My Path to Sex Addiction

My story began when I was eight years old, during a spend-the-night party at a friend’s house. The day began ordinarily enough, swimming at the local pool, eating pizza for dinner, and playing video games late into the night. But, after the parents went to bed, my friend wanted to show us something. He disappeared, heading to his (high school-aged) brother’s room, and returned a minute later carrying a stack of magazines. The images in those magazines—hardcore pornography depicting an array of sex acts—were bizarre and confusing and mesmerizing to my child brain. A few years later, when a (different) friend explained to me how sex worked, I thought back on the images in those magazines.

Oh, THAT is what those people were doing. THAT is sex.

I never forgot those images, and the allure of them stuck with me. At other friends’ houses, more magazines showed up and even late-night videos on the television. But, the turning point came when a friend showed me that I could find all of this on the computer through a thing called the internet—a new technology that was spreading through all of our homes.

I am a child of the early internet age. Even now, I can call to mind the music of a dial-up modem. Most weekends of my early adolescence were spent huddled with friends around a computer screen while AOL chat screens popped left and right. And, to accommodate game playing or learning or something, my parents eventually put a computer in my bedroom. So, when I learned that I could find those pictures online, it did not take long for me to figure out how.

From the beginning of my time looking at pornography in my room and masturbating (around 10 years old), I felt like something was wrong. I told myself over and over again that I shouldn’t do that again, but the memory of the ecstasy I felt in the moment drew me back again and again. Soon, we got high-speed cable internet and my usage exploded. Now, a seemingly endless supply of pornographic videos was at my fingertips. And each time when the buzz wore off, I was left only with the dull hum of shame.

In my family, we did not talk about emotions. We did not talk about failure. We did not talk about weakness. I came to the conclusion early on that the best way to attention (and, in my mind, love) in my family was by performance. Academically, athletically, socially, whatever. To attract my parents’ attention, I must achieve. One place I found to achieve was church and/or religion. I set out to be the golden boy. The moral one. And my involvement in church groups set up an identity for me. It also set a pattern that would ripple throughout the rest of my life.

The fact is that the bigger that image became, the more I felt like a fraud.

If they only knew… if they only knew… if they only knew…

And my addiction—and that is what it was at this point—only deepened. As I progressed into high school, pornography usage and masturbation were a daily routine. Throughout high school and college I had relationships that crossed physical boundaries repeatedly. In college, I hinted to others that I had a problem, but was never fully honest about the scale of my problem. With every effort I made to stop (through accountability software, confession, etc.), there was an equal and opposite effort to hide or circumvent.

And this was what I was carrying when I met my wife. From the outside, she saw a confident college kid who was dead-set on achieving academically, professionally, socially, and even in the local campus ministry. She also met someone adept at keeping his flaws hidden. And I had every reason to do so, because I was completely in love with her from the very beginning. The question was how to get her to love me back.

If she really knew me, she couldn’t really love me.

So, I pursued the same model for getting love that I tried before—I wooed her with performance. I performed academically, made grand romantic gestures, and took on leadership positions in anything I could find. I was a catch!

Still, my addiction marched on. I lied and hid, acted out, swore to myself that I would change, acted out, lied and hid some more. And, in the back of my mind, I started to believe that if I got married and really started having lots of shame-free sex then this problem would take care of itself. Right? RIGHT!?

Wrong. What happened instead is that a few weeks into our marriage I was back to regular acting out patterns, but this time G. caught me. Looking back, this was the first, best exit ramp that I passed by. I could have gotten honest here and gotten help. This would have spared myself and G. so much pain, but I simply was not yet willing to face the truth. I wanted to get the heat off of me as fast as possible.

The aftermath of this initial discovery was not pretty. I had no idea the degree of pain that my acting out caused her. The fear. The insecurity. The anger. I was not prepared for it. And when she pressed for more information about how long this had been going on, I did what I always did—I lied. I minimized, saying it was only a one-time thing and that what I needed was to re-establish some “accountability”. And deep down I believed that I would never do it again after seeing the pain it caused her.

That lasted about a week. Then the pattern continued. About a year later G. caught me again, and again I minimized the issue, claiming it was another one off. But, after this time, I knew I was on thin ice—if G. caught me again, I might wind up divorced. Again, that didn’t stop me.

Instead, the fear, shame, and descending despair only accelerated my addiction, as the thought began to percolate in my brain Maybe if I just cross that line, the obsession will go away. Some recovery literature calls this the search for “the Big Fix”. So, I started crossing lines—lots of them. Strip clubs led to prostitution led to random hook-ups on the internet. I lied. I stole from my family. I gambled to try to cover my tracks. I took risks that, looking back now, make clear to me that I was in the midst of a form of insanity.

The depths of my addiction took to places and to actions that I would never had thought possible. I had completely lost myself. Every escalation felt like a going past some new point of no return.

If they really knew me, they wouldn’t love me, they would leave me.

I was surrounded by friends, but hopelessly isolated by my own secrets and shame. The list of things I was certain I would take to my grave was many pages long. When I entertained the “what if” of being exposed, suicide became the only viable solution. I could not fathom facing the world as I was, rather than as I wanted everyone to think of me. And this shame and fear churned, driving me to numb it with pornography and sex over and over again.

All the while, the image grew. I hustled in every way to try to work off my shame. I climbed the ladder at work. I did my usual achievement at church, eventually moving into a (lay) leadership position there. My wife and I had two kids. And with every new change, I believed that this would be the thing that got me to break free of my addiction. But, nothing ever worked. And this pattern continued on in secret, hidden in the shadows, until something completely outside of my control intervened . . .