Adult Child of a Sex Addict Finds New Understanding

A few years before he died, my father began to change his life. He did this, as some do, through religious conversion. He became something known as a charismatic Catholic. In the days leading up to his death from bone marrow cancer, he became confessional, explaining how his conversion had changed him. My father had an experience he believed was like St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus, where he was blind but could suddenly see, and he glowed when talking about it. The last days of his life gave me, a child of a sex addict, a new understanding.

He sat across from me in a hospital gown, hooked up to multiple IVs. He’d had a hard day, but wanted to talk. “After I experienced my conversion,” he struggled to say, “I stopped going to strip clubs with the men from work. And I evangelized to them, telling them not to go either.” I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t imagine my father doing either thing.

This man talking to me now about either sex or religious conversion was not a man I knew. The man who’d raised me had grown increasingly uncomfortable with me as I’d grown older, as my body had changed. He’d become stiff and unable to offer so much as a pat on the shoulder. I was asked to stop referring to him as “daddy”—to call him only “dad.” Once, when I’d been singing along with a song on the radio, he’d stopped the truck and cut the wires to the device. The lyrics to the song had been racy, but I hadn’t known it then; I was just a little girl.

Later, my mother read the 7^th-grade notes between a puppy love crush and me (she liked to snoop). We’d been out riding four-wheelers the afternoon before, with full permission, and the notes had talked about how much fun we’d had and how sore we were (kids on four wheelers are rough). I was interrogated for an hour about the terrible thing I had done with this boy, even though I had no idea where my parents were getting their assumptions. I simply didn’t understand how being sore from four-wheel-riding sounded like a euphemism. I didn’t know any sexual euphemisms!

My parents took some of my innocence that day, and my father most of all.

The Intimacy Disorder of a Sex Addict Parent

Despite his strange reactions, my father never addressed sex directly—not to say that it was off limits or even to explain that I would understand it later. Still, sex was everywhere. My parents were very sexual, and my father had a wandering eye. When I was a high school freshman, my dad would leave my mother for another woman and I would learn all about his affairs. His marriages were scarred by his cavalier position on fidelity and my relationship with him was scarred by his physical and emotional distance. He was in the same house, but a thousand miles away (intimacy disorder defined). During the last six years of my dad’s life, he would only agree to call me once per year to evangelize. It was only in the very end that I saw him and we spoke, and I am grateful for those moments.

I believe my father was a sex addict because of everything I have been told and all I have pieced together (he was an admitted recovered drug addict). I know that he experienced intimacy disorder. He had been given up for adoption as a little boy and was raised in an orphanage; primary “intimacy injury” does not even cover it in his case. There are sex addicts who are inappropriate about sex and sexual topics with their child-age and adult children, but perhaps due to my father’s degree of discomfort with his own behaviors, he swung to the opposite extreme.

He was like an iceberg—an unfathomable drifting cliff. Whatever lay below his surfaces was more than inaccessible to me; it had been unreachable even to him. I don’t know what my father would say about his relationship to any of these things if he’d lived, or even if he could say, but I know that having been his daughter shaped my own relationship to my body and to the minds and bodies of others—particularly my need for, but fear of others—in intractable ways.

There are days when I wish, like Lazarus, I could haul him back to life, and ask him more about the man he’d been, and perhaps about the man he’d wish to be.

By Julie