If you’ve ever dealt with a sex addict or love addict, you are familiar with the experience of asking yourself ‘What world do they live in?” In your attempt at understanding them, you find that everything in their thinking is topsy-turvy. Their approach to affairs is so alien to what you’re accustomed to.
It’s a bewildering experience when that happens. When that bewildering experience happened to me, something a physician working with me shared helped. Dr. John Wamble told me “To understand a sex addict, you have to take your brain out, turn it totally around and then put it back in your head.” So when you understand what you’re about to read, know that I’m doing exactly what Dr. Wamble said. The concept itself is not mine but it made sense to me and helped me in my quest for understanding the world of sex addict.
Sex addicts are like the fish who don’t know they live in water. They think their experience of life is normal. They do not see that they have a problem.
It took me a little bit of pondering to make sense out of what he told me, yet once I grasped it, I began understanding what I was dealing with. Their way of thinking and doing things is very different if you’re not accustomed to it.
An old country idiom captures the idea as well. “Hang by your heels and the whole world looks upside down.”
I included love addicts since they are so caught up in their search for ‘true love’ that sex for them is a way of getting their needs met on par with shaking hands in greeting people. The notion that there are limits and boundaries means nothing when they’re searching for love. I included them because although love addiction and sex addiction are different, they can be intertwined such that the two go hand in hand.
In the case of the sex addict, the affair is nothing more than ‘getting their fix’. The affair contains no commitment or special status beyond being their latest source for their fix.
Living with either a love or sex addict is draining. It literally takes the life out of you in your efforts at dealing with them.
The longer you struggle with the addiction, the larger the burden you’ll find yourself carrying. If you find yourself scared and bewildered by these kinds of behaviors, you need to take care of yourself for a change.
Going through the turmoil is traumatic. Returning back to normal requires you deal with the trauma that the addiction brought. You may have been stuck so deep in the addiction, that you wonder if there’s even a way back.
If you have these kinds of concerns, I encourage you to download the video on “Overcoming Affair Trauma.” In the video, you’ll learn ways of turning off your hyper-vigilance and reducing the anxiety that has been plaguing your mind and emotions.
Even if the affair happened years ago, you may still be carrying scars that it brought into your life. Download it now and begin your own recovery from the damage done.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
