"Each week, the PoSARC inbox is filled with all kinds of e-mails requesting help. But hands down, our largest percentage of mail contains questions directed to the small handful of addicts in recovery I work with who occasionally donate their time to answer the questions I put before them. What I glean from reading all of these e-mails is what I call the million-dollar question: "How can you (the sex addict) do these behaviors when you're in a relationship? What were you thinking?"
I always feel a little saner when I read those because it helps me know that I wasn't the only one who was beyond vexed by this right after Discovery and in the next few years afterwards.
Well, if my readers are anything like me, they want answers to the big "WHY" question. And I don't mean clinical answers like, "Well, his family of origin was highly dysfunctional, so...."
They might be interested in that, also, but there's way more....
I have a sizable library of books that helped me get my head around the "Why? How?" questions I had of the sex addict(s) in my life because no therapist, CSAT or otherwise, could adequately explain to me how a man could sexually act outside our committed coupleship while proclaiming he'd die without me if I weren't there. HUH? And so I searched. And searched.
I hired a very bright therapist who works with sex addicts (not partners) to answer my questions. After many months of my telling him my addict wouldn't provide me with a single satisfying response about his behaviors, the therapist finally told me: "STOP asking him why he does what he does, or what he was thinking about when he---, or how he could have done this or that while coming home to you every night for dinner. Addicts don't know. They're extremely confused themselves. It takes a few years of solid recovery before they come out from under the impaired thinking and start to understand the motivations behind their behaviors."
I found this a most distasteful and disheartening response, to say the least. I felt like hitting this therapist, I was so angry. Well, it turns out he was right and today, it's wisdom I pass on to my own private clients, too. Thankfully, I can help clients in private sessions to understand a lot of what goes on in the addict's mind. The rest of it can be learned from books.
So, how can a POSA better understand this addiction? What can we learn about why Lust is so embedded in the culture that a lot of the sexual misbehaviors of the addict are not only not decried, many are even green-lighted by the society we live in? And wouldn't understanding that help us to not take it so personally, and to understand just why stopping some of these behaviors is very challenging indeed? None of this is to minimize the effects of their behavior. No, no. But it's hard to heal what you don't fully comprehend.
If you're the kind of POSA who is interested in climbing underneath something to figure it out, (as I was) you'll find the book that one of our addicts in recovery reviewed here most enlightening.
So will your sex addict/compuslive if he's in recovery, so you might want to share the Review with him, as well.
Have you been able to step outside your own relational betrayal trauma to wonder : HOW DID IT GET THIS WAY? We'd love to hear our reader's thoughts on that, so please go ahead and leave your observations in the comment box below:"
Lust Virus - a Book Review by Scott Allen
Over the eons of time, the painted image has depicted the roots of human identity, cosmology and our mythology. We have imbued the Image with ultimate power and significance in our personal and communal lives since the beginnings of time. When the painted image was replaced with the photograph, this cohesive alignment began to explode..
Television, film and internet personas have now largely replaced our real and often challenging relations with family, friends and lovers with the fantasy of belonging and acceptance, leaving us in a delusional isolation, staring at electronics but believing that we are sharing connection. For us to then heal this growing sense of our solitude, we reach even deeper into the ethers of media, only to fall further away from true, meaningful, supportive connection.
So begins the spiral of fantasy addiction as our culture plummets, relentless in it's pursuit into an endless stream of industrially-fabricated sexuality, or what's being referred to as sexuality. Specifically, this book links together pornography, sexual dysfunction and broken relationships between the sexes and within families.
To comprehend how we came to this precipice (and surely at this point in time, human sexuality does seem poised over a cliff of insanity) requires a deep and calm look at the retrospective variables that brought us here.
When viewed from a historical perspective, we can begin to make sense of the current malaise in which we suffer from the relational deficits brought about by our hypnotic absorption in media culture. We can also glean some understanding of where we are headed, thereby signaling where course-corrections need to occur for us, individually and as a society, to avert further damages and separations.
This brilliant book is that perspective, written from the deep honesty that sadly, only an anonymous writer seems capable of doing. The author, Ron J. (aka Roy K.) is also one of the founders of Sexaholics Anonymous (SA); he labored vigorously in developing his own understanding of what his lust addiction entailed.
He shares his valuable findings and insight in a well-written and thought-provoking book I highly recommend for sex/lust addicts to better understand themselves, for those POSAs who struggle over the agony of living with a lust-addicted partner, as well as anyone interested in how we arrived at such a lust-besotted time on the planet.
**Editor's note**
Though this book is available through amazon, we want to issue a warning that displayed directly beneath Lust Virus is a series of other books with "Lust" in the title, portraying sexually explicit imagery on the book covers.
To avoid all that, you may want to purchase it through the author's website which is of interest to peruse in any case: royk.com