Abused Child Turned Sex Addict Gets ‘Clean’
I am pushing through the halls, overwhelmed by the surge of teenage bodies, searching for the opening, the spray of sunlight on cement. When I finally exit, I nearly break into a run. The parking lot is broad and just as crowded but still, I hear their voices behind me, shouting, “Julia is a slut! She’s a whore!” so loudly I worry the entire school can hear them, maybe the whole town—perhaps even my father. I lock myself in my car, paralyzed. I’m usually tough, thick-skinned, but I feel crumbly inside. An inner avalanche is threatening. I don’t know yet that these words they’re throwing are used carelessly, easily. They are used to cut clear to bone, and they do.
I fear these people can see through me. That they know everything I’ve ever done, have ever been forced to do by men my mother knew. Finally, I turn the key in the ignition. I speed out of there and never want to return. I am a junior in high school and I consider dying. I walk beneath the power lines, the blonde hairs on my arms standing with static. Life to me then appears reckless with beauty and loss, and I want to be held, comforted. The only ones who’ve ever held me have been men, so I call a boy. He comes.
A Mother and a Sex Addict
I am an honors college student and I have gone and gotten myself pregnant. Everyone is disappointed and my family pulls away; they no longer speak to me because I’ve decided to keep the baby, to “ruin” my life. I want something to hold closely, to love in a way I have never been loved. This may not be the wisest reason for having a baby, but I do not know this then. My daughter is born and she is unearthly in her grace—transcendent. I never want to let her go.
But living means being needful of food, shelter, electricity, diapers. I am forced into the world to work; I must leave her. I feel naked and afraid. I begin to question my marriage to her father; we are only children, really. We hardly speak! Soon, he is working in another state, sleeping in the apartment of another woman and I am here, seeing that I wanted this break. I go to bars. I dance with women. They take me home. I begin an affair. My marriage dissolves.
I seek sex instead of love, touches instead of whispers. I want to be emptied out, not filled up. When my daughter is with her father, I am hardly a mother at all.
Sex Addiction: Hitting Bottom and Getting Clean
Seven years out of my marriage, I have had as many relationships and far more encounters. I speak my mind freely, easily, but the one word I cannot say is “no.” I have sex with a straight married coworker—a woman I must work with daily—and sex with a man I’ve only just met in a bar. I keep online dating profiles and social networking connections available, and when I’m bored, which is always, I type messages and hit reply. There’s always someone; I’m never alone, although I feel evisceratingly lonely. No one knows who I am; maybe I don’t know who I am. You cannot truly be with someone you do not know.
As if in one fell swoop, I am diagnosed with cancer, my mother must be committed (again), I lose my job (I am too sick to work), I lose my medical insurance, I lose my home, I lose my car in a flood. My daughter is taken by her father. I believe I will surely die. But I don’t simply wake up and say, “This is my bottom. I must stop acting out now.” I keep reaching out to sex and toxic relationships even after I’ve climbed out of this cavernous blackness. My phone continues to ping with messages from would-be-lovers and I continue to get the rush, the thrill of maybe, yes, this one.
Years go by before a moment of clarity finds me standing in open air, clear and conscious, surprised at myself. Dumbfounded by my actions. Remorseful, ashamed. More years go by before the practice of recovery allows me to reckon with that shame, before it becomes a norm, so that I see the pattern before it emerges and know what’s likely to trigger me, trip me up, and learn to avert without the blinders on.
They call sobriety “getting clean,” and this sits funny with me, a woman and a recovering sex addict. Clean presupposes that we were unclean before, dirty. Sex, even compulsive sex, is not unclean to me; it does not make a woman, or anyone, dirty. What becomes clean is not the body, but the mind. Denial and dishonesty dissolve in active recovery so that you can clearly see who you are, so that you can approach your life with authenticity and self-made morality. What you do with your body after that is your business, just as it always was.
By Julia