Sex as Sickness: The Life of a Female Sex Addict

October, a Thursday, 4:30 p.m.

I receive a message on my Linked-In professional profile from a high school classmate I hadn’t seen in 18  years, exactly the same number of years I had lived when I last saw or spoke to him. He sees that I live in Atlanta and is coming to town on a business trip. He wants to meet. Tonight.

I leave my boyfriend watching a movie in our bed, two cats curled against his warmth, and dress. Something black and sexy, but not too revealing. My best pumps.

I head to the bar of the chic hotel where my once classmate is staying. Eighteen years ages you, but he is still lean with muscle. We hide any awkwardness in a polished social performance, in genuine laughter, sincere questions. His hand deftly rests at the small of my back when he introduces me; mine lightly, earnestly, touches his forearm as he tells me of his brother’s loss.

But this is theater. We know what is going to happen because it has always happened between us. An 18-year hiatus does not change anything and his wife and my boyfriend make no difference because no commitment to others ever has. We are loyal only to our compulsion and in this loyalty we are the same.

We spend an hour at pretense and then I ask the first honest question of the night, “How many times have you cheated on your wife?” At first he lies. He sees my face and admits the truth. Fifteen. For a half-second I actually think less of him. Hypocrisy.

We drop the veil and head to his room. As soon as it’s over, I dress. He is already asleep.

The high never peaks anymore; the crashes are harder. I’m overcome not so much with guilt – although there are years’ worth of guilt – but with self-loathing.

May, a Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.

It isn’t like the movies where rows of chairs all face a podium. It is a conference room in an old wing of the hospital. The veneer of the table exposes particle board at the corners. No one speaks to me at first until a woman in a caftan passes me a brochure. She smiles and introduces herself and sits down far away. The next part is like the movies. “I’m Jim,” Jim says. “I’m a sex, love, and relationship addict.”

This is the first time it’s occurred to me that love could be anywhere in this equation.

Now

I know how badly I needed this. Honesty. Perspective. Some kind of ownership of all the pain I’ve put people through. Ownership of the fact that I’ve been hurting for a long time and I will surely go on using – one thing or another – if I’m not willing to look at my history honestly. But I’m also creeped out by the “pink cloud” of recovery. I don’t want to be that jerk who thinks she’s so aware, so serene because of what all her insights and sobriety are bringing her, just to hit the brick wall of bad news, or bad mood, or illness, or loss that the architecture of being human ensures we periodically endure.

I have no desire for pink clouds unless I also have space on my canvas for gray ones. Black. The only future I’m willing to write is one that embraces contrast. One in which I can look at the life I’ve lived without pity or loathing – approaching extremes without perspective is juvenile, unintelligent, or madness.

A Formulation for Addiction

Gabor Maté, M.D., author of  “In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts” wrote, “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors.” Dr. Maté’s work rests on something perhaps much of Western medicine has forgotten: emotions, particularly trauma, are implicated in the creation of addiction.

Dr. Maté explains something about the gene model of disease that illuminated the disease model of addiction for me. This model is still controversial in the science if not the public mind. Everyone is taught that addiction is genetic; that it is a disease one has, as if once you have it, there is very nearly nothing that can be done. There are no medications, after all. It’s a lifelong, chronic disease in which patients must battle with self-discipline and 12-step meetings, but still. It’s in the genes.

What Dr. Maté reminds us is that a seed is essentially a combination of genes. But rest a seed on a table and nothing will happen. It won’t grow into a corn plant or a geranium or anything else on its own. It needs the right environmental conditions. Something particular to addiction is this: provided an individual is receptive, (let’s call it what it is) fragile enough, the right environmental conditions might activate addiction. But by “right,” we mean not good. Bad in fact. Hurtful. Painful. For many, traumatic.

To reverse addiction, address the conditions which inspired it. And this is what I’ve had to do.