.Addicted to Sex

It's no joke. The Internet has escalated a problem that's tearing apart families and lives.

On the second Wednesday in September, Nicole, a Brentwood resident in her mid-thirties, received a call from a single female friend in Southern California. They hadn’t spoken in a while, but the friend cut right to the chase: “What the hell is your fiancé doing on Match.com?” she asked. Nicole told the truth: Trevor was a sex addict. She’d known that much two weeks earlier when he’d left for a business trip in Los Angeles. Now, much to her surprise, it seemed he wasn’t coming back. And judging from the things she’d discovered in his absence, Nicole was pretty sure she didn’t want him to.

Her friend e-mailed over Trevor’s Match profile, and Nicole sat in front of her laptop staring at the broad-cheeked face she’d found so appealing in the past. She could tell he’d snapped the shirtless self-portraits in a guest bedroom of his parents’ Danville home. His manic grin cut through the numbness that had taken over more and more of her mind lately. She felt disgusted. But it was his description of what he wanted in a partner that shook her to the core: “I want to have fun. After being in a relationship with someone who controlled me for the last 4.5 years, I need to find myself.”

Controlled him? Nicole reread the words several times, incredulous, and before she knew it she was crying once again. No one could have controlled this man. That much was obvious from the intricate web of lies he’d spun for so long. She read further: “I am extremely giving and will pamper, but I also need to be pampered. I am looking for someone who likes me for who I am.”

Who was he, anyway?

Nicole printed out the two-page profile in full color and added it to what she would come to call her “bucket of evidence,” a deep nine-by-twelve-inch plastic bin. This was where she collected proof that the man she’d dated for six years and lived with for five, whom her adolescent son loved and called Dad, was not only a sex addict but a stranger. Her determination that she and her boy not get dragged down by Trevor’s lies was the only thing keeping her sane.


Nicole isn’t alone. In a trend that has escalated with the growth of Internet access, millions of Americans are now addicted to sex — between 3 and 8 percent of the population, experts estimate — and many are in long-term relationships. Just about all the ones who seek treatment say they use the Web to feed their addiction, according to psychologists.

“The porn industry is what built the Internet, and it’s still the most profitable part of it,” says Don Mathews, director of Pleasant Hill’s Impulse Treatment Center. “Imagine that heroin were readily available in every household. Some people who never would have otherwise tried the drug would become heroin addicts.”

Indeed, it’s hard to spend much time online and not interact with the multibillion-dollar Internet porn industry in some way, even if it’s just deleting X-rated spam. But millions of adults intentionally wander into triple-X terrain. Last month alone, adult Web sites drew between 42 million (Nielsen NetRatings) and 65 million (comScore Networks) unique visitors, depending on which of these prominent Web-tracking firms you believe. In a JupiterResearch poll earlier this year, 16 percent of US adults reported viewing porn regularly. And because it’s not something many like to admit, the true number may be significantly higher.

As recently as twenty years ago, porn aficionados had to work for their fix, and stash physical evidence. Men would trek to the local 7-Eleven to score the handful of monthly porn rags on the stands, and hope they didn’t run into a familiar face. Buying videos required a socially risky excursion to the adult bookstore. People seeking anonymous sex had to stake out the bars in the hope that a like-minded lover might turn up. And paying for pleasure often meant betting that the local massage parlor wasn’t legit, or that a corner prostitute was.

Today the addict’s online arsenal is inexhaustible, often free, and far easier to keep under wraps. Al Cooper, the late Stanford-affiliated psychologist who pioneered cybersex-addiction research, called the Net a “Triple-A Engine”: affordable, accessible, and anonymous.

Some addicts confine their behavior to the virtual world, spending countless hours surfing for increasingly arousing photos and videos, frequenting cybersex chat rooms, or paying Webcam-equipped sex workers to do whatever they’re told for a fee. Many others start out online but ultimately end up slapping skin in the real world. What they all have in common is a disease that really has nothing to do with sex. This addiction, experts say, is all about the secrecy, the hiding, and the consequences of getting caught.

“It’s not a moral issue, or a religious issue,” explains Rob Weiss, director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles. “It’s not about sexual orientation. It’s not who you’re having sex with. It’s not a sign of other major mental disorders. And, like compulsive gambling, it isn’t about the payoff.”

The orgasm, Weiss adds, may not even be desirable, because it means an end to the exhilaration of searching and anticipating, but the emotional issues the addict is attempting to evade are still there. “I think it will be the defining addiction of the century,” Weiss concludes.

If sex addicts are of a type, they tend to be people-pleasers who are eager to avoid conflict. They’re often talented deal- sealing businessmen with social graces and charisma. “There’s the stereotype of a guy in the dark trenchcoat seeking out some seedy section of town, but in reality they’re probably more common in places like churches and synagogues,” says Mathews of the Impulse Treatment Center. “Because they’re trying to be nice people. Women meet them and think, ‘This is a nice guy I have!'”


He might have been talking about Nicole, whose friends had continually cooed about how affectionate and thoughtful Trevor was. She was caught completely off guard in early 2005 when she discovered that Trevor’s occasional massage parlor visits involved “happy endings,” a euphemism for hand jobs or oral sex.

“I was hurt, and I questioned myself,” she recalls. “There I was, in my early thirties, in my prime. And I’ve always been … I’m not a prude! For him to do this, it didn’t make sense to me.”

The couple sought advice from their church pastor, who suggested Trevor might be a sex addict and began meeting with him weekly. Relieved that the issue would soon be resolved, Nicole didn’t breathe a word about it to anyone. After six weeks of counseling, Trevor called it quits.

“He said he would never do it again because he didn’t want to risk losing his family, his home, and everything he had,” Nicole recalls. Although Trevor did appear to go out of his way to make her happy in the months that followed, in hindsight she imagines that was just his way of dealing with the guilt. Gradually, it became clear that something still wasn’t right. One clue was that their sex life, which had always been satisfying if not stellar, screeched to a halt. “I kept questioning what was going on,” she says. “I kept trying to think of other things it could be. But in the back of my mind, I kind of knew.”

One day this past August, Nicole, who’d recently launched her own business at Trevor’s urging, was cleaning out his car when she came across a stash of receipts in the console. Sifting through them, she saw that he’d been withdrawing money from her bank account. She managed the family finances but hadn’t noticed because the amounts were relatively small, and he’d been quite clever about it. “He’d say, ‘Oh, honey, I’ll go to the store for you,’ and then use our debit card,” she says. Sometimes instead of taking out cash he’d purchase one or two of the retail gift cards displayed in the checkout aisle.

She was baffled, and it struck her as particularly odd that he’d even save the receipts. It occurred to her then that he must be in real trouble. A cool calm flooded her body. Nicole had faced tremendous adversity before. Her son’s father left her when she was just a few months pregnant, and she’d worked sixteen hours a day for years to support herself and her son. Now she was determined to help Trevor no matter what she found out.

“About 150 lies and two and a half hours later, he told me that it wasn’t just massage parlors anymore,” she says. “He was going on Craigslist to find perfect strangers, and escorts, and meeting them in parking lots for hand jobs, blow jobs, whatever.”

Trevor got emotional, as he often did. He cried. She cried. He swore that he’d get help as soon as he returned from his business trip. Nicole swore that she’d stand by him. She begged him not to go. He insisted, and kissed her goodbye. In one of the dozen teary phone calls they shared the next day, Trevor assured her that he’d already spoken to a counselor in Walnut Creek in advance of starting treatment.

Don Mathews surmises that people searching for sex addiction treatment in the Bay Area fifteen years ago might have hit upon his name and perhaps one other. Mathews was well established in the burgeoning field of anger management when he read Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, the first book on the subject, published in 1985.

The author was Patrick Carnes, a psychologist who has since penned more than a dozen other self-help books on the subject and is widely viewed as the field’s pioneer. Mathews contacted Carnes, who agreed to train him. “My colleagues were thinking, ‘Boy, are you into something weird now, Don!'” Mathews recalls. But hundreds of other clinicians have since studied with Carnes, who currently directs a treatment program in Mississippi and maintains the Web site SexAddict.com. The East Bay now boasts more than a dozen sex-addiction specialists.

Despite Trevor’s promise, he may never see any of them. In the next conversation he and Nicole had — their last — he sounded cold and distant. Then he changed his cell phone number, stopped taking her calls at his office, and e-mailed her to announce he was staying in Los Angeles.


On a clear mid-October morning nearly seven weeks later, Nicole plops her evidence bucket on the spotless glass table in her Brentwood kitchen. Her clear blue eyes are watery but bright, and despite the subtle makeup she’s applied, circles are apparent beneath them, a symptom of her recent subsistence on a few hours of sleep a night.

“After he left I would spend hours and hours on the computer, searching for things,” Nicole says, tucking a long strand of blond hair behind one ear. “I would make the best private detective.”

She lifts several manila folders out of the container and opens the first to reveal a ten-page document. Under the heading “MPReviews” and the silhouette of a curvy woman on all fours is a list of eight sex workers Trevor had commented on. Nicole had happened across his screen name in one of her searches a few days after he left. She’d plugged it into Google, and up popped the Web site. All it took was his password — “the same one he used for absolutely everything” — and she was in. “The MP stands for ‘massage parlor,'” she explains. “There’s Tara, Stacy, Cocoa, Desiree … and here, the name of the place they each work for, how much they charge, and the location. Irvine, San Ramon, Tracy, Laguna, San Jose.”

The reviews stretch back to 2004, and Trevor had posted one a scant week before he split for Los Angeles. Nicole flips through the pages. They contain Trevor’s clumsy, graphic descriptions of his encounters with each woman, emphasizing what each one let him do to her, and how far he imagined she might actually go. “Oh, and there’s a link to a glossary on the home page,” she says. “ATF stands for ‘all-time favorite.’ I had to look up ‘kitty,’ too.” She pauses, and then chokes back a pained laugh. “I’ve never heard this man say these things! We didn’t have hanging-from-the-chandeliers sex. … I’d like to have met this man! Our sex life was okay. It wasn’t amazing, but I loved him.”

Nicole rises and walks across the large kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it’s just a couple of years old, decked out with brushed-steel appliances and polished marble countertops. Sunshine streams in from a huge window above the sink, and on the opposite wall hangs a framed school portrait of her son. The heels of her suede cowboy boots click on the clean tile floor. She returns to the table and slaps down a card adorned with pink flowers. “Trevor gave me this on Mother’s Day,” she says, opening it to read aloud what he’d written: “‘You are my life. I couldn’t survive without you.'” She arches an eyebrow, reaches into the plastic bin, and extracts another folder.

This one is filled with receipts: the ones from his car plus a slew of others Trevor had wedged behind their lawnmower in a plastic Safeway bag. (She discovered it when she’d gone to mow the lawn, having just informed their regular gardener she could no longer afford him.) A third folder contains Trevor’s credit report and various finance-related documents. Reading the report only made her feel more justified in having pulled it. “Look at this,” Nicole says. She points to a dismal credit rating, and slides a finger down a long list of lenders he’d attempted to borrow money from. “He applied for a housing loan in July,” she said, “and some auto loans? Anywhere he might get money, I guess.”

Finally, she removes a printout of an e-mail correspondence she conducted with Trevor’s ex-wife after tracking her down through a school reunion Web site. That was how she learned Trevor’s sex addiction was even more deeply entrenched than she’d realized: It had been a major force behind the dissolution of his nine-year marriage. He’d also taken money from his ex. Meanwhile, the tale Trevor had relayed to Nicole was that his former wife was emotionally and physically abusive — the same yarn he was now spinning about her, she’d already learned.

Sex addicts can appear sociopathic, Berkeley psychologist Rob Weiss explains. They’ll tell lie after lie and do other things they’d never normally do. “Someone who is doing heroin may steal their grandmother’s retirement money to get drugs,” he says. “When sober, they might contribute to her retirement. It’s the same with sex addiction.”

Nicole stacks everything back in the bin, which she pushes across the table. She studies her hands. “I feel like I’m on a reality TV show about suffering, and after seeing how much of this I can take someone is going to pop out and award me five million dollars,” she says, eyes darting around the room as though to look for the hidden cameras. She can’t help but smile at the thought. “Don’t I wish.”


Her notion isn’t so far-fetched. Pop-cultural references to sex addiction have become increasingly common, cropping up on TV shows such as Desperate Housewives and the new Matthew Perry vehicle Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In 2005, indie filmmaker Caveh Zahedi made a movie about it. Oprah has dished about it. Bill Clinton is said to have sought help for it. But you won’t find any reference to it in the DSM-IV, the most recently published edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, which dates back to 1994.

“That’s something that this community has got to work out and overcome and get it listed,” says Robin Cato, executive director of the national Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health. “They do talk about sexual disorders, but they do not talk about sexual addiction.”

A key argument against including sex addiction in the next edition of the psych manual is that addiction must involve ingestion of a chemical. People who want it included say there’s indeed a chemical involved: endorphins.

Sex addiction, like any addiction, is chronic and escalating, says Sharon O’Hara, a Los Angeles therapist and former president of the California chapter of the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. Addicts experience a high, she says. They can’t stop without serious consequences, and when they do, they often suffer withdrawal, battling symptoms such as irritability, headaches, and sleeplessness.

Despite the persistent stereotype of sex addicts as pedophiles and perverts, very few fit that profile. Most are everyday folks. Although fewer women than men seek help — experts interviewed for this story suggest that 10 to 20 percent of sex addicts in treatment are female — their numbers are increasing. Cato points out that alcohol addiction programs in the 1950s had a similar makeup, and alcoholism was then considered a male disease. Attend an AA meeting nowadays, she says, and you’re likely to see an even split. “This isn’t a man thing,” Cato says. “It’s a human thing; it’s part of the human condition.”

Robert Weiss of the Sexual Recovery Institute notes that woman feel far more shame revealing a problem that involves having a lot of sex. “No matter how sophisticated we become, a woman having lots of sex is still a slut,” he says. “A man is still a stud.”

Case in point: the day Jerry, a Contra Costa County resident, divulged his sex addiction to his tennis partner. “His reactions ranged from ‘How the hell do you get away with it?’ to ‘You rock!,’ especially when I showed him the pictures of some of the women I slept with,” reports Jerry, who works for a Fortune 100 company in San Francisco. He assumes his wife would divorce him if she knew that he’s slept with roughly one hundred women in the course of their decade-plus marriage, but he isn’t entirely selfish. He indulges her with many of the between-the-sheets tips and tricks he’s picked up over the years. “If anything, it has enhanced our sex life,” he explains.

Jerry, who is boyishly handsome in a way that conjures up a Ralph Lauren ad, recognized his addiction as such two years ago. He tried to go for a day without searching for online porn (at home), perusing Craigslist personals (at work), or trying to peek down a woman’s blouse (on BART), but just couldn’t do it. Even so, he says he won’t stop unless he is forced to choose between his family and his habit.

“I provide well for my family,” he explains. “I have never let my addiction take precedence over the family. For me, it’s a getaway from the mundane, everyday, same-old-same-old life. Cute women actually want to make love to me. … That is a great boost to my ego.” He even credits his secret sex life for recent job promotions.

Jerry doesn’t limit himself to women he meets online. Oftentimes he chats up would-be lovers during his late-night train rides home. But it’s not as if they hop off the train with him at the next stop and rip off their clothes. “Most of the women aren’t that easy, and it usually takes a couple of weeks of convincing to meet for a rendezvous,” he says. Many of them are also married, he adds, and seem to get a kick out of having casual sex with a stranger. His pattern is to hook up with the same woman several times in a San Francisco hotel room, and then break it off. He’ll lie, telling her that his wife discovered the affair and he needs to end it.

In reality, Jerry goes to great lengths to ensure his wife remains oblivious. He uses an alias, corresponds via anonymous e-mail accounts, and never divulges his phone number. When he meets a woman for sex, he’s sure to never leave anything behind that might identify him. “Touch wood, but no close calls so far,” he says. Currently, he’s juggling three women. Four, if you count his wife.

Jerry may think he’s got it all figured out, but an undercurrent of anxiety ripples beneath the surface of an addict’s everyday life, psychologists say. That’s because they always live with the fear that they’re just one step away from being found out.

“I’ve probably treated a couple thousand sex addicts in my life, and can count on one hand the number who came in for treatment wanting to change their behavior, saying, ‘I don’t feel good about this,'” Weiss says. “The vast majority come into treatment because of consequences. Most don’t come in until their wife says, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re doing this. If you don’t quit I’m going to leave you.'”


Stephen, who might pass as the older brother of actor Steve Carell (star of The 40-Year-Old Virgin), has heard the latter threat more often than he can count. Seven years ago, his teenage daughter happened upon a disturbing Web page on the family’s home computer. Splayed across the screen were images of her father, naked and engaged in a variety of sexually explicit poses.

Stephen had to tell his wife the truth: For years, he’d been having anonymous sex with strangers he’d met online. Most were men. “My wife said, ‘How could you do this if you loved me?'” he recalls one recent afternoon in Oakland. “I said, ‘Love has nothing to do with it!'”

Back then, neither Stephen nor his wife understood his behavior as an addiction. Nor did the doctors at the hospital where he was treated for depression in the days that immediately followed his confession. After he returned home and reconciled with his wife, he tried to control his behavior, but ultimately could not.

For Stephen, the hunt was a huge part of it. He’d spend four to eight hours securing each partner. Then he’d slip out of his San Francisco office for an encounter that rarely lasted more than twenty minutes. The sex was almost always disappointing, he says, and afterwards he’d feel overwhelmed with shame. “The high, for me, was more in the communicating back and forth and finding somebody who seemed to think I was attractive and accepted me for who I was, even though it was in a strange way,” he says.

“It’s the fantasy that’s the drug,” concurs O’Hara, the Los Angeles therapist. “It’s the fantasizing about getting it, and then getting ready for it — the whole deal. When you actually do the sex act, it’s all over. So you want to prolong the buildup.”

When Stephen first started “acting out,” as therapists call it, he rationalized his behavior by reminding himself that his wife’s interest in sex had vanished after giving birth to their youngest child. Looking back, he says, “It’s difficult to know whether our sex life disappeared because I started engaging in anonymous sex, or whether I started engaging in anonymous sex because our sex life disappeared.”

His partners were mostly male, he says, because he found that most men were eager to keep things anonymous. Plus there were far more men than women seeking sex on Craigslist. Stephen didn’t want a relationship — he can count on one finger the number of times he met someone twice. “I don’t have the slightest idea how many guys I was with,” he says. “A wild guess would be between 50 to 75” — he hates to ponder it — “but it could also be 100 to 150.”

Despite all these trysts, Stephen identifies as straight, and guesses about half of his male partners did, too. He’s still trying to figure out his sexuality. “Am I homosexual? Bi?” He shrugs. “I was addicted to the physical side, but my emotional self is purely heterosexual.”

His situation isn’t so uncommon, according to Berkeley psychologist Charles King. “People end up fighting their own values, and questioning their own sexual desire — like married men who may get involved in sex acts with other men,” he says. “It’s exciting, but it leads them to think, ‘Who am I?'”

At home, Stephen was a typical suburban dad in his fifties, perhaps a bit more introverted than some. But he had the wife, the kids, the house, the cars, the job, and the retirement fund. He was an expert at checking his addiction at the door. When he surfed the Web at work and passed through the doorway of a stranger’s San Francisco home, he was someone else entirely: an adventurous, sexually desirable, confident man living on the edge of big city life.

Three years ago, Stephen’s wife discovered he was acting out again, and asked him to leave. He turned to the Web for help and stumbled across a diagnostic test that posed the question, “Are you a sex addict?” After he took it, a sense of relief washed over him. Yes, he thought. That’s exactly what I am. “I realized I couldn’t make excuses anymore, because I could always come up with a million excuses for doing what I did,” he says.

He moved out, entered therapy with a sex-addiction specialist, and began attending weekly meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous. Before he identified as one, Stephen had little tolerance for addicts of any stripe. All they had to do was stop, he’d believed. “I was going to a meeting that I pretty much looked down on,” he says. “But I had no other choice. I figured, maybe this is the only chance to save my family. And as a matter of fact, it was.”

Stephen credits the program, which is based on the AA model, with saving his life as well. It and similar twelve-step groups, including Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and Sexaholics Anonymous, host a total of 43 meetings every week in the East Bay, and 41 in San Francisco.

Anecdotally, at least, these meetings appear to be increasingly popular. On one recent weekday afternoon, 25 people attended a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting in the East Bay. The people were as diverse as you’d find in line at the DMV. One longtime member who spoke indicated that, just a few years ago, the same meeting attracted just a handful of people. When the volunteer leader asked if any newcomers were present, several gingerly raised their hands.

Stephen says walking into his first meeting was the second-worst experience of his life. The worst? “Saying, ‘I’m Stephen and I’m a sex addict,'” he says. “It is almost too much for a person to have to do. Anyone who doesn’t have tears in their eyes the first time …” He pauses and casts his hazel eyes to the table, where his fingertips are pressed together in a peak. A thin wedding band encircles his ring finger. “It’s just very tough to have to admit that to a group of strangers,” he concludes. But the admission eased his shame.

Now, the meetings are his refuge. “SAA is the one place I can go and say anything I want without some judgment,” he says. “I understand that I’m not alone, and that a lot of normal people get caught up in this.”

Home is where sex addicts may be less likely to find solace. Often enough, the jilted long-term partners simply don’t want to deal with the addicted partners’ issues. The way Stephen’s wife reacted when he suggested that she, too, should engage in counseling is typical, experts say. “Why should I get therapy for your problem?” she’d asked.

“Being a martyr and a victim is the hallmark of being involved with an addict,” Weiss says. “It takes them a long time. I wouldn’t expect a partner to take any responsibility or take a look at their own stuff for at least a year or so.”

In Stephen’s case, it’s been nearly three years since he realized he was a sex addict, and his wife has yet to entertain the suggestion that she might play a role in his recovery. He’s suggested couples groups, such as Recovering Couples Anonymous, an Oakland-based national organization. He’s also mentioned COSA, a twelve-step program for those affected by a loved one’s sex addiction. But she has yet to bite. And whenever he’s home, Stephen feels as if she still monitors his every move and has him walking on pins and needles.

Eventually, Weiss says, someone in Stephen’s situation might want to tell their partner to cut it out: “They need to say, ‘That’s not okay with me. I understand that you don’t trust me — you don’t have to trust me. But if at some point if I’m acting in a healthy way I don’t have to be accountable to you.'”

When Stephen moved back in with his wife two years ago, however, he agreed to be accountable. He promised to be completely honest: If he slips, he has to tell her. But if he slips, she’ll divorce him.

Rare, though, is the addict whose path to sobriety is free of potholes. “Sex addicts are particularly vulnerable to relapse,” O’Hara suggests. “You don’t need any props; you don’t have to go out and buy drugs on a street corner. You can just sit down and create the chemicals.”

In sex-addiction parlance, sobriety is self-defined. Unlike substance abusers, they can’t simply eliminate sex from their lives. Part of the recovery involves relearning how to have sex so that it’s intimate and meaningful, rather than merely the fulfillment of an urge. Stephen has been sober for fifteen months now, he says, but he hasn’t told his wife about the few relapses he’s had while in therapy.

“My goal is to stay with my family,” Stephen says. He conveys this desire repeatedly. His grown children, whom he’s certain his addiction has damaged, love and accept him. And he hopes his wife will one day do the same.


Michael doesn’t have a wife, or a girlfriend for that matter, and he blames his addiction in part. Most experts believe that the typical sex addict was either sexually abused as a child or exposed to porn at an early age. This tall, affable 32-year-old computer engineer fits that characterization to a T. At age five, Michael — who, unlike other people interviewed for this article, did not insist on a pseudonym — was molested by a mentally retarded man in a department store bathroom. His parents pressed charges, and he recalls being grilled by someone at the district attorney’s office who acted as if it were the boy’s fault. “It’s not one of those things I think about a lot,” he says. “But I certainly think it had a big impact on me.”

By the time he was eight or nine, Michael knew to reach beneath his father’s dresser for the porn rags hidden in plastic bags. In his teens, he would slip into adult bookstores to buy his own. When the Internet came along, he was an early, eager adopter. He’d masturbate beneath the desk at his on-campus, computer-equipped museum job, and anywhere else he could manage. “Porn was never something that made me feel good,” he says. “I felt ashamed and embarrassed. Yet those feelings didn’t stop me from doing it.”

He lost his virginity at 21, “a horrible experience,” he recalls with a shudder. “I was a late bloomer in every way.” A few days before his 24th birthday, he hired his first prostitute. Within a year, he says, he was spending upward of $1,500 a month on sex. He became a massage-parlor regular, and a fan of Web sites like MPReviews. Occasionally he turned to independent contractors on Craigslist — he might call up 25 women in one sitting before finding one who met his criteria. He’d drive from the South Bay, where he lived at the time, to San Mateo, Fremont, San Francisco — wherever a woman was waiting.

“I would be fine one minute, then get an urge to get laid, and twenty minutes later I would be in the arms of a sex worker,” he says. When he couldn’t manage the real-world version, he settled for porn. His $60,000 salary went only so far. He estimates he’s spent more than $20,000 on his addiction, and he’s still struggling to pay off about $10,000 in related debt.

And yet, financial issues aside, he didn’t really see a reason to stop. After all, the places he visited existed for a reason. He treated the women well, he says. And while he’d dated here and there, he’d never cheated on anyone.

The only personal trouble his behavior had caused was when his mother blew up after catching him using porn on her home computer. Their rift lasted a few months, but in the end she revealed a bit of invaluable information: His parents’ divorce was largely due to his father’s unquenchable thirst for porn.

Michael’s turning point came in 2001, when a massage-parlor worker he liked told him she was leaving to pursue her dream of becoming a hairstylist. He went to a specialty shop, intent on buying her a nice pair of scissors as a going-away present. He selected a pair that cost $400, far more than he’d planned upon, and she seemed pleased. Soon after, inspired by her motivation, Michael decided that he, too, might be better off quitting.

It has been more arduous than he’d anticipated. “I used to make the mistake of thinking I could will myself out of it,” Michael says. “But ultimately, I couldn’t.”

So, for four months, he attended private and group therapy at the Silicon Valley Psychotherapy Center. He made it through only one Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting, however. “I ran out of the room as fast as I could when it was over,” he recalls. “I think it works for some people, but it made me feel like I was even more of a freak. It was kind of — ‘Let’s all get together and be depressed about our problem.'”

Michael ceased treatment when he left the Bay Area to attend business school, but a year later he came across a new online review of the sex worker for whom he’d bought the scissors. He was bummed that she was still working, but he, too, hadn’t entirely stopped paying for sex, and he still planned his days around his Internet access. So he tried harder. Today, he says he hasn’t been with a prostitute for months, and that he no longer feels the pull when he passes a massage parlor.

“There are still days when I think, ‘Why the fuck am I still doing this?'” Michael says, referring to the three or four hours a week and $20 to $50 a month he spends looking at online porn. He’d like to have a real relationship soon.

“I’m probably a little myopic in what I find attractive now,” he says, glancing around a crowded diner. “I’m wired to chase girls who are cute, more attractive than average. Take that waitress over there,” he adds, turning to look at a stocky woman with a dark ponytail filling a coffee cup on the other side of the room. He lowers his voice. “She’s fine looking, but I don’t find her attractive. Now the girls at the table next to us …” He tips his head to the side, indicating several younger women with long, fussed-over hair and trendy outfits.

When Michael does meet the right woman, he says he’ll readily disclose his past. He’s already told a few friends, and it “wasn’t a big deal to them,” he says. And if someone else — a future boss, or colleague, or father-in-law — discovers his past and confronts him — well, bring it on. “I want to be able to look someone in the eye when he says, ‘I uncovered the fact that you used to sleep with prostitutes,'” he says. “I want to throw it back in his face and say, ‘You’re right, it was a shitty thing to do, and I struggled for years to stop, and to make myself a better person.'”


Nicole hopes that Trevor will one day be able to say the same thing. But right now, she’s just trying to get through each day. She’s read half a dozen books on sex addiction and she and her son both are in therapy. She’s planning to become a twelve-stepper. She’s held a yard sale to rid the garage of some of Trevor’s things. She’s left several phone messages with the Brentwood Police Department to complain about the fact that sex workers are finding local clients on Craigslist. (She’s peeved that she has yet to hear back.) And she keeps her evidence bin, should she ever need it.

She still has to figure out how to manage a $5,000 monthly mortgage payment on her own, because the last thing she plans to do is lose her house, and disrupt her son’s life any more than Trevor’s departure already has.

Nicole assumed that as the weeks passed, her numbness would give way to acceptance and calm. Instead, each day brings a bit more devastation. Her son doesn’t understand how the guy he called Dad, who’d coached his sports team, taken him fishing, and cuddled up to him while watching TV on their brown-leather couch, could possibly have disappeared without so much as a goodbye. “Is it because I don’t listen to you?” he has asked Nicole. “Tell him I’ll be better!”

“My ex-fiancé had been with my son for over half of his life,” Nicole says. “To him it’s a very traumatic loss, kind of like he died.” She pauses to think over that notion, and shakes her head.

“Logically, I know it has nothing to do with me,” she says. “But emotionally, I’m not quite there yet.” She glances around the kitchen and the adjacent living room where, beyond a sliding glass door, the blue water in the swimming pool she designed herself lies flat and still in the sun. “And realistically, it doesn’t matter. ‘Why me?’ It just matters that he’s gone.”


SEX-ADDICTION RESOURCES
To learn more, or contact the people mentioned in the story…

General Information
Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health: The national organization’s informational site for sex-addiction educators, treatment providers, and people seeking help

SexHelp: The site of Patrick Carnes, who penned the first book on sex addiction.

Sexual Addiction Screening Test: Wondering if your online and/or real-world behavior might represent an addiction? Find out here.

Addicted to Sex, a powerful documentary featuring candid interviews with sex addicts and therapists. A particularly valuable resource for friends and family members of addicts seeking to get a better grasp on what the disease actually entails, and how to treat it. Available only by contacting producer Sean McFarland at [email protected] or 310-572-5496. ($44.95, DVD only)

Twelve-Step Programs with Meetings in the East Bay
Sex Addicts Anonymous

Sexaholics Anonymous

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous

COSA: A recovery program for people whose lives have been affected by a loved one’s sex addiction.


Recovering Couples Anonymous
: While RCA was created as a program for couples dealing with sex addiction, it now welcomes couples struggling with any major issue.

Local Sex Addiction Counselors
George Collins, Compulsion Solutions (Walnut Creek)

Charles King, private practice (Berkeley)

Don Mathews, Impulse Treatment Center (Pleasant Hill)

Susan Raeburn, private practice (Berkeley)

Jason Saffer, Center for Creative Growth (Berkeley)

Other Therapists Referenced
Sharon O’Hara, private practice (Los Angeles)

Rob Weiss, Sexual Recovery Institute (Los Angeles)

Doug Weiss, Heart to Heart Counseling Center (Colorado Springs)

Thomas Kelem, private practice (Berkeley)

Paul Shepard, private practice (Oakland) (510) 333-4511.

Paul Slakey, private practice (Oakland)

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