Sex Addiction Recovery: Being True to Ourselves
Until a couple of years ago, Shannon felt she was like most successful Morehouse graduates. She’d come from a successful Atlanta family and had attended her parent’s alma mater. She’d landed a great job in her chosen field right out of college despite the economy, and there, she’d met Marcus, a young but highly influential Atlanta minister. Shannon was swept away by Marcus’s charm and intelligence, and was curious about his success. Marcus proposed to Shannon after a year of dating, and she was delighted to say yes. They were wed by his father in his enormous church, with hundreds of guests in attendance. Shannon felt like she had become the bride every little girl dreamed of.
After they were married, Marcus insisted that Shannon not work and, in the beginning, she was happy to consent. They were wealthy enough, due to her inheritance, but especially because of Marcus’s work; his church paid their pastor handsomely. Soon, though, Shannon found that shopping and lunch dates with other career-less women were not enough for her. The goals and aspirations of her particular group of female friends seemed to be so different from hers, and most of them already had children, while Shannon wasn’t quite ready to be a mother. Shannon liked being tetherless well enough, but she found herself experiencing an emptiness she couldn’t put her finger on. The only people who seemed to understand her were the successful husbands of her new friends.
At first, Shannon was only half-aware of the ways she attempted to attract the attention of these men; it hadn’t occurred to her that what she was doing was “wrong,” or that her behavior would go beyond harmless flirting. Soon, Shannon had the sensation that she was observing herself from across the room. She saw herself coming on to the husband of a friend while that friend was in the very next room. This behavior progressed to sexual encounters – in closets, bathrooms, offices, and even a church anteroom, and it didn’t remain exclusive to one individual. Shannon had begun to seduce the husbands of as many of her friends as she could. Ironically, she felt desperate about her behavior, but felt powerless to stop…until she was found out – caught in the act by the wife of a man she’d been pursuing. Her now ex-friend told everyone in Shannon’s circle, including Marcus. Shannon denied everything at first, but soon found herself pleading for forgiveness.
Marcus permitted Shannon to leave for 90 days of inpatient treatment for sexual addiction, despite his distrust that there even was such an addiction. From treatment Shannon worked hard to uncover the root of her problem and prayed her husband would find a way to forgive her.
Addiction’s Purpose
Addictive behaviors serve a psychological purpose; they offer immediate relief from depression, pain, and anxiety. But the relief addictive behaviors offer is temporary, and often brings in its wake a mounting pile of further complications – psychological and otherwise. In Shannon’s case, it is clear on the surface that she felt an emptiness around purpose and meaning and was seeking sexual rendezvous in order to numb herself to that emptiness; she wanted to feel she was perhaps special in some way.
Shannon had originally pursued the path both her parents had taken, which was to become accomplished, to stand out in school and in her social sphere, and to attend a select university her community and nation prizes. She landed an excellent job in the career she had dreamed of, but something diverted her from her dream of using her skills, talents, and intelligence and working hard. She fell in love but was enamored more with the esteem of position, of class and influence. She soon found, however, that simply being the wife of someone influential was rather dull. Her career might have given her more meaning, but she failed to acknowledge that consciously. If she had, perhaps she and Marcus could have out worked their arrangement easily enough with Shannon going back to work in order to feel a sense of purpose and position on her own. This possibility remained unconscious as much as the reason for her unease, and instead, Shannon found herself gravitating to the husbands of her friends, men who expressed the kind of experience she unconsciously wished to have – independence, working lives, success created by their own talents and hard work.
Looking Deeper
Shannon’s addiction manifested as sexual addiction and particularly as the pursuit of sex, rather than being the pursued, as women can often be in our given social construct. Sexual addiction is often viewed as an addiction which expresses the buried emotion of shame, and shame is closely related to regret; we feel regret about events that cause us to feel shame. Uncovering the reasons we may feel shame or regret and bringing them out into the light of day, rather than keeping them buried where they have the power to continue to create endless amounts of further shame and regret is essential. For Shannon, uncovering the reality that she had chosen to bury her true desire to work and that she felt shame and regret about it was essential to her recovery. But it was key for her to look further in order to ensure her work was done. What Shannon uncovered is that a trauma in her past had led her to feel she did not deserve to be successful. She had buried this event and the feelings around it. Everyone in her family, every coach she’d ever had, all of the teachers and professors she’d ever had, and all the staff at the companies with which she’d interned had been positive and encouraging; they’d all sent the same message to Shannon: she would be a success. And yet, secretly, she refused to believe she deserved to be.
It has been written that to truly realize our goals we must 1) believe it is possible to achieve them, 2) believe we are able to achieve them, and 3) believe we deserve to achieve them (Joseph O’Connor). Shannon had all but the third part down when she landed her dream job, and so she chose another path and began to sabotage herself, something many of us do through lives of addiction. What is important in uncovering our unconscious motivations is that when we discover a past trauma that we do not become oriented toward the past and stuck looking backward, replaying the tape of trauma, continually explaining to ourselves and others why we have not moved forward. Once we read the writing on the wall, it’s time to move out of the cave and leave the old scripts behind. We can begin then to move forward, to heal, enlightened by the knowledge that the past was keeping us stuck, but that it doesn’t have to anymore. We always deserved to succeed, and we are inherently able to do it. All we must do now is believe.