Understanding the Sex Addiction Cycle

Mark Laaser

Shame is the the emotion, the feeling, the perception of self that will lead you into what we would refer to around here as coping. You're going to figure out ways to cope with that. We don't like the feeling we'd like to get rid of the feeling. We may have figured out ways of medicating that feeling, and there can be hundreds of ways that we medicate that feeling.

Mark Laaser

Some of the classic ways in terms of substances are, you know, alcohol and so forth, watching too much TV, working too much. You know, we've talked about this numerous times on the show that we all probably have a variety of coping strategies in the life of a person who struggles with sex addiction. They have learned that the neurochemistry of sexual arousal is one of the ways that they cope.

Randy Evert

Welcome to the Faithful and True Podcast. I'm Randy Everett, your co-host, and I hope that you will join us today as we feature doctor Mark Lazar in a legacy presentation. It's part of our series called The Sex Addiction Cycle, and we know that you will enjoy listening to Doctor Lazar on this subject. We'd also like to invite you to visit our website, Faithful and True.

Randy Evert

Com, where you'll find lots of additional information and online registration information and online registration for our three day intensive workshops. Here now is doctor Mark Lazar and the Faithful and True podcast.

Mark Laaser

Today, Randy, we're going to continue our trek through the Faithful and True Workbook. And we are on unit seven. And today we're going to talk about the fourth and fifth lesson.

Randy Evert

Yes, the sexual addiction cycle.

Mark Laaser

I do want our listeners, our audience, to know for sure that we're talking about some original ideas that Doctor Kerns first had, and were published for the first time in 1981.

Randy Evert

We also want to thank we got a very, very nice email from one of our regular listeners who, after hearing the series, now that we're several weeks into the Faithful and True workbook, sent you a thank you email, a congratulatory email referring to the Faithful and True workbook.

Mark Laaser

As you're really leading me into that.

Randy Evert

I am. I'm making you tell the audience what he referred to it as.

Mark Laaser

The 67th book of the Bible, which is so absurd that I surprised you would bring it up.

Randy Evert

Well, I immediately I immediately pointed out to you, before, you know, such a rave reviews would would actually have any chance of going to your head, which I know you would never let that happen, but I just thought, let's not to get too big on ourselves here, but that's a fine compliment.

Mark Laaser

That was a very there was a very nice way of affirming the the work that we're doing and the value in his own life. I think that.

Randy Evert

We appreciate that he is receiving great direction from it. So let's jump into this cycle of addiction. Tell us about that.

Mark Laaser

Well, the cycle of addiction was Doctor Kern's first attempt to describe the spiral that we get ourselves into. The repeating cycle, the downward spiral, if you will, of addiction. And I should say that this spiral of addiction, this cycle really refers to all kinds of addictions or problematic behaviors. It's the lock to place that we get ourselves into.

Mark Laaser

Now, when Doctor Kerns first described it, he was very big on also describing shame. In our last lesson here today from this unit, we're going to get into a little bit more about the core beliefs of shame. He felt that addicts tend to have a lot of shame, and shame is the product oftentimes of beliefs and perceptions and meanings that are brought out of our life experience growing up.

Mark Laaser

And I think as things have evolved, we've we've added to where some of these core beliefs come from. It's not just your family of origin. It might be your neighborhood of origin, your school of origin, your church of origin, your extended family of origin. It's not just your parents. So as long as the listeners don't get to preoccupied with trying to figure out whether their mom and dad created all of this stuff, we do know that the average guy who walks through our doors does have a great deal of shame, and some of it is stuff he learned in childhood.

Randy Evert

And shame isn't that true? Shame is one of the these first steps. You're not automatically thrown into the middle of the sex addiction cycle. Shame is like that first stepping stone leading you towards the cycle. Is that not right?

Mark Laaser

That is right. Shame is the the emotion, the feeling, the perception of self that will lead you into what we would refer to around here as coping. You're going to figure out ways to cope with that. We don't like the feeling we'd like to get rid of the feeling. We may have figured out ways of medicating that feeling, and there can be hundreds of ways that we medicate that feeling.

Mark Laaser

Some of the classic ways in terms of substances are, you know, alcohol and so forth. Watching too much TV, working too much. You know, we've talked about this numerous times on the show that we all probably have a variety of coping strategies in the life of a person who struggles with sex addiction. They have learned that the neurochemistry of sexual arousal is one of the ways that they cope, which is generally referred to as preoccupation.

Mark Laaser

We get preoccupied with a sexual idea.

Randy Evert

That means you find yourself, throughout the course of your day, being locked into only those types of thoughts.

Mark Laaser

That's right. And for the life of a sex addict, this could be when we say preoccupation. It could be hours per day. It could be just repetitive thoughts that you can't seem to get out of your head. Other words that are used here are fantasy lust. But basically the idea here is that you're preoccupied with a sexual thought.

Randy Evert

And where does that preoccupation lead you to?

Mark Laaser

Well, in the cycle, it's going to eventually lead you to some form of acting out behavior. We discussed in our last show some of the various forms of acting out behaviors. So anything from masturbation all the way up to crossing the flesh line and having affairs and other kinds of sexual activities that we described. But in between that, in between the preoccupation and the acting out behavior, which is actually at the bottom.

Mark Laaser

So if you if the listeners out there would just envision a clock, the preoccupation stage is right at the 12:00 place, the acting out is actually at 6:00. And the in-between stage is called ritual. And ritual is really at the 3:00 place.

Randy Evert

Okay. And ritual. The ritual can vary from individual to individual.

Mark Laaser

That is right. It's really totally unique to every individual. But if you think about ritual, it's basically any preparations in a way that you need to make in order to act out. So you have a thought about acting out. You have a fantasy or a mental picture of acting out. Do you need to get someplace? Do you need to gather things to yourself?

Mark Laaser

Do you need to make free space for yourself? For example, one of the illustrations that we always give is the guy that late at night looks at pornography and masturbates. Part of his ritual may simply be to wait until his wife goes to bed, and he may do what he needs to do to make sure that she's asleep.

Mark Laaser

And then he goes downstairs or goes into the room where the computer is and he starts surfing the net. Or he has his favorite websites that he already knows to go to. And eventually, when he gets himself stimulated enough with this pornography, then he would go ahead and act out in an act of masturbation. That's a fairly short ritual.

Mark Laaser

When you think about it. It might only be an hour or two from when you first get the thought in your head to when you actually act out. Although some of the guys might have been thinking about doing this all day long, you know, just.

Randy Evert

So they've built up the anticipation of it.

Mark Laaser

Yeah. Part of the the power of the preoccupation or the fantasy is the anticipation of doing whatever it is you're going to do. There are the guys that have, you know, other, more complicated acting out. Let's say they are engaging in massage parlors. So, you know, part of their ritual could be to figure out how to get the money.

Mark Laaser

Massage parlors cost money, particularly the more kinds of sexual activity you'd like to have. So they figure out ways to stash cash away, take it secretly out of the bank account, do whatever they do to get the money that they need.

Randy Evert

It's much more complicated than slipping into your office, in your home and turning the laptop on.

Mark Laaser

That is right that that is one of the more primary rituals. And, you know, as you move up the scale of severity of acting out, it may involve more preparation, more planning, more saving, more excuses. You know, you're going to have to figure out if I need to be away from the office or away from home in order to go to a massage parlor, you got to have to figure out excuses as to where where you are and what you're doing.

Randy Evert

Right? Where were you? What took you so long? Where have you been? I tried to reach you. Where? So that ritual part of the cycle can really vary so much from individual to individual, depending on also how long they've been an addict. You've told us before the concept of like with any addiction, like it takes an alcoholic more drinks to reach the same high, right?

Randy Evert

The same applies to a man struggling with sexual purity issues. He is going to need to engage in looking at deeper levels, new and unexplored levels of pornography to reach the same excitement level.

Mark Laaser

Well, you may not ever graduate away from just looking at pornography and masturbating, but yes, he he would spend you know, I was looking the other day at the statistic on what is the average length of time on a website. And it's like 38 seconds. So, you know, you're not there very long and then you get bored with that and then you move on.

Mark Laaser

What you're talking about is that as the neurochemical tolerance factor increases, we're going to need more stimulation, more excitement. Sometimes that leads us into more dangerous places, more involved activities. One of the interesting parts about the ritual is that the ritual carries with it secrecy and perhaps danger. So there's adrenaline to that. And some would say that the rituals themselves can be addictive in nature, and rituals happen before you ever act out, at least sexually.

Mark Laaser

The the longer rituals for a lot of people tend to be when you cross the flesh line and have affairs and you know, your ritual could be in terms of how you recruit sexual partners these days, you know, as opposed to my day, I mean, my day. You had to meet people in public and, you know, engage in various banter and dialog in order to get to in a fair place.

Mark Laaser

But these days, you can just go online and make those connections. And it's it tends to be much faster. But that's still a ritual to go online. It's still part of the before we leave ritual. There's one thing I forgot to mention, and that is that rituals also involve excuses. They they involve the minimization of the rationalizations, the justifications, in other words, for you to be in your ritual and across your own moral barriers, you've somehow got to come up with some rationale why it's okay for you to be doing that.

Mark Laaser

So thought life is also part of the ritual. Now we get to the bottom, which is acting out. We don't need to cover that again. We covered it last week in terms of the various kinds of sexual acting out behaviors, and one of the points to make here is that the average addict may have several different kind of acting out behaviors that they're doing.

Mark Laaser

They may be masturbating, they may be looking at pornography, they may be having affairs, they may be going to massage parlors, they may be doing lots of different things. And what is true is that you can have rituals that lead you into those behaviors going on simultaneously. I remember that in the old days of having sexual encounters with women, you know, I would have rituals going on with several women.

Mark Laaser

And in the meantime, I had my pornography and masturbation rituals going on simultaneously. So this can get to be complicated. And also, it speaks to the point you were asking about earlier is our neurochemical tolerance increases. The balls that we're juggling in the air in terms of various activities, can get to be quite extensive and quite stressful in and of themselves.

Randy Evert

Well, you listed in the workbook how sexual preoccupations and rituals will almost always lead to sexual acting out. In order to stop sexual sin, you must stop the rituals as well.

Mark Laaser

That is exactly right. And rituals, like I say, have their own excitement, their own adrenaline, their own neurochemistry. And if you get into that, you're pretty locked and loaded. You're past the point of no return. And most of the experts in our field believe that when you get into the ritual stage, you're going to act out come hell or high water.

Randy Evert

Well, you list for us here a passage from Proverbs 2813 which says, he who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.

Mark Laaser

That's right. So we need to get honest about all of the secret stuff that we're doing. The rituals are about secrets. We have to maintain secrecy about them, otherwise somebody is going to intervene. So yes, there's everything about our program of healing and recovery that is about getting honest, even about some of these ritual behaviors. And I would tell you, by the way, that it's harder to get back to some of these, some of the guys, when they first come in, they don't realize all the planning and preparation that they've done to act out.

Mark Laaser

They just know that they've acted out. They know they need to stop, that they don't quite have a sense in the early days of all the other boundaries that they're going to need to have to enforce. So, in other words, if I'm a guy who has affairs, and part of my ritual has been to engage in conversation with women out in public, one of my boundaries is going to need to be that I that I don't do that anymore, that I don't have private lunches or coffees or conversations with with women in my case.

Mark Laaser

So understanding your rituals will lead to a healthy set of boundaries as part of what I'm trying to say.

Randy Evert

Well, once you've been engaged in this cycle with shame leading to coping, leading to triggers, preoccupation, bringing you to your rituals, you're acting out. That leads to despair.

Mark Laaser

Yeah, that's the perpetuation, really, of the feeling of shame. So the whole thing started with shame. And now you've acted out again, and now you say to yourself, gee, I wanted to stop and couldn't. I must be a terrible person. I couldn't control it, I couldn't stop. Here I go again. And one of the things that fascinated me in the early days, when I was learning some of the stuff from Doctor Carnes, he had actually done a study with some alumni of the treatment program, and he found in that study that 71% of the addicts that had been treated at that point had actually it sometime considered at least suicide.

Mark Laaser

Now, that's not about the guys that actually have tried a couple along the way who had been successful but successful, meaning that they had actually committed suicide, not successful. I'm mixing myself up here.

Randy Evert

Yeah, putting a positive spin on suicide.

Mark Laaser

No, I'm not I'm not trying to do that. I'm just saying that they had had a plan, that they carried it out, but 71% of the guys had thought at some point they'd been depressed enough. There's there's something about this stage that is about shame and depression and, and despair, which is what it's called, that there's no hope.

Mark Laaser

I mean, basically, this is a stage. There's no hope. So if in fact, at first where this whole thing got started, we we began with a sense of shame, then despair. Will will lead us back into our need to preoccupy with the with the sexual fantasies that we started with. So that's why it's a vicious cycle. And it leads us back to the top.

Mark Laaser

One of the things that's been an amendment to this, I think, along the way, is that when we get to despair and your average addict might have other ways that they cope, that that place of despair might lead them into drinking or eating or TV watching or working or smoking or whatever it is. So we might have a variety of ways that we cope in despair can lead us into other addiction cycles as well.

Mark Laaser

But if sex is the primary way that we cope, it will always lead us back to sexual thoughts, preoccupation, fantasy.

Randy Evert

Well, as usual, I appreciate in our listeners appreciate because I've heard from them at the end of each of these lessons, and we've been reinforcing this recently with there being some thought given to spending more time in meditation. You recommend the following affirmation to say this quietly to yourself. Separate yourself from the busyness of your day and say the following affirmation five times I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me.

Randy Evert

I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me. And that comes from Philippians 413. The focal passage says, I do not understand what I do for what I want to do. I do not do, but what I hate to do, I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good as it is.

Randy Evert

It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is the sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my sinful nature, for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do. No, the evil I do not want to do this.

Randy Evert

I keep doing.

Mark Laaser

That's kind of the central unmanageable passage that we think about. Your quoting Romans seven, verse 15 and following, and it's kind of that unmanageable passage. There's things that I want to do. I don't there's things that I hate doing that I keep doing. Later on in the passage, Paul says, what a wretched man am I? Which is what about shame?

Mark Laaser

And that leads us into really the final lesson in this unit, the core beliefs that start a lot of this off to begin with. By the way, you also had the affirmation related to Philippians four. And Philippians four also reminds us to think about good things as opposed to destructive or negative or sexual things, right? So it's not a bad practice to spend some time daily thinking about things we're grateful for, things that are holy and pure and all of that.

Mark Laaser

So we we have talked some about that before in the show in terms of taking every thought captive. But we do have a choice in terms of what we focus on and what we put in our brain on a daily basis.

Randy Evert

And how does this then open the door for us to to think about core beliefs?

Mark Laaser

Well, core beliefs are four in nature. The currents originally described in that first book, out of the shadows. And it starts really with the the core belief of shame. I am a bad and worthless person if you understand shame, you know that I'm not a good person and not even God can love me or God can forgive me.

Mark Laaser

A lot of the addicts who come here, they understand Christian beliefs and Christian theology, and they understand somewhat intellectually and know Scripture in terms of what God did for us through His Son, Jesus Christ. And they may even preach it to others, but they don't necessarily believe it for themselves. In other words, I know God sent Jesus to forgive everybody else except me, and that sounds kind of outrageous.

Mark Laaser

But nevertheless, that's that's what a lot of the addicts think. I am a bad and worthless person. Not even God's love extends to me. So if you're a person out there wondering that, thinking that you also would have beliefs along there that no one else has thought about done some of the things that I've done, no one else has been as egregious as I have been.

Mark Laaser

No one else has been as depraved as I. You always tend to get into comparisons about how bad you are compared to others, and the reason you don't know about some stuff that other people have done is because you've never chosen to share about your life in some of your secrets.

Randy Evert

And doesn't the sex addict think to himself, sex is equal to love and sex is my most important need?

Mark Laaser

That's that's like the second core belief, depending on how you want to order these. But yes, if I'm a bad and witless person, one of the things I've learned along the way is that maybe one of the ways to medicate that belief is to get what I perceive to be the symbolic acceptance of engaging in sexual activity. And there's a lot of associations here that sex is equal to relief.

Mark Laaser

Sex is equal to love, kindness, nurture, affection, affirmation, and those kinds of things. So but simply stated, the core belief is that sex is equal to love, and sex is my most important need. The third core belief is that if I'm a bad and worthless person, no one will love me as I am. Doesn't that make logical sense?

Mark Laaser

So I'm a bad person. No one will love me. And then the last core belief that we talk about is that no one will take care of my needs but me. Part of the early level trauma, woundedness, core beliefs is that no one seems to care about me, take care of me, want to be with me. Therefore, I'm going to have to learn how to take care of myself, which is what makes coping and even sometimes addictive activity so appealing.

Mark Laaser

It's the way that I take care of me well.

Randy Evert

These core beliefs seem to have formed its own cycle. Again, each of these seems to feed from from one concept seems to feed into the next.

Mark Laaser

You know, one of the ways to tie all this together that we've been talking about is that the challenge I think, of recovery, of healing journey is that we don't just heal this problem by stopping something. We don't just stop the behavior, we don't just stop the rituals, but we really need to speak into that shame place in that despairing place.

Mark Laaser

Because unless you can get to a place where you truly understand that you are a good person, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. God has a plan for your life, a plan to prosper you and not to harm you. That God sent his only son to die for you. Until such time as you really embrace that. Believe it, accept it.

Mark Laaser

It's going to be hard for you to break through this cycle, because the cycle is the way you've been medicating that shame in many cases for ten, 15, 20, 30, 40 years. So stop the behavior. Yes. And the longer term, healing is through truly a spiritual life in which you fully embrace what God thinks about us and what God has done for us.

Randy Evert

Thank you for joining us today on the Faithful and True podcast. We hope that you've enjoyed this message from doctor Mark Lazar. We'd like to invite you to visit our website, Faithful and True, or you'll find lots of a information, articles, blogs, and online information and registration capabilities for our three day intensive workshops. In the meantime, we hope this coming week will be a week for you that's filled with many blessings and with great vision.