Coping with sex addiction

Sex addiction is not just for the stars: it’s a real problem for real people.

By Sally Williams

'I close the curtains, take the phone off the hook, turn off my mobile, and if I have plans – say a dinner with a friend – I just cancel. Then I log onto various websites and look at images, look at movies. It’s pure, unadulterated physical enjoyment. The high of sexual excitement.”

Ash Walker is a clean-shaven, dark-haired dentist in his mid thirties. He is also a sex addict, and Ash is not his real name. I don’t know his real name, or his mobile number or email address. The only way he’s agreed to communicate is by calling my mobile and blocking his number.

These are dark waters, and the consequences for his career, should the truth get out, could be serious. But he wants to meet up and as he walks into the café, it’s clear that he fulfils neither stereotype of the sex addict: the handsome Lothario with a rampant libido, or a dirty old man in a raincoat. He is well-mannered, with a distinguished demeanour.

Sexual addiction first made headlines with the Hollywood actor Michael Douglas in 1990. More recently, the comedian Russell Brand and the golfer Tiger Woods have come out as “sufferers”. Now Hollywood has become intrigued by the idea. Shame, a forthcoming film directed by Steve McQueen, stars Michael Fassbender as a thirtysomething New Yorker unable to control his sex life, while Gwyneth Paltrow is set to play a successful businesswoman and recovering sex addict in a comedy drama, Thanks for Sharing. 

“Sexual addiction is a pattern of sexual behaviour which feels out of control,” explains Dr Thaddeus Birchard, director of the Marylebone Centre for Psychological Therapies in central London, who has 18 sex addicts in treatment, aged 22 to 56 – all of them men. “The male sex drive is higher than the female sex drive,” he says, “so strange behaviours are more of a male thing.” The number of people seeking help is increasing, he says, because of wider awareness of the problem, and because of the internet. “The use of the internet for sexual purposes is on the rise. It makes accessing it [pornography] very affordable and very available and seems anonymous.”

The addiction can manifest itself as a desire for crazed one-night stands, prostitutes, downloading porn, or building the perfect showreel (this is a showreel of porn films downloaded from the internet, which is more about the browsing and collecting than the actual “use”). “We’re not talking about something that is fun,” Dr Birchard stresses. Sex addiction may lack the history and profile of alcohol or heroin (some don’t even acknowledge it as an addiction) but it still has a spectacular ability to destroy lives. “I’ve had people who’ve spent over £500,000 on escorts,” he says. He has also had two clients commit suicide. One jumped under a train; the other overdosed. Crucially, this is not simply about desire.

“All addictions are anaesthetising behaviours,” says Paula Hall, psychotherapist and author of Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction. “They are something you are doing in order to avoid dealing with something else.”

The son of a doctor and a housewife, Ash grew up in a strict, high-achieving family. “No TV, music, films, we were not really allowed to have any friends. My parents didn’t want me to fall in with the wrong crowd.” Hard-working and clever, he got 10 As at GCSE. “But I was quite isolated, unhappy. I remember wondering on many occasions how I could run away.”

One day, aged 16, he went into a newsagent and became captivated by a magazine on the top shelf. “My sex education had been very limited, very scientific, so I was utterly amazed by what I saw. It was a way into a fantasy world, a way to run away from everything I had worried about or found difficult at home.”

In 1990, Ash was spending £1.95 a month on girlie magazines. These days, he spends thousands of pounds a year on subscriptions to websites and every 10 days or so gets lost in three-day bonanzas so extreme he has to take time off work.

He likes hardcore material, and what for many is of transient use seems to lodge in Ash’s head. It has an irresistible intensity. The world he disappears into is so compelling, the pull so titanic he forgets to eat or sleep. And while immersed he is not ashamed of anything, just consumed by an urge to go further and further, falling gratefully into a world with no limits.

“Then once I’ve done with it, masturbated, I feel utterly guilty and swear never to do it again,” he explains. (Orgasm, many addicts agree, is not the best bit. For Ash it simply marks the time to surface again.) He emerges exhausted and pale, with a need to re-establish some order. “I delete all the evidence. I buy new clothes, new shoes, new underwear and then I set a day that I call Day One, and that is the day I start my life anew and vow never to look at pornography again.”

But it’s not long before a whisper pops into his head. “The trigger might be the word 'prostitute’ on the radio, or a sex scene in a normal film you see on the BBC. And I end up relapsing, and that has pretty well been the cycle for the last 20 years or so.”

Until this summer, the longest he’s been without “acting out” (therapist-speak for the compulsive behaviour) is six weeks. The toll on his personal life has been immense. He is divorced, and estranged from his eight-year-old daughter. “I’ve wasted time and money and I have very few male or female friends.” He gorges on pornography as a way of escaping stress, boredom and loneliness. The trouble is that it cures nothing, and makes everything worse. “I’ve heard people laugh about sexual addiction, say that it doesn’t exist, but I’m living with it every single day and I just want this torment to stop.”

But Phillip Hodson, fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, is not convinced. He believes “addiction” should only apply to the ingestion of psychoactive drugs – alcohol, nicotine, cocaine. “So let’s call it obsessional, not addictive.” What’s more, who’s to say that having a lot of sex is wrong? “There are naturally people who are so highly sexed that the rest of us can only gasp,” he says. “Sex addiction is an unhelpful term because it allows people to think they are less responsible for their actions. They could have said no. It’s a way of having your cake and eating it.”

“Behavioural addictions can and do exist,” argues Dr Mark Griffiths, a chartered psychologist and Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University, whose research includes new wave addictions – video games, internet and exercise, for instance. “But in the case of high-profile celebrities like Tiger Woods, it may be the case that they were simply in a position where they were bombarded with sexual advances, and they succumbed. How many people wouldn’t do the same thing if they had the same opportunities? In these situations, it only becomes a problem when the person is discovered.”

According to Paula Hall: “Sex addiction is more akin to an eating disorder. It is a normal appetite that has gone awry and is being used as a way of managing life.”

Myth or medical condition, there are many therapists worldwide who make a living by treating it. Guy Kennaway, British author of Sunbathing Naked and Other Miracle Cures, a memoir of how his battle with psoriasis lurched into sexual addiction, was treated at The Meadows, a rehab centre in Arizona. Before treatment, “I saw sex everywhere,” he writes. Even in the act of filling his car. “I picked up the nozzle, stared at it…”

The programme at The Meadows included group therapy, Feelings Check (reporting to nurses how you are feeling every six hours), and wearing a hula-hoop for a week “to teach me that all of us have a circle of space which we are safe within”.

In the UK, there is now an Association for the Treatment of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity (ATSAC), and a number of sex addiction specialists along with 12-step self-help support groups such as Sexaholics Anonymous.

Ash has completed a 16-week group therapy course (which cost him £1,600) and sees a therapist once a week. “I’ve learnt that I need to look at release and comforts. So when I’m thinking of acting out I play a game of squash, or go and drive a car around a racetrack. I also soothe myself by reading interesting, mainstream books and having a hot bath. I’ve also learnt not to think of sex as something dirty and shameful. Erotic art and erotic fiction are useful.”

“My last Day One was July 12 2011 and I managed to go four months, then unfortunately I relapsed about a month ago in a really bad way.” It was a three-to-four-day frenzy. But Ash had a new Day One this week. “I’m very hopeful that I will get to a stage where I will have beaten this,” he says.

Coping with sex addiction