Tag Results
5 posts tagged Rob Weiss
Recovering From Sex Addiction
After several years in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Jennifer,” now a 74-year-old Tampa Bay–area resident, realized she had a problem with sex, too. “I’d been doing the same things in the rooms of AA that I’d been doing in bars: picking people up and having a lot of casual sex partners,” she recalls. Coming to the self-diagnosis that this behavior was proof positive of her sex addiction, Jennifer started going to meetings of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) two years after the pioneering group launched in 1976. There she quickly grabbed some tools—literally—to distract her mind from sexual thoughts. Building things and doing fix-it projects around the house have served her well ever since, allowing her mind to “go into idle.”
Fantasies are a tricky negotiation for recovering sex addicts (or people suffering from “hypersexuality”—the revised DSM, due out next year, reportedly will deny this problem the addiction label). Whereas a drunk can’t quite “think up” an alcoholic slip, euphoric erotic recall is rote for sex-obsessives the world over.
The addiction-or-not argument may remain unresolved, but treatment for sexual obsessions and compulsions has made impressive strides over the past three decades. Standard treatment for sex addiction these days is membership in a 12-Step program plus cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a systematic, short-term, goal-setting approach to the talking cure. In the 1980s, frustrated with the failures of the “just-stop-what-you’re-doing” method of fighting hypersexuality, Mississippi-based sex-addiction pioneer Patrick Carnes, PhD, developed a task-oriented CBT (the “Thirty Task Model”) that has inspired numerous treatment programs. Carnes is the eexecutive director of the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, where golfer Tiger Woods and other celebrity sexaholics have spent time.
As the thinking goes, Jennifer had to challenge her own patterns and routines before starting to figure out how she ended up trolling bars after an uneventful childhood as the daughter of non-alcoholic parents and the sister of three Eagle Scouts.
Unlike traditional psychotherapists, who tend to focus on family issues and early development, CBT therapists ask sex addicts to own up to their behavior and their beliefs about themselves; patients even get homework. Alex Katehakis, MFT, clinical director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, gets patients to list everything they do that is “secret, shaming or abusive.”
And then there’s the all-important spring cleaning—the sex equivalent of “getting all the booze out of the house,” says counselor Jeff Schultz, LPC. This is a lot harder in the digital age than it used to be. Chucking flesh magazines and DVDs is one thing, but people need computers and the Internet—where more than 12% of all websites are pornographic—for work and for keeping in touch with family and friends, so cutting the broadband cord is rarely practical.
One option is to set up web-browsing filters or even “accountability software,” which tracks computer activity and shares it with an “accountability partner,” or if sexting is a problem, canceling the text part of your cell-service package.
But that doesn’t touch some of the biggest temptations. “Smartphone apps are crack for sex addicts,” says Robert Weiss, LCSW, founding director of LA’s Sexual Recovery Institute. GPS-based dating services such as Grindr for gays and Blendr for straights make it incredibly easy to find people willing to hook up. And now there’s Siri, the iPhone 4S’s “humble personal assistant.” In the past, if you wanted to find a prostitute, you had to get dressed, get in your car and risk getting arrested. Now all you have to do is ask, “Siri, where are the escorts?” And she will tell you.
It’s very difficult to get sober from sex addiction by yourself, even with the help of a therapist. Since hypersexuality is a problem of isolation and generally comes weighted with an extra dose of shame, 12-Step meetings—with their emphasis on fellowship and acceptance of newcomers regardless of the state in which one “comes in”—seem especially well-suited to the problem.
If a sex addict is unwilling to try a 12-Step program, group therapy can be a good stand-in, so long as the group is specifically focused on sex addiction. Futhermore, group therapy—which is widely viewed as offering more benefits than one-on-one therapy for people struggling with addiction of any kind—holds a potential advantage, in that groups are typically smaller in size, and members are allowed to express their thoughts and feelings about what their fellow members are sharing (whereas 12-Step meetings forbid such “crosstalk”).
But 12-Step programs are still the gold standard when it comes to sex addiction, although there are a number of differences among them. Of the four major “S” fellowships, only Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) defines just what “sexual sobriety” means. And SA is the most conservative from a Judeo-Christian point of view, teaching that “any form of sex with oneself or with partners other than the spouse is progressively addictive and destructive.” Sexual Recovery Anonymous (SRA) is SA’s close cousin, except that “committed relationship” is substituted for “spouse.”
Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) started as a fellowship for gay and bisexual men and is now much broader. One current SCA member, a 45-year-old LA resident whom we’ll call Scott, remembers about 90% of members being gay men at his first meetings in 1996. It was a welcoming community for him at the time, as a recent refugee from Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA): “For me to share [at SLAA meetings] about having gay sex at bathhouses was uncomfortable,” he says. That honesty allowed Scott to begin working the steps—although he ended up having to get chemically sober before his sexual sobriety could kick in.
Not everyone in an “S” fellowship has to stop drinking—or follow any particular formula for changing their sexual behavior, either. The big attraction for many SCA members is that they’re allowed to define their own sexual sobriety. You outline a recovery plan with your sponsor by pinning down your own “bottom-line” behaviors (other fellowships call these “inner circles”)—what you need not to do in order to consider yourself sexually sober. There are “plan meetings” or “plan workshops” for working on your sexual recovery plan in a group setting.
Perhaps the fastest-growing and most broadly based of all is Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), which was founded in 1977 by a handful of men who desired greater anonymity from their sex-addiction program. Similar to SCA, members of SAA define their own sexual sobriety with a sponsor or therapist—and right now the program is booming. Katehakis mentions a daily meeting in Los Angeles that has been around for over a decade. A few years ago, the six to 10 individuals showing up each day doubled to 20, with 80 people attending the Saturday-morning meeting.
SLAA is for those with “a compulsive need for sex, extreme dependency on one or many people, or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue or fantasy.” Members of both SLAA and SAA come up with lists of outer-circle, middle-circle and inner-circle behaviors as part of their sexual recovery plan, with “outer” being healthy activities and “middle” ones serving as warning signs on the road to “inner.” A middle-circle action for one person might be looking at pornography, for instance, or checking out photos of an old ex on Facebook, while that could be all the way to relapse (inner) for someone else.
Continue reading this article on The Fix
