Wilson’s Story __________________
“Shut the hell up! If you open your frigging mouth again I’ll shut it for you!” Wilson cowered in the corner as he did every time his dad got drunk and started finding fault with every member of the family.
“I’m sorry.”
“I said shut the hell up. You’re just like your mother, you sniveling coward. You’ll never amount to anything.”
Sometimes Wilson got hit. Other times, like tonight, he was pummeled by his father’s words. He was reminded again that he was worthless, that he didn’t measure up to his father’s expectations and would never succeed at anything.
Wilson often deliberately became a target to keep his father occupied so his drunken rage would spare his mother and his little sister. The scars on his back and legs were not as memorable as the deep psychological wounds his father inflicted. Whatever the problem, whatever was broken, whatever was missing, Wilson knew it was his fault.
Just once he wished he could see his father sober and hear him say kind things to him. Just once he wished he could hear his father say, “I love you.” But not tonight. Tonight Wilson was angry too. He thought to himself, one of these days I am going to be big and I will make you pay!
By the time Wilson was ten, he had seen pornography many times. He discovered his father’s hidden stash of sexually explicit magazines. Then an older girl that lived down the street introduced him to physical sex. What Wilson realized was that as long as he was engaged in any kind of sexual behavior he didn’t feel alone and unloved. He began to live for the moments when he could slip away and live in fantasy.
By age eleven, Wilson discovered masturbation by accident. He realized that if he rubbed his penis, it felt good. Every time his father started raging, Wilson would escape to the bathroom or the garage and masturbate. He could escape into fantasy and for a few moments block out his father’s anger.
By his thirteenth birthday, Wilson was masturbating every day, sometimes several times a day. Regardless of the dysfunction at home, he could escape into his fantasy world of sex and, for a while, forget the daily pain of his life. He often had open sores on his penis where he had rubbed the skin off from his constant masturbation.
As Wilson matured physically, emotionally he seemed to remain stuck at ten years old. By the time he was fifteen, his father had deserted the family. Even in his absence, Wilson could hear his father’s voice in his head telling him he was not good enough. When Wilson was not being sexual with himself or someone else, he nursed his rage. His anger always seemed to be just below the surface. He got in fights at school and destroyed other’s property.
As an adult, Wilson continued to use sex to medicate and to escape reality. After several failed relationships, he gave up on the idea that he would ever be in a loving and fulfilling relationship. Sex partners seemed plentiful. He didn’t have to pretend to care about someone in order to have sex with her. He felt like he invented the term “friends with benefits.”
What Wilson had a hard time admitting was that he longed to have a special person he could love and then be truly loved by her. He scoffed at one partner who told him that he was looking to her to find the love his father never showed him. How could he still want to be loved by his father after being so abused by him?
As Wilson entered his mid-twenties, he achieved significant success as an investment banker. He thrived on work and found that people trusted him. But his professional life and his personal life were very different.
Wilson spent few evenings without being engaged in some sexual activity with someone. He began to have two depressing thoughts. First, he realized that his life was dominated by sex. He now felt alone even when he was having sex. He was always looking for the next person with whom he could start a relationship. And it didn’t matter how much sex he had; it seemed like it was never enough. Second, Wilson felt he would never be able to live a monogamous life.
These thoughts and the concerns they generated were the beginning of Wilson’s quest for recovery. He wanted a different life—one not dominated by sex. He yearned for a healthy relationship. He also wanted to get free from his propensity to rage when things didn’t go his way.
How could he be a success in other areas of his life and have messed up his personal life so badly? Others looking at him saw him as someone who succeeded against great odds. People admired his success in business and envied his ability to carry on multiple relationships with so many women. His friends constantly fed his ego saying, “You’re the man!”
Yet in his private moments, Wilson knew he didn’t want to continue the shell of a life he was living. He yearned to be free from his obsessive and compulsive sexual behavior. He wanted to feel normal, but he didn’t know what normal was. All he knew was the life he had lived.
Abuse during childhood does not cause addiction. However, many, many people who struggle with addiction have been abused—some physically, others verbally and psychologically, still others sexually. Abuse is the fertile soil in which addiction—in all its forms—often grows.
Abuse during the formative years of life sets a new normal; it changes the baseline for what is normal behavior. A person who has been abused may escape into sex, food, work, alcohol or other drugs, spending, gambling, high-risk sports, self-abusive behaviors (cutting, burning, etc.), criminal behavior (burglaries, theft, arson), or even violent crime. We will examine the role of abuse in the development of sex addiction a bit later. But abuse itself does not explain why someone becomes addicted. For every person who comes from an abusive childhood and becomes an addict, there are many more of similar backgrounds who never develop addiction. Another factor that often sets the stage for addiction is the presence of addiction in one or both parents.
Addiction seems to run in my family. Three of my four grandparents are alcoholics and my brother is a drug addict. Am I at greater risk of developing addiction?
Addiction is an intergenerational problem. When we study the families of addicts we often find that addiction is present in preceding generations. Although this is often the case with alcohol and other drug addictions, sex addiction may be so well hidden that an addict may not be aware of the presence of sex addiction in his parents. And when it comes to grandparents, even if compulsive sexual acting out occurred, often such behaviors become the closely held family secrets. Family histories are frequently sanitized in an attempt to preserve the illusion of an ideal family.
The most reliable risk factor for future addiction is a family history of addiction. For alcohol and other drugs, we know that the transmission of addiction is part genetic and part environmental. There is speculation that there may be a genetic component to sex addiction, but as of yet there is no scientific data to back that up. However, a variety of environmental factors seem to provide fertile ground from which sex addiction can rise.
When we hear the word “boundaries,” we may think in terms of sports where there are clear indicators on the court or field of play as to what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. Families have boundaries as well. Boundaries let us know who is responsible for various tasks, how family members interact with each other, what behaviors are acceptable, and what behaviors are not acceptable. There are three broad categories of boundaries in families: clear, rigid, and defuse.
In families with clear boundaries, children have an established bedtime as well as clearly defined rules by which they