Sex Addiction Diagnosis, Treatment & Addressing Partner Sensitivity w/ Tim Stein

Narrator: This is Pathway to Recovery, an SA Lifeline Foundation podcast featuring hosts Tara McCausland, who is the SA Lifeline Executive Director, and Justin B., a sex addict living in long-term recovery. We have conversations with experts and individuals who understand the pathway to healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma because we believe that recovering individuals leads to the healing of families. Hello, friends.

Tara McCausland: I'm really excited to share with you this interview with Tim Stein. He has a lot of interesting things to share about addiction recovery. But before we get into the meat of our podcast, I wanted to remind you that coming up November 7th and 8th is our SA Lifeline virtual conference, From Surviving to Thriving: Turning Pain into Purpose. And this is really going to be a great event. Yeah, it's going to be a great event. And I hope that you will stop the podcast now, go to salifeline.org, and register.

There will be 8 presenters sharing their insight and expertise on the subjects of betrayal trauma, sexual addiction, and healing couples and families. As well, there's gonna be a lot of opportunity to interact on the chat, fill out polls and surveys, ask questions during live Q&As, hear from individuals working our SAL 12-step program, and more. It's really going to be fantastic. So I hope that you will come. Prioritize the time, prioritize your healing, and get some momentum on your healing journey.

We'll see you there November 7th and 8th. Now to the show. Tim Stein is a co-founder of Willow Tree Counseling, which is an outpatient treatment center for sexual addiction, partner betrayal, and trauma. He is also the president of the board of the American Foundation for Addiction Research, AFAR. With over a decade of experience in sexual addiction, partner betrayal, and trauma fields, Tim is a significant contributor the treatment community and frequently presents at national conferences. He hosts the podcast Conversations on Sex, Addiction, and Relationships, produced the online video series Introduction to Sex Addiction and Partner Betrayal, and is the author of Finding the Way Through: A Workbook for Sex and Pornography Addiction, Sobriety, Recovery, and Partner Betrayal Sensitivity and Gifts of Recovery: Daily Meditations for Men, And the book Gifts of Recovery: Daily Meditations for Men and Women in Recovery from Sex Addiction.

Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery Podcast. I'm your host, Tara McCausland, and I'm really thrilled to have here with me Tim Stein. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Stein: Ah, thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

Tara McCausland: I'm really grateful to talk to you today about some of the important work that you're doing. And we're actually going to start with— and this is a new organization to me, so I'm really grateful that you've brought it to my attention— you are involved You're also involved with the American Foundation for Addiction Research, or AFAR for short. Tell our listeners, what is this organization? Why are you involved?

Tim Stein: The American Foundation for Addiction Research is an organization that was founded by Patrick Carnes and a number of other people back in the late '90s. And it was founded because there was a realization that we really needed research to validate what we saw clinically, which was that sex addiction was an issue, that it was a real thing, that it was problematic, and that we needed to understand how to treat it because treatment for sex addiction in some ways is similar to other addictions, but in other ways, it's just fundamentally different.

And we needed to be able to clarify that and have research to validate what we were seeing and what we were talking about. And eventually it became the idea of, and we need to get a diagnosis so we can actually get people help with this from a, you know, where their insurance can cover it, where the treatment and the medical communities in general can acknowledge it and lean in. And so AFAR was started and funded a bunch of research to identify what, what is sex addiction?

What is it not? How does it develop? What's the history and the background of people who struggle? with sex addiction? What does effective treatment look like? How can we better identify who is a sex addict and who is not a sex addict? All kinds of stuff. And it identified a bunch of that, which culminated in, you know, one of our favorite studies, which was a Fulbright Scholarship study that was done by Patrick Carnes and Catherine Acheson up at the University of Alberta.

And basically, we got, you know, 500+ sex addicts who were inpatient in the United States, and we collected data and genetic material from them. We got over 2,000 controls from the University of Alberta, about 12% of them actually, based on their data, we moved them into the sex addiction group, which is kind of what we see with the population out there in general. And we were able to sort of do a large-scale study on, well, what are all these things that we're seeing?

How does this show up in this larger group? And where does it take us? So I got involved with AFAR. I was helping out with one of the programs that we run for individuals who are in high-profile places and have a hard time going to in-person meetings. And so I was involved with that group, and they asked me to join the board. And then eventually they needed somebody who could step in as board president, and they thought I had the skill set and the personality that— Right.

could do that. And, uh, I took on the board presidency, and I've been the president for about, about 3 years now. And, uh, I just love it. I have a lot of passion for this work. I'm in my own recovery, which is why I do this work in the first place. Yeah. I see all the, uh, important stuff that AFAR is doing. We have leaned into, in addition to research, we're now leaning into advocacy and education as well.

And we've also leaned into betrayal trauma. So we're not specific to just sex addiction, but we recognize sex addiction, betrayal trauma, the importance of research, the importance of advocacy for those impacted by it, and who are treating it, as well as education about what it is and what it is not.

Tara McCausland: We'll put this in the show notes for the AFAR website. But one thing that I really appreciated was that as you scroll down, one of the first things you see there is sex addiction is real. And we talk enough on this podcast about the uphill battle that we're seeing still in the clinical field that There's so many different opinions about what to call this issue. In a former interview I did with Stephanie Carnes, she talked about when we don't have an actual diagnosis, it's really hard for people to, as you said, like get insurance to pay for therapy, et cetera.

So how do you see increased research really helping us make headway in this field, not just generally, but for individuals?

Tim Stein: I mean, the increased research, one, hopefully we're moving towards a diagnosis. And if you get a diagnosis, that opens up all kinds of doors. We saw this when we got the diagnosis into the ICD-11, which is the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual that the rest of the world uses. The United States, we decide to be difficult. But the rest of the world uses it. And we got a diagnosis in the impulse disorder section for problematic compulsive sexual behavior.

We got that in suddenly. a lot more research was easily fundable, because it was as a diagnosis that we saw somewhere else. Suddenly, it was easier to incorporate questions about addictive patterns related to sexuality in the World Health Organization's sexuality survey. You know, suddenly, we were able to start having conversations based on sort of this diagnosis, and we could talk with other clinicians and people who are treating it in a very different way. So the understanding the research, the breadth of what we can identify as effective treatments suddenly just increased exponentially.

When we get that in the United States, and we are doing a lot of work as an organization to try to support getting some sort of sex addiction diagnosis into the DSM in the next round of DSM updates, it will, will have that same impact in the United States. In the meantime, You know, there's a lot of controversy because, you know, I assume I'm speaking to the choir here. We see sex addiction, we see how out of control it is, we see that people are— it's an addictive process.

There's a reason that there are so many 12-step meetings. It's not because people are like, you know, I'm looking at porn, or I'm going to massage parlors. And, you know, I don't really know that that fits for me. And I'd like it to be different. That's not what we're seeing. We're seeing people whose lives have fallen apart, whose like sense of relationship with themselves has in many ways shattered. I know when I was in my addiction, you know, there was a very real sense of having not liked myself for a very, very long time.

That's why we're seeing all these people in there. And when we don't have a diagnosis, it's too easy for the people who are either skeptical because they don't want to think of sex as possibly being addictive, or They're skeptical because they're making money off the sex trade. And there's a lot of money that goes into people who want to say that, well, no, you're just being prudish. You're just being overly moralistic. I think we know that that's not the case.

As a sex addiction therapist, I will often say, I have no interest in telling other people what to do with their sex life. You know, if you— if it's mutual, if it's satisfying, and both of you feel connected and better coming out the other side, Go for it. But when it falls into an addictive pattern and when it starts to become painful and problematic and takes over in other ways and has those negative consequences, then we're having a different conversation.

Tara McCausland: Thank you for that. I know from observing my father, who was and is a great man, he— I wasn't aware of it for many years growing up, but I know that he was one who wanted to be a good family man and involved in his community church. And he couldn't shake it. It wasn't about a moral failing. It wasn't about lack of willpower. Sex addiction is real. And so I appreciate what Afar is doing to help us better understand these patterns and how we can better treat and diagnose these issues.

Tim Stein: That's some of the stuff that we're really looking into and highlighting right now is with The research, especially this last batch of research with Catherine Etchison and Patrick Carnes, and it's being published over over time. What we're really finding is that what's the background? There's often you know an abusive history. The people that are sex addicts and that what that looks like varies. We see a correlation with ADHD. We see a high suicidality rate, whether they commit suicide or they just have suicidal ideation.

We see that very highly with people who are sex addicts. We don't see— it's a parallel process, but it's not a connected process. It doesn't really link with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I, I'm appreciating because, you know, sometimes people are like, well, this is just a different form of OCD. And it's like, well, no, it's not. And we've got the data that shows that. But the other thing that we're finding is the neurological changes that take place in the brains of sex addicts When, as an addiction, and it parallels what we know for other addictions.

So we see changes in the dopamine transmitter system in the, in the brain. We see changes in the serotonin transmitter system in the brain, and it all leads to a syndrome that we call reward deficiency syndrome, which is basically a neurological condition where you get hyper-drawn to the object of whatever it is your brain wants. Your brain's ability to contain itself and sort of regulate itself gets compromised, and the ability to sort of think things through, it goes out the window.

And you combine that with the trauma reactions where the frontal lobe goes offline and your survival brain says, this is what I need to do to survive. You've got a whole neurological cocktail that is working against you. And so for for us to understand that this isn't a moral failing. This isn't somebody just purely making a bad choice. I'm not going to say choice doesn't go into it, but there's more to it than that. There's a whole neurological component.

For somebody who has an addiction, one of the first things they have to understand is their brain is working against them to get sober. Hmm. That's, that's why trying to get sober on your own very rarely works. That's why we have 12-step programs. That's why we need other people. Because when the addict's brain is going haywire, and it's saying, hey, this is the best idea ever, you got the other people in the, in the community who are either in the room or available by a phone call, who can— because they're not in the middle of that moment, they can see more clearly what's going on and guide that person.

And then that person gets to repay the favor when the other person's brain is going off on its addiction. in its pathway. But neuro— it's a neurological condition. It's a trauma condition. It's an ideology of what we have gone through, uh, you know, processes. This is not a moral failing. This is not just people who don't have any willpower. There's a lot more going on here.

Tara McCausland: I think that bears repeating. When you are suffering from addiction, your brain is working against you. Oh yeah. And I think repeating that when you don't want to go to the 12-step meeting or you don't want to go to another session of therapy, it's like, my brain isn't functioning properly. It can get there. Our brain can heal over time. But until then, we need the support of a vast community to help us.

Tim Stein: Let me actually adjust your statement there, which is our brain gets better over time. The problem is that with addiction, the neural pathways or the neurological scarring that our addiction put in place never actually goes away. There's always that vulnerability. You know, I remember somebody in one of my early meetings who'd been sober for 20 years and went off the wagon, that addictive thinking of this is why I need to do it. And he was a therapist, which was very sad.

Yeah. Hmm. Um, but, and we see this with alcoholics who relapse after 15, 20 years, and they very quickly go back to where they left off. What we have to understand is that our brain gets much better, and we can start to function like a recovery brain. And, you know, there, there's the, the saying, no matter how far down the road you go, the ditch is always 5 feet to the right. It actually gets a little bit further. It gets easier to navigate out there.

But if we go back into our addictive pathways or back into our addictive behaviors, those old unused neurological pathways that were associated with our addiction, unfortunately, they start to sort of clear off and become the primary pathways again. And so it's never that, that if I'm an addict, I don't have the luxury of assuming that my brain has wiped itself clean of the addiction. My brain has overlaid recovery on top of all that, and it's functioning in the recovery places.

And I have to continue to hold the boundaries and work my recovery program, whatever that might look like at this particular time, in order to maintain that. Because if I stop and I let myself slide back into some addictive type of patterns, my brain will revert back to what it was before.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, actually, I really, really appreciate that, Tim. And I know that some people really have a hard time with the saying, once an addict, always an addict, and some people might really push against that. I think it's helpful to ask ourselves if the label is impairing my recovery. However, I think what you're speaking to is very true. I've seen it. Mm-hmm. I've seen it many times working in this field. And very sadly, I think when we get too comfortable and we rest on our laurels, we can fall back into patterns really, really quickly.

And I was telling Tim, for our listeners, you know, my dad could be white-knuckle sober for 3 years at a time. Granted, that was before he got into some good positive sobriety and really healthy living. It can actually really be in our favor and empower us when we can just embrace This is a part of my, my journey, and I have to play it safe. I have to keep my boundaries, bottom lines in place. Anyway, we can go on and on about that, Tim.

Tim Stein: I actually view it as a blessing these days. One of the, one of the things that I am really fascinated with right now, especially from a neurological perspective with addiction, is dopamine and how dopamine plays out. I will give a plug to Anna Lembke and her fabulous book. Dopamine Nation, if people haven't read that. We were fortunate enough to have her as a guest speaker at one of our retreats that we did recently. And she makes the point that anything that, that directly spikes our dopamine is addictive.

And so as a sex addict, that's what I did. And so in recovery, I'm learning to manage my dopamine system in a very different way. Because when I do something that my brain finds uncomfortable— exercise, meditation, journaling, rigorous honesty— when I do— and those are all the things that we use as standard, you know, sobriety tools to help us stay sober. When you look at what we use for sobriety tools, what you'll see is that they are actually dropping our dopamine levels because we find them uncomfortable.

And our brain, our brain has this thing of homeostasis. It wants to keep the dopamine levels equal. And so if you spike dopamine, the brain actually drops your dopamine level an equal amount below. If you drop your dopamine, your brain will naturally spike the dopamine level an equal amount above. And wherever the brain adjusts it, it stays there for an extended period of time. So when I do something like rigorous honesty and meditation, my dopamine level drops, and then my brain naturally pushes it up to a high of feeling good.

That's what runner's highs and those kind of things are. And then it hangs out there for hours and hours and hours. Instead of in my addiction, I spike my dopamine, my brain drops my dopamine level, and it stays lower for hours and hours, which is that sense of uneasiness, discomfort. Oftentimes as addicts, we experience that as like the trigger for an urge of I want to go act out. But she was making the point that right now in our society, we have all this stuff.

Our society is about instant gratification. We have social media, we have YouTube, we have TV, we have our cell phones that are just sort of like instant dopamine hits walking around in our pockets. And So we have a society where we are off consistently spiking our dopamine, which is actually consistently dropping us into a sense of feeling less than, which is wanting to spike us for more. I'm grateful because in recovery I have to pay attention to all this stuff.

As a recovering addict, I hold this stuff in a very different way, and so I'm able to sort of go through life. And I'm not perfect. I'm, I'm very aware that YouTube is my kryptonite currently. Um, not because I'm going to inappropriate videos. I can just get lost on stupid stuff there for way too long. But I'm aware of it and I'm paying attention. Right. And it allows me to stay balanced. You know, I'm— I often tell my, my clients and my friends that I, I don't wish addiction on anybody, but I wish recovery on anybody that can get it.

And so I don't really see the work I've had to do as an addict in recovery, and the work I continue to do as an addict in recovery, as a burden. I actually see it as a blessing.

Tara McCausland: I actually really appreciate that perspective. And these are things that I am striving to do myself. And I am not a recovering addict. I just know that when I'm exercising, when I am meditating and praying, when I am journaling— and that one's really hard for me— all of these things that require a lot of effort, when I'm doing those things, I just feel so much better. We all have our own patterns that we fall into when we're feeling low.

I know that, you know, those tortilla chips are just a pantry away and gorge myself on certain foods. And I— anyway, obviously, porn and potato chips or tortilla chips are a different story.

Tim Stein: Yeah, porn and potato chips are different, but not really to your brain. Because your brain is using them both as something to, you know, immediately spike the dopamine. And so from a dopamine perspective, from an addictive perspective, it's the same. which is why we see so many people get sober from one addiction, only to sort of like wander into other areas of either addiction or compulsiveness. You know, yeah, I've worked with plenty of alcoholics that have been sober for years and years and years coming into my office because they're realizing that their sexual behavior or their porn use is out of control.

I work with all kinds of people that get sober from sex addiction, and then we're paying attention to their alcohol intake and their food and, you know, their social media use. And, you know, nicotine comes back into the picture and they've gotten sober from this behavior, which they've decided is the problematic behavior, and they're missing out on the underlying neurological pattern that just moved to a different behavior.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, you keep checking me here. And I guess I was talking like the level of unmanageability that potato chips versus porn can create are maybe a little bit different. But you're right, the brain, the brain is looking for a coping mechanism. And we all have to be very mindful of what it is that we turn to. And so the healthy living behaviors that we were just describing, we call them top lines. And I say lifeline. When we choose to maintain those top lines, bottom lines, boundaries, we are just happier individuals.

So I suppose if we can kind of shift our perspective a little bit and recognize, even if addiction has been a part of our story, even if our brain is always going to carry scars, if we really live a life of recovery, that's a good life. It's a happy life. So let's maybe shift gears a little bit here. You've been involved in research with AFAR, et cetera, and you are also a clinician. You're a certified sexual addiction therapist.

In your work with individuals struggling with sexual addiction, What patterns or challenges have you seen emerge most often in the recovery process?

Tim Stein: Patterns and challenges that I see emerge are that they get the idea of sobriety, and they miss the piece about recovery. And they often miss the piece about partner sensitivity. And so there's, you know, there's this, a number of People that will get sober, but it costs them their marriage unnecessarily. And so there's this piece about understanding how you got to get sober and you got to focus on your own stuff as you get sober. But if all you do is stop at sobriety, you know, that, that's not really where life change comes from.

Life change comes from recovery. I mean, we often say sobriety is about what you don't do. Recovery is about what you do, you know. And so when I hear you talk about your father, I make up that, you know, your dad getting sober, awesome. The reason that you're— you have such a strong connection to your father and that his life has changed is not because he got sober. It's because he got sober and then he stepped into, how do I live my life in a different way moving forward?

And likely because of the way you talk about him and the way that, you know, he's still married to your mom and all that stuff, I make up he also leaned into understanding, okay, there was an impact I had on, on my wife. There was an impact I had on other people. Wasn't my intention. It wasn't something I was trying to do. Doesn't mean it's not my responsibility and not— and it doesn't mean that it's not important for me to understand what they're going through.

And so there's this whole shift that has taken place over the last decade or more. Yeah. About really understanding the trauma that other people who are in relationship to sex addicts have experienced. Because a sex addict relapsing into a sexual behavior has a very different impact on their partner and the partner's sense of who they are than an alcoholic who relapses on alcohol. If an alcoholic relapses on alcohol, the partner doesn't have that sense of, was I not enough?

But, and we know with sex addicts, that's usually not the case. It's usually not the case of my partner wasn't enough. But just because we can say that as the addict, it doesn't mean that our partner doesn't still feel that. Because the impact that we— that trauma has on us isn't logical. It's a very deep impact that is in many ways unconscious. So when people come through our program, And they do the work to get sober, and then they're willing to continue the work to lean into, well, not only am I sober, but how do I live my life differently?

How do I lean into things differently? What does rigorous honesty look like? What does sort of leaning into integrity and sort of identifying my values and living my life by those— when they— which isn't easy, but when you understand them, most of your decisions are made. They're just not always comfortable decisions, as well as You know, what's the impact I've had on my partner? And while I can't do my partner's healing for them, I can certainly support them.

And I can have empathy and understanding. And, you know, I'm kind of fond of saying, I'm never going to tell you your partner's response is always going to be kind, appropriate, or even balanced or grounded from a neutral perspective. But the more important question is, can you understand why that response made sense to them? In that moment. And when, as an addict, you can say, well, my partner's response to me in this moment is not appropriate and it's not kind, and yet I can understand why it made sense, I can hold my boundaries with my partner in a very different way, in a very sensitive, supportive way, while still having a boundary.

Tara McCausland: That's going to speak volumes to our audience, Tim. As an organization, As we were discussing beforehand, so we, we really value therapy, qualified therapy alongside good 12-step. And we have men and women learning this process, kind of a similar path. We know that betrayal trauma healing looks different than addiction healing, and we acknowledge that. But the fact that both can understand the trauma piece and walk that path together seems to be really helpful for both sex addicts and betrayed partners.

I know that you have co-authored a book with Jeannie Vitoni where it focuses on those struggling with sexual addiction, but there's a great emphasis on partner sensitivity. Tell me a little bit more about the workbook and how is this workbook different from other workbooks out there?

Tim Stein: Yeah, my business partner Jeannie Vitoni— and I'm very fortunate to be partnered up with her, we've been working together since 2008, 2009, somewhere in And she was very much clear from the get-go about betrayal trauma and what's going on. And so we have incorporated that into the work we do at Willow Tree Counseling from day one. We have— we run a bunch of weekly sex addiction groups. Part of it is process, part of it is education and curriculum-based.

And so we had been evolving the curriculum over years and years and years and just finally decided it was time to tweak it and put it out as a book that other people could use as well. The book is called Finding the Way Through. It's a workbook for individuals who are working on sobriety recovery from sex and pornography addiction. And it also incorporates a lot of partner sensitivity. So not only— and I'm really very proud about this, I feel very proud that it's a very solid book, As far as what are some of the steps and tools and pieces you can put in place, and how do you start to uncover the the parts that you're missing?

So you're you know white knuckling, like you were saying with your dad. White knuckling, I believe, is a skill that every addict who's going to have successful sobriety needs to have. But if that's the only tool you got, it's not going to work. What is it? The book has all these pieces about what do you need to know to. Build a successful program, to uncover the pieces that you're missing, to fill in those gaps so that your sobriety program becomes pretty solid.

But in every chapter, we also have incorporated partner sensitivity and education about what's the partner going through, education about what is trauma, education about how can you and your partner sort of sit down and have a check-in that's an effective way, education about How do you negotiate with your partner as opposed to sort of digging in your heels? We use an analogy of, you know, in in recovery sometimes people will talk about you got to stay on your side of the street.

And Jeannie in particular, I give her credit for this, recognized very early on that the other side of the street felt too far away for partners. And so she shifted the analogy. And so now we talk about you got to stand your. side of the fence. And it's like a little 4-foot fence, you can see the other person and what they're doing. And they can talk to you about their program. You don't hop over the fence and manage their yard for them.

But you can see what's going on. And it's a very different impact. And vice versa, the addict can see the impact of what they're doing on the partner, but can also see the partner doing their work to sort of manage that. And you can have those wonderful over-the-fence conversations. All the therapists that work for us, we learned very early on that it was important to for a therapist to be fluent in not only what's going on with sex addiction and the addict and their sobriety recovery and their treatment, but to also have fluency in what's going on with the betrayal trauma piece, what's going on with the partner, what does betrayal trauma healing look like?

What does, you know, rebuilding the partner's life with appropriate boundaries look like? Because when we— when you have both sides of that equation in your pocket, and you can talk about them, suddenly I can help the addict make sense of what they're seeing with the partner. And I can help the partner make sense of what they're seeing with the addict that maybe isn't as intuitive as we'd like it to be. And so in this book, we've incorporated the partner sensitivity piece, partly because I think it's important to know, but mostly because I want the addict to understand what's going on on the partner side.

Because, you know, we've seen relationships that have unnecessarily, you know, been harmed or ended because there was a lack of understanding about what was going on on the other side of the fence. And so we feel very strongly about bringing partner sensitivity into the addict program, not because the addict does the partner's work, but because when the addict understands the partner's work, the outcomes are very different.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, really well said. Do you think it's possible really to heal a marriage without the addict getting some of that partner sensitivity and betrayal trauma education?

Tim Stein: Uh, yeah, there are plenty of marriages that have, um, stayed together, plenty of relationships that have thrived before we started educating people about Betrayal trauma and partner sensitivity and everything that was going on. But what what stood out in the relationships that really thrived was that the addict was really able to lean into empathy for the partner and what they did. Another way of saying that is the relationships that thrived were the relationships where the addict naturally leaned into partner sensitivity.

without us having to educate them about it. Hmm. So I think that— I don't think you have to have the education. Some people are just naturally a little bit more empathetic from their background, from their experiences, from their different professional trainings. They may have that, like, more in their, their back pocket, and they're able to lean into it. What we wanted to do was, if that wasn't something that was coming up for people naturally, You wanted to educate them about it.

And the other piece is, if I can educate you about it, you don't have to sort of like go through the natural process of developing it by living it day to day. I can teach you stuff and you can get it on board quicker. And then you don't have to kind of like slog through it quite as much.

Tara McCausland: It's nice when we don't have to reinvent the wheel, right?

Tim Stein: It is nice. I'm thinking about a friend of mine, Rob Weiss, used to talk about 12 steps in therapy. And he would say, 12 steps is where I grew up. Therapy is where I went to school, and you know it's as much the same thing. It's like I can you can get a lot of this stuff just by living and going through the process. But if you've got a coach, if you got a therapist, you got somebody who can say, "Hey, here are the pieces, and this is how it works." We can learn those skills a lot quicker, and we can apply them more quickly.

And you know when you combine that with like a twelve-step community. You know, you got a winning combination.

Tara McCausland: Yeah. Yeah. So we asked the question, what patterns have you seen emerge with sex addicts in your work with them? But I'm curious, when it comes to supporting partners who've experienced betrayal, what do you think is most often misunderstood, either by the person in recovery or by professionals?

Tim Stein: There's been a shift in the partner community. I think that what most often gets missed is that people look at the partner's behavior, they don't understand the trauma, and they just look crazy. And we assume, well, this person is just controlling, this person is just codependent, this person obviously has a personality disorder. I mean, all those things. And when we educate the addict about what's going on with the partner, Or when I educate other other therapists, or they get the training in it, suddenly they can see this behavior and they can help make sense of it.

Now, if we get like a year in and none of none of those things have changed, we're having we have a different conversation going on. But most of the time, when we start working with a partner around their trauma, when the addict understands what's going on and can lean in, things change radically. There is a piece. That seems to be shifting because it always shifts. We went from— I was trained back in the day when we used the co-addict model, and that was very much, you know, the partner is sicker than the addict and they need to get their own work and all that stuff.

And, you know, that was problematic. And then we shifted and like we always do, we overshoot center. We ended up on the other side, which is the partner is never wrong and anything the partner says is absolutely right. Mm-hmm. And we're finding our way back to the middle, which is, you know, the partner's traumatized, the partner's problems, they're not always going to be appropriate. They need to own that too. But we also need to acknowledge that they've gone through this trauma that has really been created by the addict's behavior, whether that was their intent or not.

Right now, I think with partners, sometimes people miss that there's a trauma piece underneath it, and they just see the inappropriateness or the craziness of the behavior. And they assume that that's the person. I think there's also a piece of sometimes of missing that there might be something else going on with the partner and assuming that everything is trauma when there actually might be other pieces that the that are going on for the partner. We always have to be really careful with that because we don't want to pathologize.

But we're you know we're getting better at understanding the partner piece. I think we've come quite a ways. I don't know that we've. overlapped where we are with understanding addiction yet. But, you know, we're catching up.

Tara McCausland: Yeah. Again, really well said. I appreciate the perspective you're bringing to both the addiction piece and the trauma piece. We, we want to marry those 2 so that we can heal not just individuals, but families. That's our tagline at Isaiah Lifeline: Recover individuals, heal families. We know that this impacts bless children as well. I am the daughter of a recovering addict. And when a couple heals, a natural outgrowth is going to be not always just immediate healing for children, but without at least one person in that coupleship choosing healing, I think I would have really struggled.

But when the couple can both get really good tools and understanding, boy, it can bless generations. And that's been my experience.

Tim Stein: And there's an important piece to recognize here is that But one of the things that we know about genetics is that the environment and experiences change our genetics. They don't change the DNA, but the RNA, which is how things are expressed. Earlier, when I was talking about the dopamine transmitters and the serotonin receptors, those are all based on RNA. If I'm an addict, when my kids are conceived, the RNA that has shifted and changed because of my experience as an addict are inherited by my kids.

So my kids are not guaranteed to be an addict, but they're more vulnerable to that than somebody who wasn't an addict. And then they're brought up in this household where they've got me acting out, whether they see that or not. The energy kind of floats in the house. Yeah. And so there's this impact on our kids, which we have to own and acknowledge and recognize. But the beauty of it is, again, if you remember that RNA is impacted by the environment and the behaviors and the things that we do, as I move into my own recovery, my recovery patterns impact my RNA and it starts to adjust to a non-addict pattern.

And so I'm actually shifting that and I'm creating a different environment for my kids so that their RNA can adjust to something different as well, in addition to them experiencing me living my life in a very different way, not because I'm sober, but because I'm leaning into recovery. So there's this, this piece we have to own, which is, as addicts, we have, you know, deeply impacted our kids, even though that was never our intent. And some of that impact was genetic.

And as I lean into recovery, I can lessen that impact, and I can actually help them to move towards a more positive direction and a more positive outcome for themselves, both relationally, behaviorally, and genetically.

Tara McCausland: So if you needed another reason to really work your recovery, let that be for the upcoming generation, for your kids, for your grandchildren, and not to put more pressure on individuals. I know that recovery work It's hard. But as the recipient of 2 individuals that have chosen recovery, and I am now teaching my own children about recovery principles and trying to create a safe, healthy environment. I mean, we're not doing it perfectly, I know. But boy, it does make an impact when one person chooses healing.

Tim Stein: There's that old phrase out there, you know, one generation plants a tree, the next generation enjoys the shade. As addicts in recovery, that's what we're doing. You know, we're planting a tree and hopefully we're, we're putting the benefits out there for our kids to experience.

Tara McCausland: Well, 2 questions before I let you go, Tim. This has been so fun. I've really enjoyed this interview. So first of all, if people would like to connect with you, where is the best place to find you?

Tim Stein: They can find me at willowtreesantarosa.com. Okay. That's, that's the website for our agency. They could also find me at addictionresearch.com. That's the AFAR website. And those are the 2 places that would be easiest to, to get in touch with me one way or the other.

Tara McCausland: Okay, great. We'll make sure we put that in the show notes. And our bookend question that we love to ask people at the end of each episode. If someone's listening to this episode and they're just brand new on the recovery path, what would you tell them? And then on the flip side, what would you tell somebody that's been doing this work for a while?

Tim Stein: If somebody is brand new, I would tell them, hey, there's hope. You are not alone. Uh, don't let your fears get in the way. You go find a meeting, go find a therapist, go admit that this is a problem and step into it. And Things will change. You know, there's hope. Find people who can give you that hope and strength and see what's going on. Somebody who's been in this program for a while, keep walking the path.

Don't stop. That's going to be problematic. But, you know, you've found things that work for you. You've found things that help you to shift and change. Keep walking the path and keep giving back to those who are coming behind you, whether they're your kids, whether they're other people who are just walking into programs.

Tara McCausland: Awesome. Thank you. Well, again, so fun to be with you. Really enjoyed this conversation and best wishes in your continued efforts to heal those suffering from this issue. Really appreciate you, Tim.

Tim Stein: Oh, thank you so much.

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