Over the last several weeks, I have watched Brittany Maynard's interviews as well as read articles about her daily struggles with terminal brain cancer. The 29 year old was given 6 months to live after being diagnosed. She decided she wanted to die her way instead of having the cancer take her on it's terms. So, on November 1st, 2014 in her Oregon home, she ended her own life with her loved ones by her side. Regardless of what any of us believe about the controversial debate over the right to die movement, Brittany's choice to leave this world her way and on her terms left me to pause and wonder:
Can each of us choose what we want to let "die" in our lives?
Deepak Chopra, in his wonderful book The Path To Love (1997) talks about the path to love "never being about externals"; he says that who you are with " is a mirror of who you are on the inside" (p. 4). He adds, "When you struggle with your partner, you are struggling with yourself. Every fault you see in them touches a denied weakness in yourself" (p.4). It is so interesting how hard it is to see the mirror that our partner holds up that represents the good, bad, ugly and beautiful about ourselves. How hard it is for us to accept what we want to deny and yet how easy it is to blame our partner's for our misfortune and pain.
We know the following about sex addiction: It is an intimacy disorder, a dissociative disorder, a brain disease, and surprisingly (or not so much) it is not actually about sex. We also know that it is an attachment disorder that begins in childhood.
I recently read an article titled, “Why Kids Sext” in the November 2014 issue of The Atlantic Magazine (Volume 314, No. 4, pp.64-77). The title of the article made the front cover of this particular issue, which immediately caught my eye. As a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist-Supervisor, I have been taken aback by how prevalent sexting, or what some law enforcement agencies have termed self-produced child porn, has become among pre-teens and teens. Even more concerning are the challenges with how to deal with this type of issue in the criminal justice system. According to the article, two-thirds of the cases in the small town in Virginia in which the article was based involved an adult, were taken without the permission of the youth in the picture, involved some form of sexual abuse or blackmail, and therefore were criminally pursued. However, one-third of the cases were based on sexual experimentation of youth (p. 69).
"There is a fire burning. It isn't outside, it is not in a fireplace, there is nowhere to hide. There is a fire burning, it runs deeper than a wound, it bleeds fumes of hatred, and seethes hurt, doom. There is fire inside, it's burdens run deep, it holds onto shame, and claims defeat. There is a fire inside. It is a candle that burns, but it can be cooled, with many lessons learned. There is a fire inside...." (Poem by Candice Christiansen, 2014) Can you relate to this internal fire? Can you feel it? Do you know the kind of pain, anger, sadness, shame that I speak of? Most people do. We all have experienced some thing or another that causes us to bleed with this type of emotion.
