Addiction Is an Intimacy Disorder
Addiction and Early-Life Trauma
Addicts are people who’ve lost control over their relationship with a substance or behavior. They use when they don’t want to. They use when they have promised themselves and others they will stop. They use when it pushes them away from family, friends, and other important people. They use when it impacts their work, schooling, finances, reputation, freedom, etc. They tell egregious lies to themselves and others to rationalize and justify their actions. They...
One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction: An Interview with Erica Garza
At various points, I’ve written about the difficulties women encounter when trying to recover and heal from sex, porn, and love addiction. For starters, they can be more difficult to diagnose because they tend to speak about their issues in terms of relationships, dating,...
When Online Sex Sparks Meth Addiction…
A few months ago I had the pleasure of speaking at a Meth and Sex Addiction public forum in Palm Springs, CA. The three-person panel—myself, David Fawcett, and Terry Gatewood—spoke to an attentive and participatory audience of around 100 addicts and clinicians about the...
Five FACTS About Porn
Today, digital pornography is a hot topic. Very hot.
Beliefs and opinions about porn’s availability, use, and effects abound, but facts are relatively scarce. There are pro-porn factions who think porn is great for sex and relationships; the more the better. At the same time,...
Beliefs and opinions about porn’s availability, use, and effects abound, but facts are relatively scarce. There are pro-porn factions who think porn is great for sex and relationships; the more the better. At the same time,...
Working with Partners of Sex Addicts: An Interview with Dr. Barbara Steffens
My friend and colleague, Dr. Barbara Steffens, has specialized in the treatment and coaching of sex addicts and the betrayed partners of sex addicts since 1999. During that time, she has conducted groundbreaking research on the trauma that betrayed partners experience, and she has written an excellent (and highly recommended) book on the topic, Your Sexually Addicted Spouse: How Partners Can Cope and Heal. Dr. Steffens is also a founding member and current President of APSATS: The Association of Partners and...
Debunking Myths About Sexual Addiction
At the age of 20, Steven came out as gay to his highly religious parents. As members of a very conservative sect, they struggled to accept his “choice” as “normal,” and they decided to seek advice from their pastor. Unfortunately, their pastor, a trained and licensed pastoral counselor, suggested “sex addiction treatment” with another therapist in their religious community. In this treatment, Steven was given a variety of highly homophobic tasks to complete—participating in...
Keeping Your Addicted Clients Focused in the New Year
As any therapist knows, the beginning of the year is when a lot of new clients show up, and when a lot of old clients decide to get serious about the work they’ve been doing. They seem to view the new year as a great time for a fresh start. This is especially true with addicts. Unfortunately, an addicted client’s enthusiasm for recovery can wane as quickly as our own resolutions to go to the gym...
With Sex Addiction, Sobriety Looks Different for Every Addict
There is a lot of confusion and misinformation about sexual addiction, much of which centers around the way in which “sexual sobriety” is (and is not) defined. For starters, a lot of people, including some underinformed therapists, think that clinicians who treat sex addiction dictate to their clients what is and is not healthy, which would leave the definition of sexual sobriety open to the clinician’s personal, moral, and/or religious views about what sex should look...
Infidelity and “Gaslighting:” When Cheaters Flip the Script
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where one partner persistently denies the reality of the other partner (via consistent lying, bullying, and obfuscating the facts), causing that person, over time, to doubt her (or his) perception of truth, facts, and reality. Some people...
Infidelity: Why Do Men Cheat?
In my recently published book, Out of the Doghouse: A Step-by-Step Relationship-Saving Guide for Men Caught Cheating, I define infidelity as “the breaking of trust that occurs when you keep intimate, meaningful secrets from your primary romantic partner,” noting that this definition encompasses behaviors other than actual sexual intercourse, that purely online behaviors can still be cheating, and that behaviors that might qualify as cheating in one couple might be perfectly OK for another...
