4 Deadly Horseman in relationships

Dr. John Gottman is a researcher on couples therapy. He is well known and respected for his work at pinpointing factors that contribute to long-term relationships as well as behaviors that facilitate the demise of relationships. One of his metaphors that he identified was the 4 deadly horsemen in relationships; those behaviors that that bring about an end of a relationship (playing on the theme of the 4 deadly horseman of the Apocalypse, the end of the world.)

Criticism
Criticism is focusing or otherwise only seeing the negative components of a partner. We all understand the basic negative impact of negative criticism. The non-verbal forms of negative criticism are sometimes as equally difficult to address. Ever get that “look” from your partner? Assertive communication is the path out of criticism. The difference appears small, but the implication is significant.

Defensiveness
Defensiveness focuses everything on your partner’s mistakes. The defensiveness creates a barrier to admitting your own part of the conflict or struggle. This approach reflects the saying, “The best defense is a strong offense.” By avoiding your role in conflict, you project onto the partner all of the problems. Owning your behaviors, and taking responsibility for your part of the conversation is one helpful strategy.

Stonewalling
Stonewalling refers to the avoidance of the partner, or passive-aggressive behaviors. In Minnesota, we call this “Minnesota Nice” where your words don’t match your attitudes/behaviors. Assertiveness is again a strategy to help you here. So too integrity is helpful, “saying what you mean and meaning what you say.” Uncovering or otherwise revealing your hidden/secret thoughts and feelings is necessary.

Contempt
Contempt is the judgment that occurs in a relationship. Much of Gottman’s research has focused on the subtleties of how contempt shows up. It usually serves to demean the individual. Finding healthy ways to address the underlying issues is important. Taking responsibility for your thoughts/feelings, as well as developing assertive ways to communicate them is necessary. Being mindful of your judgment is necessary.

If you notice any of the behaviors in your relationship, seek help. Often one of these sets of behaviors is linked with others leading to a flood of issues to be addressed. As the saying goes, the 4 deadly horsemen don’t travel alone.

Sexual Health and Covey’s 7 Habits

My approach to sexual health integrates other helpful tools. Sometimes these tools are implicit such as the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. You can read more at Wikipedia, but a super-brief summary is here with an application to sexual health.

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Your choices are the primary determining factor for effectiveness in your life. Take responsibility for your choices and the subsequent consequences that follow. In the sexual health workbooks, I highlight this concept as assertiveness, integrity, and responsibility. You are where you are at because of choices you’ve made. It is no accident.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Clarify your values and life goals. I ask you to think about how a sexually healthy life would look, and help you put in place the values that reflect the sexual health.

Habit 3: Put First Things First
Review and assess if your behaviors reflect your values, and move you toward your goals. This is an ongoing task. Simply working through the workbook is the first part; reviewing the progress in response in the workbook is an ongoing task.

Habit 4: Think Win-Win
Valuing and respecting people by understanding a "win" for all is ultimately a better long-term resolution. Your work in the workbook is done in the community of your support group including your partner. Sexual health isn’t a free-for-all, but sexual health may require difficult choices.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood
Talking about sexual health leads to a deeper understanding of yourself and others. Engaging in respectful conversations can create amazing intimacy, and profound transformation. Your primary source of information occurs when you understand other’s journeys are a reflection of your journey.

Habit 6: Synergize
Long-term recovery in sexual health can only be done in a network. One of the first and one of the last assignments both address developing and confirming your support network. It is often the task people avoid.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
I concur with Covey’s importance of maintaining a balanced program in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. I obviously add a fifth area of sexuality.

Habit 8: Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.
In a later book, Covey adds an 8th Habit. This habit isn’t too different from the 12th step. By finding your truth in sexual health, you attract and promote sexual health in others. Simply standing in your truth allows others to seek their truth.


To your good sexual health!

Yoga, Individual, Integrity, Intelligently and Sexual Health

While in Puerto Valletta, Mexico, for a well-earned vacation, I take time to attend Yoga as part of the vacation. (And, no, blogging isn’t work; it’s a type of journaling for me!) Today’s lesson was about being in the moment, a great thing to do while on vacation. The instructor also talked about how yoga is an individual practice that needs to be done with integrity and intelligently.

She explained that each student knows his/her body, and knows when to push the extra effort to fully enter the experience, and each student knows when to pull back. This is/must be done with integrity. The only one who truly knows is the student.

The individual practice done with integrity also requires intelligence. By this I understood intelligence to reflect wisdom, correct/good form, and staying at the edge of practice without going too far and hurting one’s self. Intelligence implies listening to the body, increasing self-awareness of one’s greater limits and personal limitations.

So to do these terms apply to sexual health. Your journey toward sexual health is YOUR journey. Only you know what truly expresses your heart of hearts regarding sexual health. No one else can tell you. Others may guide you, but you are the one responsible for the final choice. And sexual health requires wisdom, knowing and respecting your inner truth.

Namaste

Importance and Difficulty of Integrity in Sexual Health

Link to Dan Savage and Mistermix


The above link describes another public scandal regarding sexuality. What both Dan Savage and Mistermix highlight is the importance of sexuality in a person's life, the desire for sexual satisfaction, and the danger when you're not able to resolve these difficulties in your relationship. Integrity in sexual health requires personal responsibility to declare your personal definition of sexual health. Sometimes this requires challenging the stereotypes of what others think you should want, and choosing your path toward sexual health.

Your Truth and Sexual Health

Truth liberates – but it must be your own.
OSHO

The last few entries on sexual health (including authenticity and repression) highlight the importance of understanding YOUR truth regarding sexual health. The process of clarifying your values, and the behaviors consistent with those values is YOUR truth. Identifying the thoughts, feelings and high-risk situations that impair your life is a process of discovering YOUR truth. One of the major assignments in the workbook is the personal definition of sexual health. The focus of the assignment is to help your discern YOUR truth regarding sexuality. My experience suggests a client is much more successful with sexual health when it reflects YOUR truth.


OSHO (1999) Emotions: Freedom from Anger, Jealousy and Fear. OSHO International: New York.


This is currently available as a free kindle ebook on Amazon. (The kindle version is no longer free, updated 11/16)

I need help with my luggage. Another scandal

In the last few days, another scandal broke regarding homosexuality and the Christian right. In short, George Rekers, a Baptist minister who provided testimony against gays, served on the Board of NARTH (National Association of Rehabilitation and Treatment of Homosexuality), and on the board of a predecessor to Focus on the Family was seen with a sex worker who advertised on RENTBOY.COM. The unfolding discussion can easily be Googled on the net.

The focus of my blog is on three parts.

First I feel anger and frustration at the ongoing hypocrisy of members in the Christian Right. A long laundry list is found here. Sadly, the frustration is often expressed through the comment “here’s another one.”

Second, I do have compassion for Dr. Rekers. Here is a man who has denied a major part of his identity for all of his life, only to have the issue exposed in a scandal. Dr. Rekers' behavior can easily be understood as a form of psychological defense: reaction formation --attack the parts of my life that I hate. His stance against homosexuality over his lifetime takes on a new understanding in light of the scandal. It is easy to see how his avoidance grows over time.

Third, I want to use Dr. Rekers’ experience to highlight the need for personal sexual health in the treatment of sexual compulsivity. (While I don't label Dr. Reker's behavior as sexually compulsivity, I do want to acknowledge how this defense is sometimes present in individuals who do struggle with sexual compulsivity.) A component of sexual health is to be able to talk about all aspects of your sexuality. The conversation doesn’t need to occur in the national press, but I stress the importance of talking about sexuality with your support network. Needless to say, sexual health implies the congruence between your identity and behavior. Please review the recent conversations on integrity. In promoting sexual health, my hope is that you can find that congruence. If it isn’t there, please seek help and support.






Citation:
I found the euphemism on Andrew Sullivan’s Blog “The Daily Dish.”

Sexual Health and what I SHOULD

One of the more difficult aspects in moving toward sexual health is clarifying YOUR personal definition of sexual health. This journey builds on yesterday’s discussion on integrity. What do you really want in your life? Today’s nuance highlights how many times we are told what we SHOULD want. Listen to the language in statements by others, the frequency of “You SHOULD…..” is amazing. All of our marketing is based on “You SHOULD.” Much of our sexuality discussion is based on “You SHOULD,” or often, “You SHOULDN'T.”

In this blog, I will not go into an extended conversation about the sources of you should (i.e., review culture and sexuality). Instead, I invite you to increase your awareness of all the ways you are told, “you should,” or “shouldn’t” or more importantly, when you say, “I should” or “I shouldn’t.” There is a significant pressure toward conformity in sexuality. In reality, anything is possible. Sexual health requires that you choose. I choose to live my life this way; I choose to engage in or not engage in these behaviors. It is your responsibility to assertively confront the pressure toward conformity. What you choose is truly your choice.

Integrity and Sexual Health

Integrity (Merriam-Webster): The quality or state of being complete or undivided.

One of my major goals in fostering sexual health is to help individuals move toward integrity in the realm of sexuality. A number of important characteristics are identifiable by a person living in integrity.

1) HONESTY. You speak what you mean and you mean what you speak. In other words, if you relapse or act out, you're honest about what happened. Everyone who needs to know, knows. In terms of your sex history/timeline, everything is on the table.

2) COMPELTE. When something happens, you are completely thorough about what occurred. You actively volunteer all information versus playing a cat and mouse game about not disclosing information. Remember, your support network is on YOUR side; it isn’t a game of gothca!

3) ASSERTIVE. Ultimately, integrity requires you to speak your opinion and beliefs. If your partner, support network, group or even your therapist wants you to do something, but you don’t want to, the key is to say so and be assertive in your communication. As you finish your personal definition of sexual health, it reflects YOUR needs, wants and desires communicated to your support network.

4) BALANCE. On a philosophical level, I believe integrity reflects balance. If something feels out of wack, say so. When you ride a bicycle, for example, you know when you are in balance. The same is true for integrity. You know when you are in balance in the realm of sexuality.

5) COMMITMENT. The classic saying, “When you fall off a horse, get back on.” applies to this characteristic. Are you willing to continue doing the work when a problem occurs?

6) ENDURANCE. The going will be tough; it will require energy to keep going when you feel like giving up. When in conflict, a desire to run away is normal but endurance requires us to stay in the conversation even when anxious or fearful.



Have a question? Or an opinion? Please email or post to http://sexualhealthinstitute.blogspot.com

Integrity in the recovery proces. Meaning what you say and saying what you mean

A few weeks ago (March 13) I talked about the role of discernment. Discernment is the process of deciding, choosing, and uncovering for yourself what is at your core and your personal truth. As part of the discernment process, integrity is essential. A quick definition of integrity is meaning what you say and saying what you mean. And for most people in the depths of addiction and compulsivity, all integrity has been lost. Trust of you by another person is built on your integrity. Early in the process, integrity is absent. Two recent examples in my practice highlight the importance of integrity.

A client who I hadn’t seen for many years let me know he celebrated 9-months free from meth use. In offering congratulations, I asked how was he able to stay sober. His response was “I discovered I wasn’t being honest about stopping. Yeah, I told you I wanted to stop, but I was still glamorizing the drug and sex.”

Another client talked about a recent use of pornography. He said “I’m not able to stop viewing porn. Oh, by the way, my wife thinks pornography is a problem, but I don’t. “

Both examples highlight the role and difficulty of integrity. Only when you’re transparent about who and what is important in your life, can you build integrity. It is imperative that you be radically honest in the process. Tell everything to your support network. If you engaged in a behavior, say so. Minimizing is a failure of integrity and feeds the acting out cycle. Sharing every interior/secret thought helps uncover the multiple rationales behind your behavior. Saying you want “A” because your partner wants “A” is a failure of integrity. Being honest about what you want, for example, reduces resentment.

Building integrity requires recognizing the disconnect between what you say and what you do, and then completing the steps toward honesty. It requires work, and conflict may ensue. There are ways to recognize the level of integrity in your life. Think about the following:

1) When someone asks, “How are you today?” do you respond with a bland response or with integrity? “It’s a good day” or “It’s a bad day.”

2) When you engage in a conversation about where to eat, for example, do you put your opinion out there, or simply “go along?”

3) When you struggle with a goal, are you sure that it is YOUR goal. Are you ready to put the work toward reaching the goal? For example, do you really want to loose the 15 lbs, or are you simply bowing to the pressures of culture saying you should when you really don’t want to do what is necessary regarding diet and exercise.

4) When your partner says, “stop that” do you agree with his/her request, or do you go along with the request to avoid conflict? For example, I agree to no porn. Or, I agree to engage in sex today.

A program of integrity versus a rigorous program.

A recent phone call prompted this post. The end result of the conversation was feedback that my program wasn’t “rigorous enough.” When I asked how things might be different, the individual wasn’t able to answer. When I reflect on the question and my response, I came to a clarifying insight. I affirm that my approach to treatment is not “rigorous.” Rather, my treatment approach emphasizes integrity.

Let’s expand on the two terms, rigorous and integrity. Merriam -Webster defines rigorous as: “1): harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment: severity (2): the quality of being unyielding or inflexible: strictness (3): severity of life: austerity b: an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty.” Explicit in this definition are the concepts of cruelty, inflexibility, and emphasis on rules and procedures.

Applying this definition to a treatment program, it is easy to imagine how many people desire the clinician to be in charge. I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve been asked “Tell me what to do.” “Is this OK?” or “what should be my bottom line behavior?” As a clinician I will provide feedback and suggestions, but I impose very few behavioral restrictions. When I do, the restrictions are usually around legal, ethical or health consequences. I might say “Remember Sen. Larry Craig? Engaging in public sex like you just described probably isn’t helpful.” Or, “Using the work computer to look at porn will get you fired.” And as a final example, “Unsafe sex puts you at risk.” To fall into the trap of “rigorous treatment,” in my opinion, sets up the therapist as the external control which is bound to fail. In motivational psychology, a long term consequence of external control is a decrease in compliance to the external limits. Slowly, resentment builds as the individual “fights” with the external limits. Eventually a total break might occur where the client’s resistance causes a rupture in the therapeutic relationship. One of my critiques of the “sexual addiction” approach is the risk of imposing an external code to create sobriety through rigorous compliance. This code is usually reflects narrow Christian values. Simply complete a web search and you’ll find many therapists treating sexual addiction using a 12-step approach with a Christian evangelical approach. In the long run, it is my opinion that this treatment approach will fail.

Instead, I emphasize integrity in my treatment approach. Merriam-Webster defines integrity at “1: firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: incorruptibility; 2: an unimpaired condition: soundness; 3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided.” Implicit in this definition are the ideas of wholeness, completeness, and unity. The approach also implies an internal local of control. Research in motivational psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that individual’s will create profound possibilities when internally motivated. When a person is internally motivated, they will do things not thought possible; they will run marathons for example because they want to make a difference in the world. Think for a moment of someone who has inspired you; their source of motivation was probably internally focused. My treatment approach is designed to help the individual create integrity in their life. The goal is to help identify behaviors, attitudes and goals that lead to wholeness, completeness and unity. This approach, however, is more work and intensive than simply following a list of rules. It also requires some trial and error which results in reassessment of the internal purpose. Following this approach, a client who has created an internal moral code of sexual health will be happier, more effective and ultimately “whole.” This is what I create in my treatment approach.

Furthermore, my commitment is to provide my services with integrity. My internal purpose evokes from me a level of interest in your progress that goes beyond the therapeutic hour. I try to help you develop a parallel internal purpose as defined by you. My role is to be a coach, advisor, teacher, and supporter. And it requires direct honest feedback which may sometimes feel harsh. But, paradoxically, you’ll be amazed at how often I’m “thanked” for being honest with my clients. In the end, my treatment approach requires from you a transformation versus a compliance with a set of rules. And in this transformation, unlimited possibilities are possible.

References/resources

Merriam-Webster Dictionary retrieved from http://www.m-w.com/

Visual Thesaurus retrieved from http://www.visualthesaurus.com/.