Always Carry a Rubber Chicken

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Boredom often triggers sexual acting out. Actually, boredom allows junky feelings about self to come to the surface. Those junky feelings trigger acting out as a way to alter the junky mood. Of course, in the long run one of the goals of therapy, 12-step work, and reforming your relationship with yourself is to reduce those junky feelings and improved your relationship with yourself. In the meantime, it is also useful to have a repertoire of safe, effective tools for altering your mood. The two - improving your relationship with yourself and having a set of tools for altering your mood - are not antithetical. They are companions on the path of recovery and maintaining sobriety. When you have a toothache, you make an appointment with a dentist. But in the intervening time, you also take a pain reliever. A rubber chicken is like a pain reliever.

Sex addicts have used sexual experiences as all-purpose mood altering medications. To some extent, they need to replace sexual acting out with other activities. Play and humor are good, healthy, portable, replacements.
Avoid a slip by keeping things around that allow you to enter a psychological play zone. This, of course, depends on your taste and circumstances. Such things might include rubber chickens, sock monkeys, Groucho glasses, joke books, cartoon books, whoopee cushions, and other silly, playful things. I do exercises in classes that involve big, colorful balloons. It is remarkable how quickly a few balloons will transform the mood of a room filled with otherwise apparently serious adults. So, make a decision about what will work for you and acquire some useful, mood altering toys for yourself.

Consider these reasons to buy a rubber chicken. First, play and humor alter mood, lift boredom, and can help you to avoid a slip. Second, laughing and playing are good for you. Fun and play are natural, self-rewarding processes that should occupy a place in any healthy and growthful life. Third, sex addicts take themselves, their addiction, and life too seriously. Shifting over into the zone of play and pleasure in a here and now, healthy, fun, way is a good remedy for excessive seriousness. And finally, there is an element of rebelliousness in silliness and play, just as there is an element of rebelliousness in sexual acting out. A psychologist named Apter called this motivation the "Offense Mechanism". Finding safe, healthy, harmless ways to express this Offense Mechanism is a good tool to put into your recovery tool box.

So, always carry a rubber chicken.

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