Vulnerability: Four Pillars of Coregulation, Part 2
When you expose your inner world, you invite the other person to step in your direction, which they often do, feeling pulled to respond in kind.
Authenticity: Four Pillars of Coregulation, Part 1
It means being true to yourself—living in alignment with your values, beliefs, and desires rather than conforming to external expectations.
Black and White Thinking
The left brain loves to categorize life into opposites, black or white, right or left, up or down. But when the complicated parts of life get forced into either/or categories, results can get weird and destructive.
Curiosity Is a Superpower
With practice and consistency you can discover better answers to why you do what you do. The human heart is deep. Curiosity helps you access the depths.
Forging Core Values (With Examples)
Have you ever considered the principles that you want to govern your life? Consider this: No one stumbles into success. Or, there are no accidental saints.
Sex Addiction and the Nervous System, Part 3: Dorsal Vagal
Men with a sexual addiction use sex, porn and masturbation to pull themselves out of a pit of despair, out of a state of dysregulation and shut down. This pattern then gets wired in the brain.
Sex Addiction and the Nervous System, Part 2: Fight-or-Flight
Sex became a way of soothing the nervous system and coming out of elevated dysregulation. Sex became relief. They learned that “acting out” could calm the body and even lull them to sleep.
Sex Addiction and the Nervous System, Part 1: Ventral Vagal
When your nervous system deems your surroundings safe, you move about life with relative ease, getting things done, interacting with people as you need and want to, and feeling pretty good overall.
Getting Organized for Recovery (With Examples)
It can be a good idea to clean up and organize your life. Your environment matters. Like breathing pollutant air to your lungs, living in chaos and stress in your personal life erodes your mental health and recovery.
Crappy Behavior Is Eroding Your Relationship
Crappy behavior can be minor, but if we have crappiness spread out over the whole of our lives, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. Behaving badly adds up.
Listening Without Fixing
“Your job isn’t to fix something, but to genuinely take in and resonate with what she’s feeling.” That’s your job. Save the fixing, if that’s what you enjoy doing, for the house and the cars and the yard.
How Does a Sex Addiction Develop?
Is it due to a high sex drive? What about toxic masculinity? Is it from living in a hyper-sexualized culture? To understand how sexual addiction develops we should talk about the family of origin and big-T and little-t traumas.
When Your Inner Child Takes Over
We have younger parts of ourselves within us. And if we aren’t careful, they get triggered and take over. Learn to embrace your inner kid without letting him run the show.
“I’m Being Reactive”
Being reactive with your loved ones, as a man, can cause serious damage, fast. Robert Masters has deceptively simple advice for you. Try it if you find yourself consistently hurting your closest relationships.
You Need a Purpose
Without a sense of purpose life can feel like a bag of sand you drag around behind you. You have less energy and less inspiration. A strong sexual sobriety and recovery require purpose!
Your Wife Wants You to Lead the Healing Process
Wives often find themselves leading post-discovery, but she does not want to! Give her the feeling that you are taking this seriously, that you are doing everything necessary to help your relationship heal and grow.
6 (More) Partner Responses After Sexual Betrayal
If you have sexually betrayed your partner due to stepping outside the relationship in some way, listen carefully, you are both lover and abuser. One person, two identities.
5 Partner Responses After Sexual Betrayal
For her, it could manifest as not feeling good enough, attractive enough, sexy enough, that some deep flaw is irreversible and permanent and that this was the reason you acted out in the first place.
Group Counseling for Porn Addiction
Many porn-addicted men have never been truly vulnerable, allowing others to see their hearts and scars, the good, bad and ugly of where they’ve been. This is where group counseling comes in.
A Period of Celibacy
On the other side of this celibacy period will be your brain’s renewed ability to experience pleasure in the little things—a cup of coffee, a walk in the park, holding your wife’s hand—even eventually the seemingly mundane day-to-day unfolding of your life.