Experience
Extract from 4Health (http://www.channel4.com/health/microsites)Russell's story
He is 30, married, and is a sex addict. 'Every week was the same. I would play rugby on a Sunday morning, meet this woman after the game at the same car park and then have sex in my car. Yet the intensity and excitement would begin when I packed my kitbag on Saturday night. It sounds bizarre but I got sexually excited cleaning my boots the day before, because I knew what was to come the next day. It wasn't about who I was meeting or how I felt about her or anything. There was no love. She was just a means to an end. A supplier almost.'My path to addiction is probably a therapist's dream. I racked up a huge bill ringing phone sex lines. Then I spent hours on the internet at home looking at pornography. Before too long I was entering chat rooms and meeting women for sex. It was very gradual, but I still had no idea what I was getting into, or what I was doing to my wife.'
Russell's wife, Clare, also 30, has struggled to come to terms with his addiction. 'The effect on our relationship has been shattering. I have lost my self-worth, I no longer see myself as attractive and I feel emotionally and physically rejected. We have had sex three times in the past two years. I had no clue he was a sex addict until he broke down in tears one day and told me. I suspected he was having an affair. But nothing prepared me for what he had to tell me. I just couldn't take the lying and the deceit.'
Two Extracts from: The Secret Life of a Sex Addict
(from http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Sex/sexual_addiction)
1. He says he's just horny, a real man.I'm addicted to phone sex. For years, I saw it as no big deal. When the others in my office bragged about their sexual exploits, I stayed silent. Compared with them, I was a saint. My thing was solitary. Phone sex was just an exciting form of masturbation. I wasn't cheating on my wife of ten years. She and I still had sex on a regular basis. As a 38-year-old sports promoter, I made good money and, at least in the beginning, could afford the phone calls. My wife didn't have to know. No one had to know. No one could know because the experience, while getting me off, was bringing me shame--and pulling me deeper into a pattern of behavior I couldn't stop.
Later I would learn that sex addiction--commonly defined as repetitive and compulsive sexual behaviour, that over time negatively affects a person's life--is a progressive disease. What begins as an occasional thrill builds into an uncontrollable obsession. I went from spending $10 a week to $100--and then $1,000. I went from phone sex with women to phone sex with men. The verbal stimulation became more bizarre--cruder, crueler, enticing me into areas that, only months before, I could never have imagined entering. I felt imprisoned. The minute my wife left the house, I rushed to the phone and stayed there for hours. I grew so alarmed that I called a psychotherapist and made an appointment.
The therapist helped me see the roots of my addictive personality. When I was a child, my parents discussed sex inappropriately. They used words and expressions that were shockingly explicit. Their language turned me on in ways I didn't understand. But even with this new insight, even after an illuminating session with the therapist, I still ran to the phone. I still sought the heat of phone sex.
When my wife spotted a $4,000 phone bill and demanded an explanation, I confessed. The next day was Christmas. She went off to church where she sought God's guidance about whether to leave me or not. Meantime, I spent the morning binging on phone sex. That afternoon, disgusted with myself, I finally did what I knew I had to do. I went to a 12-step group devoted to my disease and said the four words I never wanted to pronounce publicly to a group of strangers: I'm a sex addict.
Public confession gave me something that private counseling, for all its benefits, never did--accountability. I felt accountable to a group of fellow sex addicts. Some of their stories were more dramatic than mine, some less. The common bond, though, was our admission that sex was our drug. We were powerless over this drug and, only with the help of a higher power--call it God, or call it the mysterious healing feeling of the group--could we do without our destructive behavior. We called each other when we felt the urge coming on; we listened to one another without judgment. The wreckage of our past cost some of us our wives, husbands and families. It cost me my marriage. But my own life, for the past four years, has been free of phone sex. That, in itself, is a miracle.
Here three men and one woman--all of them currently in 12-step recovery programs--share their struggles with sex addiction in the hope that we might better understand a disease that's quietly devastating millions of lives. (To preserve the anonymity that is the hallmark of 12-step programs, and to protect subjects' privacy, names and identifying details have been changed.)
2. BEN: 'I Stayed Drunk on Web Porn
Computers made my career and computers ruined my life. Computers fed my addiction to hard work, creative planning and hard-core pornography.
My story began as the classic African-American success story. My parents are government workers who saved up for my college education. My wife is a schoolteacher. My affinity for computers landed me an excellent job. I invented a software program that saved my company millions, and I became a senior vice-president with a big office and private bathroom. I moved my wife and three children to the suburbs and took them on Hawaiian vacations. A division of 50 people reported to me.
In my off-hours, I started dabbling with some of the milder sex sites. No big deal. But as the years passed, these sites became more explicit. That excited me. So did the changing technology-chat lines, Web cameras, E-mail photos. The world of Web porn became endlessly fascinating, but I still wasn't worried. I restricted my sex surfing to my lunch hour.
Then an hour in the afternoon. Then an hour at home after my wife had gone to bed. Soon I was ordering secret credit cards as a way to hide the expense. I was suddenly visiting sites--and staying for hours--where Web cams were showing things that had me dazed. I didn't realize my behavior was so extreme until a colleague, who had inadvertently seen me on-line, told my boss. Because of my value to the firm, I was given a warning. I was told that if I were caught again, I'd be fired. Rather than seek help, I bought a handheld computer that I could operate in my private bathroom. I spent at least half my time at work in that bathroom. This time it was my secretary who reported my secret behavior. That was it: I was terminated, and my wife was told why. Infuriated and frightened, she took the kids and left.
I can analyze my situation with clarity. As a child, I discovered an uncle's stash of porn magazines. The images confused and excited me. They were more than any child could handle. As a result, I was still seeking the thrill of that early discovery. Then came the computer.
The computer is addictive in and of itself. Combine it with porn and you have two mighty addictions operating in tandem. No wonder I capitulated. No wonder porn is a multibillion-dollar on-line business. But all the clarity in the world does not get me my family or my job back. And the worst part is, I'm still deep in the addiction, even after a weeklong stay at a rehab facility.
On Phone Sex Chatlines
"My first significant encounter with phone chatlines was back in about 2000. I was single and deeply frustrated by my failure to find a girlfriend. Having reached my forties, it was becoming harder and harder to simply 'go out on the town' to clubs, bars, music...whatever, and find someone where there was mutual attraction. I must have seen a chatline advertised in the back of a paper or magazine and rung it. I really didn't expect to meet anyone seriously, but I made an attempt by providing a suitable profile and going to the chat-room. Sure enough I was getting nowhere fast, and the only women who messaged me were just not my type.
One thing that struck me though was the number of women who were playing fast and loose with their sexuality. I realised then that 'chatlines' were a euphemism for something much more sexualised than simple conversation, and that many of the participants were there for something far more basic. I guess I was quite naive and old-fashioned about romance and sex. It was quite shocking to me how they talked about their bodies, what they wanted men to do to or for them etc. Part of me felt that maybe I wanted to engage with these 'wanton' women....that it would be fun and enjoyable, rather than desperately plodding on with my search for a date. Anyway, the seed was sewn, and over the following months I used the line less and less in the search for a partner, and more and more to make sexually explicit conversation. I felt there was little wrong with it, and I was relatively good at it. I got more and more attached to the activity and found I could achieve orgasm and make other women do the same. Conversation per se became redundant, and even flirtation became an inconvenience; I simply felt all talk should cut to the chase, i.e sex. I found it hard though when they hung up the moment they 'came'. It started to instill in me a sense of guilt...".who were they? maybe I've really upset them? they've simply used me (as I had them); are they OK...have I upset them?" At such times I would vow to myself that I would stop...that it was empty and dead sex....that I was engaged in something wrong.
But after a week or two I'd be back to do some more. The lines were relatively cheap and I could stay on them for hours at a time. At weekends I would use them even more: I started to stay up all of Friday night and get on them as soon as I was awake on Saturday. Then Saturday night into Sunday: different lines, more daring lines. My phone bills started to rocket but I was working and didn't care that much. I started to miss out on social and cultural events: often I'd be too tired after a night on the phone to feel any enthusiasm to go to a gig, or a film. Also the nature of the exchanges with the women started to change: the sex became more kinky: without going into all the details, it had an increasingly dark, alienated quality to it. Sometimes I had nightmares that clearly linked to the phone calls. At no time did I actually meet any of these women: partly because there was no particular desire on either part to meet, and partly because I would periodically close or lock it down and try to leave it all behind, thereby severing whatever contacts I may have been making. By late 2002, I was clearly in trouble from all this. My mood was depressed, my job going nowhere (from lack of energy and enthusiasm) and I knew, deep down that my phone use had become compulsive. Its difficult to communicate the strange dread, self-loathing and yet excitement that used to accompany my use of the chat lines. I was sometimes literally powerless to resist the need to ring and possibly make contact with a woman for this emotionally numb, disembodied,'head sex'.
There would be a deep sense of emotional pain as well, that was temporarily masked by the headlong rush. But 'temporarily' would last all night long, and the scales of motivation always seemed to be on the side of compulsion. The sense of guilt and foreboding though were a gathering force, and during those times away from the phone (at times I had the line cut off) were seriously getting to my mind. I felt emotionally, mentally and spiritually impoverished. But I just could not stop.....At no time did I feel able to share my difficulties with anyone. Neither was I aware just how devastating the gathering storm was to be..."
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