Sex Addiction: B.S. Excuse for Not Thinking?

Now that I've gotten your attention, here's an interesting and provocative (check the comments section!) article by Michael Bader* in AlterNet:

Whether applied earnestly or as a PR gloss for bad behavior, sex addiction is an increasingly common diagnosis. In my view, it's a problematic one. It's ambiguous, hard to define, blurry around the edges, and an excuse for not thinking. If a married man has a lot of extramarital sex, is he necessarily a sex addict? If a seemingly straight man frequents restrooms for casual sex, is he an addict? How much pornography does someone have to look at, how many hours spent in chat rooms, hookers hired, to go from "hound dog" to "sex addict"?

Bader goes on to distinguish addictions from compulsions - addictions usually involve tolerance and withdrawal which are not present with compulsions - citing the example that anxiety around frustrated sexual compulsions is quite different from DTs experienced during alcohol withdrawal.

He adds that treatment modalities like the 12-step program which focus on behaviour modification alone, in the absence of any real inquiry into its underlying meaning, most often completely miss the mark.

Unlike alcohol, sex is a natural and normal part of human life. So is sexual fantasy. Unlike heroin, sex naturally engages issues of intimacy, power, autonomy, and love. Sexual arousal always has meaning. In fact, sexual excitement of any kind is impossible unless its mental and social context is specifically conducive to it. While the desire for sexual pleasure is natural, the how, where and why are not. Sexual desire actually begins in the mind and travels down. The "problem" of sexual addiction always involves the mind and the social world, never the desire itself.

Examples from his clinical practice illustrate how insights gained through examination of the underlying psychological dynamics enable clients to face their anxieties and empower them to make better choices.

The actual psychological reality is that the so-called addicts' desires and fantasies are perfectly understandable attempts to deal with anxiety and depression given the context of their personal histories, their painful and irrational views about themselves and about men and women, and their inability to imagine a healthier way of living. Once they’re helped to become aware of these meanings, they actually increase their self-compassion and are freer to exercise self-control.

He concludes:

Everywhere that sex enters the public arena, whether it be in education, gay marriage, Internet sex, or the hypocrisy of self-righteous politicians getting busted for their indiscretions, we see a worrisome refusal or inability to think about psychological meaning, and to instead reduce the conversation to either a morality play or a voyeuristic parade of gossip and speculation. Replacing the psychologically complex and intensely human drama of sexual behavior with two-dimensional labels like addiction is but one example of this trend.

Click Here for full article and comments.
~~~~
*Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco. He is the author of "Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies" and "Male Sexuality: Why Women Don't Understand It -- and Men Don't Either." He has written extensively about psychology and politics.
~~~~
~~~~
I've got you like a habit and I'll never get enough
there ain't no cure, there ain't no cure
there ain't no cure for love
- Leonard Cohen
~~~~

If I Knew Where The Good Songs Came From...

...I'd Go There More Often

Leonard Cohen:

"I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune."


In this PBS NewsHour Poetry Series interview, singer and poet Leonard Cohen discusses the difference between writing a song and a poem and explains why "out of the thousands who are known or want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes."

With characteristic directness and humility, Cohen shares his insights on fame, poetry and growing older. A short but revealing read.

~~~~
Well my friends are gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places where I used to play
and I'm crazy for love, but I'm not comin' on
I'm just paying my rent every day...



~~~~

The Inner Landscape of Beauty

The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Ċara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In this, one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.

John O'Donohue: Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you, and I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

Click here to enjoy this dialogue between Krista Tippett and John O'Donohue on the Speaking Of Faith website (podcast or transcript).

A moving exploration of beauty, God, time and friendship.
~~~~

The Inner History of a Day
by John O'Donohue

No one knew the name of this day;
Born quietly from deepest night,
It hid its face in light,
Demanded nothing for itself,
Opened out to offer each of us
A field of brightness that traveled ahead,
Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps
And the light of thought to show the way.

The mind of the day draws no attention;
It dwells within the silence with elegance
To create a space for all our words,
Drawing us to listen inward and outward.

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.

Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.

So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.
~~~~

We All Shine On

~~~
A rare treat (and a must-read) for Lennon fans and other awakened dreamers...
~~~
excerpted from The Cynical Idealist: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon, by Gary Tillery (Quest Books, December 2009)

~~~
What if a significant number of us were to agree that, starting next Monday, we would treat everyone we encountered with respect, compassion and love?

John Lennon realized, then propounded, that since as humans we have the ability to change our own habits and convictions, the only barrier to our living in a better world is agreement that we are committed to it. He implied the concept in "All You Need Is Love", "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)", and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". However, he crystallized his point of view in his masterpiece, "Imagine". In simple but resonating lyrics he sketched the framework of a harmonious world he and other dreamers had in mind, concluding with an invitation to the listener to join them.

Then he read a book called Mind Games....
~~~

This fascinating review in Reality Sandwich chronicles Lennon's ongoing quest for expanded consciousness and a peaceful society. Following the de-legalization of LSD in the 1960s, Mind Games authors Robert Masters and Jean Houston developed alternative approaches to mind expansion based on meditation, assisted trance and guided imagery. This work caught fire in Lennon's imagination.

To those who were beginning to believe that the spirit of the 60s had died, he was advising, don't give up, keep on, keep chanting the mantra of peace and love. Let's work together as an invisible army. We'll use the power of visualization - some call it magic - to project our image of peace in space and time. We'll create an "absolute elsewhere" in our middle, an ideal so detailed and realistic that our intentions will make it manifest.

This absolute elsewhere, given the name Nutopia by Lennon and Yoko Ono, was revealed at a press conference in 1973.

Nutopia was a proposed emotional, intellectual and spiritual union of people. It would be an imaginary union, but certainly no more imaginary than the artificial boundaries that separated people in the "real" world.

Those perceptive listeners who understood and embraced the absolute elsewhere of Nutopia would constitute the invisible army Lennon described in "Mind Games". Acting individually but in concert, they would bring about a more harmonious world through communal visualization.

I don't want to give the whole story away in this post - it's well worth a click to read the whole review. John Lennon's vision and his message have now become a global movement, a universal wakeup call for humanity. It is a great sadness that he will not see it blossom.

Consistent with his own insight, Lennon had already used the principle of collective visualization to plant a positive image in the public psyche. He had already written a song that offered his solution, his alternative to the nightmarish futures on which the people of his era were focused - the endless quagmire of Vietnam, world famine, Orwell's 1984, nuclear winter, apocalypse in the Middle East - as well as his prescription to end the perennial strife of our species.

He recorded and released it in 1971, a song that would become his most famous anthem:

~~~~
keep playing those mind games forever
raising the spirit of peace and love
~~~~

Time Is All We've Got

Andrew Cohen Quote of the Week:

From the perspective of evolution, time is all we’ve got. Evolution only happens in and through time, so we can only affect change in the cosmos in and through time. Therefore, if we care about making a difference, we need to have the courage to look directly at our own lives in relationship to time.

Why? Because time runs out! And too many of us are still putting off what is most important, postponing and hesitating, because we feel that we’re not quite ready yet. We’re not quite ready to live a life that bold, that intentional, that immediate. But time keeps passing.

So to me, one of the most important steps in an individual’s spiritual evolution is when they embrace what I call an absolute relationship to time. That means they are no longer waiting for anything. They are seeing the whole process of their own life-experience with a sense of great urgency and immediacy because there is so much that they need to accomplish and they need to do it now.

If we are to truly make a difference in the short time we each have on this earth, more and more of us need to awaken to this Great Intention, this great urgency, and this great will to evolve. That alone is what makes this life meaningful.

~~~~
people, you're going to die - what are you waiting for?
- Lodro Zangpo, Gampo Abbey 1993
~~~~

Why Are We So Blind To The True Horrors Of War?

News items like "...four Canadian soldiers were killed today when their tank was blown up by a roadside bomb" have become so commonplace we scarcely notice, barely pause in what we're doing. Have you ever stopped to think what those soldiers felt as that happened? What it's like to be inside a tank when it explodes - the noise, the power, the searing heat - how your body feels as it is torn apart?

From Chris Hedges, originally published in Truthdig:

"If we really saw what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myths propagated by our warmongering government."

In this article Hedges reviews two haunting books of war photographs: Peter van Agtmael’s "2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die" and Lori Grinker’s "Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict." He does not mince words, and the mental images that arise on reading the article are sharp and penetrating. But as powerful as they are, they only hint at the effect of the photographs. Even so, he describes the photographs as "...shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery."

An excerpt from the article:

Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief elements of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like "Platoon," movies meant to denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of the weapons shown. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.

For the full article on AlterNet, click here.

~~~~
I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states
but when I talk to the survivors of things too sickening to relate
if I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate
- Bruce Cockburn
~~~~