Sexual Addiction:Strength/Hope/Recovery

It can be confusing to ascertain if you have features of Love Addiction or Love Avoidance.  This show highlights how love addiction and love avoidance is different from sexual addiction. Learn about how childhood traumas feed into this disorder

Life After Lust is unlike any recovery book available today. It guides the reader into intentional personal growth but also frames the pursuit of a meaningful life as a byproduct of succerssful recovery. Carol the Coach interviews Forest Benedict author of Life After Lust: Stories and Strategies for Sex and ography Addiction Recovery. He has a 52 week plan that helps navigate addicts into healthy recovery and healthy living! This show will help to change your life!

You can’t be a sex addict, you’re a woman.” “Women don’t recover from sex addiction.” “You’re not welcome at this 12-step fellowship meeting because you’re a woman.” These were all things that were said to interviewee as she started to search for help for her sex addiction. Women need help and support in sex addiction recovery.  She started Worth Recovery and the Worth Recovery podcast as a support for women in recovery.  It started with the mission to reach women sex addicts who were recovering from their own addiction – but as her recovery has grown – She learned that she had a parent with a sex addiction and she needed to recover from that, she have a food addiction and she needed to recover from that, she had a dysfunctional family and  needed to recover from that – so has the listenership.  It is the mission of Worth Recovery to dispel shame and build hope in the lives of women recovering from addiction in their lives, however that addiction has touched them – whether it is their own or that of someone else.  Worth Recovery offers support for these women through our podcast, blog, one day workshops, recovery coaching, and online courses all with the goal of supporting women in recovery.

One of the greatest challenges that couples in recovery face is navigating the journey out of the diseased world of sexual addiction and into the healthy and robust life of relational wellness. The trauma of discovery is a gamechanger.  The betrayed (partner) often suffers with PTSD primary to the discovery – with all of the accompanying distressing symptoms including a pervasive sense of unsafety and impending doom, fear, hypervigilance, a questioning of ones’ reality, depressed, anxious, suicidal, angry.  The addict is anxious, angry, lost, avoidant, - the system is destabilized and chaotic. Tonight, Carol the Coach interviews Michele Saffier. LMFT, CSATwho is an expert in helping couples heal. She believes that couples don’t know how to be in one another’s’ presence, how to talk, how to contain anger and fear, how to behave in front of children, who to tell, what to tell, how not to tell; the bottom line is that there is no organic sense of how to cope with the level of distress it faces. In this show, she talks about how she helps couples experience a deeper relational healing through the process of reconciliation.

Carol the Coach interviews Christina Bell who has made it her mission to work with couples whose lives have been ravaged by sexual addiction. She has worked with a lot of couples with sex addiction and has developed  a roadmap to help them through the first year. Tonight's show will teach couples what they need to do to work through the hard work that goes into recovering from  the collateral damage of  sex addiction and learn how to be close again.

Shame is the most painful of all emotions. People will go to almost any length to avoid feeling it. The problem with addiction as a way to avoid shame is that once the addictive behavior ends, the shame comes back many fold. And it takes stronger and stronger doses of the addiction to move into good feelings again. Working with shame involves helping the person transform toxic shame that leads to the addiction into healthy shame. Carol the Coach interviews Bret Lyon who is an expert in helping sex addicts work through the stages of shame.In toxic shame the addict freezes, feels helpless and is unable to change  behavior. In healthy shame a person can reassess, see oneselves as a flawed human being, living in a community of flawed human beings, who made a mistake and is open to the possibilty of change.

As a resource for partners, PCS offers a  6-day intensive outpatient program in Scottsdale AZ.  They run their program 52 weeks/year. Partners of sexual addicts are a regular part of  the program and an area of particular focus.   Our work at PCS is heavily trauma focused and takes into account co-occurring psychological and medical disorders . The IOP at PCS was the first intensive outpatient program in the country, started by Ralph Earle 40+ years ago. Clients do 55 hours of intensive work in 5-1/2 days (Sunday thru Fri) with 35 hours of individual therapy, and 20 hours of group therapy and psychoeducation. Individual work includes EMDR, psychodrama, somatic experiencing, art and music therapy, equine therapy, brain mapping, neuro-biofeedback and other techniques. Marilyn Murray, the inventor of the Trauma Egg and Circles of Intimacy, is an integral part of our program. We also focus on brain health from an integrative medical perspective, seeking to facilitate on-going therapy work with nutrition, exercise, improved sleep habits, brain games and supplements. The intense nature of the program can help bring about substantial change for the partner with relationship trauma.   Overall, the program is intended for men and women recovering from the impact of addiction, codependence and compulsivity as well as trauma, abuse, PTSD, relationship dysfunction, mood disorders and other disorders. We work with individuals, couples and families who are stable enough to manage an outpatient program, and interested in getting a big jumpstart on the issues that drive their unhappiness and individual/family dysfunction. We work extensively with partners as well as addicts and work with them individually and as couples.

Partners of sex addicts experience a barrage of painful emotions and reactions after discovering their significant other's acting out behaviors. Typically, these symptoms are consistent with a trauma reaction or even post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes they are so severe that they interfere with a partner's ability to function in live and mau require treatment from a physician. Carol the Coach interviews Honor Ashbaugh MD who a primary care physician who is now a therapist treating sex addicts and partners. Dr. Ashbaugh has an extraordinary heart for helping couples navigate the debilitating symptoms that accompany sexual addiction and partner betrayal. Find out what you should know to ease the symptoms!

Carol the Coach will be interviewing Milton Magness and Marsha Means who will talking about their new book, Real Hope, True Freedom: Understanding and Coping With Sex Addiction. This book is filled with a conslidation of over 4,000 questions submitted to people who needed to understand the truth on multiple topics related to sexual addicion. This book helps readers understand the reality of sex addiction and to know that recovery is posssible!

Carol the Coach will be interviewing Sonja J Rudie who is a certified EMDR Therapist . She is an expert at treating people who have experienced trauma in their childhoods and in the coupleship as a result of the "addiction discovery". Listen as she describes how EMDR can help you!