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.
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By the time he was arrested that morning in 1990, he says, “I knew it was over. There was no real thought process per se. I realized I’d already done my thinking. I still had the number of SAA and a therapist. The only way to not get arrested again was to stop doing this.”
FOR RON, FACING UP TO HIS ADDICTION was much less dramatic, but in its own way, just as difficult. Ed had the advantage of engaging in compulsive sexual behavior that was clearly illegal and bound to bring him into contact with the law. But Ron’s acting out had always been not only legal but also, because of an increasingly permissive society, generally acceptable. “You remember how the seventies were,” he says. “It was a sex addict’s dream.”
After his playing around led to a divorce from his first wife, Ron found “the perfect sex partner” in his next wife. Except his dream girl didn’t dampen his lust for extramarital sex. Indeed, to his consternation, he suddenly found himself philandering not just with women but also with men—even though he had never been sexually attracted to them before. Ron came to view it as a matter of efficiency. “Sometimes I’d meet a woman, and of course, I’d immediately begin thinking about how to get her into bed,” he says. “But then I’d realize that it might take dinner and a lot of conversation to accomplish that. With men, I could just go to a bath house, and it was all very quick. I didn’t really consider myself bisexual; I was just behaving bisexually. My partner in sex didn’t matter at all.”
Like compulsivity, objectifying sex—draining it of any of its emotionally nurturing qualities—is a hallmark of sexually addictive behavior. Soon Ron was out of control, operating in the same sort of trance that Ed was in when he exposed himself. “I was acting out three, four times a week,” he remembers. “After a long day’s work, I’d begin thinking about what kind of sex I was going to have later. You know, male or female, pick somebody up in a bar, or go to the woods someplace. There was a point at which I began to realize it had control of me, not the other way around.”
By 1988 Ron began to think he might need help. The problem wasn’t just the damage to his second marriage. “It had just diminished my potential as a lawyer and a human being. There were peers of mine making half a million a year and up in the legal profession, and I was just in private practice. It takes a lot of time and energy to be an addict. When my mind was the slightest bit blank, I’d immediately think of sex. And it would hang in there until I did something about it.”
By happenstance, Ron read a reference to SAA in a newspaper advice column. “It was the first time I’d ever thought of the idea of sex addiction. I thought, maybe that’s my problem with sex.” He wound up at an SAA group. “The first meeting I went to was in this guy’s living room,” he recalls. “There were a handful of the most ordinary people I’ve ever seen there. Then they started talking about their troubles. The main thing I began to realize is that a lot of the sex-addiction problem isn’t just about sex.”
EVEN THOUGH THE SEX-ADDICTION SELF-HELP movement has attracted a huge following, it has an uneven track record at actually “sobering up” sex addicts. “Sobriety with this addiction is tough,” says Ron, who admits to relapsing several times during his ten years in recovery. “See, there’s a critical difference here. An alcoholic’s bottom line is just don’t take a drink, period. With us, no one’s saying, ‘Don’t ever have sex again.’ They’re saying, ‘Find a normal sex life.’ That’s hard. Sex is much more difficult than booze or drugs because of that element of fantasy that is often the real addiction. That’s why, for the time being, my bottom line is celibacy until I get things figured out.”
The movement has also suffered from its own popularity. “There may be too many different groups to achieve the unity that AA has,” Carnes says. “I’d say the sex-addiction recovery movement is about where AA was in 1960 or so—still struggling for respectability.” Some of the splintering has been over the issue of the addict’s bottom line. A group calling itself Sexaholics Anonymous, for example, eschews the idea of allowing addicts to set the parameters of their own recovery and flatly states that the only healthy recovery from sex addiction is one that allows sex only within marriage. Groups have also diverged because of gender. As with AA in its early years, women were slow to show their faces at meetings. The brutally frank, male-dominated discussions of sexual misbehavior often put them off, and as one female addict told me, “The nature of the addiction and how it shows is going to be different with a woman. A woman’s problem may just be that she’s codependent with a male sex addict, or it could be that she’s more of a love addict than a sex addict—addicted to the guy and the relationship, not necessarily the sexual acting out.”
Many sex addicts use private therapists to augment their self-help recovery programs, though, as Ron and Ed agree, maintaining a productive, long-term relationship with a therapist can be hard. Managed care doesn’t look kindly on most mental health claims, let alone those involving a condition that is not officially recognized by the psychiatric establishment. (The American Psychiatric Association does not list sex addiction as a psychiatric disorder in its most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which was published in 1994, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine does not yet recognize it as an addiction.) A sex-addiction problem frequently has to be piggybacked on a more acceptable diagnosis, such as depression. Similarly, most large treatment centers, which have been effective in treating alcoholism and drug addiction, don’t treat sex addiction, but addicts have found help by seeking out those that embrace the polyaddiction concept. One facility that does is the Sante Center for Healing near Denton. Though Sante doesn’t treat extreme sex offenders, like pedophiles and rapists, many of its patients either manifest a sex addiction in addition to a substance-abuse problem or face up to a sexual compulsion once they are in drug or alcohol treatment. “Treating addictions as somehow different from one another doesn’t make sense,” says the center’s clinical director, Deborah Corley. “The whole point is to get at the source of the urge to relieve internal pain by somewhat maladaptive means.”
For Ed and Ron, it’s one day at a time. In the tradition of recovering alcoholics, both do volunteer work with sex addicts, counseling sex offenders in Texas prisons and on parole. Ron is thinking about starting a clearinghouse “where people with this problem who don’t know where to turn can get referrals.” Ed has spoken at police stations, telling his story in an attempt to explain the mind-set of individuals who act out as he used to. He has also offered them tips on how to catch sex offenders.
Despite such efforts, Ed is not overly optimistic about the future of SAA and its brethren. “I’m not sure the sex-addiction programs will ever be accepted the way AA has been. Maybe the best we can hope for is that society will at least realize that we are humans and we are generally trying as best we can with dysfunctional self-beliefs and that we—some of us—can get better.” Ron, for his part, is seeing a woman seriously for the first time in years. By mutual agreement, they have decided not to have sex until they get married. “It’s very exciting for me that this is working so well, but I’m nervous,” he says. “I’ve messed up most relationships because of sex. That’s why we’re doing this the good old-fashioned way.”
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