When Helen entered treatment for sex addiction, she learned that the hardest work she had to do involved changing the way she thought about herself. With the help of a skilled therapist, she was able to develop a new script for her thoughts and came to believe that she was a person of worth and value. Helen also found she was able to stop her acting out and live in true sexual sobriety. Two years into recovery she met and subsequently married a man who was himself a recovering alcoholic. They have now been married for ten years and believe that the success of their marriage is due to the commitment each of them has to their own recovery.
We recall the children’s rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Not only is this not true, we know that psychological abuse inflicted by unkind words can cause even more damage than physical abuse. Psychological abuse, also referred to as mental or emotional abuse, can contribute to the development of depressive and anxiety disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as addiction. Emotional abuse can take many forms and can include anything from verbal abuse and constant criticism to more subtle tactics, such as intimidation, manipulation, and refusal to ever be pleased.
Sometimes those who are being psychologically abused may not even know it. They may think what they are experiencing is normal—as in the case of an abused child who has not known anything else. Other examples of psychological abuse include efforts to control and dominate, shame, blame, accuse, judge, humiliate, degrade, abandon, neglect, and the “silent treatment.” Children who are psychologically abused may be threatened, cursed, called names, yelled at, mocked, and ignored.
As with other forms of abuse, it is important for the person who has been abused to know that it is not his or her fault. He or she did not cause it. The abuse is the result of the issues and insecurities of the abuser. Behaviors that lead to addiction may be the way a person escapes the pain of his or her abuse.
Religious abuse involves using religion to control or manipulate someone. It is the mistreatment of a person who is seeking spiritual guidance, and may include harassment, intimidation, fear, and guilt trips. Religious teachings may be well-intentioned but taken to extremes or used as a weapon to pressure a person into certain behaviors. The extremes of religious abuse are clear in cases of sexual abuse by priests.
A less well-known example of religious abuse is when an elder of a church pressures a mentally ill person not to take medication but instead to pray harder. Another example is when people are threatened with going to hell or perdition if they engage in certain behaviors. Religious leaders as well as parents may use shame to pressure people to throw away music or books that are thought to be evil. Children are frequently taught in absolutes and that it is wrong to question dogma. They learn that they are not to think for themselves but to accept without question what they are taught. Religious leaders can be authoritarian and narcissistic. Often a very high level of trust is placed in their words, which congregants often accept without question.
Have you been the victim of abuse? It may be helpful to go back through your life, especially the first eighteen years, and make a list of incidents of abuse by category. What kind of abuse occurred? Who was the abuser? How old were you when it happened? How did you feel at the time of the abuse? How do you feel now?
Having a history of abuse does not excuse addiction but it may help explain it. You did not intend to become a sex addict. Yet, a variety of circumstances in your early life worked together to make you vulnerable to addiction.
When I (Milton) first attended graduate school in the 1970s, I was taught that the brain was pretty much set at birth. It was believed that people were born with a large but limited number of brain cells and that number decreased through the years. Further, it was thought that neuropathways were already fully developed and would change little throughout life.
However, we now know that, just as with other parts of the body, we produce new brain cells (known as neurogenesis) throughout our lives. An article in the scientific journal Cell gives evidence that 700 new neurons are added to the hippocampus daily corresponding to an annual turnover of 1.75 percent of the neurons in that part of the brain.1 Neurogenesis is good news in that it helps restore healthy brain function and improve the quality of life for people with a variety of disorders and aids recovery from addiction.
When it comes to understanding addiction and recovery, of even greater importance is neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. A research study showed that the hippocampus—the part of the brain that holds spatial representation capacity—of London taxi drivers was significantly larger than that of London bus drivers. Scientists at University College, London conducted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of sixteen London cabbies and found that the hippocampus was significantly larger than that of the fifty control subjects. They also found that the hippocampus was more developed in cab drivers who had been driving for forty years compared to those who had driven for a shorter period of time.2 The scientists theorized that since bus drivers travel the same route every day, they do not exercise that part of the brain as much as taxi drivers who have to navigate different routes constantly.
Psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, regarded as one of the leading experts in the field of neuroplasticity, coined the term “brain lock” to describe both obsessive-compulsive behavior and a treatment plan based in neuroplasticity he developed for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients. He said persons with OCD can self-treat their condition using four steps:
1. Relabel the obsessive thoughts and compulsive urges as obsessions and compulsions, not as real thoughts.
2. Reattribute the obsessive thoughts to a brain malfunction called OCD.
3. Refocus on a wholesome, productive activity for at least fifteen minutes.
4. Revalue the entire obsession and compulsion group as having no useful meaning in your life.3
Although sex addiction is not the same as OCD, certainly many of the behaviors in sex addiction and other forms of addiction involve obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors. As George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, put it,
A lot of people think addiction is what happens when someone finds a drug to be the most rewarding thing they’ve ever experienced. But drug abuse is not just feeling good about drugs. Your brain is changed when you misuse drugs. It is changed in ways that perpetuate the problem. The changes associated with drug use affect how addicts respond to drug cues, like the smell of a cigarette or the sight of a shot of vodka. Drug abuse also changes how other rewards, such as money or food, are processed, decreasing their relative value.4
Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize-winning ethologist, coined the term “supernormal stimuli.” He found that he could create stimuli that were far stronger than the natural stimuli that cause certain animal behaviors. For example, he constructed plaster eggs and found that birds would choose to sit on eggs that were larger and more vividly colored than their own eggs. Some of the eggs were so large that birds had a hard time remaining on them without sliding off. He also found that certain territorial fish would more vigorously attack wooden fish models that were painted more vividly. In one study he constructed cardboard dummy butterflies