00:00As a woman. How do I know if I struggle with sex addiction? Welcome to the Real Talk Recovery podcast with the Therapy Brothers. We're brothers. We're therapists, and we know recovery. Bring your stories, your questions, your success s with Real Recovery.00:33Brenda, this is going to be a good topic today. I'm excited that we've got a caller that's willing to come on and talk about this. We don't often talk about it from this angle or this side of things, so I'm hoping it'll be really beneficial and helpful for a lot of people who are listening today. Yeah. It's actually a lot more common than you would think, but it's not talked about.00:51It's very taboo in many ways. And so to have a caller who's courageous enough to come on to discuss this, to talk about it, I think is really exciting. Yeah. Well, before we get started, Brendan, I want to kind of call you out on something. We were in Mexico last week and you ended up going and getting your hair put into braids. I thought the agreement was that because we now have our video on Spotify that you are going to keep your braids in for an episode.01:21So why are you looking all like, well, normal. I need you to understand something. An agreement is between two people, not just one. Hey, you look like a goofball. So now you're coming on. I was like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm good. Especially after you took them out. I saw the picture of him. You taking them out last night, and you looked exactly like Bob Ross. I got thick hair. I had this big Afro.01:51Yeah, but Mexico was good. It was fun to get some sun and just hang out with the family. Just got the best family. So grateful for everybody. So good times. Now we're back at work, back at just doing what we do. So with that, we have Claire on with us today. And Claire, I'll just turn it over to you for a minute.02:16If you could give just a little bit of a background of what's going on with you, give us some context and then ask any questions that you have. Thank you. So, yeah, my name is Claire, and I am a woman, and I struggle with sex addiction. And I'm still getting used to hearing myself say that because I've only been in recovery less than six months here. So my background, I started, like most addicts, being exposed to pornography at a really young age, nine or ten.02:51I was raised in an overly sexualized environment. I would say not just in my home, but my friends, homes and neighborhood. Lots of adultery, pornography. As a teenager, I could name by name at least six pedophiles in the neighborhood and who they were messing with. It was not a great environment to grow up on. And then to add on top of that, a lot of emotional abuse in my home.03:18So when puberty hits as a teenager, of course, I masturated a lot. But as a woman, a girl at the time in the 80s, I didn't know that's what I was doing, because nobody talks to you about your sexuality when you're a young teenage girl. So masturbation, of course, is a boy problem. So I didn't connect that until much later.03:45Eventually, I got married and things I was able to not act out for several years. But then things get hard in life. Of course, my husband is diagnosed with depression. Kids come along, which are a joy and a trial at the same time. But at that point, I started to fall back into some fantasy.04:12And at first it was kind of innocent. Just what if we lived here? What if this happened? That happened? And then I discovered romantic fantasy, which looks like taking men that I knew and then fantasizing about different things happening. And these weren't always sexual fantasies. They were primarily just romantic encounters, things like that.04:38And then one day, one of those fantasies comes real when one of these guys actually hits on me, and it starts an emotional affair that lasts about two and a half years. And then my husband finds out, and that ends. We move, I find another guy, start another an affair again, emotional husband finds out about that one that ends, find another guy.05:06It becomes a pattern there. With the third one, though, things get to be more challenging. My husband's losing patience with me, acting out with other men, and it's affecting my work environment as well. And so we end up in the Bishop's office, and I'm in full on denial because I don't want to lose this affair like I did the other ones. A lot of deflecting and rationalizing.05:36And I would look at the relationship and tell myself, well, I'm not physically attracted to this guy, so we're not going to have sex. So what's the big deal? But even as I would say that, I knew there was something wrong, because again, this was third affair. I was struggling to find happiness in my marriage with my husband. So the Bishop at the time tells us we need to get counseling, which we go and do.06:06And my counselor diagnoses me with PTSD and codependency, which are real things, and we start unraveling that. But there's no mention of addiction at this point, even though she knows my background. And then one day I'm sitting in the Bishop's office and he's checking in to see how things are going, and he happens to mention another woman that had come in to talk to him about being addicted to romance novels.06:38And I respond and say, yeah, that's total female porn, right? But I dismiss it because I'm not reading romance novels. And then a couple of weeks later, this conversation comes back and I hear the words, Claire, you're not reading the romance novels. You're acting them out. And that opened a big light bulb in my mind. And I started to look back at my behavior and was able to see a lot of the compulsive nature of what I was doing.07:09Big manipulations, trying to get these guys to act out those romantic fantasies with me. Right. So I realized this is a problem and decided, I'm going to end this affair. I'm going to end put up boundaries so that I don't start another one. But trying to end an addiction without the proper support doesn't go so well, right.07:36And so after I stopped those, the withdrawals hit, I started acting out morewith masturbation and some pornography use, which I'll clarify as I was texting with my husband. But more and more, I was only sending him a few of the images and deleting most of the content because I was embarrassed at how frequent this was happening.08:03And it was proof that I was acting out without him. So it became hidden. And then I was at the wrong place at the wrong time and found another guy. And this affair was more physical in nature. And at that point, I realized they really had a problem. And it got to the point where if I went back to see this guy again, it was going to be full on sex.08:33And that was something my brain couldn't handle. And so I realized I needed to get some help. I was terrified to tell my husband about this other affair. So I reached out to the Bishop, and we started working on some things with him. But the withdrawals were there pretty significantly. And then there was one weekend where I'm at home on a break from work, and I'm sitting on the couch, and I'm physically shaking from the withdrawals.09:06This is about four weeks after I last seen this guy, and I wanted to go back so bad. And then my stomach is, of course, all tied up in knots from anxiety. And I'm having trouble focusing because my body is just throwing pornographic images into my head because it wants to get high. And I'm sitting there thinking, I've got to go back to work in an hour, and I can't function like this, so I've got to do something. So I pull out my phone and I start looking at Internet porn.09:38And immediately the withdrawals calmed down. It was a really weird experience. And then providentially about a week later, I was at a meeting for Church, and I saw a woman sitting in the audience that I knew from work. We'd work together, but we weren't particularly close friends and had this impression that I needed to go and talk to her.10:07And within five minutes of our conversation starting, we were sharing intimate details about our shared experience with sex addiction. And she became a key support for me to get into recovery. She helped me through the physical withdrawals, which lasted about three months, really, and then help me talk to my husband and get that in the open and get through some of the hard times.10:35And so that's where I'm at now in recovery, but still struggling with the aftermath. So questions. Yes. Claire, a question for you. When you kind of connected with her, did that start process of engaging in twelve step or therapy or just recovery work? What was your recovery work like?11:05Yeah. So talking to her was huge because it felt like finally someone got it. I have been in canceling and had been in counseling for over a year, but my counselor was more focused on the codependency issues than the addiction.11:32I've been trying to build a support group, but as a woman, one of the barriers I ran into is people are hesitant to really go there with you into that sexuality and the problems there. So it was hard to connect with people. So this woman that I found, she became hugely helpful because she did get it.11:57And that helped me put a lot of things into words that I was able to express with other support groups. But she did get me into a twelve step programwith her. And then telling my husband and getting that open and honest conversations going was hugely helpful to recovery as well. So, Claire, all of this last stuff kind of has broken open in the last you said six months or so?12:32Yeah, over the course of the last year, pretty much. Okay. So up until then, everything was still kind of being done underneath the surface, kind of hidden. Am I hearing that right? The physical affair ended about five months ago, so it hasn't been that long. Okay.12:59All right. I got a couple of different directions in my head that I like to go. I'm sure Brandon has a couple, too. So I just want to ask you a couple of questions first just to kind of maybe try to gain greater understanding and also hopefully paint the picture of what I think you just described, the first question is in all of the forms of that you've referenced that you've called as acting out, which happens to include ranging everywhere from masturbation to emotional connection with other men outside of your marriage to physical acting out to pornography to romance novels, all of that stuff, what is the payoff with all of that stuff?13:42What's the benefit that you've gotten over the years from doing those things and engaging in those behaviors? Huge amounts of dopamine. Right. Just feeling high a lot of the time. So being able to escape reality is it fair to say that? Number one.14:11So basically what you're saying is it was used to increase pleasure in your life, get high, but it was also being used as a medicine for whatever the painful parts of your life were that you didn't want to tolerate. And it was a way to numb those out or cope with those things to cope with that pain? Very much so. From my childhood had learned that with the emotional abuse, to bury all of those negative emotions, that my emotions didn't matter, that I wasn't important to people only in how I could help and serve them a lot.14:44A big message that my worth as a woman lay in my sexuality and my physical appearance. Okay, so the acting out helped to numb out a lot of stuff. Okay, great. You're kind of getting to my next set of questions, too. Is that what we're starting with here is what you would call the acting out, all the ways you acted out. But what I'd like to get to is what was pushing the acting out and what the cost was of the acting out itself. So in the aftermath of that acting out, it sounds like you got the dopamine rush, you got the physiological release.15:16You got kind of that emotional coping that you taught yourself from a really young age to be able to manage and control on your own. But what did it do? What was the price you paid in terms of how you saw yourself? I have struggled with feelings of low self worth from a young age, and I think there was some shame there, but that was buried really deep.15:49I struggled to feel like what I was doing was wrong. But a lot of it, I think, stemmed from feelings of low self worth. So even when these men would pay me attention, I would downplay it and think, well, they really don't see me that way or like me that way.16:16And then I would have to act out more to prove that they did. If that makes sense, it makes perfect sense to me. It's like a catch 22. And that's what I'm trying to get out, is that for most people, it's that belief system of you said low self worth, and then you also had certain things you were just startingto mention on I need to get my value through sexual ways as a woman. That's what I should be all the should, should like, I should do this, I should do that, I should do that. I'm not this. I'm not that I'm not that those core beliefs were pushing things, and then they lead to a second set of core beliefs, which says, and this is where the catch happens.16:51On the inside, I feel terrible about myself. On the outside, I've got to portray myself in a different way, which means I need to put on a mask because there's a belief that if people really see me the way I see myself, they won't love me. Everything that I believe about myself will be true. So now I've got to perform, and sometimes we over perform, which it sounds like you did. Sometimes we Underperform, but then in that over performance and under performance, now we're stuck between these two places where on the inside we feel worthless. On the outside, we're projecting something else.17:20But now we can't even accept all the goodness that we've got because even if people see it on the inside, we go, yeah, if you only knew me, and that leaves us in an isolated place, it leaves us actually alone, still craving connection with other people. And so then we continue to pursue that connection in a non vulnerable way in the acting out kinds of ways. And then it forms its own sort of like negative spiral where we end up trying to cope with that worthlessness and life, the stress and anxiety and boredom and hunger and stress and everything else that goes with life.17:54And it becomes this negative spiral that we end up always going back to the same kinds of things to cope with. And most people focus on the things they do to cope instead of all of that other belief stuff that's underneath it. And I believe that really the bigger picture here is that whole cycle and not just the acting out. Yes, I would agree with what you're saying there.18:23Let me see if I can say I'm saying the same thing as Tyler, just another way here. We focus too much on the payout and not enough on the void. So what that means is we focus on, hey, you have an addiction. And the reason you have an addiction is because you get a dopamine hit which numbs out the pain. Right. So that's the payout of the addiction. You get a dopamine hit that numbs out the pain. Also the codependency.18:52We could look at that. You're codependent. You have not enough boundaries with your husband or other people. And it's like, well, we need to fix that as a therapist. We need to get you not to be codependent, but really, what's the void? What's underneath all of this behavior? These are the symptoms. What's the actual problem? Right. And Claire, you actually were getting there. You were talking about that, saying, I've never really felt wanted or desired.19:24I don't know how you said it, Claire, but that right there is really interesting to me and the core work in the full recovery process, I think, Tyler, the first thing I would do is help Claire not live in compulsivity and get out of the behaviors that's causing destruction. That's like the first step. But that's not the real recovery work.19:56The recovery work is saying, okay, I do these things because I feel this way. Why do I feel this way? And how can I get myself to not continue to feel this way in my life? So I don't have that void. Is that making sense? Yeah. And I can speak a little bit more to that. I mean, there was a lot of fear over, asyou say, letting people see the real me.20:26And I am very beautiful and talented as a person. And so it was easy to throw out this outward perception to the public and have them buy into it. And I got a lot of praise for all of the things that I could do and how beautiful I was and that kind of stuff. But yeah, underneath not feeling at all like that's who I really was.20:53And so as you talk about the recovery, one of the big pieces to that was facing the fears of just letting my husband alone in to see that I'm not what I'm portraying myself as. Once I was able to stand in that uncomfortable place of having that vulnerability with him, that went a long way to helping me get things under control.21:28How did he respond? Well, it's interesting, and I think you've mentioned this before on your other podcast. The emotional affairs were much more hurtful than the physical one because the physical affair happened with a guy that my husband, when I told him that he could see very clearly this was the result of the addictive behavior, whereas the other emotional affairs were with guys that he did feel threatened by and thought that I could potentially leave him to go pursue relationships with them.22:05And by that time, he actually has a better therapist, I think, as far as what he's been able to get access to, as far as support. And so when that one was disclosed, it went a little bit better than some of the others. So as you're talking, Claire, what is the emotion that's bubbling to the surface as you're talking with us right now?22:43That's a good question. I'm not very good at naming my emotions yet. And feeling emotional. Is that all I can tell you right now? Okay. The reason I'm asking is because I actually think that even in the call we're having right now, there might be something beneficial happening towards your recovery, which is that even though if you can't necessarily give it a name yet, that'll be part of the work.23:10You're here and you're having a conversation and you're doing it in a way that is actually quite vulnerable. But you're tapping into some key principles here that I think illustrate. They can illustrate some of the directions that you or anyone else who's listening who might be in a similar situation to you can be going to overcome this thing. That's more than just the sobriety piece. So Brandon recognized and I recognize it in what you're saying, too, that in your situation, there is a compulsive nature to this addiction.23:42It's like, okay, there is something that I am pursuing, and I do need to set up some what we call bottom lines to change the acting out part of it. But that's level one. And the bigger, deeper stuff here is I need a few things in my life to be put into play that can help shift the whole trajectory of my life. And I look at what I call the four cornerstones of recovery with clients sometimes, and I think you've actually got a few of them going, but I want to help strengthen some of them as well.24:13The first one is that bottom lines piece, which is I need to stop the behavior that's continually hurting me and keeping me stuck in this cycle. So I'm going to set new lines around living that will protect me from not acting out in those ways. That's called a bottom line. The second piece is that I need to engage in something that we call daily, or Brandon refers to it sometimes as recovery capital.24:41But I need to go on a pursuit every day to find and connect with the best part of myself. Instead of running from the bad part of myself all the time, I actually need to create space in my life and prioritize it to pursue some daily meaning. It's self care. It's the pursuit of an emotional experience with my best self or with God or with other people. I need to get busy living instead of just running from all the pain in life.25:09The third thing that I teach is mindfulness, which is that I actually need to start to learn to get in touch with my brain, my body, my thoughts, my emotions again. I need to start learning to live life on its terms again. And then I can develop some coping skills to go with it. And then the fourth thing, and this is the one that sounds like you found like this water in the desert with this friend at Church is you need a team.25:32You need a few people in your life that can be there to learn with you, to hold the things you're going through and to provide you with perspective and empathy and understanding, people who will be willing to keep your confidence and not share your stuff. And then people who will ultimately respect your choice in your agency, because ultimately that's what recovery is about, is choosing the life that you're going to live and choosing that with all the consequences that will come.26:02And if you get those things in place, then you have a structure, then you have sort of a scaffolding to start moving into all of the other beautiful places that recovery can lead. In hearing you, it sounds like you've got little pieces of it. Being a woman in this world is a little bit more difficult because the resources for the quote, woman sexual addicts don't seem to be as abundant as resources for a male sexual addict.26:32But the principles are still vitally important. Even though you might not have the same amount of groups to go to or twelve step meetings or anything else, the principle of having the right team is still in full effect here. Yeah, that's definitely been my experience. And part of the reason why I've come on here is because hearing this friend of mine share her story with me was such a big help because I could relate to it.27:14I have pieces, like you say, of a lot of those things, that there are challenges to it when you have experienced the trauma. And being able to trust people is really hard art. I'm working at it, though.27:38But it is a challenge to build that support team to where it needs to be and then to maintain it is a bigger challenge of being continually being able to reach out and keep them engaged. I tend to do more of the reaching out when I'm in big trouble, but not as much just on an everyday basis.28:06Claire, to get to your question, I want to ask you a question from left field here a little bit. What was your relationship like with dad? That's a very good question. It was problematic. My father, looking back, I think he also had a sex addiction. I got very mixed messages from my parents.28:32My mother was very much shame based in her view of sexuality, very distant emotionally, not a lot of hugs. And I love you from mom. Dad was the opposite, but almost to the opposite extreme in saying that sex is great, you should have sex before marriage. And even though we're raised LDS, a very loose ideal of sexuality. So I got a very mixed message.29:02But my father was probably the one that I bonded with more than mymother. So you're bonded with dad? Mom was disconnected. Parents relationship was not at all good because my dad had a pornography addiction and struggled with that. And my mother was very much frigid, I guess the old term for it. And so there was a lot of conflict there.29:34So your mom was like in the midst of betrayal, trauma, while dad was kind of just acting out, doing his thing, but very kind of just trying to be connected to you while mom was kind of shut down. And we also throw in the fact that dad was emotionally unstable, very quick to anger over stupid things, very volatile, volatile.30:03So as much as I love my father, I was afraid of him at the same time. Okay. And how many kids are in your family? Seven. I'm number two. What number are you? So I do relate to Tyler's stories about feeling like you're the good one and have to maintain the caretaking for the rest of the kids because my older sister was not stable either.30:34So you're the number two of seven. You had to be the good one. You had to protect your family. Dad was very confusing because it was like, he loves me, but Yikes, he's scary. And mom wasn't that confusing. It was just like, I don't know, if you do love me, you're shut down and not connected. Is this accurate? Okay, so as a child, how did you internalize that?31:02What were the messages that beliefs about yourself that you started to internalize. The big one was that my feelings didn't matter to anybody. But what I had to say, I remember very clearly thinking, nobody cares what you have to say, Claire, with friends at school and at home that I didn't have anybody to help me through any concerns and trials and struggles, I had to do it on my own.31:41Yeah. I'm hearing insignificance there that you felt pretty insignificant and not seen. And so it's no wonder that here you are as an adult with opportunity to be seen, to find connection to that's very enticing. Yes.32:07And it's very easy to get that kind of attention, especially from men when you're very pretty. And it's there a lot. So it's very hard to turn that down sometimes. It's right there for the taking, that very thing that you craved all growing up as a child. It's right there for the taking. But then the problem is it comes with a bunch of consequences that you don't want.32:38Right. And it doesn't fully fill that void. I'm insignificant. Oh, we connect on kind of this almost fake level because we're not really in an intimate relationship here. And in the end, I just feel guilty and shame about hurting my husband and hurting my wife and a lot of shame about hurting the other wives, the spouses of these men.33:08That's something that I've actually reached out to a couple of them to apologize, and one of them will never talk to me again. But one of them was very forgiving. And I do feel a lot of guilt and shame around that. Is it all married men?33:36And I think that's because they feel safer than the single men, because they do have an underlying core belief, as I said, that sex outside of marriage is wrong. And so I don't want the sex, but I want everything else that comes before that. Right. And that's my girlfriend has the same issue, she's like, I don't want to have sex with these men, but I want them to want to have sex with me.34:02And then if it gets to that point where they're pushing for something and the married men that I tended to act out with also have those same core beliefs. They're Christian men. They're like, but it's like this exciting thing outside of the marriage. But we're really not going to go all the way to the full on sex. I think it's very telling.34:30I don't want sex with them, but I want them to want to have sex with me. There's a lot there that you can look at and say, wow, there it is. Why is that so just intoxicating and enticing for you. And when we talk about your childhood, Claire, you can totally see it. Right. So let's back up a little bit. Let's back up to these faulty core beliefs. I'm not significant.35:01I'm not really seen. I need to protect those around me because I'm somewhat of a family hero when those things are going on, how do you actually heal those wounds and know that you are seen? You are significant. You don't have to protect everybody.35:25How do you go through that process to actually get to that place where you can let go of the beliefs that the trauma has caused? I want to add a couple of things before she responds. Brandon, you mentioned a few of the things that were like the family of origin things going on. Listen to this. Like what? You guys just broke down. It's actually pretty amazingly adaptive for a little girl to figure out what she just did, even though that little girl is still operating in an adult body right now, I'm looking for my father's approval because he's the one who can give it sometimes, but he's also dangerous because it's volatile.36:02So now I get into a Christian based relationship with my partner that's supposed to be stable and secure, but I'm still needing to pursue outward connection, outward validation from these male figures. But I'm doing it in a way that I'm not going to get myself too burned because they're married and I can't let it go too far. And I have this moral code that I'm trying to live by, but I'm still operating from the place of needing them to tell me that I'm good enough in some way by getting this validation or this attention.36:34And then you have what you said at the beginning of the episode, which is that even outside of your just immediate family, you were highly sexualized. You were exposed to a lot of things as a child. There were messages being sent about sexuality to that little girl at the same time. It's really a no brainer that that little girl kind of came to this point of going like, oh, this is how I navigate. Like, this is how I avoid as much pain as possible. This is how I use myself to try to be valuable.37:04You hear the term code of penanacy? It's not like, oh, this stuff starts to make sense now. It's like codependency was a swear word when you started therapy, but now it's like, oh, yeah, naturally. Like that little girl. That little girl was trying to figure those things out. So back to Brandon's kind of original question. Where's the real work here? What would be the first steps to take if all of what we're talking about is true? Which I don't know, Claire, you'll probably have to think about all this, too.37:42The step I'm taking now is that vulnerability. And I'm opening up to some of my siblings that I haven't opened up to before and telling them what's going on with me. And that's been helpful.38:01And like I say, with my husband opening up, trying to be more authentic with just everybody in my life, really. But if you have other suggestions,well, what you're saying, Claire, is spot on. So the way to counteract, like, faulty core beliefs and shame messages that we encourage as children is to first get conscious of how we're living and you're there, you're getting conscious of what's going on with you.38:37The next step is acting opposite to that shame. So it's consistent acts of courage. It feels backwards like to be vulnerable to your siblings and with your family. Well, this is the place where you felt insignificant, not heard and not seen. So why get vulnerable with them? Well, there's a reason why for you. And the reason is this is if I go get vulnerable and honest and authentic with them and they don't care or they reject me or they open their arms and give me empathy, any one of those things can be very therapeutic for you.39:14Because if they reject you and you realize I'm okay, even if they do reject me, I'm good. Like, I got God here. I'm okay. Or if they get empathetic and support you, that feels good. I got support. I got love. I'm okay. That's good. But if you just stay hidden in your hole and just scared to really face the shame, then the shame will still drive the show, so to speak, drive the ship.39:45And so when you turn around and you look at it in the eye and you face it and you step into it, it takes the power away from those things, those systems that have been there to try to protect you. It takes the power away from that. And then all of a sudden, you get to experience what I believe is God's love. You get to experience real healing.40:09And while you're talking this most recent experience. So this physical affair, the man that happened with is not in a good place. He's not a good guy. Really abusive, drug abuser, it's pretty bad.40:32But I catch myself every once in a while wanting to go back to that, even though I know that's who he is, because that's where I feel comfortable and that's where my self worth is. Right. And there were often times when I was dating I would have guys that would be very much gentlemen to me. And I remember feeling absolutely uncomfortable with that. And I would push them away and go find the loser to hang out with in the basement at the dance.41:07Yeah. For good reason. In addition to what Brandon is saying, Claire, I just can't get it out of my head. This image of a little girl with your face on her, there's a little girl inside of you in an adult body right now that is still living according to the old beliefs, so much so that it's preventing her from accessing real, true love, real, true value.41:40What Brandon was saying was God's love. And it's the beliefs that are still ruling your life now that are preventing that little girl from getting what she needs. And if we were to take our conversation today. And if you were to picture a picture of yourself, take yourself back to being twelve years old, go get a picture of yourself at twelve years old and look her straight in the eyes. What does that girl need that she didn't get when she was twelve years old because she just didn't know any better.42:16She needs love and support. How is she going to get that? By asking for it. I'll tell you, Claire, how she's not going to is by getting unhealthy men to want to have sex with her, right? Yeah, we laugh at that.42:43But that's the fake drug, right? That's the thing that prevents you fromactually getting there. But it's so scary. The beautiful thing that she has is that she has you as an adult woman who's starting to see these things.43:05And now what you get a chance to do as an adult and these are these acts of courage that Brandon is talking about is that every time one of these old beliefs manifests themselves, every time that you feel the urge to want to go back to the jerk that's going to use you, every time you hear that word in your voice that says I'm insignificant, or any time you feel like you're not good enough or you need to perform in order to be valuable, every time you recognize those urges and feelings in your body or those thoughts in your head that now can be used as a signal to spend some time with the little girl and express to her how much you love her, how much God loves her, and how much she's valued and how grateful you are that that girl figured out how to survive the childhood she had and that she doesn't need to believe those things anymore.43:54So now the autopilot that seems so scary gets to be the catalyst for a new way of being in a new practice. But Claire, let me walk you through what Tyler is saying. You're triggered into calling this guy. Let's say I just desire that thing that he gives me, right?44:22That unvulnerable validation thing that he gives me. So now you in recovery and you working through your shame would go to someone like your husband if your husband's healthy. I don't know your husband, but vulnerably open up and say, man, I've been triggered and I just want some love and I want some love from a healthy man. And I'm scared of it.44:51I'm really scared of it. But you know what? I want some connection and some love. And I'm noticing that I'm triggered and I want to go about this the unhealthy way, but I just want to be open with you. That that's where I'm at and that's how I'm feeling. The old you would not do that, right, Claire? Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. That's the last thing you want to do, right?45:19But instead of shaming yourself for having those triggers, you take those triggers and you say, oh, this is the opportunity I have to turn it on its head. I have an opportunity to get vulnerable, to get authentic, to allow God to allow others to love me, because that's what I'm needing right now. Your triggers. Sorry about you answered your own question earlier when you said that little girl's got to ask for help. The way that she's asking for help right now is through those triggers.45:51And if you see it that way, you can meet her with love and compassion and non judgment and make new choices instead of the old story, which is like, oh, I shouldn't have these thoughts. I'm terrible. I can't believe I still want to go do this stuff. I'm codependent. No, it's like, oh, the fact that all of this is here Is my little girl screaming for somebody to come to her and give her some love.46:19That makes sense. Claire, we're running low on time, but I just want to say you have been so courageous to come on. I've tried to start sex addiction groups for women I don't know how many times.46:40And every time they fall apart Because we don't have enough women who are willing to be vulnerable enough to actually talk openly and face their shame and overcome their addiction. And so it breaks my heart Because I want to create programs and provide support for women struggling withsex addiction, Because I know they're out there, but they don't have the courage that you have. So I just want to give you just a huge thank you for coming on.47:10I know you're helping so many women who are listening, who are thinking, gosh, I'm not alone. I'm not alone in this shame. I'm not the only person. You aren't alone. I'll tell you, even in the betrayal trauma groups that I run for women, after there's a long enough time of trust established and there's safety in the group, Those women who are going through betrayal trauma will also start to say, hey, I've got my own issues.47:39And the fact that they've carried that with them, even though the trauma recovery work fuels more of the trauma, and it prevents them from being able to set boundaries and do other things Because they're still feeling their own sense of, like, shame and fear. You're absolutely not alone. Even though I know that in your world, sometimes you feel that way. And, boy, you really did a lot of good by coming on today, so thank you, Claire. Thank you.48:08All right, you guys, if you found this helpful and if you think it would be helpful for anybody else, don't be shy to share it. I know it's a sensitive topic, but it might be that catalyst to actually really help somebody and have a wonderful day. We'll see you guys later.
