Recovery and Intimacy

Recovery and Intimacy
 
Often sex addiction develops as a misguided attempt to find intimacy.  It never works.  When the acting out behavior is curbed, the need for intimacy resurfaces and it is important that addicts deal with this.  Addicts who don't develop truly intimate relationships have higher risk of relapse.
 
The trouble in developing intimacy in recovery is three-fold.  
 
First, having compartmentalized parts of self and lived in secrecy and isolation, recovering addicts often find that they lack the skills needed to tolerate the social and emotional conditions of intimate relationships.  Those skills must be learned - and like all learning, that happens a bit at a time.  
 
Second, addicts almost universally have difficulty experiencing empathy.  In recovery addicts must first develop empathy for themselves and then extend that to others.  This too takes time, work, and close attention to history.
 
The third obstacle recovering addicts must overcome are blocked emotions.  Let's say the emotions are sadness, fear, anger, passion, disgust, excitement, surprise, and joy.  Few addicts arrive at recovery able to experience and express that full range of feelings.  Some can only experience one or two - some none at all.  Blocked emotions block intimacy because emotional connection with other people allows us to feel vulnerable which is an essential precondition to intimacy.  Blocked emotions keep recovering addicts disconnected from others and so isolated from intimacy.  
 
This clarifies the work of recovery in several very concrete ways.  To move into recovery addicts need to develop interpersonal skill and empathy for self and others, develop awareness of and the skills to appropriately express the full range of human emotions, the ability to experience vulnerability and so connection, all in the interest of developing the capacity to experience intimacy.  
 
Recovering addicts who take the time and care to do this work do better in the long run and have fuller and more satisfying lives.  
 
By Insight Coaching, LLC & A. Michael Johnson Ph.D. PLLC