Dr. Barta: 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: Welcome back to the Reconnection Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about stopping the behavior is not the same as treating the addiction. Dr. Barta, there are still prominent clinicians in the sex addiction field who emphasize stopping the sexual behavior as the most important part of treatment. You have a different perspective. Why?

Dr. Barta: Well, yeah, I do. Because I wanna start by making something really clear, right? Of course, the behavior needs to stop.

Dr. Barta: Of course it does. Everybody knows that. If someone's engaging in pornography, having affairs, paying for sex, or participating in other destructive sexual behaviors, there needs to be boundaries, right? Accountability and behavioral tools that help them stop. Particularly when there's a betrayed partner in the mix, we can't ask her to continue being harmed while I try to figure out, or the clinician tries to figure out, what's happening within him.

Dr. Barta: But this is where I differ a lot. The idea that stopping the behavior is the treatment, or that we need to get the behavior under control first, and only later begin looking at what's causing it, what's driving it underneath, that's not gonna work, okay? I've seen it. I've been doing this since 2009, and I developed this whole model starting in about 2011 because I was seeing that getting people to stop the behavior doesn't work long-term.

Dr. Barta: One of the reasons is when a person stops a behavior, everything that they were using the behavior for to escape from is now right in their face, okay? So we tell the guy, "All right, stop." So he stops, right? Then what?

Dr. Barta: We've never talked about the driver that's causing the behaviors to happen in the first place. And when we're not talking about that, a person can feel incredibly hopeless because they're like, "Now what do I do with these emotions? Now what do I do with all the stress that my sexual behavior was taking away from me?"

Dr. Barta: That's where I differ, right? Because the idea of stopping the behavior is the treatment is lacking quite a bit, all right? So we can do both at the same time.

Dr. Barta: We can help someone stop the behavior while simultaneously beginning to treat what's causing and maintaining the behavior.

Host: So why has addiction treatment historically focused so heavily on stopping the behavior?

Dr. Barta: Well, a lot of the thinking about addiction treatment in all areas was what we learned treating alcohol and drug addiction. And that made sense. If alcohol is destroying somebody's life, he needs to stop drinking. If he's addicted to cocaine, well, then he needs to stop doing cocaine, right? So treatment developed important concepts around abstinence, triggers, relapse prevention, accountability, and avoiding situations that are associated with use.

Dr. Barta: But as we begin recognizing addictive patterns involving gambling, sex, and other behaviors, many of those concepts were under... what happened is we just started applying this treatment modality that was used to treat drugs and alcohol over all these other behaviors. But the problem is not every addiction is identical. Sex addiction is commonly described as a behavior or a process addiction, right?

Dr. Barta: Instead of repeatedly introducing an external substance into our body, the addictive cycle develops around a behavior and the anticipation and the reward reinforcement internal experiences associated with it. So sexuality presents a particular challenge when we're looking at it as an addictive behavior, because we're not trying to remove the sexuality from someone's life.

Host: So how does that make sex addiction different?

Dr. Barta: Well, if someone has what they call now... when I was growing up and when I got sober, it was called alcoholism, but what it's called now is alcohol use disorder, abstinence is appropriate. Alcohol can be removed from our lives, but we can't remove our sexuality from being a human being, right?

Dr. Barta: I don't have to go into a bar. I don't look for cocaine anymore. I mean, it's not naturally produced in my body, so I would have to go find it. It's something that I'm gonna ingest in me.

Dr. Barta: It's not something within me, right? So healthy sexuality isn't the problem. Attraction isn't the problem. Sexual feelings aren't the problem. So ultimately what we want in this whole experience is someone capable of healthy sexuality and intimacy and connection.

Dr. Barta: But there's another difference that's particularly important to me. Much of what drives compulsive sexual behavior can travel with the person. We can block pornography, we can change access to our technology, we can establish boundaries over particular people, places, and situations.

Dr. Barta: I've seen guys do this repeatedly and still relapse because his shame has gone with him. Loneliness goes with us. Inadequacy goes with us.

Dr. Barta: The things we are trying to escape are within us. They're not outside, all right? Our attachment patterns go with us. Our nervous system goes with us.

Dr. Barta: And our difficulty tolerating vulnerability will go with the addict as well. I can put a filter on a phone. I can't put a filter on shame, right?

Dr. Barta: Eventually we have to develop a way of experiencing and responding to shame.

Host: So are behavioral approaches inadequate?

Dr. Barta: No, not by themselves as tools. They can be extremely useful. Somebody absolutely needs accountability, boundaries around technology, boundaries around certain places, behaviors. We have to change our routines.

Dr. Barta: We have to know what's causing us to want to act out. We have to have relapse prevention strategies. And see, these interventions can help interrupt a disruptive or destructive cycle and create a bit of safety. But what's inadequate is treating behavioral containment as though it represents the entirety of recovery. So imagine a man spent 20 years turning to sexual behavior whenever he feels rejected, or when he feels ashamed, lonely, or inadequate, right?

Dr. Barta: And now he stops. And that's important. But what happens then the next time he feels rejected? What's he doing with his shame?

Dr. Barta: What happens when his partner is angry with him? What happens when he's alone and feels worthless? If our answer is "Don't act out," we've given him a very, very important behavioral instruction. But we're also giving him instructions that he's been told a million times before, or that he's told himself thousands of times before. And it doesn't work. If we could just not act out, don't you think we would have by now?

Dr. Barta: Right? What we haven't done is helped him to develop another way of remaining and being with himself. And that's one of the most important questions, a central question to my Reconnection Model: when the sexual behavior is gone, what must be possible instead?

Host: You know, some therapists believe a person needs a period of sexual sobriety before beginning trauma work. What do you think about that?

Dr. Barta: Well, I think we have to distinguish between working with trauma and immediately doing intensive trauma processing, right? There's situations where somebody needs some stability before certain trauma processing interventions are appropriate. And we don't want to destabilize someone more than they are already destabilized in the name of... just so we can say, "Okay, I'm getting to the trauma."

Dr. Barta: But that's different from saying we shouldn't begin addressing developmental pain, attachment, shame, emotional regulation, or intimacy until somebody has been sexually sober for a predetermined amount of time. If shame is contributing to the addictive cycle, why wouldn't we begin working with the shame now? If he can't regulate himself when he feels rejected, why wouldn't we begin developing regulation for him now? If vulnerability feels dangerous, why wouldn't we begin understanding that now? We can establish behavioral sobriety and accountability while simultaneously beginning the deeper healing, right?

Dr. Barta: And this is where the black-and-white model is, right? It's like, "No, behavior first. It's right.

Dr. Barta: These are behavior problems. They needed a behavioral approach." And I'm like, "True. And that's not it. That's not the whole thing," right?

Dr. Barta: It's not like we can say, "Oh, if you just stop the behavior, your life's gonna get better." I mean, that's been proven for years. I mean, Bill Wilson wrote about it in 1939, right?

Dr. Barta: If we could just stop the behavior, then we believe we could just manage our lives well. Well, that doesn't turn out very well, right? We're not able to manage our own lives. These objectives, they don't have to compete with each other.

Host: That's a strong message right there. Could looking underneath the behavior give somebody an excuse for what he's done?

Dr. Barta: Well, it shouldn't, right? Because understanding is never about excusing. Understanding is about understanding, right? It's data that we build on. It's not about, "Hey, you know, this happened to me, therefore I did this, and you shouldn't be mad at me because I hurt you." That's not what this is about at all.

Dr. Barta: If developmental experiences contributed to how somebody learned to regulate himself, you know, that may be a really good way to understand how he became vulnerable to addiction, but it doesn't erase the choices that we make as an adult, or the harm these choices created in our lives. I can say this developed for understandable reasons, and I'm responsible for what I do with it today.

Dr. Barta: In fact, understanding can increase our accountability. Now I'm not only responsible for not acting out, I'm responsible for recognizing what happened when I'm ashamed, lonely, when I'm frightened or inadequate, and I learned to respond differently. My history may explain the adaptation, right? It may explain what caused me to find something to use to escape what was going on in me, but my recovery is my responsibility.

Host: So you're really saying we don't need to decide between stopping the behavior and treating the cause.

Dr. Barta: That's right. That's the false choice I want to challenge, because why don't we establish sobriety while we're understanding what the person is trying to regulate? Let's create accountability while we're addressing shame.

Dr. Barta: Let's establish boundaries while we're helping him develop healthier ways of responding to his loneliness, inadequacy, and the emotional discomfort. And let's stop the destructive behaviors while we're becoming curious about why the behavior became so powerful in the first place, because ultimately I don't just want someone to be better at fighting an addictive behavior. I want them to become less dependent upon the behavior, because that behavior was serving a purpose for them, and I don't want them to continue to use that.

Dr. Barta: Behavioral sobriety tells someone something very important about what he has stopped doing. But recovery should eventually tell me about what has become capable for me to do instead. What capacity do I now have instead of relying on this destructive behavior?

Dr. Barta: So yes, stop the behavior. But don't wait unnecessarily to begin what's underneath it. We can, and I believe we should, do both.

Host: Thank you, Dr. Barta. And thank you for joining us on the Reconnection Podcast. If you'd like to learn more information, check out drmichaelbarta.com. We'll see you next time.

Dr. Barta: 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.