The first seed of kindness we can sow into the heart of our spouse is words of kindness. Let’s start with responding kindly. For whatever reason, often when we get familiar with our spouse we can lazily move into being gruff, sarcastic, or demeaning in our responses to just normal questions. Our answers seem sharp instead of seasoned with grace.
Withholding Spiritually - Intimacy anorexics can be very religious or a spiritual leader, but they rarely connect spiritually at home.
Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
The losses for the addict, who disclosed or was caught in adultery due to his addiction, are real. Even though they are the guilty party, they still experience losses.
Withholding Sex - Not all intimacy anorexics withhold sex, but most intimacy anorexics withhold intimacy during sex when they do have it.
Take all your effort and focus it on one area. Let’s suppose you are working on being more kindness. Take one of your goals towards kindness and stay focused, measuring your progress. Stay consistent in your goal towards kindness until you think you have achieved your goal. Then take on another goal. Measure that goal, stay in Blitzkrieg mode until you achieved each goal you set for yourself. Now you are going to see some real results. You can see and measure that you are actually much more kind than you were weeks or months ago.
“We admitted we were powerless over the sex addict and that our lives had become unmanageable.”
The internet is now an integral part of our society. We not only have internet access at home and work, but people are on cell phones almost everywhere. The internet represents the absolute best and worst of humanity. You can discover so much about addiction recovery and so much about addiction in a very bad way.
Withholding Praise - Intimacy anorexics do not regularly give praise to their spouses privately.
Love never fails. The very nature of God is in our marriage. He is able to sustain us and mold us through this miracle we call marriage. When we both manifest His nature toward each other, we do not fail.
Withholding Love - Intimacy anorexics actively withhold love the way their spouses like to be loved.
Spouse attacks are almost like panic attacks. You’re all of a sudden focused on all of the negative that they are or all the negative that they have done or haven’t done over all the years of the marriage. Yes, that’s normal, it happens too many of us now and again. These spouse attacks can be more prominent under periods of financial, sexual or personal stress in the marriage. They can happen the day after a big emotional confrontation. They can also move in when you realize your spouse isn’t going to change the way you want them to change and you begin to feel hopeless about it.
BRAIN BUZZ PORN ADDICTS This type of porn addict is literally taking the highest level of endorphins and opiates that sex gives and attaching them to the object of pornography instead of a real person. These endorphins and opiates are like “brain cookies.” They give your brain a release of chemicals which make you feel good and block your pain receptors. The highest chemical releases your body produces is an orgasm. You attach to what you look at during your orgasm. Simple right? Remember Pavlov’s dog? Ring the bell, feed the dog. Porn is the bell and you are the dog. You taught your brain to salivate, hunger for, and desire porn. You did this and the good news is you can stop it as well. I have stopped being Pavlov’s dog for over thirty years.
Blame - The intimacy anorexic will blame their spouse for the problems in the marriage.
Busy - Intimacy anorexics stay so busy that they have little time for their spouse.
God wants every addict who takes the journey and does the hard work of recovery to be fully restored as a son or daughter of the Most High God and be rid of all slavery thinking and behaving. His desire is to see them restored to him and to family members and friends.
Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Be wise about who you let praise and touch you on a regular basis. Women know that men like praise and touch, and some will use this knowledge to seduce you. If a woman praises me, I am cautious. If she continues, I am extremely cautious because deep down I know I’m not really that amazing. As a married man, if a woman touches me, especially if it’s on a regular basis, I definitely set clear boundaries.
Blaming is important to the survival of the entity of intimacy anorexia. Blaming is the insider game. The anorexic really believes that circumstance, their spouse’s abuse (real or imaginary), family of origin issues or personality is to blame for the lack of intimacy, criticism or sexual disinterest.
I don’t know if you realize this or not, but next to God, you are the loudest and most consistent voice your spouse will hear throughout their life. So you decide what kind of voice your spouse hears. You can choose a kind voice that supports and encourages your spouse by putting wind under their wings or another not so positive voice. You can choose a silent voice or a gruff voice that discourages, degrades, and minimizes your spouse on a regular basis, but this is not the best choice.
Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
Luke 15:20: “So he got up and went to his father.”