps many of you who previously felt unfamiliar with the term dissociation can identify with the character Ida B. as you read her words. For some, dissociation may be slight, leaving you able to function on one level. For others, it can be so all-encompassing that your world grinds to a halt and functioning normally becomes impossible. In the extreme, it produces amnesia about the traumatic event. Why does it happen in the first place?
What Causes Dissociation?
Trauma specialist Peter Levine explains what causes dissociation:When neither fight nor flight will ensure…safety, there is another line of defense: immobility (freezing), which is just as universal and basic to survival. For inexplicable reasons, this defense strategy is rarely given equal billing in texts on biology and psychology. Yet, it is an equally viable survival strategy in threatening situations. In many situations, it is the best choice. On a biological level, success doesn’t mean winning, it means surviving, and it doesn’t really matter how you get there. The object is to stay alive until the danger is past and deal with the consequences later. Nature places no value judgment about which is the superior strategy….Animals do not view freezing as a sign of inadequacy or weakness, nor should we.4
Dr. Levine is telling us several things about dissociation. First, it is an instinctual defense (protective) response to threatening situations when we can’t run and we are unable to fight back.
Second, it’s a way to “freeze-frame” what’s happening, knowing we can’t respond to it any other way at the moment because we’re overwhelmed. Third, this response is universal—meaning we all have the instinct within us if we find ourselves in a situation where we believe no other choice is available to us. Last, it’s not a sign of weakness or inadequacy. Staci Haines, another specialist, echoes Levine by saying that “Dissociation is a normal response to trauma, and allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time.”5
I think I methodically stuff—freeze my pain—then put a cap on it to keep it from swamping me, engulfing me. Even my vision became very focused and narrowed, kind of like when you’re in labor. The words that kept swirling through me were I don’t have any hope that I will ever be desired or sought by him.
Dissociation can be unsettling, embarrassing, frightening or even dangerous, depending on when the unanticipated fugue settles over you. Learning how to counter a dissociative state before it happens is not only empowering, but it can also prevent you n from getting lost behind the wheel or embarrassing yourself in public.
Countering Dissociation with Grounding and Impersonal Energy
When we begin to dissociate, our awareness grows fuzzy, as if everything slides out of focus and our attachment to the earth weakens or disappears. We lose our “grounding” and our sense of solidity. Yet in nearly every situation, we can learn to recognize that fuzzy sense of reality before it sucks us away and break its pull by re-grounding ourselves immediately. Getting in touch with the “concrete” world is one quick and easy way to do that. Think of getting grounded as “breaking a spell.” Perhaps an example will add clarity to our explanation.
Several years ago Marsha was taking domestic violence counseling training which included a dramatic movie. As she sat in the darkened room with a small group of peers, one character in the movie began to verbally, emotionally and finally physically dominate another, and as he did, Marsha felt herself begin to slip into overwhelming old feelings:It was sort of like being anesthetized. I could feel myself “going under.” I was losing touch with my trained, strong self and sliding into an old pattern. I knew I had to act fast to avoid getting lost in it and getting grounded was the fastest, easiest way. I jumped up and left the room, walked around in the hall, put my hands against the wall and got in touch with my concrete world. I also “switched emotional gears”: I mentally moved into the stronger aspects of my personality—much like switching into overdrive to drive up a steep mountain highway—and began to operate from a place of strength in me, rather than that old, well-worn place of weakness.
When I went back into the room I was careful to not allow myself to get emotionally drawn into the remainder of the movie. Instead, I chose to watch it from the safety of a professional distance, which enabled me to remain grounded for the rest of the day.
In this example, Marsha uses both grounding and impersonal energy to “stay present,” rather than allow herself to dissociate. While dissociation provides one instinctual survival skill in the moment of trauma, it can become a pattern that takes over when it’s no longer needed. And when it does, it interferes with our ability to cope by using the stronger aspects of our personalities. Grounding and impersonal energy provide tools you can use to stay anchored in the present.
Impersonal Energy
“Trauma survivors have a monocular view of themselves,” Trauma specialist Tana Slay, Ph.D., informs us. Dr. Slay communicates that our pain and loss become so all-consuming that we begin to see ourselves as one-dimensional: We hurt like crazy and it feels impossible to survive and cope. We can get so lost in our painful emotions and feelings that we forget our many strengths. But in truth, we all have strong, empowered parts of ourselves we’ve drawn upon during earlier difficult times. While it’s true that for most of us this experience exceeds any pain we’ve known before, we do still possess those strengths. And those strengths are transferable to our present dilemma if we draw on them by learning to “switch gears emotionally.”
To make that switch, we must recognize and affirm those stronger aspects of our personalities, which Dr. Slay labels as our impersonal energy.
“Impersonal energy means to come from an aspect of one’s personality which is not bound to one’s emotions and feelings,” Dr. Slay says. “The client is able to step outside of his emotions and feelings and view himself and his experience from another perspective. This allows the client freedom in choosing his response to an experience instead of being driven by his unresolved trauma pain and cognitive distortions.”6
If we can grasp this concept, it becomes a powerful resource to help us deal with our current traumatic situations, because it offers us another emotional “gear” to switch into. Julia was able to identify her impersonal energy by “locating” the place inside her that she used to deal with her daughter’s epilepsy.
When I first read about impersonal energy, I didn’t understand what the term meant. But the more I listened, the more I began to realize all I had to do was to think about how I dealt with the challenges my little girl’s epilepsy brought with it. Back then, I had to square off with park and recreation districts, with school teachers and with other parents who didn’t understand the disorder. I had to try to not make her a prisoner of my fears in that if I let her do things other kids do she might die if she had a seizure. I was able to do that by thinking and acting out of a common sense, logical part of me that refused to operate out of raw emotion. Realizing that place still exists inside of me was half the battle. The other half was learning to switch into that mindset as I dealt with my husband’s sex addiction.
Eliminate Cognitive Distortions
Do you ever hear yourself thinking “If he/she really loved me he/she wouldn’t do this?” While such an assumption might sound logical when we’re hurting, in reality it falls into the category of cognitive distortions, because nearly every sex addict will tell you the addiction has nothing to do with his or her spouse. Though few of us realize it, our feelings about ourselves, other women and men, sex addiction and our spouses become skewed, because our thinking on those topics is distorted.
Cognitive distortions are inaccurate thoughts or ideas that maintain negative thinking, which helps to maintain negative emotions. This self-perpetuating cycle of inaccurate thoughts —>negative thinking—>negative emotions, holds the power to defeat us, or at least suck all of the joy from our lives. Challenging and changing these distorted patterns of thought can take us a long way toward our own healing. The most common cognitive distortions:• All-or-nothing thinking: “If he looks at porn/other women, etc., it means he doesn’t love me.”
• Overgeneralization: “Men are all a bunch of animals.”
• Mental filter: “My husband is in recovery but I saw him check out the waitress, so his recovery is all a sham.”
• Discounting the positive: “I know I’m feeling better, but it’s just a matter of time before I am triggered again.”
• Jumping to conclusions: “She’s irritable today...she must be acting out again.”
• Magnification: “This is the worst, most horrible day.”
• Minimization: “It’s not that bad; others have it worse so I shouldn’t feel this way.”
• Emotional reasoning: “I feel frightened; therefore he must be acting out again.”
• Making should statements: “I should be over this by now.”
• Labeling: “I married a pervert” or “She’s a whore.”
• Personalization: “If he doesn’t stay in recovery, it’s because I am not a good enough spouse.”
Learning how to steer our thought patterns can take us a long way toward a happier outlook on life, no matter what our spouses choose to do about their addictions. Cognitive therapy specialist Arthur Freeman tells us, “Many clients find it useful to label the particular cognitive distortions that they notice among their automatic thoughts and find that simply doing this weakens the emotional impact of the th
oughts….Once the client understands what each distortion is, he or she can watch for examples of ‘personalizing,’ ‘mind reading’ and so on, among his or her automatic thoughts.”7 Psychologist Edmund Bourne says:Learning to identify and counter these unhelpful modes of thinking with more realistic and constructive self-talk can go a long way toward helping you handle everyday stresses in a more balanced, objective fashion. This, in turn, will significantly reduce the amount of anxiety, depression and other unpleasant emotional states you experience. Remember that your immediate experience of the outside world is largely shaped and colored by your own personal thoughts about it. Change your thoughts and you’ll change the way your world appears.8
Eliminate Negative Self-Talk
When we face the pain of our partners’ sex addictions and all the damage they bring, negative self-talk can slip in the back door of our minds and we aren’t even aware of its presence. You know, those nasty little voices in your head that nag at you and devour your peace?
It’s easy to understand why this happens when you realize that negative self-talk flows from a brew of distorted reality (cognitive distortions), over-focusing on the problem, half-truths and poor logic. It’s hard not to over-focus on the problem when it is destroying our lives!
Yet even if it occurs automatically, if the calm and peace required to survive and heal remain our ultimate goal, we need to work to replace negative self-talk with positive internal dialogue. If we don’t, negative self-talk keeps fear, anxiety, pessimism, unrealistic guilt and even shame percolating deep within our minds.
Your Sexually Addicted Spouse Page 16