"Thirrrty jobs lost in the hundred acres woods todaaaay."
Posted on 06/26/2003 2:29:08 AM PDT by sarcasm
Sex addiction: It's a phrase many people take as a joke.
Some may remember the old "Cheers" episode in which Sam, the lothario bartender, attends a Sexaholics Anonymous meeting to cure himself of his womanizing ways. He leaves the meeting with several dates.
"I've heard people say, "Oh, sex addiction? I'd take that any day!' " said psychologist Jeanne Pettijohn of Overland Park, Kan.
But Pettijohn knows it's no joke.
She knows because for the past 10 years, her practice — once dedicated to treating alcohol and drug addiction — has burgeoned with men and women whose careers, marriages and entire lives are being ruined by their uncontrollable sexual behaviors.
To be sure, sex addiction isn't new. But the Internet still is. According to experts in the field, it is prompting a tremendous increase in such behaviors.
"I'll just say it exposed me to things I didn't know existed," said a Kansas City area professional, 40, who's seeking treatment and asked that his name not be used. "My personal life became a shambles. The sexual part of my life became my whole life."
What started as an experiment with phone sex, he said, escalated to Internet porn sites, then on to cybersex and sexual chat rooms on which he would spend upward of eight hours a night. On weekends he'd spend more time.
"I hated what I was doing," he said. "I hated the way it made me feel. I was leading a double life. I wanted to stop, but I couldn't and didn't know what to do."
Of course, it is impossible to know how many people are sex addicted or became so because of the Internet. Some authorities doubt whether sexual addiction is a true addiction. It is not among the recognized mental illnesses listed in the professionals' standard reference, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.
But to those who either suffer sex addiction or treat it, the disease is all too real.
"I have colleagues who thought sexual addiction was nuts until they had people coming in and talking about what they were doing on the Internet," said psychologist Patrick J. Carnes, who conducted a recent seminar on the topic. A leading author and expert on sex addiction, Carnes is the director of sexual disorder services at the Meadows, a private residential treatment center in Wickenburg, Ariz.
Though hard numbers are difficult to come by, psychologist Alvin Cooper, a leader in the field and director of the San Jose Marital and Sexual Centre in California, estimates as many as 50 percent of all people online have used the Internet for sexual reasons, from flirting to cybersex.
Among that population, he said, 18 percent to 22 percent are believed to have a serious online sexual problem.
Men and women who might never have walked into a pornographic book store, let alone buy the services of a prostitute, he said, find themselves spending countless hours engaged in Internet sex. And despite terrible consequences, they feel virtually powerless to stop themselves.
Setting up affairs. Logging on at work. Logging on in their off-time or, secretly, while their loved ones are asleep.
It's a lure, Cooper said, that can be as powerful as crack cocaine because it offers what he called the "triple-A engine" of sex addiction: accessibility, affordability and anonymity.
"In my mind, there is no doubt that there are many people who would not have a problem were it not for the Internet," Cooper said.
Or the Internet just makes an existing problem worse, as it did for a 39-year-old married doctor from Olathe, Kan., who also asked that his name not be used. He was married in 1984 and has two children.
"Within a year of getting married," he said, "I started engaging other women … I had two or three affairs within the first years of our marriage."
He had them with acquaintances. He had them with patients.
"It was pretty rampant," he said.
His wife found out. She collapsed to the floor, crying. "I don't even know how to describe the pain," she said. "The heartache, my chest physically hurt."
He promised to get help, but it was a dodge. He met a stripper and others. Later, he'd be sued for sexual harassment.
Marriage. Family. Career. He put everything in jeopardy. The affairs nonetheless continued for 17 years until, again, his wife had had enough. They separated.
"I hit the Internet and went on binges," he said. "I went to Las Vegas … went to brothels and to swingers' clubs out there and went crazy."
Finally, when he discovered that his wife, who had filed for divorce, had met someone, he decided he wanted her back and wanted to change. Again they reconciled. For a year, he has been in treatment and faithful, though sometimes when he's on the Internet he feels the pull.
"It still plays a role, actually," he said. "Looking at it, I can instantly find myself going into this trance."
As for what prompts a sexual addiction: The simple answer, for some, is childhood trauma. Whatever the nature of that trauma, Carnes said, it interferes with the healthy development of what he called a child's "sexual attraction template," the blueprint for how one relates to the world sexually.
For many people that trauma may be physical or sexual abuse. The Olathe doctor said that, as a 5-year-old, he had been sexually abused by his teenage sister who, in turn, had already been abused by an adult relative.
But sexual abuse is hardly the only trigger. A young mother from Cass County, Mo., talked about growing up in a family devoid of real love or emotional connection, touch or caring. As a teen, she had a sexual relationship with a married teacher. After she married, she felt compelled to have serial affairs.
"There was a lot of yelling in our family growing up," she said. "I would hide from it. I would not deal with it. … I was very needy. I wanted somebody to pay attention to me, to give me the attention I never had."
In his training, Carnes noted that, for some people, a skewed sexual template can lead to sexual addiction, to certain compulsions or fetishes such as risky sex, pain, self-degradation or voyeurism. In others, it can lead to the opposite: sexual deprivation.
Carnes, for example, told the story of a young man who, as a teen, shared an attraction with a teenage female cousin. On a lazy summer day, believing they were alone, the two explored each other's bodies in rather innocent ways. Their families, however, had been watching and became enraged.
The teens were ripped from each other. The boy's father, screaming, told the boy he had disgraced and destroyed their family and would never see his cousin again.
He never did. Traumatized, he came to believe sex in any form was wrong. He kept away from it and, consequently, away from all caring human relationships.
"Talk to some patients and they will say that as children they were not traumatized. They'll say nobody ever touched them, nobody every hurt them," Carnes said. "But living in some families is fearful. Witnessing some marriages is traumatizing."
Fortunately, through counseling and self-discovery and by becoming committed to any number of long-term 12-step programs dedicated to sex addiction, it is possible to manage sexual addictions, compulsion and deprivations, experts insist. Some medications, such as the anti-depressant Zoloft, may curb some of the impulses.
As with other addictions, however, the path is not easy. Nor does success always come without setbacks and failures.
Several special centers and in-patient programs designed for sex addicts are available nationally, though they can be costly. Weekly support groups are run in most major cities.
As neither sex nor the Internet is going away, the first step is to admit to having a problem. Step two is getting help.
Honeydew melons: Not just for breakfast any more....
LET'S BURN THEM ALL DOWN!
OH NO! A half a dozen workers lost their jobs in a machine shop in Alabama!??!?!?
We must run and tell Willie Green!
"Thirrrty jobs lost in the hundred acres woods todaaaay."
(sorry)
--Boris
That's the only medicine that works - the forces of evil in the sexual realm is almost overwhelming.
I believe you are correct. Several generations of un-fathered males are helping to turn the country into a socio-political dump. The more men that make the effort to take their "medicine" and pass that on to their sons, the better off we'll all be.
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