Teaching the Sex Offender to Clarify the Assault Cycle
Original authors: Steven E. Mussack, Ph.D. and Alison Stickrod, M.S., NBCC 

Definitions
The specific details of events, thinking errors, feelings, goals, and behavior which proceed, occur during, and follow a sexual offense, is defined as the cycle of assault.  An assault is defined as any behavior which excludes the rights and welfare of others causing harm to others or to self.  Assault may be sexual abuse, physical abuse, or emotional abuse.

Sexual offense behavior is viewed as a middle step in predictable sequence of repeating maladaptive behaviors.  Feeling victimized by a sense of betrayal, helplessness or powerlessness appears to be the first step in this cycle, followed by a predictable pattern of maladaptive and acting-out behaviors which precede the sexual offense.  There are also post-assault behaviors, thinking errors, goals and feelings which are predictable and repetitive, and which conclude the final step of the cycle, that of the offender feeling "okay" in his/her world.

Goals of Assault Behavior
The sexual offense and the maladaptive acting-out behaviors exist to meet normal human needs for self-esteem and personal power.  While the human needs are shared by us all, the offender's method to get those needs met is harmful, exclusive of recognizing the rights and needs of others.  The sexual offense and the preceding and post-assault behaviors appear to be efforts to achieve some personal equilibrium within the offender's view of the world.

A Primary Treatment Goal
A primary goal of sexual offender treatment is to aid the offender in accepting full accountability for his/her offense.  Teaching an offender how to identify, recognize and then interrupt his/her own assault cycle, serves this goal.

In order to teach cycle clarification effectively to the offender, it is important for the therapist to understand:

The client ask "why" learn cycle?  The client needs reasons that make sense to him/her in order to do the work, reasons that fit into his/her own framework.

As therapists we need to understand the value of the developmental process for the client well enough to pass those reasons along.  Where the therapist is clear of the value, then the value can be taught in all aspects of treatment.  The value of clarifying cycle is so extensive, its importance should be discussed repeatedly.

As we teach the offender how to identify assault cycle details we help the offender understand that a cycle of maladaptive behavior exists.  It is important to magnify all the ways the process sets up practice in successful employment of adaptive healthy behaviors.  Clarifying cycle is literally a reconstruction process.  In order to identify the multiple steps personal exploration, self discovery, personal insight and personal decision making.  Identification of assault cycle details becomes a practice ground for learning assertive healthy behavior.  Through clarifying one's cycle of assault the offender may build a bridge to development of a positive and healthy cycle of adaptive behaviors.

10 Interventions Statements
It is helpful to give positive reasons of how developing a clear understanding of an individual's assault cycle can be valuable and powerful for them. Listed below are 10 intervention statements.

Clarifying cycle is valuable because it:

1. Makes behavior predictable, brings maladaptive behavior into full consciousness, providing a conscious opportunity to accept responsibility for self.

2. Proves to the client he/she can be extremely self observant.

3. Enables the client to experience vulnerability as a positive and empowering experience.

4. Provides the client with an experience of nonsexual intimacy, feeling ownership, and personal self control from revealing their self to themselves.

5. Helps the client break their secrecy with self.

6. Breaks the clients' isolation from others, by providing an experience  to inform and help others, self disclosure to others, instruct others.

7. Helps the client work toward healthy ways to meet personal goals, the same goals that the maladaptive assault behavior attempts to meet.

8. Aids the development of alternative healthy behaviors in a non stress time, assists the client in developing a preconceived plan to deal with stressful situations.

9. Provides practice ground for assertive behavior, self discovery, and personal decision-making.

10. Places the offender in a position to be extremely helpful and instructive to the victim and others who he/she has harmed by informing others of offender accountability for assault cycle behaviors.

Key Dynamics within the Assault Cycle

Within the repeated sequence of predictable maladaptive feelings and behaviors exists a potent dynamic for change called recycling.  It is a predictable departure from a series of predictable behaviors, and a re-entry to the beginning point of cycle prior to an assault.  It is a dynamic of self perpetuating stress.  The offender is dysfunctionally failing to meet personal needs in mid-cycle and before the assault.  The offender experiences feeling re-victimized by non-victimizing events and starts back through cycle another time.  Each repetition through an incomplete assault cycle, through return to a repeated sequence of thinking errors, feelings and behaviors serves to decrease esteem, and to increase the offender's practices to self protect in ways which exclude and increasingly exploit the rights and needs of others.  The process appears to escalate objectifying others, viewing others as objects.

Recycling functions as a build up of increasing internal frustration and pressure.  This pressure may be vented by acting-out behaviors or by fantasy of getting back at others.  Initially get-back fantasies serve as a pressure reducer.  Recycling desensitizes the individual to the initially high degree of pressure release achieved by fantasy or acting-out behaviors.  Repeating get-back fantasy as a maladaptive form of problem resolution, pressure release, or discharge of anger or hurt, may subsequently decrease in desired effect.  Fantasy may need to become increasingly sensational intrusive or exploitive, in order for the individual to continue to derive the same rush, or relief.  Like the alcoholic who increases the chemical to achieve an initial desired effect, the offender may need to advance fantasy to greater exploits and/or translate fantasy to action.

Assault Cycle Illustrated

The following is a generic cycle to illustrate common components in all assault cycles, and to demonstrate the dynamic of recycling within an assault cycle.  The recycle point has the greatest potential for advancing the sequence to an assault and has the greatest potential for changing the pattern, and adapting alternative healthy behaviors.