Old dogs, new tricks
During the course of 3 decades, I’ve helped a lot of people build their businesses, retrieve their sanity and sense of well-being after getting involved with a borderline disordered lover, recover from sex and/or porn addiction, dismantle their anxiety and panic attacks, and heal childhood wounds that have undermined their self-esteem lifelong.
Acute discernment is needed when someone reaches out for help at the very start, because while it’s hard to believe, an extraordinary number of people don’t actually want to get well. Determining who does and doesn’t, is a crucial element during an initial phone interaction, because if you can’t ask the right questions and sense someone’s level of commitment to doing the kind of work that will grow and heal them, you waste your precious energy and time on a dead-ended, hapless human who’s considerably more comfortable with misery, than joy!
Sex addiction is simple to repair. It requires a different skill-set than the average psychotherapist possesses to treat it, but it’s not difficult to resolve. I recently got a call from a seventy year old man who spends thousands of dollars hiring sex workers to gratify his prurient appetites, yet told me he didn’t think he could afford my help to resolve his shame-producing sex addiction. He routinely self-flagellates after acting-out his libidinous impulses, thanks in part, to a Catholic upbringing.
I called bullshit on him, saying that humans always find the money they need for the things they really WANT. He’d rather waste his financial resources on guilt and shame-producing behaviors, than bother trying to get well. It’s plain as day to me.
As hard as it is to understand, millions of people are afraid to be happy. Happiness is completely foreign to their life experience, and it not only feels uncomfortable if they feel a few minutes of it, they’re immediately drenched in anxiety, waiting for “the other shoe to drop,” as their repetitive, childhood programming instantly kicks in and erroneously reminds them that; “after good, always comes bad.“
Whenever this child felt relatively stable or even calm and good for a brief period, something painful always followed, to rob them of their glee. Hence, an entrenched belief system evolved, and they grew into adulthood, distrusting light, good feelings, in preparation of shock, surprise and emotional devastation that would surely follow.
If one grows to adulthood and gets involved with a Borderline Personality Disordered lover, this childhood pattern is consistently repeated, because after the calm, loving, intimate moments, a Borderline experiences anxiety about feeling attached to you, and picks a fight, distances, or cheats on you with your best friend (which may or may not be an exaggeration).
In all the years I’ve helped people grow a healthy sense of Self, I’ve noticed that it’s not one’s chronological age that determines their capacity to hold, integrate and make good use of work they do with me. It’s the age of their soul.
Old souls have been thru many generations of pain already, and want to be finished with it. Young souls (spiritually speaking) are not ready to heal. They literally lack the motivation and determination that’s needed to transform themselves, and many believe they “haven’t yet suffered enough.” Misery to these people, is familiar and therefore less threatening, than the (opposite) amorphous “unknown,” which only the most courageous will allow themselves to gradually explore and experience.
The meek and chronically self-destructive, will never achieve contentment and happiness. When someone says to me, “I can’t afford your help,” what I hear is, “if I’m to do this work, I might be free of my shame and pain~ which have become the only constant companions I’ve ever known!”
In short, they don’t want to give them up~ and who can blame ‘em? https://sharischreiber.com/outgrowing-your-addiction/