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.”
Some of you are struggling with self-will. You don’t want to submit to a person or a process, even if these could free you from your current addiction. Overvaluing your opinions and will can make your road to healing longer and more painful for both you and those who love you.
When you’re preoccupied with the one you love it’s almost all-consuming. You wonder what they’re doing, thinking, feeling or experiencing while at the same time you’re working, in class, just doing chores or other activities. Then you become preoccupied with past conversations together, hugs, kisses, notes, or things you did together. You go into an almost timeless state reviewing the movie of your relationship and pushing pause to think and feel about this or that moment.
When someone does not believe their marriage is a miracle, a separate creation of God, they walk in various degrees of being deceived. What I mean by deceived is we believe something God doesn’t. A deceived person could look at a child and see him or her as a number, instead of a miracle made in the image of God. In the same way, a married person can be deceived by sensing their marriage as less than an amazing miracle. One of the characteristics of a married person who has a degree of deception is that they have no awe of their marriage. To them, it’s just a marriage. This person is rarely aware of all the miracles it took for them to get married or to stay married. A deceived person might live their life as if their marriage is a legal arrangement, a mutual living situation or even worse, something to be distained. Take a few moments thanking God for the amazing miracle of your marriage.
Step Six: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character."
The comments or dialogue is what happens to the anorexic after connected sex. The spouses state that the anorexic “gets cold,” “leaves me physically or emotionally,” “gets angry,” “gets very distant,” “critical” or “picks a fight the next day.”
Many of us have had things done to us by others. Often, we have done things or allowed things to happen to ourselves or even simply abandoned or neglected ourselves.