Dorothy hayden lcsw


Dorothy C. Hayden, Mental Health Counselor / Therapist in New York, NY 10003

Dorothy C. Hayden

Counseling for Couples NY

Sex Therapist New York City

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Ms. Hayden has been interviewed on HBO, CNN (Anderson Cooper/360) and ABC’s “20/20”. She holds an M.S.W. from New York University and an M.B.A. from Baruch College.

She took six years of advanced clinical training from the Post Graduate Center for Mental Health, the Object Relations Institute and The Training Institute for Mental Health where she studied Couples Counseling. Ms. Hayden is currently a student at The Imago Relationship Therapy Institute after which she will be a Certified Relationship Therapist.

A specialist in treating sex addicts and their partners, she has authored 40 articles and one e-book about the subject. She is the author of “Help for the Partners of Sex Addicts” (online). Prior to going into private practice in 1995, Ms. Hayden held jobs for 10 years at various alcohol and drug rehabilitation facilities in New York City. In 1994, she was awarded a CAC (Credentialed Alcoholism Counselor).

Dorothy is a popular presenter in New York on such topics as couple relationships, sex addiction, ADD and achieving sexual potential. She is affiliated with The New York State Society of Clinical Social Workers and The Post Graduate Society.

Ms. Hayden lives in Manhattan with her husband and “Molly”, her apricot toy poodle.

Practice Areas/Issues Treated
 Counseling / Therapy
 Addiction
 Coronavirus/COVID-19 Issues
 Couples Therapy
 Group Therapy
 Marriage & Family Therapy
 Marriage Counseling
 Men's Issues
 Relationship Issues
 Stress Management
 Women's Issues
Licenses/Certifications
 Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)
Bio:
Dorothy Hayden, LCSW, with over 15 years of experience in treating sex/porn addiction is considered a "thought leader" in the field. She has published over 20 articles, has written an e-book on Sex Addiction Recovery and has appeared in such media as "HBO"; "CNN's Anderson Cooper 360" and "ABC's '20/20'" as an expert in the field of sex/cybersex addiction. Trained in sex addiction with Patrick Carnes, Ph.D, she attended advanced psychoanalytic training in Manhattan for six years.

1. Freedom from repetitive, self-damaging compulsions
2. The ability to make choices about how to use your sexual energy
3. Heightened self-esteem and the elimination of shame
4. More satisfying human relationships
5. Better job performance
6. Healthy, mature, satisfying sexuality with a cheered loved one
7. Increased time and energy for setting and persisting in meaningful goals in the areas of intimacy, professional achievement and recreational activities

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The Cost of Sex Addiction: Loss of Friendships/Dorothy Hayden, LCSW

dorothyhayden03 / March 4, 2016

Reclaim Sexual Sanity:  Find Recovery Now by Calling 212-673-5717 for an Initial Consultation.  See www.sextreatment.com for 35 full-length articles about sex addiction and for details about my private practice.

“In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. They keep the young out of mischief; they comfort and aid the old in their weakness, and they incite those in the prime of life to noble deeds.”                                                                 –Aristotle

One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.  

 George Santayana

Something that strikes me in my work with sex addicts is the amount of time porn takes away from them.  Porn addiction can easily steal 4-5 hours of your daily life, with some folks reporting whole weekends being spent at the computer screen.

Usually one of the first things that get replaced in sex addicts’ lives is friendships.  Yet, friendships can be at least, if not more, important than a person’s immediate family.

Tom Rath, author of “Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford To Live Without”,  makes the point that if you ask people why they became homeless, why their marriage failed or why they overeat, they often say it is because of the poor quality, or nonexistence, of friendships. They feel outcast or unloved.

Rath undertook a massive study of friendship, alongside several leading researchers. His work resulted in some surprising statistics: If your best friend eats healthily, you are five times more likely to have a healthy diet yourself. Married people say friendship is more than five times as important as physical intimacy within marriage. Those who say they have no real friends at work have only a one in 12 chance of feeling engaged in their job. Conversely, if you have a “best friend at work”, you are seven times more likely to feel engaged in your job.

A close friend is a mirror of your own self, someone with whom you realize that, though autonomous, you are not alone.

Spending time with friends is fun, but it may also yield a multitude of long-term physical and emotional health benefits. Studies show that healthy relationships make aging more enjoyable, lessen grief, and provide camaraderie to help you reach personal goals, among other things. Maintaining positive relationships should rank up there with healthy eating and exercise as a necessary investment in your health.

Friends and Well-Being

A number of studies have highlighted the importance of friends and good relationships to health.  Here are some of the findings:

  • Socially engaged adults age more successfully. According to surveys of women over age 60, those who are socially engaged and visit with friends and family throughout the week are happier as they age.
  • Friends can help you achieve your weight and fitness goals. Encouragement and just sharing goes a long way to boosting your willpower.
  • Happiness is catching. If you have a friend you consider to be happy, you are more likely to be happy and you are able to spread that happiness to the people around you. A study of 4,739 adults who participated in the Framingham Heart Study between 1983 and 2003 showed that people tend to cluster into happy or unhappy groups, and happiness appears to spread not just to those immediately inside the social group, but to their contacts as well. Having happy friends who live less than a mile away was an especially powerful predictor of happiness.
  • Building a circle of friends makes you happy. People who see themselves as a leader in their social circle are happier than those who see themselves as outsiders — another reason why actively building  relationships instead of waiting for the phone to ring is important.
  • Friends lessen grief. A series of interviews with parents who lost a baby during pregnancy or immediately after birth showed that those who felt they were receiving social support from friends or family were better able to cope with their grief. The most welcome forms of support were simply being physically present, listening, and offering sympathy, encouragement, and practical help, such as making meals or funeral arrangements. In contrast, feeling socially alone tends to worsen grief.
  • Being social boosts your immune system. Being socially engaged leads to more positive emotions, which in turn may actually boost your body’s immune system and reduce the physical signs of stress, say health experts.

It’s also important to be a good friend yourself, providing others with as many of the benefits of friendship (infectious happiness, social support, someone to confide in, food in times of crisis) as you can. It feels good to help others, and that only adds to your own self-esteem and happiness in sexual recovery.

If you’re interested in treatment, feel free to contact me at [email protected] for a free 30-minute phone consultation.

See htpp://www. sextreatment.com for 35 articles on sex addiction

sex addiction therapy nyc,  sex addiction treatment nyc,   porn addiction therapy nyc  therapy for sex addiction nyc   treatment for sex addiction nyc    sex addiction therapy    sex addiction treatment

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March 4, 2016 in Porn Addiction.

Masochism. Perversion or spiritual growth?

Author: Dorothy S. Hayden
Dorothy Hayden, Chartered Social Worker,
New York-based psychotherapist specializing in BDSM,
fetishism, sexual addictions.
She received a master's degree in social work from New York University,
and then completed an internship in psychiatric residency.
Source: Pleasure Club

Masochism began to be regarded as a perversion only a hundred years ago. The bad reputation of masochism began at the end of the 19th century with the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing, who placed a chapter on masochism under the heading "General Pathology" of his famous work "Psychopathia Sexualis". A few decades later, Freud viewed masochism as a manifestation of infantile sexuality, retarded development, and childish irresponsibility. Since then, masochism has been firmly hidden in the ghetto of "sexual perversions" and has been considered by medicine as a pathological deviation that needs to be cured.

But over the past thousands of years, for a variety of civilizations, the connection between masochism and spirituality was inseparable. For psychologists, masochism is a disease, but in religions up to the 19th century it is a healing. Our ancestors were well aware of the spiritual, physical and emotional value of masochism. For them, he was an important part of their picture of the world: the combination of a tormented soul, ecstatic delight, severe pain and unbearable passion brought them closer to merging with something much more than their own egos.

In the Western religious tradition, the desire to be beaten reflects the desire for punishment and usually implies humiliation, shame, pain, submission and worship. In monasteries and churches, we see people in an essentially masochistic pose: detached, bowing their covered heads, kneeling, prayerfully folded their hands. The compilers of the New Testament often mention flagellation and bodily pain. The Passion of Christ, an image that has firmly entered our collective subconscious for two thousand years, includes binding, scourging and crucifixion as part of submission to the will of a higher power and subsequent ascension to a transcendent spirit. The writers of the Psalms whipped each other daily. Among the Jews in the middle of the first millennium AD. it was customary to scourge each other after prayers and confession of sins.

In monasteries and convents, flagellation was commonplace. Many Christian saints, including St. William, St. Rudolph, and St. Dominic, very often ordered their followers to whip them on their bare backs, and then themselves took it upon themselves to whip those who had just suffered it as a punishment. It became almost a necessary element in the act of submission to the Lord. Many of God's people have preached that scourging can save souls from hellish torment. They believed that through humiliation and pain lies the path to true humanity.

All early Christian orders used flagellation as part of their spiritual discipline. St. Teresa, founder of the Carmelite order, subjected herself daily to cruel flagellation. The rod and the whip brought her into a state of mystical ecstasy. The Carmelite abbess Katerina Kardonskaya wore iron chains on her body for a long time, which cut into her flesh. She scourged herself with chains and hooks regularly and violently, sometimes two or three times a day. It was said about her that through the torture of the flesh she experienced unearthly delight and divine visions. The same was practiced by the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits. Obviously, a significant portion of masochism was an integral part of Christian monastic life.

At the beginning of the 11th century, novices from Italian monasteries introduced the practice of self-flagellation and left the walls of the monasteries into the world, into the streets and into churches. We are talking about the sect of flagellants, the founder of which is St. Anthony. They brought themselves to a frantic desire and realized it through the most severe torture and physical self-destruction. Flagellants marched from one city to another in procession, recruiting new followers along the way. Sometimes their crowd grew to tens of thousands of people, they went to the church, surrounded it around, and carried out a highly ritualized punishment ceremony. Stripped to the waist, they sang hymns and prostrated themselves in prayers of repentance. The culmination of the ritual was a brutal flagellation that involved everyone and sometimes lasted for hours. In the end, these emaciated people with their backs whipped to the meat threw down their bloody whips and fell face down on the ground in a fit of humiliated remorse. They achieved bliss. For the participants in the scenes, this practice really became a means of spiritual transformation.

But Western culture does not have a monopoly on the use of humiliation and pain for spiritual education. In Zen monasteries, teachers beat novices with sticks, and achieving enlightenment after being hit is a classic of Zen Buddhism. Often disciples would sit cross-legged on cushions seven days a week for 14 hours a day, subjecting themselves to the excruciating agony of complete immobility and enduring unrelenting pain for long periods of time. The followers of Hinduism submitted themselves to the will of the guru, the Buddhists of Tibet implicitly served the lama. An early Tibetan saint named Milapara, in order for the teacher to whom he came to take him as a student, on his orders, performed hard, dirty and painful physical work, without asking a single question.

So, it turns out that the whole history of the world is filled with examples of the close connection between masochism and spirituality. What binds them, what leads to spiritual transformation in masochism? Why has masochistic submission been demanded by spiritual guides for centuries?

One possible answer to this question has to do with the notion of "rugged individualism" mentality introduced by Horatio Alger. The goal of modern psychotherapy is to promote the development of a strong, capable of fighting, problem-solving, rational personality. Be responsible. Exercise control. assert yourself. But at what cost? Strengthening the ego is only one side of the coin. In order to experience the fullness of being, we need passivity and humility as well as self-confidence. The mystical experience of a miracle is as necessary as rational problem solving. We need a connection both with the strong, loving, compassionate, competent side of ourselves, and with what Carl Jung called the "shadow" - the weak, limited, vicious, sinful side. To get out of the self-centered worldview, to give control, not just take it, is a need. Masochistic submission, emphasizing our weakness, insufficiency, imperfection, allows our humanity to reveal itself in its true fullness. Because humanity requires to pay tribute to the dark side of life along with the light side. Penitent sinners were aware of this need for suffering. They knew that it contained pride, which often clouded our eyes and made us rely too presumptuously on our abilities and capabilities. This was known to both Christian and Eastern mystics. "Humiliation is the path to humility (It is no coincidence that the words are related: humiliation (humiliation) and humility (humility, humility) - lane), and without humility nothing pleases the Lord" - these are the words of St. Francis of Assisi.

BDSM strips the person of ambition, self-confidence and success. The ego obeys the Master, the Dominant, the higher spirit, the Lord. Whether it is submission to the Dominant or the will of God - it is still submission, what lies at the basis of masochism. The components of masochism - the desire to serve, surrender, renunciation of one's own sexual, emotional and physical independence - make a person a slave to a man, woman or God. The subjugation of this passion is divine self-destruction.

Another similarity between masochism and spiritual trance is that both come from the desire for liberation, oblivion, getting rid of the burden of one's own personality with its conflicts, worries and limitations. In earlier, not so secular times, this could be called the joy of mystical ecstasy, through which the soul is freed from dependence on the body, and the individual merges with the higher spiritual essence, dissolving in it.

In submission, a person is simultaneously freed from restrictions, transcends social prohibitions, and weakens, is subjected to belittling and humiliation. Face to face with the truth about the eternal suffering of man, it can safely be called both a flight in agony and a great spiritual career.

Cybersex addiction: a case study. Dorothy Hayden, LCSW (2016)

Article Link

By Dorothy Hayden LCSW 04/28/16

Intense sexual pleasure as an escape from unwanted inner experiences.

Following the pattern that has been set by other potentially problematic behaviors and activities (gambling, shopping, eating, eating and using substances), the relatively new area of ​​Internet-based sexual activity has created another challenge for people and society. Like other behaviors, the vast majority of people who engage in "cyber sexual" activities (pornography, live webcam masturbation, sending sexual texts, interactive online sex parties, etc.) do so, sometimes, finding these activities to be enjoyable distractions that are ultimately not as satisfying as closer ties. For others, however, the ability to engage in cybersex activities inexpensively and anonymously can potentially harm lives and destroy de facto relationships similar to other forms of addiction. Dorothy Hayden has been working with sexual compulsives for almost as long as cybersexuality has existed. Here she presents a case study highlighting many of the paradigm's key features... Richard Juman, PsyD

When Steve arrived for his first session with me, he was visibly unkempt and confused. Holding his head, he did not come into contact with me and, when he sat in the chair, was inside and had nothing to say. He eventually revealed that he had received a demotion and that his wife had filed for divorce. He appears to have been severely depressed around these losses.

Steve reported that he once indulged in alcohol and drugs, but due to a serious accident at work, he stopped using drugs. However, over the next few months, he found that his urges to masturbate increased. He found that if he did not act on these urges, he would remain "horny" all day long and would not be able to focus on his work or pay attention to his wife when she was talking to him. He was constantly busy with his sexual fantasies.

Steve felt lifeless and empty, lacking energy, interest, or opportunities for enjoyment. The only thing that gave him a sense of aliveness was the sexual encounter. A few months after his wife announced she was leaving, he found his sexual fantasies and masturbation urges to become more and more overbearing. He realized that if he didn't masturbate, he would remain "horny" all day, which would make him feel restless, irritable, and unhappy.

Soon enough, Steve discovered that pornography was not enough to sexually arouse him. His use of digital devices to achieve sexual stimulation escalated. He found that being locked in a fantasy and the rituals that preceded the sexual assault was just as convincing as the actual sex act, perhaps more so. His emotionally charged high was supported by dopamine-enhanced searching, downloading, chatting, texting, sexting, and other sexual behaviors. Each new video, picture, game, or person released more dopamine, helping him maintain long periods of excitement in all his gaze, search, fantasy, and anticipation.

Steve reported that he could spend endless hours feeling intensely aroused without becoming physically aroused or approaching orgasm. His search for the perfect video, image, or partner caused him to disengage and take his mind off life's priorities, relationships, and life commitments as effectively as heroin, cocaine, or any other mood-altering substance. Cybersex was indeed his drug of choice.

After a year in treatment, Steve agreed to go to a Narcotics Anonymous (SAA) meeting. He found comfort there knowing that he is not the only person in the world who engages in such sexual behavior. He felt supported and appreciated in a way that he had never been in his life. For the first time, he felt like he belonged somewhere. He began to feel that he could talk to people and that people could share with him. Most importantly, he reported, he was learning how to be himself and fit himself into social situations.

Of course this affected his treatment. We began to analyze the costs and benefits of our sexual behavior.

At this time, Steve made a big breakthrough. His denial broke, he clearly saw the damage he had done to himself and loved ones. This included:

  • Isolation from friends and family/reduced intimacy with a perfect partner
  • Broken trust in your relationship
  • Increased stress from living a two-faced life
  • Loss of income from demotion and possible job loss
  • Partners lose self-respect and self-esteem by not being "alive" to fantasize porn pictures
  • Emotional neglect of children
  • Sexual dysfunction (erectile dysfunction)
  • Loss of interest in hobbies and other healthy activities Self-extinguishing
    1
    1 due to lack of sleep and exercise

Life Story

Steve was the first of three children, with two younger sisters. Prior to his birth, his mother had a miscarriage five months pregnant. Steve described his mother as "deceptive" - ​​warm and inviting one moment and refusing the next. She adored Steve. He was an apple-eye that couldn't be wrong. However, she had high standards, and when he failed to meet them, she told him with contempt that he was disgusting, noisy, and boorish, and sent him to her room for hours.

Steve recalled that his mother had a "terrible" attitude towards men and often complained that they were "beasts" - loud, rude and only interested in sex. She often undressed in front of Steve and left her bedroom door open before going to bed. When he was afraid, he often crawled into bed with his parents. This continued until his father left the family when he was 12 years old. He remembered that he had been in bed with her and she was wearing a flimsy nightgown. Steve reported that he always had sexual thoughts about his mother.

Steve's father was a kind, sensitive and depressed man when he was sober, but when he drank he was loud and aggressive. By the time Steve was three, his father was rarely sober. Also, he was abusive to the whole family when he drank, but he was especially abusive to Steve. He mentioned from time to time that Steve's birth was neither planned nor wanted. Steve remarked that his father "always made sure I knew what an asshole".

Steve's father left the family when Steve was nine years old. Steve felt abandoned and feared that his father would never return, but at the same time, he was also afraid that he would return and shoot them all. He also felt responsible for the breakdown of his parents' marriage.

Clinical procedure

Steve's primary emotional experience was intense, burning shame, from which sexuality gave him his only relief. He did not live up to his parents' expectations of him and failed to live up to his own. Living in a family where he was either idolized or humiliated, his shame became internalized, that is, an integral part of his personality.

He had primary shame from living with his family and secondary shame from his addiction. Every time he had an orgasm, he was left with shame and self-hatred. It's a shame not to be able to control your behavior despite your best efforts.

Steve's low self-esteem and sense of self was partly due to his feeling that his father didn't want or appreciate him, partly to his mother's erratic and narcissistic reaction to him, and partly to his divided and sometimes amorphous sense of identity. Harold's mother made it difficult for Steve to develop a healthy male identity by devaluing his father, criticizing Steve when he acted like his father, and devaluing men in general.

His experience with the 12-Step program helped lessen that stigma, and the sympathy and understanding I offered him also helped alleviate his stigma.

Treatment was divided into "first order" change and "second order" change. The "first order" change is meant to stabilize his behavior. He was sent for a psychiatric evaluation to rule out comorbid mental disorders. The doctor put him on a low dose of Prozac, not for a mood disorder, but to help him deal with his obsessive sexual urges.

We then proceeded to the cognitive-behavioral regimen to create a relapse prevention program. He wrote a series of "triggers" - internal and external events that preceded his sexual play. He learned to avoid high-risk situations. Alternative coping strategies were then developed for each trigger. Then, ways to control cravings and impulses were discussed. He saw cravings and fantasies as signals of inner distress. He could more easily observe and verbalize his internal states, rather than simply responding to them with physical action. In addition, we discussed ways in which he could deal with omissions and relapses.

Simple behavioral changes have been put in place. He traded his smartphone for a regular mobile phone. The computer was placed in the family room. A filter was placed on the computer that removed the erotic material. He set up a family contract for an internet service. When he had to use a computer, he limited himself to specific times when he checked his emails, etc.

Steve and I discussed in detail his relationship with his own emotions because negative emotions are often used as fuel for acting out. Treatment focused on learning to tolerate negative emotions without using sex to alleviate them. Knowing how to deal effectively with strong feelings is essential to sexual self-control. The question of immediate satisfaction was discussed.

A critical part of the Relapse Prevention Plan works to recognize and challenge cognitive biases. Sex addicts have many cognitive distortions about themselves, about women, and about sex. I asked Steve to write down what he thought, and then write down next to them an alternative, more realistic thought that he was supposed to read several times a week.

Because Steve has been isolated for so long, we have been working on basic communication skills and he has agreed to take a confidence course. Both of these tasks made him feel more comfortable in the world with people.

Couples Counseling

One of the reasons Steve entered treatment was the threat of his wife's divorce. Although their relationship was in shambles after years of his getting used to the behavior, he still loved her and longed to have her in his life. Sarah, for her part, was torn apart by Steve's behavior. After spending so much time in the basement engaging in "deviant" sexual behavior, she felt lonely, ignored, unimportant and neglected. Her self-esteem suffered knowing that her husband preferred to spend time in front of a computer screen in the company of a fantastic man with whom she could not compete.

She felt a deep sense of shame about what was going on in the family, which reinforced the fact that she was hesitant to tell anyone about the situation or her feelings for her because she wanted to protect Steve from the humiliation of the situation.

A combination of devastation, resentment, betrayal and loss of self-respect set the stage for Sarah to start dealing with another man. Her motives were both to maintain her sexual self-esteem and to get back at Steve for betraying her. Sarah did not continue to do this business for a long time, because she still felt betrayed by Steve.

Steve's performance had a detrimental effect on the couple's sex life. Sarah, feeling she didn't "fit" with her female fantasies, worked to make her especially attractive and initiated lovemaking much more often than she once had. She was wearing sexy clothes that she thought Steve wanted. In some cases, Sarah performed sexual acts that she found disgusting because she thought he would enjoy it. She did her best to convince him that he "didn't need" to look at these "other women".

Sarah didn't realize that no mortal person would ever be able to handle "erotic haze" - the dopamine-enhanced, highly aroused state that a sex addict enters into when he's acting, which really has little to do with sex with a real woman. A real person can never compete with fantasy. She also didn't realize that she wasn't responsible for the situation, that Steve's condition was due to childhood trauma, and that he carried emotional wounds with him long before he met her.

In treatment, Sarah conveyed that it was not the sexual behavior that hurt her, but the lies and secrets that surrounded the behavior. The thing is, she didn't know if she could forgive. She doubted she could trust him again.

For years, Steve told her she was "crazy" when she suspected something. She needed to accept that she hadn't caused the problem and that she couldn't control it.

For a number of years, Sarah, like many women before her, became obsessed with "spying" on her assistant; repeatedly checking computer hard drives, smartphones, texts, videos, webcams, emails, etc. to see if it's not working. She said she felt crazy when she did this, but she kept trying to gain more control over the situation, which made her feel powerless.

Sarah agreed to start attending S-anon, a 12-step sex partner program, where she met women who were able to give her support and empathy. At the same time, she began treatment with the help of a therapist whom I consulted while they both continued couples therapy.

Psychodynamics

One year after starting treatment, Steve announced that he was stopping treatment. I encouraged him to talk about what led him to this decision. Our research revealed his fantasy that I would punish and humiliate him for "failing" by being so self-confident. Further work showed a connection between this fantasy and Steve's shame about his fall from grandiosity and his need for help, his envy and resentment towards me, and a number of emotionally significant childhood experiences with both parents. Steve's ability to discuss these things in a safe environment allowed him to see me less as a bully and more as a stable and stabilizing mentor who could help him get out of the mess he now knew to be his inner life.

Effects of treatment

As the treatment progressed, Steve began to realize that these temporary fantasy-based sexual encounters were not what he was really looking for, as they did not satisfy him or satisfy his needs for intimacy .

Treatment then took over the damage caused by his relationship with his parents. We took a close look at the messages he learned as a child that affected his well-being as an adult. Some of them were:

  • He was not good enough, not attractive, and he did not belong
  • He experienced threats of rejection, neglect and impartiality
  • Parental perfectionism

in your life the process of mourning caused by these messages. As an adult, he deliberately challenged messages with new messages that reflected his self-image. Most importantly, he got his "borrowed shame" back. Both of his parents were wounded souls with their own low self-esteem and shame, which they passed on to Steve. Steve has made up his mind that the shame is not his; it belonged to his parents, and he gave it to where it belonged, to his parents.

Steve grasped the idea of ​​forgiving his family. He saw forgiveness as something he did for himself because living a life of resentment was too painful. This was demonstrated when he went to visit them. The visits were shorter and his interactions with them were more relaxed and less angry. He accepted them as misguided people who did their best to educate him.

Three years after starting treatment, Steve made a huge change in his life. He continued to come to therapy and he was active in Sex Anonymous. He had a network of supportive friends and developed new hobbies. He trained regularly. He and Sarah did well. They adhered to a "sobriety agreement", which consisted of a list of behaviors that he adhered to. Over time, he showed her that he could be trusted again.

Steve still had cravings, but he had skills to handle. He failed several times. However, due to the relapse prevention work we did, he did not go into a full blown relapse and he realized that this meant he had to make some changes to his relapse recovery plan.

His self-esteem has increased. He was no longer a victim of self-hatred and shame. He felt comfortable in his presence. Through his participation in his 12-step program, he was satisfied to be a member of a caring community and help others.

The therapy changed his outlook on life. He went from being an immature, narcissistic person who viewed others as "objects in need of satisfaction" to appreciate them as people with needs, thoughts, and feelings. He learned to be a good listener and to be sympathetic. As a result, he developed satisfaction with having a network of close, supportive friends, including and especially his wife.

After a couple of couples' consultations, bitterness and anger were put behind them and, thanks to their separate therapies, they learned to be "allies" in the treatment. Each of them claimed that, having gone through their crises, they enjoyed deeper, richer and more sexual relationships.

Conclusion

Love and sex are part of the human condition and are therefore a concern for the clinical community. We need those of us who work with the clinical population, especially young people, to be familiar with the implications that digital technology has on human sexuality.


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