Do you need help healing from a pornography addiction?
This is our primary specialization. We can help you.
All Las Vegas Counseling therapists are extensively trained to treat pornography addiction or sexual addiction and the related trauma that partners of sex addicts often experience. Sexual addiction can ruin marriages and other family relationships and is incredibly difficult to overcome without specialized treatment.
When people come to our office for help, they often tell us, “Your office is my last hope.” We take that very seriously and work every day to provide the highest-quality care available for you and your loved ones.
Success is absolutely possible when we work with you to recover from pornography and sexual addiction.
We take the guesswork out of change. We’ve studied not only addiction recovery principles, but the underlying principles of human change in general. We use the most up-to-date techniques to help you make real, lasting change.
For those who are married or in a committed relationship, we work with affected and traumatized partners as well. In fact, it’s a core part of our treatment process. Helping only the sex addict when there is a spouse or partner involved is an incomplete treatment. We’re fully invested in complete healing for both addicts and their partners. Let us walk you through the basics of our treatment below.
So many people who struggle with sexual addiction spend years trying to stop the compulsive sexual behaviors on their own. They disconnect from others and avoid asking for help. They often keep secrets from the people that love them the most.
Isolation and secrecy gives power to addiction. Shame results from secrecy. Shame is that sense of brokenness that is so painful for people that it pushes them to relapse back into their addiction.
Getting better and really healing is not just about stopping a set of behaviors. It’s more than that.
Recovery from pornography or sexual addiction is about changing so much more than just behavior. It’s about living a more productive, healthy, and connected life. It’s about living the way you want, without the baggage of sexual behaviors looming over your head. Here are the basic concepts that we’ll cover in counseling:
1. Honesty and accountability
No one gets better on their own and people don’t improve without accountability. Accountability is a daily practice that keeps you connected to your goals, and allows you to review each day how your changes are coming along. Accountability with others who care about you lets you feel like your changes are going noticed and are making a difference.
2. Confronting denial
Denial is the story you tell yourself that allows you to stay in your addiction despite whatever consequences you’re experiencing. Denial is so subtle that most people don’t realize they’re in denial until it’s pointed out to them. The counselor’s task is to help you confront denial in a way that feels natural and desirable. Pushing too much often results in defensiveness and avoidance. We will help bypass that problem.
3. Using emotions for healing
Most people struggling with addiction are disconnected from their emotions. They don’t see muchc use for emotions. In fact, emotions are some of the most powerful helpers in recovery. In counseling, you will learn how to harness the power of emotion and use painful emotions as early warning signs of relapse. Engaging emotion allows you to truly connect with those around you for healing.
4. Practicing empathy
Empathy will do two things for you in recovery. First, it allows you to have compassion on self (combatting shame) and on those who are trying to help you. Second, especially for those in relationships, empathy helps you understand the harm your addiction may have caused to your relationships. Relationship improvement can be impossible without empathy.
5. Whole-live change
Recovery is a life change–not just a behavior change. This might sound a bit overwhelming, but it’s the greatest thing about real healing. It allows you to find real joy–perhaps for the first time in your life. Addiction ruins people’s ability to connect, love, share, and contribute. Healing and recovery changes all of that and makes people whole again.
When a spouse or partner is involved, pornography or sex addiction treatment must involved the hurt or traumatized partner.
For partners of sex addicts, whether it’s acting out with others or pornography addiction, it’s a real betrayal to the relationship. Partners of sex addicts often experience real trauma (PTSD) and they can feel like their whole world is turned upside down.
An addiction like this can make partners feel abandoned, unsafe, and unable to emotionally connect in their relationships.
This experience of trauma must be treated, in addition to the recovery work the addicted person must do, in order for couples to work their way through recovery together.
Partners of addicts need at least three significant things:
1. Learning to trust again
Trust is not automatic. It is earned. We encourage partners to trust only at a pace that parallels the addict’s own recovery. Spouses or partners are not obligated to trust. In therapy, they learn to express honestly their needs and experience of the addict’s recovery (or lack thereof). Partners begin to trust again within their own defined parameters.
2. Learning how to implement healthy boundaries
Often spouses or partners struggle to have healthy boundaries for themselves and their addicted partners. In therapy, we work to help affected partners create and maintain healthy boundaries. These include boundaries around their own reactions to the addiction or their triggers. They also include boundaries around intimacy with the addict. This helps the traumatized partner feel emotionally and physically safe during treatment. Good boundaries can be defined in this way, “This is how I will take care of and protect myself when you [the addict] do not take care of and protect me.”
3. Emotional healing
We recognize the emotional and relational trauma caused by addiction. Affected partners and spouses need to heal. They need time, space, and permission to heal at their own rate and in their own way. Part of that healing comes when the recovering addict presents a therapy-guided “full disclosure” of all of his or her past acting out behaviors. Secrets are such a large part of addiction that real healing for affected partners rarely comes without a full disclosure.
We help couples navigate the disclosure process in a safe way. Partners of addicts also heal as they get permission to share their story in therapy and with safe others. They heal as they make sense of the addiction in ways that are not shaming to themselves. Affected partners heal as they watch their recovering partners work to rebuild what they destroyed through their addiction. We walk through this process step by step with couples.
If you or a loved one are struggling with sex addiction in any form, please call or text our staff to schedule with one of our competent therapists. Success in recovery is very real.
We have seen so many individuals and couples heal from pornography and sexual addiction. We want to help you do the same.
Struggling with pornography or sexual addiction?
Call our office today and we'll help you get started.