Saturday, January 28, 2012

TREATMENT OF SEX ADDICTION: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

NLP is an approach to doing psychotherapy that was all the rage in the 70's and early 80's.  It is a model of the structure of your inner, subjective experience and how that experience influences behavior.  It provides a framework for eliciting the way you experience reality with a focus on reorganizing that experience so you, as a human being, can optimally function in work, love and recreation.  NLP is designed to elicit information from the subjective (inner) world, to see the limitations these experiences impose on each individual and to direct strategies to the conscious and unconscious processes for the purpose of facilitating change towards a happier, more satisfying life. 

Addiction, in all its forms, is a social epidemic and certainly represents an obstacle to a life well lived.  NLP's methods, skills, and strategies (too numerous and complex to detail in this paper) allow for the construction of a wider and more effective repertoire of internally generated alternatives to addiction. 

As is the case with any major dysfunction or illness, sex addiction, or the process of being a sex addict, erodes your internal repertoire of choices, until life becomes determined by basically one primary factor: access to sex and to the "erotic haze" that accompanies it.  Stated in a different way, the acquisition of a sexual "rush" determines your lifestyle and  imposes severe limitations on your experience of yourself and your life. 

NLP offers "technology" for therapists to deliberately internally "install" various strategies and processes, allowing you the required range of choices needed for you to move toward an addiction-free, satisfying sense of well being in your life.  It both increases your awareness of your internal processes in measurable ways and provides specific methodologies for using information obtained through your conscious/unconscious processes in the manner of one who has "enlightened self-interest."  If internally no new choices or alternatives are generated in you, you will repeat – ad nauseum – choices and behaviors that obviously no longer work in the present, but which at some point in time, appeared to have produced results.

 One of NLP's precepts is that all behavior makes sense in the context in which it was originated (called "Positive Intent of Behavior versus the Manifested Behavior).  Behavior, no matter how bizarre if may appear to be (I think of fetishes), makes sense when it is perceived in the context of the choices generated by the individual's particular model of himself and the world.  Addiction is not a matter of making a wrong choice, but of not having sufficient internal choices – thus you act on old instruction or generally outdated information that has no bearing on the present except that the present contains the trigger that sets the old behavior in motion.