Sex Addiction Recovery: Dealing With Your Emotionally Triggered Wife

Early recovery from sex addiction is a tumultuous time, your recovery foothold is shaky at best. So how do you maintain that precarious foothold when your partner is on the emotional rollercoaster? You know the rollercoaster I’m talking about; the one where she is angry, sad, fearful, or an ever shifting mix of all; the one that seems to come out of the blue to you; the one where her facts and logic just doesn’t make sense to you; the one you don’t really understand but have learned to fear.

How do you survive her rollercoaster &, more importantly, how do you help her through it so the seeds for a tiny bit of trust are planted? If the Serenity Prayer seems like your only lifeline for getting through the rollercoaster, let me teach a new strategy for helping to calm the emotional storm and begin to repair your relationship.

First of all, accept that you won’t understand, so don’t make the mistake of saying you do just to appease her. Let me tell you a secret about your wife; she already knows you can’t understand. She may not like that fact, but when she’s not on the rollercoaster she does get that. She also knows you can’t fix her or stop her pain. What she needs from you is not to make the rollercoaster go away, but for you to get on the rollercoaster with her and help her deal with the pain until it eases. Remember when you were a kid and banged up your arm? You probably gently cradled it with your other arm. You held it until the pain subsided. When you can tolerate hearing your partner‘s pain it is like you are cradling her heart and helping to hold her pain until it recedes.

Seven Ways To Earn The Love of Your Acupuncturist

So you’ve decided to start making some positive changes, and have finally scheduled that acupuncture appointment. You know that this practitioner is going to become an important part of your journey to well-being, and you are going to be seeing them on a regular basis…so you should probably try to start off on the right foot with them. Here are some pointers on how to begin the acupuncturist/patient relationship on the right track:

1. Show up. Don’t just blow off your appointment without calling. Most practitioners charge a “no-show” fee for this, but even if they don’t-it’s still unacceptable behavior. It’s one thing to forget, but simply deciding not to come in because you’ve changed your mind is wasting your practitioner’s time, and taking that time away from another patient who might really need it.

2. Try to be on time. I understand that things happen, but if you are 30 minutes late for every appointment, perhaps you should shift your appointment time to a time that better suits your schedule.

3. Be honest. I will be asking lots of questions about your health, and even if it seems that these questions have nothing to do with why you are here, everything is connected. If you don’t answer these questions truthfully, I will have difficulty forming your diagnosis-which means that your treatment may not be as effective.

4. Be patient. If you have had a health issue for 20 years, it’s probably not going to resolve overnight. I will discuss what I think you will need, treatment-wise, during our first session. But please don’t give up after the first session if you don’t get immediate relief-acupuncture can sometimes take time, just like Western medicine!