530 | Support for Both Spouses | Therapy Brothers,

Well, Brandon, you've said that you used to be a much more directive therapist and that you came to believe that shame-based approaches were creating suffering rather than healing.

What happened? Was there a specific client or a specific moment? How did you turn that corner?

Oh, that's a lot longer story than you probably want to hear.

But the way I was trained was in working with addiction was to be the bulldog, confront denial head on, to not take anybody's bull crap and to just go at them.

And what I found was that was effective in terms of they were kind of shocked, like, wow, you're responding different than the rest of the world because the rest of the world just kind of buys it.

Right.

Sure.

Right.

Yeah.

But then long term, it just wasn't working.

What I found is to be very honest, I can still be direct, but with an increase of love and to help them see their denial themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's kind of the art of therapy that I've learned over the years.

Way more effective than me just in their face, you know, calling them out on their stuff all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have a saying in Samson that it's a crime to steal another man's epiphany.

I like

that.

In our world, a lot of men have been handed the message that the problem is their appetite.

You seem to be saying the problem is underneath that.

What's actually underneath?

Yeah, you're spot on with that.

I think the whole world, and especially the traditional way that both Brandon and I came into this, we came from a traditional recovery setting, which was focused heavily on the behavior itself.

And in our world, we deal a lot with, same as you, with sexual compulsive behaviors or sexual addictions.