The day after the 9/11 attacks on her city, Lili was asked by a physician friend to volunteer her time in the makeshift clinic downtown, doing intake interviews of the First Responders that survived the terrorist attacks. In the next weeks she spent volunteering, what became quickly apparent to Lili was that training in Grief Counseling would have helped enormously. The many policemen and firemen who showed up were physically challenged, yes, but the deeper wounds were clearly on the emotional level.
Doing the best they could, Lili and the other volunteers worked to comfort the deeply broken men who had witnessed their brothers perish by the hundreds. The cathartic experience of working with these deeply traumatized people provided the motivation for Lili to begin the educational track that would ultimately result in her being able to formally help others in crisis.
Graduating six years later from an accredited New York Interfaith Seminary she entered post-Ordination training in Spiritual Counseling. She feels blessed to have studied Grief Counseling with a gifted Dean there.
Learning to help others who find themselves faced with difficult life challenges provided a poignant segue into working with the devastation of sex addiction and the grief processes it brings on.
Lili experienced the trauma of pornography/sex addiction in her primary relationship many years ago, and through her training in Counseling she developed a deep understanding of not only her own long-term healing, but for how to embrace others’ suffering from the same painful circumstances. She believes that discovering the betrayal of sex addiction in one’s primary relationship can elicit a spiritual or existential emergency, throwing one into deep trauma.
In her own words: “By integrating my own experience plus that of others, with all my research, I hope to guide those who are suffering the effects of being partnered with a sexual compulsive, into a healing experience. For myself, I can say that though the Discovery phase and the difficult years which followed it were among the most painful of my life, I was also blessed with great healing and growth on this journey. It is this which I hope to share.”
Lili has also completed a Jungian analysis that spanned fifteen years and another fourteen (and still counting) in eclectic other therapies—from Cognitive to Somatic Experiencing-based psychotherapy and others in between—Lili has been augmenting her ongoing professional trainings for working with PoSAs to include trainings that will eventually allow her to do recovery coaching work with couples, using the Trauma Model.
Lili is also enrolled in a three-year professional certification program to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Somatic Experiencing is considered a premier trauma resolution modality founded by Dr. Peter Levine.
She looks forward to implementing the highly applicable tools that Somatic Experiencing offers as they teach the client how to self-regulate their own emotions, eventually expanding their own capacities for healing traumas. We know how brittle we can become when trauma strikes; the techniques are designed to move trauma out of the nervous system so that one can live more fully in one’s range of resilience without past traumas constantly reactivating the nervous system. Lili is, herself, a longtime recipient of the healing work of a seasoned Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Therapist, so she knows firsthand the power of trauma resolution work to help heal the often-recurrent wounding incurred by sex addiction’s devastating fallout.
Lili is completing the APSATS*-certification training with Dr. Barbara Steffens, author of Your Sexually Addicted Spouse. Learning the Partner-Sensitive Trauma model directly from Dr. Steffens has formalized what Lili has known through her many years of coaching others: that trauma doesn’t just occur with the discovery of sex addiction, trauma also occurs with treatment that can pathologize a partner as being “sick”, rather than being traumatized at learning they are in relationship with a sex addict who has chronically and deceptively betrayed them.
(*APSATS: Association of Partners of Sex Addicts Trauma Specialists)
Her work as an addiction/recovery coach and spiritual counselor uses a holistic approach aimed to help her clients find the catalyst for healing despite the chaos of their partner’s addiction.
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In addition to covering many other aspects of sex addiction, Lili’s book deals with sexual anorexia and how it out-pictures in her very real, lived, experiential way. To be notified of the book’s publication (soon!!), please leave her your e-mail address. We promise never to lend, rent or sell it out to any other party for any reason whatsoever, nor to send you Posarc news not directly related to the book’s publication. But we do promise the book will be a great read so please sign up to make sure you will have access to it. Thank you. book@posarc.com