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(L. Bays & R. Freeman-Longo)
The word cycle is derived from the word circle. In fact a cycle is like a rotating circle. A cycle refers to a pattern that repeats over and over. The cycle's pattern may be ways of feeling, thinking, behaving, or a combination of all of them that repeat in your life. You might think of it like the loop that a bicycle chain forms on a bike. Each time you pedal, the chain moves; as the chain moves, the bike goes forward. The bicycle chain goes around and around. It repeats the same pattern over and over. You drive the bicycle chain; the bike moves and you have to steer it or crash. If the bicycle chain were to break one link you could repair it; it would be shorter but it would still work. But when you take several links out of the chain, it breaks down and will not operate.
Cycles of behaviour are like a bicycle chain; they are made up of links that together form chains, the chains join to form the cycle, which repeats over and over, around and around. Ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting each make a link in the cycle. When put together they form a complex behavioural cycle that is acted out over and over. Like a bicycle chain, a deviant cycle can be broken, but only by breaking or removing many links.
Healthy or unhealthy cycles are the basis of your behaviour and strongly affect your life. When you begin to learn about cycles, you will better understand yourself and your behaviours. By understanding how your behaviour is produced, you will be better able to intervene and change destructive behaviours. Making positive changes means you are on the road to leading a life that is happier, more satisfying, and healthier.
This article is about cycles of behaviour in general and your own in particular. As you work through it you will discover some cycles that assist you to live a balanced healthy life You will also discover cycles that are unhealthy and lead you toward deviant and destructive behaviour. When you understand the relationship between the start of a cycle and its end, you will have some of the knowledge and tools that help you avoid deviant behaviour.
Your deviant cycle is a part of your overall life cycle. Your life cycle is very complex. When it is healthy and productive, you are growing and not injuring yourself or others. At other times your life cycle may change to a "deviant" or less healthy cycle; your cycle "deviates" - it is different from normal. This deviation may be sexual or involve other areas of your life. It is possible to have deviant cycles of anger, gambling, or depression. When we use the term "deviant cycle" we mean a recurring pattern of behaviour that makes you less effective, less healthy, or prone to inappropriate or criminal behaviour.
At times your deviant cycle may become more intense and obvious, as when you begin to plan a sexual crime. At other times the deviant cycle is operating within you and you may not be aware of it. As you work through this program you will learn to recognise both kinds of cycles.
There are at least nine good reasons for you to study your cycles, especially your deviant cycle.
1. You learn what led up to committing your crime.
To stop your deviant behaviour you must answer the question, "How did I get into the state of mind to commit my crime?" or "How could I have done it?" Many offenders think, "I'm not that kind of person so why did I do it?"
Understanding your deviant cycle will explain, in part, how you can go from acting wisely, feeling good, being productive and social, to acting criminally. The path from normal behaviour to criminal behaviour can be seen when you become aware of the decisions you made and the actions you took.
The path itself from health to deviance is not simple. Many small decisions, seemingly unrelated to the result, led up to the big decision of committing a deviant act or sex offence. When you study the cycle you will discover the long route you took to acting out your deviant or criminal behaviour. When you understand the decisions that led to your deviant activity in the past, you will understand how you got into a deviant state of mind.
2. By studying your cycle you learn that each of your actions has several causes and several effects.
Everything you do has a cause, something that happened before directly influenced what came after. When you decide to masturbate, something happens before you make that decision. Perhaps you feel lonely, or see an attractive woman, or have a sexual fantasy, or just feel sexual. Something happened to set the stage for what comes next. At first it may be difficult to understand what caused you to behave in a certain way. As you learn about the deviant cycle you will discover that each thought, feeling, situation, behaviour, or perception causes some effect or change in you or in your environment.
An effect does not have to be big; it may be small and subtle. For example, waking up and becoming aware of how your mouth feels may have the effect of making you want to brush your teeth. When you understand your cycle you will learn about the causes (the behaviours, thoughts, feelings, and circumstances) that lead to your deviant behaviours.
3. You learn how you usually react to thoughts, feelings, and environments.
When you understand your deviant cycle you can predict where particular types of thinking, feeling, and acting may lead. The ability to see the effects of your reactions in your behaviour will help you control your deviancy and is a necessity for healthy living.
For example, after you have learned about the cycle you will be able to predict both the long-term and short-term effects of drinking alcohol. You will be able to say how you will feel if you drink, how you might act, and how others respond to you. Knowing about the effects of your behaviour gives you an important tool for controlling your life.
4. You learn that your behaviour is affected by every place you go and everything you see.
Different environments, friends, work, even movies, influence whether you think, feel, and act in healthy or in deviant ways. Some environments, like a topless bar, may influence you to act sexually. Other environments, like prison, may influence you to watch every move you make. As you get better at predicting how a particular environment may affect your feelings, thoughts, and actions, you will be able to find environments that encourage you to lead a healthy life and avoid environments that lead to deviancy.
Learning about the cycle will help you to understand the complexity of the relationship between your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours and your environment.
You may feel angry and be in an environment (like a classroom) that encourages you to stay in control; or you may feel angry and be in an environment (like a bar) that encourages you to "let it all out." As you better understand your cycle you will be able to identify environments where you will be at greater risk to reoffend. You will also learn about environments that may start your feelings and thoughts heading in a direction that can lead you to deviant behaviour.
5. By studying your cycle you learn how your feelings influence your behaviour.
Learning about your cycle will help you to discover how your feelings contribute to your behaviour. Consider, for example, the feeling of "righteous anger." You feel that you have been wronged and have the right to be angry. Offenders often feel righteous anger. They use it as an excuse to violate a law or get even, and they end up in more trouble than when they started. Learning to recognise unhealthy feelings and where they may lead is part of learning about the cycle.
6. You learn how your thoughts influence your behaviour.
Your thoughts about yourself and your work contribute to your health or deviance. Errors in how you think about the world and yourself usually occur long before any problem behaviour happens. If you never thought about deviant sexual behaviour then you would not act defiantly. Even in what appears to be an impulsive, spontaneous crime, thoughts set the stage for the behaviour. Learning what kind of thinking leads to deviant behaviour and what kind leads to healthy behaviour is as essential step in understanding your cycle.
7. You learn how your beliefs about the world and yourself influence how you act.
Most adults have old beliefs or fixed ideas that they grew up with. Some are accurate and healthy, and some are destructive. An example of an unhealthy fixed belief might be that women are untrustworthy simply because they are women. You might have learned it in your childhood if you were sexually abused by a woman or if the men in your family taught you to believe it. This distortion of reality ("all women can't be trusted") influences you to be suspicious or hostile toward women; your hostile behaviour then influences others to avoid you or be angry at you.
Unhealthy fixed beliefs lead you into trouble. Understanding what your fixed beliefs are and how they have contributed to your deviant cycle enables you to change in a healthy way. For example, once you realise that one of your beliefs is "all women can't be trusted", you can change that belief. You can learn that some women (like some men) can't be trusted. You can also learn how to decide which ones you can trust and which ones you cannot.
8. Understanding your cycle teaches you how what you do today influences what you do tomorrow and in the future.
Understanding your cycle teaches you where you are going. If you have a habit of being angry today, you will probably be angry tomorrow, unless you make a conscious effort to change. If you have a habit of resentment this year, you will likely be resentful next year also. If you have a habit of laziness today, you will be lazy tomorrow. When you look deeply into your cycles you see that how you acted in the past influenced your later behaviour.
In an unconscious and unhealthy way you have been in control of your life for most of your life. What you decided to do one day led you to the next day's decisions. You can change this so that you have a healthy power over your future. It all depends on what you do today, each day.
9. Understanding your cycle will teach you when and how to stop your deviant behaviour
Understanding your cycle is a step towards developing tools to break an out- of-control cycle. When you have learnt what environments, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours lead to unhealthy or dangerous situations, you can intervene to stop them. Even when there hasn't been any direct problem with a feeling or thought, you may need to intervene so it does not lead to deviant behaviour. Learning about your deviant cycle teaches you where you are heading and when you must intervene.
For example, loneliness by itself is not unhealthy, but in your deviant cycle may be an early warning sign that you need to intervene and make decisions about how to handle that feeling. You may decide to go to a support group meeting or call up a friend instead of running your old pattern of trying to drink your loneliness away. Knowing when and how to intervene is one result of understanding your deviant cycle.
* A trigger, such as an argument, stress, rejection or boredom usually 'starts' the build up phase.
* Other things start to go wrong such as - wife not interested in sex, disagreements at work, withdrawal from usual activities, fantasies increase.
* In the build up phase, there are often small subcycles like the anger cycle or the argument cycle. Offenders may cycle back to pretend normal, then experience a build up of anger again, then a withdrawal cycle... and this could continue on for weeks before entering the Acting Out phase or the offending phase.
* They may take on extra work, skip meals, become frustrated, exhausted and start to feel inadequate.
* There is likely to be a pre-occupation with deviant fantasies during this phase, which can lead to, or co-occur with, social withdrawal and isolation from family and friends.
* This is when the actual offending behaviour occurs.
* Whether consciously or not, the sex offender makes a commitment to himself to offend by planning the offence and carrying it out. Planning can take many forms, from allowing him to get so drunk that he doesn't care what he does, to actually grooming or recruiting children.
* The Acting Out phase can be one offence or a series of offences, as in the serial rapist who rapes many times over a short period of time, or the exhibitionist who exposes several times in one night.
* This is the period after the offence when the offender experiences guilt or shame. He may also suffer depression and may even feel remorse. This phase often coincides with a court appearance.
* The offender may be fearing the consequences of his behaviour, so he starts to minimise or deny the severity of his crime, or the effect on the victim. He may develop other rationalisations that make it easier for him to bear the guilt and fear.
* Often the sex offender tries to cover up his offence by being extra nice to his victim, particularly if he is related to the victim, so the victim won't report him. Others threaten their victims into keeping quiet.
* He may go into hiding or withdraw from people, believing he is not worthy of them (ie self hatred). He may become self destructive by sabotaging relationships, drinking more, or by 'putting the offence in a little box and burying it in the backyard' - this is called 'compartmentalising'. An example would be an offender throwing himself into work to take his mind off the guilt, so he hasn't time to think about the offence. He says to himself, "I'm a hard worker, I look after my family, I must be OK", or "I only do that when I'm drunk and I'm not going to ever drink again".
* This is the phase in the cycle when the sex offender vows he will never ever do it again...but in effect, by doing that he may actually be setting himself up to reoffend.
* This phase is filled with cognitive distortions, particularly rationalisations and minimisations.
* This phase may only take a very short time before the offender moves on into the Pretend Normal phase, and over repeated cycles it may get shorter and shorter.
* This is the period when the sex offender returns to his normal routine; he puts the offence behind him and pretends he is now in control and will never reoffend. He may even over-compensate by doing something to make up for his offending, such as donating to charity, joining a church group, being an extra loving family man, etc.
* He vows he will never commit another offence and believes he is trying very hard to change his behaviour (this is often referred to as false resolve).
* He thinks he is OK and past the sexually deviant behaviour and might go on like this for months or years, until something triggers his movement into the build up phase again.
THE SECRETS OF THE CYCLE
(L. Bays & R. Freeman-Longo)
By now you are familiar with your deviant cycle. You understand about cycles, chains, and links. To make the cycle more useful to
you it is important to understand the cycle's secrets. As you read about them, think about your own cycles. These examples will serve as guides for you to find the hidden ways that your cycle works.
SECRET BEGINNINGS
The cycle is not obvious. It is hidden. It never announces itself by saying; Now I am starting. Watch out! It starts simply, secretly, quietly, slowly.
Being able to recognise that you are in a cycle is the first step in recovery. By recognising you are in a deviant cycle, you show yourself and others that you are ready to learn how to get out of it. Offenders usually say they are not in their deviant cycle, when asked, because they are not acting sexually deviant right now. You are afraid and don't want to be accused of doing wrong. You might be angry, but because anger feels so familiar you don't recognise it as part of your deviant cycle. Consider how Wally is doing:
WaIIy Worker
Wally felt under financial pressure. He chose to start working later than usual to earn more money. His wife, Aileen, was feeling overwhelmed and tired from taking care of their three children and the house. Wally mentioned that he would be working later.
He thought he would just do the extra work at his job and that Aileen would be pleased with the extra money. So Wally worked the extra hours and made more money, but he came home tense and tired. Wally figured that since he was working so much more at his job to help the family, Aileen should do more of the home chores.
Although he never discussed it with Aileen, Wally came home every day expecting her to take care of his chores around the house. Aileen was busy with her own work. She reminded him frequently about doing the yard work and his share of the laundry. Wally started feeling irritated and complained that she was finding fault with him. After all, he thought, look at all the extra work I am doing at my job. He criticised Aileen, calling her lazy and a bitch.
Wally is not doing anything illegal or unusual. But as he continues blaming Aileen and not communicating with her, Wally's home life starts breaking down. Wally is in the beginnings of a deviant cycle, and if it continues, he will have more serious behavioural problems. When Wally becomes aware of a cycle beginning, he can choose to intervene or ignore it. If he chooses to stop his cycle, he can sit down and talk with his wife or call his therapist. Once WaIIy knows that he is in a deviant cycle he can get out of it before he gets into more trouble.
YOU'RE THE LAST TO KNOW
You're always the last to know when you start sliding into a deviant cycle. Your family, friends, and co-workers are aware that something is going on with you. They may not call it a deviant cycle, but they know that you don't look as good, act as pleasant, or feel as hopeful as you do at other times. Wally had a sense that something wasn't working, but didn't realise he was beginning a deviant cycle. Don doesn't have any idea that he might be in a deviant cycle.
Don Drinker
Don has gotten into the habit of having a couple of beers at lunchtime, a drink or two at night, and a couple of six-packs on the weekends. He knows that sometimes he drinks too much, but Don feels he has his drinking under control since he thinks that it doesn't interfere with his work. Occasionally when he goes to lunch he gets back to work late. But when Don is at work he tries to work extra hard to make up for his long lunches. He believes that no one knows how much he drinks and that everyone is satisfied with his performance.
In reality, the entire crew is wondering why he is so hard to get along with. Don doesn't talk with them like he used to. He acts like something is on his mind and he doesn't want to be bothered. He is making more mistakes than usual and slowing the crew down. When someone tries to correct him he gets angry and tries to show them how he is not wrong. Recently, Don's boss has started wondering whether or not to keep him on.
Many offenders who are in their deviant cycle think they are okay. If they notice anything wrong it looks to them like it is somebody else's problem. They think their wives and friends are being less patient, or the boss is picking on them more. When you don't know or don't admit you are in a deviant cycle you are more likely to stay in one.
SOMEONE ELSE'S FAULT
One of the earliest signs of a deviant cycle is that you find reasons to blame everyone but yourself for your problems. The more reasonable it seems to you that someone else is at fault, the deeper you are in the cycle. When you are in a deviant cycle, you lose perspective on the two sides. You believe that what you are doing is totally the right thing and the other person is the cause of the problem. My time you start blaming others for your problems without acknowledging that at least half the problem is your fault, you are either starting or are in a deviant cycle.
In life there are at least two sides to every situation. One side is that you are wrong and the other side is that someone else is wrong. Looking at two sides of the problem gives you the power to recognise that while you can't change other people, you can change yourself.
Ollie Ogler
Wherever Ollie went he watched every woman he passed. When he saw a particularly attractive woman, he followed her and mentally undressed her, letting his mind dwell on the probable shape of her breasts.
Frequently Ollie got into small fender benders with his car, usually nothing serious. Someone would open a car door in front of him or stop suddenly. Ollie would get out of the car and yell at the other driver for being so stupid. When Ollie's insurance rates were raised he was outraged. He went around cursing the stupid insurance company and raging about why the innocent drivers always have to pay for everyone else's recklessness.
Ollie is in a deviant cycle. If he had his mind on his driving, he could have avoided most of the accidents just by paying attention. Ollie was at least half at fault, but he blamed everyone else - from the other drivers to the insurance companies. When Ollie goes deeper into his cycle, he blames not only other drivers for his problems, but the women he is watching as well. Ollie says things like, women shouldn't dress so provocatively, or she started flirting with me so it's her fault.
Alcoholics often blame their drinking on their families, friends, and employers. Rapists and child molesters usually claim that their victims caused the crime. The deeper you are in your deviant cycle, the more you blame others. This looks the same as when you lie and blame others to cover up the truth, but when you are in a deviant cycle (and not just lying), you, like Bill, really believe that others are at fault.
Bill Blamer
Bill, a long time child molester, was just arrested for another sexual crime. When interviewed about what happened he told his therapist, children always like me. I can't keep them away. They like to play sexual games with me. I tell them to stop but they won't. TV is the problem, there is too much sex on TV and it is corrupting the children. Her father started it, he taught her to sit on his lap, so of course she wanted to sit on mine too. Bill says that he doesn't understand why he keeps getting into trouble.
STINKING THINKING
The deeper you are in your cycle, the more you repress your feelings. The more you repress your feelings, the more they distort your thinking. Your thinking defects rule your thoughts. When you are deep in your cycle, things that are really senseless seem reasonable. When you step outside your deviant cycle and look at what you have done, your stinking thinking, like Paul's, becomes clear.
Paul Porn
Part of Paul's deviancy was buying pornography - lots of it. Paul spent thousand of dollars on different kinds of exotic pornography video tapes. When he entered treatment, he got rid of his pornography. But recently Paul has begun to stop at the local quick market to look at pornographic magazines. Paul says to himself, it's okay, I'll just look for a few minutes. I won't buy anything. I can stop anytime that I want to.
Paul is not thinking clearly as he begins his deviant cycle. The more Paul goes into the cycle, the more he will use thinking defects - rationalising, minimising, blaming others, and compartmentalising - to justify his deviant behaviour. As Paul uses more thinking defects, the more distorted his thinking will become and the deeper in the cycle he will go.
When you are in your deviant cycle, your thinking is distorted in specific ways. First, it impairs your ability to be rational and reasonable. You believe you are thinking well, but when you add two and two together you come up with five. Second, it interferes with your ability to think ahead. When you are in your cycle and you can't relate to the long term consequences of your behaviour, focusing only on the short term, pleasurable results. Paul's false sense of security is an example.
Sam Slider
Sam is in prison for the second time for molesting children. He knew the prison routine and how to slide by without too many problems. He felt good. His mind was calm. He got along well with the other prisoners. He had no problems with sex. When he thought about the future he assumed he would continue to feel good when he got out. He thought, prison is so bad that if I can make it in here, I know I can get by on the outside. Sam felt that he had no sexual problems. He figured he was smart and could get along anywhere. Sam repeatedly told himself that what had happened was just a bad mistake. He got involved in therapy so it would look good in his file, but didn't think he really needed any help. He slid through it, bored with the process.
Sam obviously has big problems. No sex offender goes to prison twice (or even once) unless he has serious problems. But because his thinking is distorted, he doesn't realise how big his problems are. Sam thinks that because he is managing well in prison, he will manage well outside, even though his history on the outside counters that fantasy. Because his thinking is disturbed, he can't see that he needs to make a number of personal changes to prepare himself for his future. He is focusing on today's calm instead of preparing himself for tomorrow's challenges.
HOLEY MEMORY
When you are in your deviant cycle, your memory is rusty, full of holes. You don't remember the pain, humiliation, and despair of your deviant cycles in the past. Events associated with negative emotions (like fear and anger) are a vague blur. By forgetting, like Fred, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Fred Forgetful
Fred got a 20-year prison sentence for raping a young girl who was left in his care. When Fred was arrested he felt terrible about his crime. He pleaded guilty without trying too hard to defend himself. For the first year Fred was deeply depressed, felt dreadful, and knew he needed help.
By the second year, when Fred thought about his past, it didn't seem so bad - certainly not equal to the 20 years that he got. He still remembered the details of his crime and felt the intense excitement that he had while committing it. Fred forgot the horror and despair that he felt when he was arrested. He forgot how unhealthy he must have been to commit his crime. He dropped out of treatment saying, it's really okay. I can do what I need on my own.
Steve Sloshed
Steve uses his weekly pay to drink all weekend. By Monday he feels awful, broke, hung over, and embarrassed by what he has done. Bill collectors are calling and visiting him at work. His heating is being turned off, the phone company is about to disconnect his phone, and Steve's ex wife is trying to garnish his wages because he hasn't paid his child support. But by Friday he forgets how bad he felt on Monday and thinks he will feel still better if he has a few drinks this weekend too. On Monday he knows he needs help. By Friday he says, it's not such a big problem, I can handle it myself. Steve also has holey memory.
These two men forget their out-of-control behaviour, the loneliness, despair, and rage. They don't think about the future. And without long-term help, both of them will stay in their cycles, repeating their destructive behaviours, feeling bad, hurting others, getting caught, losing jobs, going to jail.
THE CYCLE SPINS YOU
When the deviant cycle is established it begins to live your life for you. By the time your deviant cycle is controlling your life, it does not matter how the cycle got started. It becomes like a forest fire. The more area that the fire covers, the greater the risk for more fires. Once the deviant cycle gets started it continues and gets larger. Maintaining the cycle becomes your life, like Francis, the cycle became his life.
Francis Flasher
Francis gets up in the morning and feels tense. On his way to work he gets sidetracked and drives around looking for someone he can flash (expose himself) to. Once Francis starts his cycle, he drives for hours to find the right victim in the right place. His boss has told him that if he misses one more day of work without a doctor's note, he'll be fired. His wife is upset because he's so preoccupied and distant. He is losing his marriage, his job, and his self-respect but Francis can't seem to stop his compulsive behaviour.
The cycle seems like it has a will of its own. When Francis is deeply in it, his life is out of control. He begins to live for the cycle. Exposing becomes more important to him than his wife, his children, his job, or his self-respect. Because his cycle is so firmly established, only a crisis can break him out of it; he might lose his job, his wife might leave, or he could get arrested. Any of these crises might help him stop, but without intervention and treatment, the cycle comes around again and again.
The cycle has a life of its own. When you are in a deviant cycle your mind is not working well; the things you think you are doing to get out of your cycle often make the cycle worse. Drug addicts often use drugs to escape from their pain and boredom. The more they use drugs, the more pain and boredom they feel and the more they want to use drugs. Frank's cycle just keeps coming around.
Frank Fondler
Frank is afraid that he will be found out. He has masturbated a neighbour's boy and is worried that the kid may tell his parents. Frank has discovered that when he is masturbating he does not feel anxious. Frank's anxiety is so great that he starts masturbating to get some relief. While Frank is masturbating he starts to think about how exciting sex with a young boy would be. Frank feels better as long as he is thinking about sex. That afternoon Frank is asked to babysit a neighbour child. He feels tremendous distress about what he might do. Because he feels so much distress, he starts thinking about sex to make himself feel better. The more he thinks about sex, the more he wants to babysit.
Frank feels tremendous anxiety. Anxiety (like anger, self-hatred, and other stressful feelings) fuels the deviant cycle. The more anxiety Frank feels, the more he gets involved in sexual deviance. The more he's involved in sexual deviance, the more anxiety he feels - a self perpetuating cycle. It is hard to stop it without disclosure, and that idea produces more anxiety. Your anxiety overcomes your will to resist the deviant behaviour. However, the reason for your deviant behaviour is to get some relief from your anxiety and distress. Once the cycle is well established, anxiety is unnecessary; the need to feel excited or powerful may fuel the cycle.
HIGH SPEED CYCLES
Your cycle does not stay the same; it gets worse and moves faster. The cycle gets more and more intense until it gets you into trouble with the law.
Your deviant cycle probably started slowly and got progressively more deviant and compulsive. The longer you let it run, the stronger your cycle becomes and the greater your deviancy. Each time the cycle goes around, each time you offend, the easier it is for you to do it again. Maybe you pick up hitchhikers to rape, or expose yourself, or molest children. Whatever your deviancy, the more you do it the easier it is to do again.
A WHEEL WITHIN A WHEEL
You can have more than one deviant cycle. For example, you may have cycles of alcohol and sex, anger and sex, or alcohol and depression. When you have more than one deviant cycle, the cycles tend to make each other worse. If your cycle is alcohol and depression, the more alcohol that you drink, the more depressed you feel. The more depressed you feel, the more alcohol you drink. Roy's anger and deviant sexual cycles are turning into rape.
Roy Raper
Roy's anger cycle starts when he is afraid of being seen as incompetent and weak. He tries to compensate for his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy by being a tough guy. Roy has learned that if he gets angry quickly, violently, and frequently, people around him never know that he is quivering with fear inside.
Roy also has a sexual cycle. He is addicted to sex and will sacrifice anything for a good lay. His two deviant cycles can combine to make his problems worse. Lately, Roy has learned that if he has sex when he is angry, his woman friend gets scared and acts weak and vulnerable. Roy soon discovers that he can have good sex and feel very powerful at the same time. When his woman friend doesn't submit, Roy enjoys overpowering her. Now, in order to have what he considers good sex he has to beat her up and force her to have sex. His behaviour has developed into rape.
When an individual has two or more deviant cycles, the cycles can feed one another. In Roy's case, the more angry he became, the more deviant his sexual desires were. The more deviant his sexual desires, the more he acted out his anger. When you have two deviant cycles, you make both stronger each time one of them is active. It is twice as hard to stop two deviant cycles.
LIES, SECRETS & SILENCE
When you are in your deviant cycle you lie. You lie to your therapist, your Parole or Community Corrections Officer, your family, your victim, and yourself. It is impossible to be involved with deviant behaviour and tell the truth. The longer you let your cycle run, the more lies you have to tell. Lies generate more lies; lying once leads to lying twice. Staying in the cycle requires you to lie and hide your behaviour. You become secretive, and secrecy makes you feel powerful. When you choose not to lie or hide your behaviour, you break the deviant cycle. You are probably afraid that the cost of being honest is too high. But as Larry found out, the price of honesty is cheap compared to the cost of deviancy.
Larry Liar
Larry is a rapist who is in therapy trying to go straight. While at a car repair shop he noticed a series of Hustler centrefolds on the wall and got aroused. When his therapist asked Larry if he had seen any pornography that week, Larry lied and said no. Afterwards he thought, that was easy. A few days later he was in a video store, saw an R-rated movie with a sexual theme and impulsively rented it. Lying to himself Larry thought, this doesn't have anything to do with rape. He watched it and got turned on.
Larry began having flashes of doing another rape. When his therapist asked Larry if he was having any deviant fantasies, Larry lied again; I'm okay, he lied, I'm staying out of risky situations, and I'm not doing anything bad. But Larry had started buying pornographic magazines again. His thoughts and emotions are beginning to get out of control. Larry is afraid that if his therapist finds out about the flashes and what he is thinking and doing, he will report Larry to the parole officer.
Larry pretends he is okay by avoiding his therapist. He goes to group therapy but does not participate. When he is asked a direction question, he lies to make himself look strong and good. But Larry has been checking women out regularly and drives by their houses. He knows he is in trouble. He has lied so much before that he is afraid of being found out and punished. He also lies to his therapist about being afraid, and about how being afraid makes him angry. A few weeks later he commits another rape.
When you are deep in a cycle you must be lying to someone. Lies keep the cycle going. You must lie to yourself and others over and over in order to work yourself into a mind-state to commit a crime. The truth will break the cycle every time.
ILLUSIONS OF CONTROL
When the earliest sign of a deviant cycle starts you say, I'm in control. I can stop when I want to. This is an illusion, a pipe dream, a thinking defect. As soon as your deviant cycle gets going, you stop wanting to quit, and your deviant cycle begins to control you. Perry's story shows what happens when you slip back into old patterns of behaviour.
Perry Powertrip
Perry has beaten his wife a few times and recently got into a fight with a neighbour. He got into therapy and was learning how to control his anger. After a few months he felt confident that he was in charge of his life and that his anger was under control.
One day Perry and his wife began arguing. Perry felt that he was losing and he didn't want to. He knew that it was dangerous for him to allow himself to be angry, but Perry said to himself, I can handle my anger, I'm in control of it now. He decided to let just a little of his anger out to show her who was the boss. He thought, I can turn my anger on and off when I want to. Perry let himself get angry.
He started to feel powerful as his wife became intimidated. As his anger grew, Perry began beating his wife, and it felt so good that he didn't want to stop. Perry battered his wife until she was unconscious; he get scared and called the ambulance to take her to the hospital. She is pressing charges for assault, and he's awaiting trial.
ROLLERCOASTERS
The cycle changes. It goes up and down in intensity, you have good days?and bad days. Even when you are deep in your cycle your thinking defects help you find evidence that you don't need any outside help.
But just because your cycle is less intense right now, doesn't mean you're not in it; when you are doing deviant behaviour, using thinking defects, or repressing your feelings, you are in a deviant cycle.
Even when you are deep in your cycle, there are good days and bad days. If you have big problems, feeling good is fine, but it doesn't mean you've got the answer. You help keep your deviant cycle alive and well when you take credit for random good days or weeks. When you use these times as evidence that you are not out of control, you are burying yourself in your cycle.
THE WILLPOWER DECISION
Another delusion that keeps the deviant cycle going is thinking; I can do it by myself if I just have enough willpower. Willpower alone won't work. You have probably tried it many times before. How many New Year's resolutions have you kept?
When you are in a deviant cycle you are isolated, a kind of loner. You might not be alone, but you are so wrapped up in your own thoughts, feelings, and desires, that no one else can have much effect on you. I can do it by myself, shows that you think your problems are unique to you, that you are special and unusual. You don't want anyone else to know about them because you're afraid they'll think that you are weak or sick.
The classic image of a loner is the tough cowboy who can take care of himself and needs nothing from anyone else. But the Marlboro Man is an advertising myth; everyone needs help. When you think you don't need help, you're deep into the One and Only thinking defect, just like Len.
Len the Loner
Len has been sexual with his 12 year old daughter for months. Last week while his wife was at the beach with the kids, he watched a program on TV about incest. He knew that incest was damaging his daughter. Len made up his mind never to touch his daughter sexually again. He thought about getting some help, but he knew that Children's Protective Services would get involved. The idea that the agency would interfere with him and his family made Len angry. He said to himself, she's my daughter, it's my problem, and I can take care of things myself.
Len thought that he could fix the problem and make things better for his daughter somehow. That night Len sneaked into his daughter's room again for one last time.
Willpower does not stop you from getting into your deviant cycle. As one offender said; have you ever tried willpower with diarrhoea? You, and everyone else in a deviant cycle, needs outside help from friends, family, social service agencies, and counsellors. Like all of us, you need help at times. Strength is acknowledging your weaknesses and being man enough to say it without shame.
Many people who commit sexual offences against children have developed offending cycles. From the work you've done already, you can see that your thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors play a major part in your offending.
Most cycles follow a series of stages, each one accompanied by increasingly distorted and unreal thinking. These stages are outlined below.
Read through this handout and then write as much as you can about what you do at each of the stages.
Thinking Errors
Thinking errors can be broken down into two main kinds:
1. Pro-offending thinking, which allows you to believe that what you want to do to children is OK (example: children like it, it'll be good for them).
2. Excusing thinking, which allows you to proceed to offending even when you haven't been able to convince yourself that it's OK (example: It just happened).
Both types of thinking errors continue throughout your cycle. If your baseline thinking is wrong, then your interpretation of what happens next is likely to be false too. For example, if someone believes that children enjoy sex with adults, he will interpret a child's smile as a come-on rather than as a sign of confusion or discomfort. If someone believes that he just happens to be alone with a child, he won't see how he gets into risky scenarios.
People who manage to convince themselves that offending is okay by indulging in pro-offending thinking may not need to indulge in the excuse-making kind of thinking error. If you often tell yourself it just happened, or it was an accident, or it was someone else's fault, then you are probably someone who needs an excuse to offend. You may set up conflicts with other people and get yourself into scenarios where you can give yourself excuses to offend again.
People who want sex with an adult consenting partner usually think about what it would be like to have sex with that person before they actually do it. They often think about what they and the other person did when they last met and how things might progress sexually next time. They have sexual fantasies about the person and sometimes masturbate while fantasising.
People who sexually abuse children do this too. The main problem here is that they are thinking about children, not consenting adults. Some picture children consenting to and enjoying the sexual contact. Others imagine children in pain, but not really being hurt. These kinds of sexual fantasies are dangerous because they are full of pro-offending thinking. The more often you imagine a child sexually, the more you want that child sexually. The more often you picture the child consenting, the more likely you are to put that picture onto the child you abuse in real life - some offenders talk about this as putting the mask of your fantasy on the real child, so you don't see what the child is actually feeling.
Targeting (Choosing a Suitable Child)
Most sex offenders choose the children they abuse with considerable care. You have probably chosen children while bearing in mind issues of desirability in your eyes, risk of being caught, ease of control, and the like.
Planning
Most offenders who abuse children spend quite a lot of time planning how to get near the children they've chosen or targeted. Planning goes on throughout the cycle. If you think about it, you'll know how you have planned. If you believe it just happened, think back and analyze the steps by which you got from the thought to the offence - you'll probably find some planning.
Grooming
Grooming involves three types of behaviour on the part of the offender: getting the child to go along with what the offender wants, getting the child to keep the abuse a secret, and convincing others that the offender would never do that sort of thing.
Getting the Child to Go Along With What You Want
Most sex offenders have a variety of ways of achieving this. If you're honest with yourself, you'll know what tactics you have used. These tactics may have been intended to make the child believe she or he must have agreed to the sexual contact, or to make you feel better and more comfortable with what you were doing.
Getting the Child to Keep the Abuse a Secret
The sexual abuse of children is illegal and is seen by the vast majority of people as morally wrong. If an offender is found out, there are some very difficult and painful consequences, so offenders do everything possible to prevent the children they abuse from telling anyone. Sometimes, this is as simple as the offender telling a child, don't tell anyone. More usually it involves threats, bribes, promises, or a combination of all three. If you think about it, you'll know what tactics you have used.
Convincing Others That You Wouldn't Do That Sort of Thing
It is important that no one should suspect, isn't it? So you have to find ways of manipulating people so that they don't guess. The people whom sex offenders often say they try to manipulate include their wives or other adult partners, the children's parents, family members, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, probation officers, lawyers, police, and sex offender therapists. If you think about it, you'll know who you have tried to fool and how.
Offending
Offending itself isn't necessarily a separate stage. You may be someone who starts offending at the grooming stage, perhaps under the guise of accidentally-on-purpose touch or normal child-care behaviour. Many offenders will gradually become more openly sexual with their victims over time. Some stick to set patterns of sexual behaviour, whereas others do not.
After offending, many offenders have mixed feelings. In cases where the offender has had to give himself an excuse to offend, this includes guilt.
Guilt
Guilt is difficult, uncomfortable, and painful, and most offenders find ways of getting rid of it. If you think about it, you'll know how you have tried to shake it off. Have your attempts been successful? If so, how? Have they prevented your reoffending, or have they made you more likely to offend again? Do you find you're going round the cycle again?
Speed of Repetition
People differ greatly; some have quite long breaks between separate offences, whereas others move through their cycles so quickly that it's hard to separate out any of the stages. Others may not offend for months, or years, but when they do start again, they binge, committing many offences in a short time. Still others short-circuit their cycle once they've started abusing a particular child. For instance, if an offender is living with a child, he may groom that child to the point where he can simply go from the thought to the offense.
(Bays L. & Freeman-Longo R.)
For you, as for most sex offenders, one of the most difficult parts of breaking your deviant cycle is recognising when you are in it. Keeping a note where you write down day-to-day events and your reactions to them is an effective way to observe yourself and your cycle. After several weeks, your journal entries will show your patterns of behaviour. By noticing unhealthy patterns earlier and earlier, you will be able to identify ways to change them more quickly. Your journal can be a valuable tool for keeping yourself on track.
The journal technique is a way of keeping track of your life's events and learning how they influence you. The journal is set up to help you understand the difference between events and your reactions to them. Events are all the large and small things that happen around you and to you. A large event could be getting fired from a job. A small event could be a brief conversation at breakfast. Any event, large or small, could trigger thoughts and feelings that you could use to start your deviant cycle. By writing about events and your reactions to them, you will learn about making choices for better ways of thinking, feeling and acting.
Try this experiment:
* Ask yourself, what feelings, thoughts, or behaviours did I have during and after these events?
* Next, think about recent times when you have been alone and list three or four instances. Remember what you were feeling then and write it down. Perhaps you were bored or restless. Maybe you had strong feelings about something you read in the newspaper, or thoughts about something that you saw on TV. These are the small (and maybe not so small) events and reactions that will make up the bulk of your journal.
If you keep track of several events every day, they will provide you with information you can use to discover how your behaviour repeats or forms a pattern. Seeing your patterns will help you quickly to see your unhealthy behaviour, predict where it would lead, and intervene appropriately.
Writing In Your Journal
Monitoring yourself with the journal process begins with three steps:
1. Keeping notes
2. Setting aside time
3. Laying out the page
Keeping Notes
The purpose of a self-monitoring journal is to help you recognise which events trigger unhealthy feelings, thoughts and behaviours. The first step in doing this is to keep notes. Carry a 3x5 index card in your pocket during the day. As things happen, make a note on the card to remind yourself of the incident later. Make a note about the events you have a strong reaction to and think about them several times later in the day. The note may be as brief as naming the people involved and the time. Or you may choose to jot down a few words to describe the incident. Later on you will use these notes to write more complete entries in your journal.
For instance, suppose an event was getting caught in traffic on your way to work. You could take a moment to make a reminder note on your card. The words "late for work -stressed" would be all you need to remember the event at the end of the day.
Setting aside a daily time to make journal entries is an important part of monitoring yourself. Without a regular time to sit down with your journal each day, you will quickly forget the whole thing.
If you don't take time daily, you may overlook the small incidents that happen repeatedly while you wait for the big ones that really matter. But it is often the small incidents that teach you the most about yourself. These small incidents give you the most clues about the early steps in your deviant cycle that are the easiest to change. Offenders find that by the time the large, more serious events happen, many smaller ones have gone unnoticed.
Use lined paper with holes for collecting pages in a ring binder, or write in a notebook. Begin by drawing a vertical line down the middle of the page. Write the date of the incident and the approximate time it happened on the first line, on the left side. Now, writing only to the left of the vertical line, write down the first event you have decided to record. Give enough information to be able to re-read the entry six weeks from now and still make sense of what happened. On the right side of the vertical line, write down any thoughts, feelings and behaviours that you had about the event at the time.
Peter, a child molester, is learning how to keep a journal. His first page looked like this:
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Tuesday 25th March - Events *8am - Jan (his wife) asked me to come home early today to take the cat to the vet. She complained that it was my turn because she thinks I don't do as much work taking care of it as she does. *Lunchtime - Had lunch with some of the guys from the plant. While we were there, some kids came by throwing a frisbee. * |
Thoughts, Feelings & Behaviours Felt annoyed as she was the one who wanted the cat, so I reckon she should be taking care of it.
Missing out on the news tonight made me angry, but I didn't talk to Jan about it, maybe I will tomorrow. |
Like everyone else, Peter had many small events happen during his day. He chose to record these three because he had strong reactions to them. His reactions led him to make either appropriate choices that kept him safe or inappropriate choices that put him at risk of lapsing. Links we will cover in other articles are thoughts about the event, feelings during the event, body sensations while it was happening, fantasies during or afterwards, planning afterwards, and resulting behaviours.
Your journal will allow you to identify and understand these links. Gradually you will be able to see the reactions that encourage your unhealthy behaviour and the choices that lead to your lack of self-control. When you understand what you do to shape your behaviour, you will have some real choices about how to act instead of react.
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