Are you a male who looks at porn and tends to feeling guilty about doing so, or worse? Whether you do or not you should probably know about a new book I recently read by David Ley, PhD called Ethical Porn for Dicks: A Man’s Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure. It can help give you wider perspective of a part of your life you probably never thought of, and if you have problems with porn use it can help you have a better take on the relative degree of your problem.
Read moreIt’s been long known that secrecy is the breeding ground of any number of ills, from international incidents to rifts between couples and families. In this piece I will focus on how it relates to problematic or out of control sexual behavior (which I’ll refer to as OCSB).
Read moreSome people find themselves engaging in multiple affairs either within a monogamous relationship or as stand-alone interactions: whatever the case there tends to be a common theme of secrecy, the relationships being complicated, and there being a degree of unmanageability despite what the person who is engaging in them believes.
Read moreIt seems the last 20 years have seen such a rise in the proliferation of pornography via the internet that it has become much more commonplace than in previous times. This has so much been the case that one local radio personality has spoken about how the age of 'paper porn' has come and gone. This time period has also seen the average age of initial pornography viewing and use descend to between 10 and 15 years old, at least in boys. With so many young people being exposed to pornography at such a young age, it necessitates asking the question 'How young is too young?' as well as prompting the need to look at the consequences of pornography use in general.
Read moreThere has been a lot written about the issue of what is popularly known as sex addiction. This has been promulgated early on within the addiction and recovery movement, and has more lately been taken up by mainstream media. While the label floats around and is easily applied to any number of sexual behaviors, there exists no consensus in the therapeutic community about what constitutes sex addiction. I choose not to use in in my practice not because I don’t believe there is such a thing as sex addiction, it’s just not something I care to diagnose without a clear clinical picture of just what it is. That being said, I work with men who exhibit what is less commonly known as problem sexual behavior, compulsive sexual behavior, or what Douglas Braun-Harvey and Michael Vigorito refer to as Out of Control Sexual Behavior.
Read moreIt is a gentle form of therapy for people who tend to be easily intimidated by typical forms of therapy, such as Exposure Therapy, traditional talk therapy, and even EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). All of these require the client to revisit the event that is troubling them in some degree of detail. Image Transformation Therapy (ImTT) enlists the body to help work through the issue(s) that the mind won’t or can’t get a grasp of. By visualizing a color in the body that represents the trapped pain or fear, it removes the burden of the client to revisit a painful memory or situation and helps to resolve it.
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