The Importance of Female Friendships for Female Sex Addicts
Maybe you’ve just read the title and you’ve made the assumption that treatment professionals want to encourage you, a woman with sex addiction, to stop focusing on your male friendships because they may be unhealthy for you. Let’s get this out of the way by saying, no. That’s not the intention of this article—unless, of course, your addiction is causing you to turn your friendships into acting-out spaces (i.e., you find yourself having sex or attempting to be sexual with men who were only ever meant to be your friends). If that is the case, it’s important to acknowledge that this is an area in which you will need more insight and healing, but the primary purpose of this article is to point to the foundational benefit of bringing women into your life and nurturing your relationships with them. It turns out to be more important to women’s recovery than anyone may have thought.
In the forward to the excellent Making Advances: A Comprehensive Guide for Treating Female Sex and Love Addicts the author, Marnie Ferree, a licensed marriage and family therapist and noted expert in the area of sexual addiction counseling, expresses the importance of female relationships in her own recovery. Despite being a therapist who focused on helping sex addictions, Ferree explains that she had allowed herself to become close to a man with whom she shared a trauma bond. Relationships with women had always felt uncomfortable for her, something she’d begun to realize she shared with the women who showed up in her women’s sex addiction support groups. She writes, “Relapse drove me to deeper levels of healing personally and in my private and professional relationships. Restoration also brought a determination to never again be without an intense connection to a core group of recovering sisters.”
Relapse as Healing?
Before we continue, let’s focus for a moment on part of Ferree’s illuminating admission. Relapse served as a mechanism for deeper healing inside her personal process of recovery from sex addiction. When we think of relapse, we can sometimes come at it with a sense of shame, trepidation or even disdain. Relapse is the worst possible thing we can imagine happening after we’ve experienced the profound sense of freedom and self-affirming joy that comes when we really begin to dig down, do the work and see that we’re getting better. And it’s true that relapse is a painful, oftentimes powerfully destructive force in the lives of addicts. However, even the most difficult struggles experienced as a result of addiction have the potential to create revelatory and lasting change in us. And perhaps it is the hardest of struggles that have the greatest capacity to do so. When we are finally able to turn addiction into our teacher, we begin to eradicate the albatross of shame it creates and free ourselves in order to heal.
The Importance of Friendships With Women
Other female sex addicts have something vital in the community of healing, which itself is very important: shared experience. Although a great many men experience this addiction, and currently, more are believed to experience it (though this may not necessarily be true; they may just be more comfortable talking about it), men do not face the same stigma in regard to sex that women do. Being offered a drink at a dinner party and declining with the admission that you’re an alcoholic often receives congratulations and encouragement in this day and age. It took a long time to get here. But announcing that you’re a recovering sex addict is a completely different story. Reactions would likely vary from shock to active shaming. And a woman who outs herself is far more likely to experience these things.
Women have a way of nurturing and challenging one another in relationships. Intimate bonds built and maintained with other women are healing in their own respect, but all the more so when an underlying cause of this addiction is the inability to experience emotional intimacy with others. Experiencing emotional intimacy inside friendships can feel very safe, and experiencing it with someone who knows personally what you have gone through is all the more enriching. Make creating and sustaining closeness with other women in recovery a part of your plan for healing. You may well come out of it with rewards far exceeding the exchange between recovery partners, which is tremendous in itself. There is no better cure, sometimes, than friendship.