The Weiner Roast Continues…
Three Days = New Man?
A few weeks ago New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner told reporters that in July 2011, shortly after his scandal-plagued departure from Congress, he spent three days at the Gabbard Center, a psychiatric evaluation facility in Houston, TX. As you may recall, the events precipitating Weiner’s congressional resignation involved the sending of sexual self-images to half a dozen (or more) women via Twitter and other forms of digital media. Some of the images were apparently snapped in the locker room of the Congressional gym. According to Weiner, he’d been engaging in this type of behavior for approximately three years. And now he has admitted that his sexual misdeeds continued even after he was caught and scandalized.
Gabbard, in case you are wondering, is an outpatient psychiatric evaluation center specializing in the assessment of professionals in crisis. The center’s website lists “sexual disorders” as being a primary issue it evaluates. As such, it would appear that Anthony Weiner made an intelligent decision when he decided to seek a psychiatric assessment from this facility. However, he currently insists his stay there had nothing to do with sexual addiction. So why did he go, then? And even if the problem was deemed to be something other than an addiction, a three-day evaluation is not treatment. No psychiatric evaluation, no matter how thorough, has ever “cured” a patient. In reality, an evaluation simply identifies the issues that need to be worked on and suggests a pathway for change. So while it’s nice that Weiner spent the equivalent of a long-weekend in Texas talking to some doctors, it’s unlikely he’s the “new man” that he’s been claiming to be during his ongoing mayoral campaign.
Is He or Isn’t He?
Whenever sex scandals go public, as Weiner’s did, we typically see in the media liberal and often wildly uninformed use of the term “sex addiction.” Often the person at the center of the affair tosses out the phrase as an excuse for his or her bad behavior. Earlier this year we encountered this with Ariel Castro, who kidnapped, raped, and tortured three women for more than a decade and then blamed his horrific choices on sexual addiction. As I concluded in a previous blog, Castro’s expressed level of psychopathy would actually rule out a diagnosis of sex addiction, so his claims are most likely bogus.
To Weiner’s credit, he did not automatically jump on the sexual addiction bandwagon as an excuse for his three-years-plus pattern of inappropriate behavior. Instead (and perhaps unfortunately), he seems to have taken the opposite approach, not even considering sexual addiction as a possible diagnosis. It is very possible this decision arises out of fear that such a label might stigmatize him as “damaged goods” and therefore politically unviable. He seems to think that ignoring the probable issue is a better option than actually getting the help he likely needs.
I have no way of knowing, of course, without conducting an evaluation myself if Anthony Weiner is actually a sex addict. Certainly it is possible to engage in ill-advised sexual activity without qualifying as a sex addict. People do it all the time. That said, in my experience – and I’ve spent more than 20 years treating all varieties of sexual disorders – men and women who engage in repetitive, years-long patterns of narcissistic, self-entitled, callous and brazen sexual acting out typically do meet the basic criteria for sex addiction. This is doubly true when the behavior continues after they’ve been caught, as is the case with Weiner.
One of the issues I see when treating powerful men (and women) in situations similar to Weiner’s is that they are nearly always neck-deep in denial about what they’ve done. In other words, they do not consider in any clear-headed way the potential negative consequences of their actions. Somehow they think that their clandestine liaisons and digital diddling will never become public knowledge. Lost in a fog of emotional arousal and sexual preoccupation, they feel invulnerable, safe from the possibility of their highly compartmentalized activities being discovered by their spouse, their co-workers, the media, or anyone else. Essentially, for these individuals the neurochemical pull of fantasy-based arousal creates a false sense of protection, an increasingly impenetrable “bubble” where, in the moment, little but the sex matters. Sadly, this misguided thinking often endures even after their behaviors come to light, as they stubbornly continue their process of minimization and repudiation, telling themselves and others any number of lies to justify what they’ve done.
Let’s face it, if Anthony Weiner was not a sex addict the most likely outcome of getting caught with his pants down, so to speak, would have been to immediately stop the behavior and not repeat it. But addicts don’t work that way. Instead, they continue with their compulsive behaviors no matter what, because that is how they cope with life. Think about the compulsive gambler who drops his kid’s college fund at the craps table, gets confronted by his wife, and then takes out a bank loan the next day so he can hit the casinos yet again. Think about the drug addict who gets arrested and jailed for several days who immediately, as soon as he is released, goes to see his drug dealer so he can score another fix. Why do these people behave this way when any sane person would easily see that such actions are the absolute last thing they should be doing? The answer is easy. They do it because they’re addicted. The situation is the same with Anthony Weiner, except his (probable) addiction is to sex rather than gambling or drugs.
Where is Weiner Now?
It appears that the Anthony Weiner of today is almost exactly where he was two years ago – in full damage control mode. As mentioned above, he says he is a “new man.” The campaign video that launched his current mayoral campaign conveys the same message. In the video he is seen with his wife and baby, looking more than a little bit domestic, apparently attempting to create the impression that he is “cured” and everything is now just hunky dory, perfectly normal, fine, thank you for asking.
Are you buying this message?
In my experience, almost anyone who’s crashed and burned at the level Anthony Weiner crashed and burned needs, in addition to a thorough psychiatric evaluation, intensive short-term treatment followed by longer-term outpatient treatment. This is especially true if the problematic behavior continues after initial discovery! At the very least a person should understand the issues he or she is battling and the recommended path of recovery. But in this regard Anthony Weiner seems to have no clue. Instead, he has called his sexual acting out “a blind spot.”
Is there a therapist in the world who knows how to diagnose and treat a blind spot? If so, please give me a call and fill me in on the procedure.
As of now, Anthony Weiner seems to be hoping that everyone will view his three-years-plus pattern of sexual misconduct as an aberration, even though new revelations about the persistence of his behavior continue to surface. He has repeatedly told reporters, “It’s behind me.” This, to me, sounds very much like the denial, minimization, and justifications I hear from sexually addicted men and women on a regular basis. These individuals will do/say/believe anything to avoid admitting, facing, and dealing with their problematic sexual behaviors. Their mantra seems to be: Ignore it and it will go away.
Well, it won’t go away.
Whether Anthony Weiner qualifies as a sex addict (he probably does) is irrelevant. What matters is that he engaged in a lengthy, ongoing pattern of ill-advised sexual activity with serious negative consequences and he now seems intent on sweeping it under the rug without even looking at it. Simply put, he engaged in his escapist sexual fantasies for a reason, and it is very likely that his reason involves a need/desire to dissociate from depression, anxiety, unresolved childhood trauma, or any number of other underlying psychological conditions. Until both his compulsive behavior and the underlying conditions are appropriately dealt with, most likely in an addiction-focused recovery setting followed by traditional forms of talk therapy, he is likely to struggle. And that, to me, is sad.
By Robert Weiss LCSW, CSAT-S, Senior Vice President of Clinical Development at Elements Behavioral Health, and the Sexual Recovery Institute founder