Addicted to Sex?
Believe it or not, Texas has 61 chapters of Sex Addicts Anonymous—only California has more—and flashers, molesters, and the chronically promiscuous are packing the meetings in droves.
(Page 2 of 3)
At the time, the treatment of sexual acting out—if it was treated at all—was mostly punitive. The chronically promiscuous husband went to marriage counseling with his wife. An exhibitionist like Ed was offered counterconditioning, or aversion therapy, such as popping an ampule of ammonia and sniffing it every time he found himself fantasizing. The most serious of deviates were treated with powerful libido-suppressing drugs such as Depo-Provera, or they were simply sent to prison. The Carnes approach addressed the addict’s pain, suggesting that inappropriate sexual acting out should be treated with compassion and understanding. The emphasis was less on taking blame than accepting responsibility, the goal not merely to modify misbehavior but to address its roots.
Even though Freud had identified masturbation as the “original addiction” a century ago, Carnes’s theory of sex addiction invited skepticism. To many people, the whole idea seemed to be just another example of the twelve-stepping of America, one more group of misbehavers claiming victimhood. “I got it from all sides,” recalls the therapist, who now practices at the Meadows, an addiction-treatment facility in Wickenburg, Arizona. To some, the theory seemed overly prudish: Was promiscuity or an obsession with pornography really a self-destructive addiction requiring treatment? Others found Carnes’s notion far too liberal: How could incest be compared with compulsive eating or even alcoholism?
The skepticism was perhaps to be expected. Alcoholics Anonymous had gone through the same sort of public doubt, even scorn, during its formative years in the thirties, and the fact that this latest alleged addiction involved sex only heightened the reaction. Yet for every skeptic there seemed to be a believer. Following the publication of his book, Carnes was deluged with mail from sexually tormented individuals who had never known what to call their problem and who had had trouble finding help. Self-help groups for sex addicts—which had actually sprouted up in a few isolated quarters as early as the mid-seventies—began growing, and today SAA (founded in Minneapolis in 1977 and now based in Houston) has 500 chapters across the nation. (Texas, by the way, has the second largest number of local SAA groups—61; only California has more.) A similar group, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, has about 1,000 affiliated local groups in the U.S. The Internet lists about a dozen sex-addict self-help groups, including Prostitutes Anonymous. The total number of sex addicts is impossible to pin down, as is the total of alcoholics and drug addicts. Carnes estimates that at least 6 percent of American adults may be afflicted with some form or degree of it, with a male-to-female ratio of 3 to 1, including certain clergymen who sexually molest young parishioners. And don’t forget about a certain president brought to the brink of political destruction by his “inappropriate” sexual behavior. Indeed, since Clinton’s problems with Monica Lewinsky were publicized, the main question on peoples’ mind has been: Why would the most powerful man in the world risk everything for the momentary pleasure of an illicit sexual encounter? Ed and Ron think they understand why.
THE TWO MEN CAME TO SAA FOR DIFFERENT reasons: Ed in a last-ditch effort to corral a behavior that would sooner or later land him in prison, Ron to gain control over a voracious and indiscriminate libido. Like AA’s, SAA’s twelve-step program does not pretend to be able to cure the addict—its goal is to help him manage his affliction. Both Ed and Ron had tried and failed, despite the havoc they were wreaking on their lives. And they were both all too aware that the public saw their behavior as a matter of weak character, to be remedied by an extra dose of willpower.
But for Ed, no amount of willpower could rein in his compulsion to take his clothes off and traipse around in public. “There were two of me,” he says today. “There was the normal, hardworking family man with a more or less normal sex life. Then there was the exhibitionist me.”
Ed’s exhibitionistic behavior began early in life, around age five. He does not remember being abused sexually as a child, though he does remember that his father was rather liberal about his own nudity around the house. He also recalls being extremely lonely as a child and having an inclination to act compulsively, going on occasional shoplifting or vandalism binges.
At the time, his urge to disrobe in public places might have seemed like harmless child’s play. But it most definitely had lost its innocence by age 26, when he was first arrested for wandering around naked in a parking lot in the wee hours. Ed says that a few days before that evening, he had been fired from his job but was in a good mood—he was excited about his prospects for the future. “I was driving home late, like after midnight, and I just found myself pulling off into this shopping center parking lot, taking off my clothes, and then just walking around.” The police eventually showed up at the scene, and after a spirited chase around the empty lot, Ed was arrested and charged with misdemeanor public indecency.
“I look back on that,” he says, “and I realize that I was acting out like that as some kind of relief from anxiety, just like an alcoholic might go get drunk. It was my way of medicating myself, and I kept on doing it.” Everyone “medicates” occasionally, seeking respite from depression or grief with a drink or two. And sexual intimacy has long been known to relieve stress. But the difference with individuals prone to addictive behavior is the degree of their emotional suffering—and hence, their compulsion to self-medicate. Ed, Ron, and other sex addicts I spoke with all described “something missing” that their compulsive behavior filled for them, a formless anxiety that it relieved.
Over the years, science and sociology have speculated about the source of this amorphous angst felt by all addicts—sexual and otherwise. There are nature and nurture hypotheses. Many addicts inherit their addictive predisposition. According to much recent research, a defective gene, or genes, causes a chronic shortage of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, a chemical in the brain associated with feelings of pleasure and well-being. Mood-altering substances, such as alcohol, or activities, like sex (which prompts a dopamine release in the brain), are abused by such individuals as a means of neurochemical compensation. This is why addicts often report that they are not abusing to get high but to feel normal. Addictive tendencies can also be a matter of nurture. Early childhood experiences such as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse—and consequent feelings of shame—can literally alter a child’s developing neurochemistry, causing deficiencies that he will later seek to self-medicate. Frequently, the addict who has been abused as a child will find his acting out to be, in fact, a reenactment of the particular form of abuse that was inflicted on him. He becomes addicted, as it were, to the trauma.
Whether it’s nature or nurture (Carnes says it’s usually both), the person predisposed to addictive behavior enters adulthood with a pathological self-esteem, a self-image of unlovability. Once the addict finds his medication of choice—alcohol, drugs, sex, food, gambling, or some combination—his neurochemistry can become further imbalanced. The medication is now not merely desired but required. A craving is created.
So for Ed, getting arrested that night in the parking lot, which should have been an ignominious ending to his bizarre compulsion, was really just a beginning. Over the next twenty years, as Ed and his family moved to different cities and he undertook different career paths, the one constant in his life was his exhibitionism. By his own estimate, he has acted out at least 10,000 times, often engaging in his compulsive ritual three or four times a day. Over time he began to romanticize it. “I always cast myself in the role of the outcast hero rebelling against the mores of a too-staid society,” he recalls. Like other addicts, he was living in a kind of trancelike state. “During my waking hours,” Ed says, “I’d be in a near-constant state of fantasy and inner agitation.”
My Library
