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Core Beliefs |
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Sex addicts tend to hold to four core beliefs (according to Dr. Patrick Carnes in Out of the Shadows and Dr. Mark Laaser in Faithful & True):
Let's take a look at each of these (as I understand them). If you'd like to add your understanding of these beliefs to the list, email me. 1. I am basically a bad, unworthy person.This one hits right at the core of our self-esteem. The addict tends to believe deep down that he is fundamentally flawed. He may have had some experiences in his life that tell him he is bad. Perhaps he was abandoned by his parents when he was young. Maybe she was told that she would never amount to anything. I don't mean to get "Freudian" here, but I think the addict's early relationship with his/her parents has a lot to do with this particular core belief. A child gets its self-esteem from his parents; if that parent-child relationship is somehow dysfunctional, the child may learn that he is basically bad. But this is a lie. Think of a child as an infant: innocent, trusting, and very dependent on others. Is that child Bad? Is that child Unworthy? Certainly not. When a child is brought into this world, that child is a unique creation. I personally believe that the image of God is indelibly stamped in the soul of every child, giving that child worth beyond measure. Thus, we are all fundamentally worthy -- of love, of respect, and of being valued. 2. No one would love me as I am.This belief is another reflection of our self-esteem. It seems to me that it is usually a learned response, probably from our parents or early friends. It is based largely out of fear. The idea behind this one is "I want to be loved and known intimately, but I am afraid that people who really got to know me would abandon me." We are all afraid of rejection. And we are more afraid of being rejected by those who mean the most to us. The more we value a person, the more afraid we are of having them know us. If we lose the friendship of an acquaintance, we have lost little. If we lose the friendship of our life's partner, we have lost much. To this end we hide a part of our life from them. We want them to be proud of us... we want them to think well of us. We want so badly to be loved/accepted/known by those who are important to us. At the same time, we fear losing them. (Perhaps we have been abandoned in the past by someone, and now we fear being abandoned again?) Our behavior goes something like this: We want to develop deep friendships because we want to be accepted for who we are. As these friendships develop, we value the friend more and more. A point will come when we value our friend a lot -- so much that we fear losing them. We fear that our friend will leave if s/he finds out about our addictive behaviors, so we "cool" the relationship a bit or we hide the addictive behaviors from them. It ends up that our friend knows only the "mask" that we wear, and not the real us. They love the person we pretend to be, and thus the pain grows deeper. They don't love the real us; they love the pretend us. This reinforces the idea that nobody would love me if they knew me. This is one lie that face-to-face support group meetings really helps to dispel. In support group meetings we are encouraged to be honest about ourselves, our past, and the struggles that we face. As we share honestly, we learn that people accept us regardless of what we have done. As others accept use, we learn that we are acceptable, and we can begin to break down this lie. My own experience: I was so afraid of telling anyone, and yet I could not contain it any more. I thought I didn't have any friends. I thought people liked me because of what I could do for them. However, as I looked at the people in my life I found that I could build deeper relationships with a few of them. I don't know how I did this. I think I simply exposed more and more of myself to a very select vew people, and as my trust in them grew I found that I could tell them more. I had two (or MAYBE three) people I could tell. I told the first one -- an old college friend of mine, almost a sister to me. I can't tell you how amazed I was when she just said "Damn, that must really hurt." Heh... tears come to my eyes even now. She didn't condemn me! I felt the grace of God through her, although I didn't know that was what I was feeling. The wonderful feeling of acceptance regardless of what I'd done was overwhelming. As I recall, I cried in front of her. I couldn't believe that someone would still accept me. 3. My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend on other people.Somewhere along the line we were taught that our needs would not be met. We have many different kinds of needs: emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual and sexual. At some point, though, we learned that we could not trust our parents or our friends to meet one or more of those groups of needs. With this in mind, you can see how a person would come to start relying on his/her own methods for meeting those needs. We are taught by our parents how to meet needs, but if our parents are sick or if we're never taught, how do we learn to meet those needs? Answer: we do whatever we can. But of course, this is a lie too. Just because our parents could not (or would not) meet our needs does not mean that our needs will never be met by others. As we grow into healthy adults, we have the opportunity to learn that others can be trusted to meet our needs. It takes a great deal of courage to work through this. After all, we're not talking just about needs like "I need a hamburger" but also needs like "I need to know that I'm valuable to someone just for myself." Again, support groups are a wonderful place to learn how to get those needs met. 4. Sex is my most important need.I can hear the question: "How in the world can a person believe that sex is her most important need?" This isn't a conscious belief, but rather a subconscious belief. The evidence bears it out. Consider that an addict will take money that was destined for rent, and use that to pay for a prostitute. An addict will skip work to meet a lover. When a fix is needed, nothing else is allowed to get in the way. Life, health, job, family, relationships, and everything else gets pushed to the side. So how do we overcome this one? We have to learn what the real need is and how to meet that need in a healthy way. In my experience, I would try to use sex to salve the emotions I was feeling. When I learned to deal with the emotions in a healthy way, the "fix" was no longer necessary. Don't act out. Instead, find out what is behind the desire for the addictive fix, and then find a healthy way to take care of that.
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