The Desperate Places My Sex Addiction Took Me

This article was originally published by The Fix.

Twelve years into solid recovery from alcohol and drugs, I was not ready to discover another, hidden addiction. It was during the dot-com bust and my industry was dead. I was newly married, stuck at home while my wife was flourishing in her business. My AA program wasn’t strong enough then to keep me from falling into self-pity, shame and self-loathing, so it flooded in and I reached for the only drug I had left: me.

Long sessions of masturbation provided numbness and escape for a while, keeping me busy through the idle afternoons. I developed rituals for inducing what I called the lust-trance, and they enabled an intense cathected state that took all the anxious scatter out of my mental state and did trippy things with time. Three hours could feel like 25 minutes. After a few weeks of this, I observed that I’d crossed some internal line that defined me as a sober person. I found myself doing extreme acts that I used to get to only with a lot of vodka and cocaine in my system. I could always excuse going into these taboo areas because I’d been so whacked I “wasn’t myself.” But here I was, stone-cold sober in the middle of the day, doing the same rituals.

I was cursed knowing the markers of addiction, and here they were—craving, tolerance and demand vectoring up, and my personal standards lowering faster than I could keep up appearances. One of many new lows was the day I rummaged through a garbage can on a busy intersection near my Brooklyn home at one afternoon to recover the porn magazines I’d thrown out two hours earlier, not caring who saw me.

I tried to stop many times after that, once burning my stash in a Viking funeral rite at Rockaway Beach with my AA sponsor. The moment I really sat up happened at a 'beverage' meeting when a guy I knew made the mortifying error of introducing himself as a sexaholic instead of an alcoholic. I saw him go crimson and felt the blood fill my face too, which horrified me: I’d just incriminated myself—had anyone seen? His shame was my shame.

I gingerly approached him after the meeting to ask him where I could go to out myself safely and get help. That was the beginning of my journey in the world of 12-step programs that begin with the letter 'S.' I was an eager beginner, going to meetings wherever I found myself, giving SLA, SRA and SA a shake. It took me a while to decide that SA was the only one that was going to work for me. I was used to the zero-sum premise of AA, a fairly straightforward proposition: If you drank, you weren’t sober. If you didn’t, you were. Of course, even here there are gray areas. You could fudge the definition by taking a pinch more of the pain meds than your doctor prescribed for your back injury. Some of us smoke pot and think we’re sober because we haven’t had a drink.

The S world was the Wild West by comparison, anarchy. In some programs you could set your own sobriety bottom lines. That might mean cheating was a slip, but masturbation wasn’t. Or you could watch porn and fondle yourself, but only to the threshold of climax—over, and you’ve slipped. SA, by comparison, had a clear sobriety definition: No form of sex with self or with anyone other than the spouse. It worked for me—still does— because I’m married and can have marital sex and remain sober. I would’ve struggled with miserable resentment if I’d tried to get sober in SA while still single. My higher power made me to have sex; it’s a God-given drive. This program is telling me I can’t until I get married? That’s a high bar to set, and yet people do stay sober and single in SA.