Sex Addicts Find Community in Recovery

Carolee and Sayda met in an online community called Experience Project. Carolee had been searching for stories related to female sexual addiction (she suspected she might be experiencing the problem herself), and after reading several such stories on the website, she gathered the courage to post her own. When Sayda read Carolee’s story, she related so completely that she realized she might be suffering from sex addiction, too. She was stunned. The two young women began to communicate via the site’s messaging service and eventually began to email and talk by phone. They poured out their stories and their hearts to one another.

Carolee was a 23-year-old grad student in a small college town in Iowa. She’d taken some time off but was perusing a master’s in education, a degree she felt no real passion for, but which seemed to be the course her parents had set her on years ago. She thought her life appeared normal on the outside: she was the only child of an older, conservative Midwestern couple. Her father was a hospital chaplain and her mother volunteered at the hospital as a Pink Lady. Carolee had been volunteering with her mother for years.

Sexual Abuse and Sexual Addiction

When Carolee was 9, the neighbor’s 16-year-old son had raped her, a horrible act which became a pattern. She never told her parents or anyone else what was happening even though she had not been threatened or even directed to be silent. She felt terrible shame about what was happening to her, and believed she was powerless to stop it. She was confused as any child would be.

Although her rapist had moved away from home, as Carolee hit puberty and emerged into adolescence, she grew depressed and eventually angry. Still, her parents remained oblivious. Perhaps in an unconscious cry for help, she began to act out sexually with boys, to drink and experiment with drugs, but her parents, for all their conservatism, never seemed to notice. Carolee believes she may have slept with dozens of boys before she was out of high school. She has little memory of those experiences. When the time came for college, she simply moved forward as her parents expected her to, and began the behavior all over again.

When a man would fall for her and have hope for a relationship, Carolee would feel shock and then detachment. She couldn’t understand him; she always expected to be used and had grown used to that arrangement. Men who wanted more from her baffled her. Sayda was the first friend she’d allowed herself to grow close to because Sayda had nearly the same experiences she did. Although Sayda’s parents weren’t exactly conservative, and the man who’d molested her as a child had been a cousin rather than a neighbor, Sayda’s experiences were mostly identical. The two women understood each other.

Finding a Recovery Partner

Neither Carolee nor Sayda lived in a town that offered 12-Step meetings for Sex Addicts Anonymous or Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. They attempted to be one another’s support system, but both were still very much entrenched in lives surrounded by people and by triggers that kept them addicted. Even their time on Experience Project had been fraught with triggers. When Sayda became suicidal, Carolee flew out to see her in Alaska, and there they made the decision to truly get help. They pooled their resources and went into treatment together. Today, they are part of a collective of women who organize to help abuse survivors and who write about some of the ill effects, such as sexual addiction.

At a time when neither of these women had anything like sponsors, they found recovery partners in one another. A recovery partner does not merely have to be someone with whom you identify; what’s most important is that you both truly are committed to being well, and can commit to reminding the other of this vital truth. A recovery partner does not replace a sponsor, but it can be just as vital. Imagining that we are alone in our struggle is part of the false thinking that gets us into the trap of the addicted cycle and keeps us there—none of us is alone.