Sex Addict - Self soothing through Life Stage changes?

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Human beings have a life cycle. Each stage is marked by subtle adjustments to cope with the social, economical, cultural and sometimes, chronic stressors of the stage. Here is just one version of Life Stage age grouping categories. There are variants. 

Let us look at one version. Each stage looking at the different phases of life:

 Infant (Birth- 2 years): Changes in schedules – bedtime, routine etc., strangers and chaos can cause anxiety during this phase.

Child (3-9 years): Separation anxiety can be seen as the children start going to school. Social skills and peer relationships are developed during this stage.

Adolescent (10-19 years): Peer pressure, romantic relationships and independent identity are common changes during puberty. These may bring about strong emotional reactions and behavioural risks.

Young adult (20-29 years): Beginning college, taking up a job, starting a family and buying a house are some of the significant events during this stage and may demand moving out of your comfort zone.

Adult (30-39 years): Managing family and career growth along with increased responsibilities may lead to stress.

Middle age (40-60 years): First signs of aging and effects of lifestyle, menopause in women, children leaving the house, grandchildren arriving, career peak – all these things may all take a toll on a person’s mental and physical health.

Independent old age (Age 60 onward): More signs of aging and lifestyle effects. Retirement, health problems and medications may cause a strain on a person in this stage.

Dependent old age (Optional stage): The feeling of being dependent and requiring assistance may disturb a person and may reduce their ability to enjoy life.

End of Life: This is the time when a person realizes that he/she has come close to the end and may require a lot of pep talk and love and care.

Why are these stages of interest? Life Stages are NOT Mid-life crises, as some like to call them. Often said in a negative or derogatory way. 

Each stage has its own issues that may need help to negotiate through. But what if a partner is going through Life Stage changes in different ways and at different points in life? 

That is a recipe for much conflict and can feel like that partner is 'moving the goal posts' by doing behaviours outside of the norm in the relationship.

Get some help from The Kairos Centre. See what you cannot see. Begin to change that which you begin to better understand.

Bringing colour back to life - without Shame.

Key words: sex addiction, addicted, partner, porn addiction, recovery, sex drive, therapy, sex therapy, podcast, relationships, relationship counseling, relationship advice, addiction, couples, couples therapy, sex therapy, emdr, love addiction, behavior,

Transcript

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Sex porn love addiction is all about self-soothing to manage your emotions. It got set up back in the childhood development years. It's just not about sex, it's not about porn. It's all about the repeated use to set up the physiology to crave those dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, self-manufactured drugs in the body. It's impacting women, men, children, aged 10 to 75 across all the age ranges, the sexes, the cultures, the professions. It increased exponentially during COVID lockdown and impacting so many lives. The Kairos Center has created the first online comprehensive sex porn love addiction. It's a video on demand recovery program which you can access from anywhere in the world and begin to see identifiable changes just within six weeks of beginning this weekly program. Kairos means your appointed time. Isn't it your time to reclaim your life? Bring colour back to life without shame. Click the link below and begin your journey. You owe it to yourself and to others. Thinking about that concept of life stage changes and the fact that all of us as human beings go through these life stage changes, not life crises. It's not really a good expression. It feels very critical. Because there's something about what happens when, in my partnership relationship, the two of us inevitably going through life stage changes, but the shift, the transition into a next life stage change isn't gonna announce itself with a I'm in my next life stage change, watch out, it might be good, it might not be so good. We don't do that really, it just happens, it just crawls upon us, comes upon us. And so what happens when something is shifting in one of us, but we don't have the insight and the knowledge and the understanding to realize it. But we've moved, we've moved the goalposts in the relationship, and it's really difficult for the other person because they're still doing what they've always done in their interactions with you, but you've changed, and you don't often realize it or see it. That can feel really unfair, like moving the goalposts without the trumpet announcement, which rarely do any of us do because we don't know it. And me, being me, living life how I do life, what's the problem? You're the problem. Maybe actually there's something to do with us. What's a life state change? I often think that when we are really young, so many of us have aspirations for our lives and the different markers of achievement that we hope to have gained, have achieved at different points in our life. Now that sounds really complex, as if as children we map out our lives. Not really. But so often a little girl just playing with other little girls, maybe for the short while that they played with dolls, and I know some of you didn't play with dolls, in those playing times, playing games with each other. Some of those games might be about Prince Charming, rescuing, coming to, falling in love, getting married, putting the dolls in wedding outfits, the two of you, two little girls, playing in dressing up wedding outfits, rehearsing in child play possibilities for your life, the boys, and maybe a boy type games, the tank, the cavalry, the troops, the little toy soldiers, the football, the professional football, the professional footballer. There's all sorts of ways in which we play out the adult patterns of behaviors and achievements for life in terms of capacity to earn a living from a particular thing. Now, what if something like that has actually got set up in our aspirations for the future, but we don't really know it. You see, it's much later in life as we've got so much older, that the brain carrying something about our hopes, dreams, aspirations may still be carrying a form of template aspiration. We don't fully know it, we've shifted and moved on and gone into a relationship, had children, ditched a career, changed, done this, etc. Until at some point the brain, without us even knowing it really, because this is at an unconscious level, seems to be bringing to the fore some of those aspirations, and we reflect and wonder what happened, what happened? We don't seem to have been on target in line to have achieved, to be achieving some of those things we had hoped to achieve. Something might be taking place where we look at the life we have had on this planet, we're reviewing the amount of years of life we perceive we've got left on this planet, and we're thinking about what we have achieved to date, and actually what we have not achieved to date. Now, all that sounds like we just one day sit down and have these very conscious, logical, cerebral cortex, pre-cortex, logical thinking. Well, it's not really how it looks for a lot of us. We're just getting on with life, and things just trigger. Maybe watching a movie, maybe noticing a friend that you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing the roles that they are in, the things that they achieved, and you were in a similar place to them back there, and now you have a mirror for your life as to achievements, disappointments, losses, and that can trigger us into a life stage change. Here's an article entitled Life Stage Adjustments, a journey across life. There are some really clever psychoanalysts who have given us a lot of knowledge based on research, Freud and many others. So we know there are life state changes as a part of childhood development that we all go through. That is a life state change. The different ages of changes we go through in childhood. Never thought about that as a lifestyle change. It is. And we continue into adulthood. Some of them are quite pronounced, quite obvious, but many are less so. And don't anybody dare suggest a particular person is in a life state change because we see that as negative, and yet it's about a life. It's about a life's journey. I think often our adverse reaction is because people call it midlife crises. It's not a midlife crisis, it's just another next marker in life stage development that marks a change, a shift. Send me a message. It's time to get your relationship back onto a better footing for your future. Let's do some work without shame and bring color back to life. Send the email, send the message to me, Gary McFarlane at the Chiral Center, and let's begin to reclaim your quality of life.