Healing despair 5. Healing shame There is hope for recovery from sexual addiction. Recovery is a process that occurs over time. Recovery and healing are not one-time events. Sexual addiction takes many years to develop and will require time for genuine health to be restored. It s much like losing weight: it takes time to gain weight and will take time to lose it. It is in learning how to have real closeness with others authentic intimacy that we begin to heal. To do that, we ll need to spend a bit of time understanding the early wounds that created our intimacy disordered behavior (addictions). So sex addiction recovery is about far more than one-day-at-a-time abstinence; it s real work we do on who we are, how we were formed and how we communicate with others. For couples who seek to heal these hurts, we know that there needs to be a new foundation built from telling the truth the whole truth. We call this process full disclosure. I (Debbie) work with wives and partners of men who struggle with being relationally faithful. Behaviors include masturbation, fantasizing, pornography, flirting, prostitution, massage parlors, sexual affairs, emotional affairs & other acts of infidelity. She makes a firm commitment to change after experiencing a crisis moment. This could be the diagnosis of a sexually transmitted disease, an arrest, attempting suicide or anything else that causes the addict to commit to change. The shock stage. For the next six to eight months, the addict has admitted to the problem but is in shock and disbelief. Until 1543, the accepted understanding of the universe put the Earth at the center with all other celestial bodies circling it. This thinking aligns with our instinctual tendency to see, and put, ourselves at the center of our universe. Only after Copernicus published his model was it accepted that the Earth, and the rest of our solar system, revolves around the sun. EMDR is a trauma-focused therapy that helps patients identify and process their trauma. Often, trauma gets stored in the right side of the brain (the emotional side). By stimulating both sides of the brain, EMDR shifts the traumatic memory from the right side of the brain to the left side (the logical side).