On Day 5 of the program I spoke about the Devitalized Personality characteristics as one of the major underlying conditions for sexually addictive behavior. That's why it is important for you to continually return to those reflections and activities. I said that the reason the DP continues into the present is because within a person is a kind of wounded emotional area where fifteen feeling-experiences continue to repeat themselves over and over again. This wounded area is composed of a number of very sensitive and troublesome emotions which I call needles. These troublesome and sensitive feelings originate from those childhood experiences with your parents, siblings, peers, teachers, pastors, and others. They are like sharp needles which continue to stab you with jolts of pain whenever they are experienced. They keep that wounded area alive and charged with pain and hurt.

These wounded emotions keep sexual addictiveness and homosexuality alive because they keep you emotionally unsettled and immature. As long as you remain this way, you feel that obsessive need to turn to sex or to form a love bond with another male. You can see that healing these troublesome feelings is at the heart of the resolution process.

Danny goes from one relationship to another. The last time I spoke with him, he was in tears. His last relationship broke up and he was seriously considering killing himself. He had developed a strong emotional dependency (ED) and attachment to Ramon. At twenty-four years of age, Danny had been in eight serious relationships with other men. He always found others who seemed to take advantage of him and exploit him. In each of these relationships he would let this happen until the old emotional wounds were stimulated once again. Then he would feel abused and violated, rejected and victimized, overwhelmed and depressed. None of these men, who are empty themselves, ever fill Danny's emotional hunger for acceptance and love.

1. Unloved and worthless. These twin feelings head the list because feeling unloved and worthless is at the core of the deprivation complex. To feel unloved is to feel unwanted, devalued, unworthwhile. It is a feeling of unimportance and of being unappreciated and not special to anyone. Every person needs to feel special to someone and to belong to someone in a special way. Feeling unloved and worthless is to harbor a deep, secret doubt about your self-worth and value. It is a sensitive and painful underlying, undermining attack on your self-esteem and self-acceptance.

2. Anxiety and depression. Anxiety is a feeling of dread, worry, and apprehension. Do you sometimes feel as if something is weighing on you; some responsibility, care, duty, or unfinished burden? There is a sense of some impending danger or attack that may be coming to you. You sometimes feel as if something worse is about to happen. It is vague and intangible but present nevertheless.

Depression can make you feel purposeless; that you are useless and have no interest in life. You may feel that life is unfair, bleak, and a bitter struggle. You may feel that you are always engaged in battle and always under some kind of burden.

3. Anger and irritation. I find that many overcomes have trouble with anger. I often see the "four buddies"Ñ anger, sadness, guilt, and depressionÑhanging around together. You find it hard to get angry, don't you? When you do, it can be explosive. More often, you hold anger back because angry feelings make you feel guilty and self-rejecting. So you try to avoid anger by covering it up in some way. You repress anger and deny anger, and this leads to guilt, sadness, and depression. Internalized anger is a major destroyer of self-esteem.

4. Ridicule and humiliation. You may have been openly ridiculed and criticized by your parents (or others) in private or in front of others. You may have been told that you were stupid, dumb, or made to feel deficient in some way. Now you are needled by any sign of ridicule and humiliation. You are supersensitive to any comment that indicates someone thinks poorly of you. Do you ever find yourself a bit paranoid about what others may be feeling or thinking about you?

5. Disregarded and ignored. As a child perhaps you were not openly ridiculed but instead were painfully ignored, neglected, or went unnoticed. The lack of attention left you with a sense that you are not worth noticing, not sought after, chosen, respected, or wanted. You come to disregard and depreciate yourself. You may consider yourself uninteresting and unenjoyable to be with. You put yourself down and feel unworthy of any attention or affection that comes your way

Frank notices how important clothes are to him. He spends an exorbitant amount of money on clothes. Why? To be noticed! Many evenings in the past he would get all dressed up just to go to a gay bar and be noticed. It felt so good to get the attention of other men, even if there was no sex.

6. Violated and abused. You may have been physically, sexually, or emotionally violated as a child. You may have had parents, siblings, or relatives who terrorized and tyrannized you. This may have left you with an exaggerated fear of attack, violence, physical force, aggressiveness, or bodily harm. You may feel distrusting, self-protective, and fearful of intimacy. You sometimes feel bad or guilty. You are very afraid of physical touch.

Scott warns people not to touch him. He says he doesn't trust people touching him. He doesn't believe he was physically or sexually abused as a child, but he's unsure. Scott recognizes that he has an emotional screen or barrier between himself and all other people. He won't let anyone penetrate it.

In therapy with Scott, I sat directly in front of him. I asked him to make continuous eye contact with me. Then I asked him to close his eyes and imagine that I was approaching him. He said that this caused him great apprehension and anxiety. Gradually, he let me touch his hands with mine. Later, he worked through his fear of being touched and hugged by me.

7. Guilt and shame. You may have a strong, nagging feeling of guilt and self-criticism whenever you suspect you have done something wrong. Guilt is the conviction of the Holy Spirit and is to be expected. Shame is not of the Holy Spirit and results from someone always telling you the "shoulds" and the "oughts." This made you emotionally oversensitive and unsure of your adequacy.

If you were shamed as a child, you were made to feel exposed and caught with "wrong" feelings like anger, criticism, or disagreement. This caused you so much pain that you now keep "on guard" so that you don't violate these exaggerated internal standards. This kind of shame is very different from the appropriate guilt or remorse over sin.

8. Incompetent and inadequate. Joe finds himself having internal dialogues like these:

Inner Parent (IP) "You sure are stupid. Why did you say that to him?"

Inner Child (IC) "I don't know; it was all I could think of at the time."

(IP) "Well, he's really going to think that you're a jerk. You really should watch what you're saying."

(IC) "I can't help it. Sometimes I just act before I think. I get so nervous that I just want to say whatever comes to mind as quickly as possible."

(IP) "Well, think before you act. Why don't you think first? You're always acting like a fool in front of me. You make me so embarrassed."

(IC) "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to embarrass you."

(IP) "I can never trust you. You're always doing something wrong. What's the matter with you anyway?"

Does this sound at all familiar? You still carry on those inner parent-child dialogues in which you re-create what you actually heard as a child or thought you heard. The end result is that you feel inadequate, incompetent, deficient, unable, lacking, and disabled in some way.

In my therapeutic work with overcomers over several years, I began to take note of these 15 unsettling and wounded feelings that seem to come up again and again. Your emotional healing, the un-doing of sexual addictiveness and the healing of homosexuality, depend to a great degree on your coming to know which of these emotions trouble you, and your willingness to begin dealing with these emotions in more effective ways than you have in the past. Begin to identify those that are highly charged (hc), moderately charged (mc), and only slightly charged (sc). Report this to me.