Sex Addiction - June 2010

This was recently sent to me by a good friend I wanted to add it to this months newsletter to highlight a very real adddiction and how it can destroy famillies.

CALLING ALL MOTHERS, BROTHERS, WIVES, FATHERS, SISTERS, SONS, DAUGHTERS, HUSBANDS

Did I get your attention? Stay with me because this article and its contents will make a difference. You are required to expand your human compassion and allow yourself freedom to think how this affects you and ultimately TAKE ACTION (even just reading this to the end is action enough).

There is such a dis-ease called sex addiction. There it is - out on paper for all to read who dare. My battle as a mother, wife, sister, daughter in the face of this in my life, and my reality has allowed me to reach a space where ACTION is essential.

This short article is a call to action. We all actually sense the dis-ease within our society at large. Some of that dis-ease takes the form of addiction - a word we are becoming familiar with and a dis-ease which continues to grow. Addiction takes many forms of course, but there is a general concept that people are medicating a distress they feel by using something outside of their bodies. Sex addicts use chemical rushes that happen in their bodies. Many treatment modalities work on the premis that addicts have a hole, in their soul, that they are attempting to fill.

The reality of this type of addiction touching anyones life in the many forms it can take is extremely traumatic. Its traumatic energy is intensified because it is presently not acknowledged in many areas of society and indeed recently I was mortified when i watched a breakfast tv presenter and her guests make a mockery of its existence. Two people were discussing a topic of a celebrity being unfaithful to his wife and when there was an introduction into the conversation of this persons possible struggle with sex addiction, one of the guests suggested it was just an excuse for unforgiveable infidelity. The other two people agreed - they moved on quickly.

I know that the humiliation of another humans suffering will only drive it deeper. As a human facing the reality of this in my family, I became angry and that stirred me to ACTION. The action required by you the reader is an acknowledgement on some level. Many of us appear hesitant to do this - choosing instead to wait. I cant wait any longer.

This disease will flourish if secrecy continues around it and the disaster of its affects will touch us all in a more personal sense.

The bind in secrecy is strangling a desire to be helped by the addict and to share. The addicts freezing through fear of humiliation and abandonment in a dis-ease such as this, binds him or her to the addiction cycle. Our failure to acknowledge its mere existence denies validation of all involved and pushes this deeper into our human emotional framework.

In the past few months, I have read a few very brief articles with this addiction at its centre. They have been well written, factual and informative. They all mentioned a ground swell of feeling that there is a different requirement for humans to acknowledge the effects of internet exposure. In the arena of sex addiction - the results will be felt for a very long time. One article noted that in the US (sex lies and videotape - big issue - 8-14 March 2010) there is a pornographic movie made every 39 minutes. The articles I have read have all been by women - from various different perspectives. FATHERS, BROTHERS, SONS, HUSBANDS STAY WITH ME IN THIS. We are ALL affected by this - to take effective action in our world requires us to all work together. This is where the human compassion requirement is really valuable. If you sensed it when you read it earlier, I thank god, or spirit, or hope or faith, or fate, or positive energy that you are still reading this.

Your familiarity with its forms could feel very obtrusive. I totally understand that, but if you read newspapers at all or magazines, you will be very familiar with it. The irony is as the writer of this article, that I dont generally read them by choice but in the few weeks before writing this piece, I have dipped into some written media which gave me some strength to take ACTION.

In the Metro newspaper sometime in March there have been articles about amongst other things - the churches revelations and the popes involvement, an admission by the father of President Nicolas Sarkozy that he was a sex addict (in his book So Much Life), a story about a father of two who blew more than £100,000 of his companies money on lap dancing bars which inevitably destroyed his life, his families and the eleven employees who ended up with no job when his firm went bust and an eminent pharmacist who was jailed for defrauding the NHS of £141,000 which he used for drug and sex addiction. He was a married man with five children.

In the same paper, there was a big advert for Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs. I understand there were six in Enland with a plan to set up 100 across the country.

There is a need here to make you aware of some basic facts:- Sex addicts are not men or women who necessarily battle with a high personal desire for sex - oh no its not that simple. They are using the intense feelings just like any drug to cover pain or emotions and as the human body produces sensations that can feel like the highs for other types of addicts - this is the same addictive cycle.

All addicts use substances to mask feelings, to escape reality.

Addiction definitions abound but most of them are carried out in secret and carried out with no regard to oneself or any of your loved ones who are affected by it. Only when the denial can be broken and the addict come forward for assistance and get into recovery will there be a change or a chance at least.

ALL OF US are touched by this "collective denial". It will not stop the growing number of sex addicts. To educate our society, we first need to acknowledge its existence.

Along with this acknowledgement is a feeling of acceptance of reality. This is the missing piece an addict needs to come to, where he or she will begin to heal.

Teenagers/children in our world today are bombarded with imagery of a sexually explicit nature. The power of society in its wish to protect our young is intense and inexhaustable. If this is the factor that allows us to confront denial and take action, I am eternally grateful.

Internet exposure, films and other forms of media are all more accessible to us all. Many schools are very concerned with the exposure of children and what they are faced with. We have to all collectively acknowledge this and admit the damage that has already been done. One shocking statistic I have read of in my attempts to educate myself is that the largest group of internet porn viewers are children aged between 12 and 17. Approximately 20% of all internet pornography involves children. Our exposure is continuing to expand at lightening speed. (See Natasha Walters article - Sunday Times - 17.1.2010 - How Pornography Threatens our intimacy).

My need to be anonymous stems from my absolute right to protect my children from humiliation and shame that they could suffer. When the time is right, I have to believe that I will find a way to expose them in a non-shaming way that will allow the truth of this in our family to help them rather than trap them in an addictive cycle. Shame binds addicts and forces them to continue to deny their reality and in some ways undermines their existence as humans. Underneath it all is fear of annialation, a sense of hopelessness that we can all be effected by as human beings.

One of our very basic dreds as a human is to be abandoned. Denial of this diseases existence will not make it go away - only action will make a difference - shining the light on this dis-ease will highlight its existence and be the catalyst for change and transformation.

You actively participated by reading this to the end - I THANK YOU AS A MOTHER, WIFE, DAUGHTER AND SISTER. I THANK YOU AS A HUMAN BE-ING.