Intimacy Anorexia: Healing the Hidden Addiction in Your Marriage by Weiss Douglas

Author:Weiss, Douglas [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Discovery Press
Published: 2017-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

Anorexic Strategies

Earlier, we discussed the characteristics of intimacy anorexia. Those characteristics continue steadily over the course of the marriage, until recovery is actively being worked. In this chapter, I’ll share with you two major strategies that many intimacy anorexics utilize to create distance. After defining each strategy, I’ll explain how to identify an anorexic strategy that the intimacy anorexic might be using.

Starve the Dog

As you may know, when you live with an addiction in your marriage it can significantly impact the spouse. As simple as that principle is, it is often overlooked by most anorexics. If I said that someone you knew was an alcohol, drug or sex addict, would you agree that this addiction impacted the spouse of the addict? Most people would say “of course!”

Remember, the intimacy anorexic wants to live in the good box. They are not so good at seeing the effects of intentionally withholding from their spouse. That plays into their spouse’s responses and how the intimacy anorexic sets it up to be that way.

When I counsel a couple with one or both of them being intimacy anorexic, I have a story I tell them so they will understand this point. I call the story, “starve the dog.” Starving the dog is a major intimacy anorexic strategy that I have seen in nearly all marriages where one or both have intimacy anorexia.

Here is the story. When I was younger, I learned a lot about dogs. Sometimes, it seemed that we had more dogs than people in our family. I love dogs, and I think dogs are great (sorry, I’m allergic to cats). It is fairly simple if you want to raise a nice dog within a family. You feed the puppy consistently, you pet, play and talk to the dog, and the dog will make a nice pet for almost any family.

However, not every family or business wants a nice dog. Some want a mean dog to protect a property. So, if you want a mean dog, you take a perfectly good and nice puppy, and you starve It. I don’t mean you don’t feed it. Maybe you feed it irregularly, but you never talk to the dog and you don’t touch it. That dog will become a mean dog. Regardless of how nice the dog was as a puppy, over time, because its needs were not being met, this intentional deprivation has a predictable outcome of altering the dog. The dog becomes mean, unapproachable, and altered. The on-looker of this dog thinks, “Wow, what a mean dog.” The perceptive onlooker might think, “Wow, a cruel and intentionally mean owner has created that dog.”

Intimacy anorexics intentionally put their spouse in deprivation for years or decades. They ignore the emotional, spiritual and/or the three dimensional sexual needs of their spouse. They intentionally withhold love, praise, and sex, and then blame their spouse and use anger or silence to push them away. This intentional pain given to the spouse significantly impacts and alters him/her over time.

Because of

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