Dr. Barta: 00:00
Welcome back to Reconnection Moments, a space where we get real about intimacy disorders and healing from sexual compulsivity. Not through willpower or shame, but by gently rewiring the brain and body back into connection. I'm Dr. Michael Barta, creator of The Reconnection Model. In each episode, I'll be answering questions I hear most from clients and therapists, and I will also be sharing fresh insights from my ongoing work.

Host: 00:35
Welcome back to another episode of Reconnection Moments. I'm here again with Dr. Michael Barta, talking about why we need to completely rethink addiction and recovery. Dr. Barta, before we dive in, what led you into this field?

Dr. Barta: 00:48
Well, I've been doing this work since 2007, and I've been in recovery from another addiction, alcoholism, at this point in time, well, since 1986, so over 39 years. But I got into this work because it's not just professional; for me, it's personal. In my work, what I've found were people who were stuck in behaviors that they hated.

Dr. Barta: 01:20
No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't stop, and they would come in and they would start talking to me, and there was quite a bit of recidivism in their sexually compulsive behaviors, and I'm like, 'What's going on here?' And what I come to find later on, to tell the end story first, is that I was using a model that focused on containing behaviors. What I said is, instead of trying to contain the behaviors, I started asking, 'Why do they have these behaviors?'

Dr. Barta: 02:12
It was kind of serendipitous because at that time, I was reading a book by Gabor Mate called In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost, and he had a line in there that just totally shattered my perception and concepts of treating addiction and being an addict myself, and the line in his book, he said, 'The first question is not why the addiction, but why the pain?'

Dr. Barta: 02:45
And when I read that, I was like, 'Exactly,' right? 'Where's the pain? Why am I using? What am I trying to get away from?' Because it wasn't just, I went out and started using this substance or this behavior to get high. They actually made me feel better. So I said, 'What are they making me feel better from?'

Dr. Barta: 03:14
And that's how I got this all started. So I stopped focusing on the behavior, right? And I started looking at people's pain underneath, and that's been guiding my work ever since.

Host: 03:30
Yeah, you talk a lot about not treating the symptoms, treating that underlying pain, and that leads into the five-day intensive, doing your own work first for several decades now. And then getting into the training, and the new reconnection model is centered solely on that.

Dr. Barta: 03:51
100%. Yeah. Let's find out why you're doing what you're doing and heal that. So that then the symptoms, the sexual behaviors, aren't needed anymore.

Dr. Barta: 04:07
It's kind of like, if I had cancer, right, and the doctor gave me a balm to put on my skin that numbed the pain, that would be great. But the cancer's still there. So what I want to do is not focus on, you know, the soothing agent, the balm, and go directly in and remove the cancer, right?

Host: 04:37
Yep. Absolutely. Well, that leads to the next question, which is, you know, a lot of the programs and things that we talk about today, and other programs and treatments are around willpower. But why is willpower a harmful myth?

Dr. Barta: 04:52
Well, it's harmful because it piles shame onto people who are already hurting, right? The idea that they should just try harder keeps them in self-blame. The truth is, most people in addiction are some of the strongest people I've ever met. Their struggle isn't about weakness. They're trying to survive.

Host: 05:13
So, people in addiction are actually disciplined?

Dr. Barta: 05:18
Incredibly disciplined. I've worked with decorated veterans, successful executives, elite athletes, and people in the entertainment industry. Now, these are people who absolutely know discipline. But when old wounds get triggered, that discipline doesn't stop their compulsive sexual behaviors. And that's not weakness. It's a nervous system doing what it was trained to do, and it was finding relief in whatever way it knows how.

Dr. Barta: 05:53
So discipline goes out the window, right? These triggers cause us to automatically do things. That's what autonomic nervous system means. It's not a conscious choice. We're being driven by the autonomic nervous system. So when people say just try harder, these poor people are like, "I don't know if I can try any harder." So really, the healing comes from making the unconscious conscious. Because until that happens, we have no path towards healing.

Host: 06:33
And often that's why going back to early childhood experiences and what you work through your five-day intensive, right?

Dr. Barta: 06:40
That's right. I mean, you know, it's not just all about, oh, you know, 'What did Mom and Dad do to me,' right? It's not about that. And it's not of, "Oh, I know what my trauma is now, now go fix it," right? It's actually about what I experienced in my environment, because most people don't know what trauma is, right?

Dr. Barta: 07:03
We still think trauma is something big and horrific that happened to us. And a lot of people, when I ask them, you know, where's your trauma, they're like, 'I didn't have any trauma,' right, because they never had anything horrific happen to them. But what's most important about trauma is not that it was an event. It's the experience that lives inside of us because of what we experienced, all right?

Dr. Barta: 07:30
So if we didn't get what we needed, if we didn't get attunement, if we didn't get stability, if we didn't get the proper amount of validation for our authenticity, that's trauma, right? And the brain and nervous system are designed to go off how they were trained, all right? So these early environments, it's kind of like a training ground, right?

Dr. Barta: 08:00
The little kid doesn't know that it's being trained, and it's going to believe life is what it is by its experiences. And a lot of people come in and they are really surprised by amount of trauma that they've experienced in their life, not just their family of origin, but their whole environment, you know, in their first, probably 20 years of life. And how it affected them, how it left residual feelings in them, and how it created these core beliefs of actually who they are, right?

Dr. Barta: 08:38
So you know, when we're looking at this, we have to go deep. We have to find out what the trauma was, right? But more importantly, how did it shape you to respond to life?

Host: 08:53
So, Dr. Barta, you just helped really illuminate all of that and how it relates to healing, but just for a second, getting back to willpower, why doesn't willpower work neurobiologically?

Dr. Barta: 09:05
Well, I haven't spoken much yet about it, and I will in future episodes, but you know, people come in and they're like, 'Well, I have these sexual problems. I have sexual addiction, I have compulsive sexual behaviors,' and yes, that's true. And they're surprised to learn when they get there that I'm not treating those behaviors. When I'm treating is the core, and that core is what's called intimacy disorder.

Dr. Barta: 09:30
An intimacy disorder is somewhere along the way, our brain and nervous system didn't get what it needed to feel safe enough to connect with other people. And instead of learning that closeness is secure, we learned that closeness is actually dangerous, inconsistent, or maybe just not even there at all. And that leaves us disconnected. And from that point on, we manage our own lives.

Dr. Barta: 10:00
We try to handle life alone. You know, Bill Wilson in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says this phrase over and over again, which I love. And he says that, you know, us, people who have addictions, live life trying to fix, manage, and control, people, places, and things. And what we're trying to do is rearrange everybody in our life, right? So that we can feel safe. That's absolutely opposite of what connection is, right?

Dr. Barta: 10:43
Addiction, therefore, becomes a substitute for the connection we never got. It's reliable. It's there. It's always present, right? The problem is, it never delivers connection. It's not designed to deliver connection.

Host: 11:01
So earlier, you kind of got into this just a little bit with intimacy disorder, but can you tell us how it develops?

Dr. Barta: 11:08
Well, yeah, I mean, it develops out of our early life experiences, right? So there can be neglect. We could come from chaotic environments. We can come from places that didn't have stability, like we were moving around all the time, things like that. And just even emotional absence. You know, in my own case, I had everything I wanted. My parents gave me everything. I mean, food, clothing, beautiful education, all these things. But what I realized later on when, you know, I started doing this work, was that I lived in an emotional vacuum, right?

Dr. Barta: 11:46
Emotions weren't allowed. They just weren't there, right? So what I learned is that I'm an authentic self, right? My authentic self learned that if I express emotions, I will be rejected. So I discarded my authenticity of having emotions and started putting everything inside, right? So I didn't get what I need in order to learn that being connected to another person felt safe. And when that happens, it wires our brain and nervous system to expect threat in connection instead of safety.

Dr. Barta: 12:35
And what that did was it made me unable to trust. I couldn't stay calm. I couldn't lean on others, right? I was doing it all myself because my biggest fear was I'm going to be rejected if I'm myself. So whatever I do, 'don't be who you are,' right? That creates a lot of pain. And that pain is what I then found substances and behaviors to mitigate that pain, all right?

Dr. Barta: 13:12
So that's where my addiction took off. So this is my nervous system using survival strategies. And my addictions were one of those strategies.

Host: 13:26
Can you give us an example of intimacy disorder and adulthood?

Dr. Barta: 13:30
Well, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, look, someone's longing for closeness with their partner. But every time they get close or the intimacy starts to deepen, they pull away. And this isn't hard to understand because they're not consciously pulling away. We're just unconsciously pulling away. We're moving backwards, right? We could disappear into porn. We could disappear into other sexual behaviors.

Dr. Barta: 14:00
And on the surface, it looks like a void, and it even looks like betrayal. But underneath, it's the nervous system saying, closest isn't safe. And I need another way to feel calm. That's the intimacy disorder playing out in our lives as adults.

Host: 14:19
How can someone know if this applies to them?

Dr. Barta: 14:23
If you've ever felt no matter how much you love someone, you can't let them in. No matter how much you love someone, you continue to hurt them. No matter how much you love someone, you use your sexual behaviors to manage feelings or stress that you can't share with others. I think this may apply to you. But here's the most important thing. It's not who you are. It's what happened to your system, and that can be healed.

Host: 15:01
And that goes back to the four pillars and co-regulation, right?

Dr. Barta: 15:06
Absolutely.

Host: 15:07
That you work on and the intensive, that you give people the tools for that, that you've programmed into those five days.

Dr. Barta: 15:15
Yep. And for me, you know, after all these years in recovery myself, that's what my goal of recovery is. To be who I really am. To express myself, to allow myself to be me. My greatest freedom in the world is just walking around, being me. Not pretending, not manipulating, not trying to change other people's opinion of me so that I don't get rejected. It's just being me, right?

Dr. Barta: 15:48
And that takes me being vulnerable all the time. It takes me being transparent. You know, I'm not living a secret life with agendas and motives, right? And I'm actually here, I'm present, right? I'm listening to people, I'm feeling what they're feeling, which is called empathy, I'm listening and it's changed my life.

Dr. Barta: 16:14
And this is what I want to deliver to other people. And it happens through these four pillars.

Host: 16:20
You could also say those four pillars or the four practices, when I can imagine, as you're talking, just thinking, okay, how do I practice that authenticity?

Dr. Barta: 16:30
I really like that. Yeah. How do I practice authenticity? And one of the exercises that we do in the intensive is they're given a chart at the beginning of the week where they start tracking their authenticity, vulnerability, transparency, and presence, right? Because I want them by the end of the week to know these are the things that I need to continue to do on a daily basis to rewire myself so I know that connection's safe. Because until we know it's safe, our autonomic nervous system is going to run its old program and say, 'It's not safe, don't get close to people.'

Dr. Barta: 17:16
We have to experience safety in real time, right? We can't learn it in a book. We can't be shown how to do it and then do it; we have to live it. And really, that's what we do every day in my intensive, right? It's designed so that you are practicing or embodying each one of these four pillars, the whole time you're at the intensive, all five days, day and night, right? So we really want you to learn that connection is actually safe. And then from there, your whole life is going to change.

Host: 12:51
I see that, and I know you have recovery groups after they leave the intensive that they can be a part of to continue those four pillars, right?

Dr. Barta: 18:08
Yeah, and that's what the aftercare groups are about, right? So I used to run aftercare groups, and people would come in, and they would share their week, and we used it to give feedback and things like this. And it's kind of like the same. There's a component of that because the accountability is really important, and people need feedback as part of the connection. But the most important part is the practicing of these pillars, right?

Dr. Barta: 18:34
And we have exercises designed to do that in aftercare. Because aftercare needs to be more than just talk, it needs to be a movement forward from what you just learned in the intensive that you just went to, okay? So it's a continued healing, it's not just a place where you get together with people and talk. And that's been the true value of these new aftercare groups.

Host: 19:01
How is reconnection different? You've been in your own recovery for three-plus decades now. You've done a previous model in TINSA, now the new model in reconnection. And how is reconnection different from what you've done in the past?

Dr. Barta: 19:19
Well, what I did in the past in my first model, right, is that I wanted to show how the brain and nervous system get changed by traumatic events, and it was successful in doing that. And it helped a lot of people, but I realized people needed a lot more than that. They didn't need to just understand why. They needed a way to heal right in the moment, right? And that realization led me to create this whole model and this new intensive, right? So instead of focusing on controlling behaviors and avoiding triggers, we flip the script. And instead of managing these symptoms, we go right to the wound that created them. So we're actually in this intensive and in my work, and all my work, we're working directly with the brain and nervous system to restore safety and the ability to connect with other people. And like I said earlier in this podcast, when that happens, those compulsive behaviors lose their power naturally.

Host: 20:29
So what does healing look like?

Dr. Barta: 20:32
For me, healing looks like being able to fully and authentically show up in my life and authentically show up in my relationships. So our sobriety will stop the battle, right? It becomes a natural outcome of our ability to reconnect. But we have to reconnect with ourselves first, right? A lot of people come in and they're like, 'How do I heal my relationship? How do I do this? How do I do that?'

Dr. Barta: 21:09
And I constantly preach, you can't heal your relationship until you heal yourself. And what that means is you cannot heal your relationship until you have a relationship with yourself. Like you have to be inside of you. You have to have these four pillars inside of you before they can transmit outward, right? So we work with the brain and nervous system with this. And what happens is their behaviors kind of just aren't needed anymore, right?

Dr. Barta: 21:47
The sense of finally being able to connect is such a relief to people that their pain automatically starts diminishing. It's just about, 'What's my relationship with myself,' right? 'I hurt myself before I hurt anybody else with my sexual behaviors. And until I realize that and stop hurting myself, nothing was ever able to change. Because if I hurt myself, I'm automatically going to hurt others.'

Host: 22:26
What do clients usually say when they have that epiphany that I've been trying to manage things externally, and you're talking about inside-out work? What are the common things you hear?

Dr. Barta: 22:41
You know, I'm kind of laughing right now because people go, 'How could I not know this? How can I not know what was going on?' There's a 'Oh my God, this is like the answer I've been searching for my entire life. I've been looking for a way to understand why I do what I do and why I am the way I am. But it was never explained to me. I never was able to find a method that allowed me to see how I was formed, okay?'

Dr. Barta: 23:25
Because what they're learning is they were never broken, and you know, that kind of freaks them out, and they have a hard time believing that. But it's like, look, our authenticity is like a diamond, okay? And that diamond cannot be changed. We are who we were when we showed up on this planet. And when people look at it, and if you've ever seen a newborn baby, you know there's perfection there. You know there's innocence. You know there's infinite possibility. There's warmth, there's love, there's kindness. We have all these things inside of us. Those don't go away.

Dr. Barta: 24:12
However, what happens is when we're living in environments where we're told, 'Do this, don't do that,' or don't get what we need, we reject that diamond in order to survive, in order to stay in relationship. So what happens is our diamond becomes covered with mud. And what we're doing, what they're learning in this intensive, is they're wiping away the mud. They're getting back to who they really are, right? And that is probably the best feeling in the world.

Dr. Barta: 24:49
And when people have that epiphany, as you said, there's a tremendous amount of freedom. Layers and layers of shame fall away. They're accountable. They know that they've done behaviors that have harmed other people. And they're willing to make that right.

Dr. Barta: 25:10
But the difference is, the shame is gone, right? They have an understanding of what they did. It wasn't a measure of their worth. It was them trying to survive.

Host: 25:25
So if listeners had one thing to take away from today's episode and a beautiful model of healing that you presented, what would you want them to know or hear through this?

Dr. Barta: 25:37
Well, addiction isn't about willpower or weakness. It's about our inability to authentically connect with another human being. And the beautiful thing is, this inability to connect can be healed. That's what gives us the most hope. This connection is the most important thing for a human being to be able to possess; without it, we're alone, and we're not designed to live alone.

Dr. Barta: 26:14
So when we can heal what's causing us to recreate over and over this inability to connect, then we have the problem solved. And this is also what lasting recovery looks like.

Dr. Barta: 26:32
Thanks for joining me today. If you want to learn more about how this healing happens, visit drmichaelbarta.com. And if this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. Until next time, keep reconnecting.