Tag Archives: sex addiction

August 25, 2025 · 4:37 am

A psychoanalyst and sex addiction specialist spar

G: Hey there, welcome. This is Graeme Daniels, psychoanalyst and author. I am a co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction and more recently, the author of An Analyst in Training, and I am the winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Lee Jaffe prize for my paper, “Panal Treatment of an Alcoholic with Substitute Addictions”. I am here today with a guest, dr. Davide Sakmanov, host of the podcast, “the empathy coach”, plus the workbook, “do it the right way: a practical guide for behaving properly”. Davide Sakmanov, welcome to the show.

D: Thankyou for having me

G. So, Dr. Sakmanov—sorry, the doctor—is that a medical title?

D: No, it’s a sobriquet, as it were

G. A nickname? So, you’re Doctor Davide?

D: I prefer coach Davide. The doctor thing is more of a nom de guerre, if you will

G: Nom de guerre. So, this is war. And you’re not a doctor

D: Not as such

G: Or an academic?

D: Umm…define academic

G: a Ph.d, for example

D: No, not a Ph.d. Sorry, are we here to discuss my credentials?

G. Only if you don’t have any?

D: Alright, if it’s like that, then I’m an MSW, a CCPSC…

G: MSW—social work. CCPSC?

D: Certified Process Safety Professional

G. Is that a mental health credential?

D: It can be. Look, I thought we’re here to talk about my intervention model for the treatment of sex addicts and their impacted partners. You’ve written your big to-do paper on “substitute addictions” or whatever—good for you, and I read it in fact—but I’m here to talk about my model of care that emphasizes empathy. I call it the 2 Es idea—emphasis and empathy—that are the building blocks of a paradigm that has drawn countless listeners and followers…

G: Countless? I mean, if you’re referring to your podcast, it’s easy to track #s. It tells you how many people you have listening, so it’s only countless if you don’t know how to read numbers

D: Okay, thousands. Is that what you want to hear? I have thousands of listeners, and lots of readers

G: Lots?

D: Yes, lots. I’m popular. Very popular. You’re popular too, I’m sure, though I bet not AS popular as me

G: Okay, we’re popular. Maybe you’re more popular, let’s leave it at that, shall we? Let’s talk ideas

D: (relieved) Yes, thankyou. Gawd…

G: Okay, so in your model, the—lemme get this right, Recovery Empathy Couples Therapy Unified Mission– just thinking of what that spells, actually—you bring together couples who have been impacted by infidelity issues, sometimes other addiction issues (we’ll come back to what that means, maybe) to do interventions relating the traumatizing effects of cheating behavior, which includes use of online pornography, utilizing feedback from a treatment team of collaborating professionals. So, I’m curious in particular what that last part means, the “utilizing feedback” from a treatment team

D: Right, so as you probably know, old school therapy models, addiction models, recommend that the sexually misbehaving person, or perpetrator as we call him, does his personal therapy work privately while the woman does hers separately without any coordination that would make her feel safe. The thing is, as the partner, you have every right to know what he is doing and what his treatment plan consists of, and you get to weigh in as to what you believe will strengthen the relationship.

G: Well, there are a number of phrases there that bear exploration, but firstly, again, regarding “utilizing feedback” and say, the “right to know what he’s doing”: do you mean that impacted partners have a right to know, and therefore should know via feedback of a treating therapist, when a cheating behavior has occurred? Are you asking individual therapists to inform other therapists in a treatment team, and thereafter, their impacted partner clients, when a behavioral slip or relapse has occurred?

D: We can do it that way. I know of countless occasions when that has proven therapeutic both for the perpetrator of infidelity and the impacted partner. We know from our clinical experience that disclosing behavioral slips makes an impacted partner feel safer, plus it’s relieving for the other person to have that experience

G: Clinical experience. Not exactly proof, as you put it, but let’s say we agree that it can be therapeutic for an acting out person to reveal their secret behavior to a partner. But you’re suggesting, I think, that the disclosure would occur via an informant therapist, not the perpetrator, as you put it.

D. It doesn’t have to work like that. It would be best, I guess you’d say, if the perpetrator did the disclosing.

G: Under duress? Meaning, it would be “tell your partner or else we will”

D: See, I think you’re trying to make this something it’s not

G: I’m more than trying, I think I’ll succeed in making it sound like what it is. You’re saying that if a client in your program reveals to their individual therapist that they have slipped in their behavior—let’s say, looked at porn—then that individual therapist would communicate that information either directly to the impacted partner, or to that partner’s individual therapist, who would in turn relay that info to the impacted partner, yes?

D: Under the terms of an honesty agreement that we have our clients sign, then yes, that’s how that might play out. I don’t see a problem with that

G: The terms of an agreement? Is there an understood window of opportunity in which the acting out person must disclose to a partner?

D: We like 48 hours. We think that’s enough

G: Between disclosure to a therapist and thereafter to a partner, or between the onset of the behavior and disclosure to a partner?

D: Okay, well I guess the former in practical terms since the disclosure to us is when we’d remind the client of the honesty agreement

G: (upon pause) Do you find that they need reminding? Presumably, they are aware of this agreement all along, or certainly upon agreeing to it. You’d think it would influence whether they choose to share with a therapist an instance of cheating behavior, as your program defines that. Don’t you think that sets up a dynamic that contaminates the authenticity of disclosure? Why would your clients share their secrets with you if you’re going to either inform, in effect, their partners, or else guilt them into doing that?

D: I think you’re getting into the weeds here. Our method has helped untold number of couples heal after years, even decades of deceit and disloyalty

G: Which you seem to think you can dissolve with an honesty agreement and a “come to Jesus” moment in your office. I think you’d consider this matter “the weeds” because your training around confidentiality issues has been remedial

D: Remedial? Lemme tell you something, our program has gotten more positive feedback from all corners of this industry than your outdated psychoanalytic whatever…ever will

G: Again, I’m sure you’re a big hit on tik-tok

D: See, now you’re being a snob. Our program employs the golden seal of approval from leaders in the field of sex addiction: renowned experts in a condition that afflicts millions of men across the world

G: They’re experts in a condition not recognized by the AMA or APA, by the way.

D: It is recognized, meaning sexual compulsivity is recognized, by the WHO

G: Yeah, only as recently as 2017, and with a caveat within its criterion language that warns against diagnosis for moralistic reasons. You don’t merit diagnosis of sexual compulsivity disorder just because you “violated your own values”, like masturbating when you think it’s a religious sin, or because objectifying women via porn violates a feminist affectation. Also, why are men the only focus of your program? The pronouns you use imply that the perpetrators of this sexual abuse, as you think of it, are dominantly if not exclusively male

D: Not exclusively, but most are male. I think it’s harder for women, they have to face the stigma relating to their sexuality, so for them sex addiction or infidelity treatment is really shaming

G: which would be moot if the “right to know” or the “trauma” of their impacted partners were being privileged, as it is in your model. So, why wouldn’t male impacted partners be calling you in #s asking for you put their wives and girlfriends under privacy-violating cross-examination, to “hold their feet to the fire” with honesty agreements, full disclosures, polygraphs?

D: Like I said, I think it’s more complicated

G: Meaning you don’t know why you don’t attract male impacted partners

D: I think maybe they don’t want to appear weak so they don’t…who knows?

G: Sure, who knows? Women don’t want to be shamed for their sexual desires. Men don’t want to appear as victims, would rather act out and feel guilty—actually, that is something I think is true—but maybe these are side issues, “weeds” that are unworthy of attention, as far as you are concerned. Back to the main point: you think the impacted partner, likely female, has a “right to know” what the perpetrator is doing in his behavior. They have a right to know whether that perpetrator’s individual therapy is facilitating expression of appropriate guilt and awareness of the full impact of the perpetrator’s behavior upon their partner’s emotional, physical, and spiritual health

D: Absolutely!

G: And those perpetrators will gladly disclosure those slips and relapses, past and recent past, moved by your coaching about how their partners deserve to know the truth! They will be galvanized by learning the extent of their impact upon their loved ones—they will learn how they have induced hyper-arousal, high anxiety, self-blaming, in an innocent partner—and in developing this awareness, they will not only significantly reduce if not entirely halt their harmful sexual activity, they will take empathy to another level, privileging a definition of empathy as meaning the validation of an impacted partner’s feelings and perceptions, whether they are distorted or not: the “perpetrator” will eliminate argument from their repertoire of conversation; validation of their partner’s feelings and perceptions will become a near reflex. They will surrender their will to the power of God as they understand it. They will extinguish negative feelings that are denied but acted upon, and love…will prevail

D: I know you’re being sarcastic, but yes…all of that

G: Well, I doubt you understand all of that. And given your stance, plus—I will concede, that of many professional counselors, licensed and not—an astute consumer of psychotherapy might wonder why a mental health professional versus a clergyman is even necessary when it comes to infidelity treatment. A priest, or anyone for that matter, can say that an intimate partner has “a right to know” truths. Anyone can point out the common sense that secretive behaviors violate consciously made agreements about sexual exclusivity. What difference does it make that an “expert” can recite the criterion of PTSD syndrome. You want details? Vivid anecdotes to relate to? Go to CODA meetings. They existed long before you came up with what you think is your original “empathy” model.

D: Hold on. What is it you think I don’t understand?

G: Firstly, I don’t think you understand what I meant by “feelings that are denied but acted upon” because your model ignores unconscious process. I think you think that individuals can be coached to access their loving feelings, put aside what is implicit in acting out—angry feelings, underlying rage—and skip to guilt as a therapeutic tool that will heal. You think that perpetrators are NOT aware of the impacts of their behavior, hence needing education. They ARE aware to the extent that they attempted, at least, to keep their behaviors secret. To complicate matters, they are paradoxically in denial of impacts so as to protect themselves from feelings of guilt, which in turn stem from uncomfortable hostile feelings towards loved ones. It is therefore the INHIBITION of these thoughts, the failure to access AMBIVALENCE, that is THE PROBLEM. Your model, plus—I guess I’ll say, “countless” like it—emphasizes reactive love response designed to vanquish ambivalence. You think your clients or coachees can’t tolerate ambivalence, likely because you can’t tolerate ambivalence, so you preach “get over yourself” rhetoric

D: That’s not true. We talk about ambivalence. We understand ambivalence. We educate that ambivalence is normal

G: Yeah, educate, right. So, in this model of “She has a right to know” regarding slips, plus “what’s happening in the treatment”, that latter ambiguity implies that disclosure beyond the matter of perpetrating behaviors are subject to being relayed to the partner. Regarding empathy, if your client discloses a slip in empathy—let’s say, “I hated her guts yesterday”—that should be shared with the partner, or is there an agreed upon or tacit agreement that such thoughts would not be shared, and what would be the reason for not sharing? The client’s right to private thought? A fear that such thoughts would be traumatizing for the impacted partner, triggering a reactive outrage?

D: Probably more the latter. I see what you’re saying, there’s room for counselor discretion. I wouldn’t share that thought you mentioned. I think that would be re-traumatizing for the impacted partner, and plus I’d think that a defensive thought on the part of the guy

G: Probably true, though your thought about the impacted partner suggests an illustration of my earlier point: you think the impacted partner would not be able to tolerate the hostile feelings of her partner

D: She’d think he shouldn’t have those feelings, sure…

G: And you’d agree with her…

D: (Pause) yeah, I think so. Because I’d think he was being defensive. You said “probably” so maybe you disagree

G: I said probably because I wouldn’t foreclose the possibility that his anger may be legitimate, and that what’s defensive is the addictive acting out as a displacement, plus the inhibition of what may be a rightful protest

D: What rightful protest, hating his wife’s guts? How is that in any way healing?

G: Why do we have to rush to healing? Since neither of us is a doctor, can’t we look to understand the thought, which may only be an impulse, before we seek to eradicate it? So, forget informing the wife for the moment. If we did that, we’d likely get into managing or soothing her feelings, which I think interferes with the process of understanding, taking focus away from his internal problem. Besides, why not consider that the expression, “I hate her guts” is a reaction to a series of repressed thoughts, the content of which is obscured by what’s disturbing in the intense expression

D: Okay, I can see that, sort of…and I can see why we don’t have to share with an impacted partner, or encourage sharing with an impacted partner, every time this guy has an undesirable thought…

G: Right, so…

D: At the same time, I’d be concerned that by inviting more details about this rightful protest that is speculative, we’d be indulging a defensive pattern, which would take us in the wrong direction

G: That presumes a bi-linear process, plus the bias that all negative thoughts are a “slippery slope” that must be avoided. But lemme give an example: a man and his wife are in household garden together, having what at first seems like a benign disagreement about an arrangement of flowers. At first, the problem is that he had gone ahead with the flower arrangement without consulting with her. As they talk about it, the conflict escalates. He says, “what’s the problem?”. She says, “it looks fucking stupid!” and further starts cussing him out, after which he complains that she’s always abusing him or talking down to him. That scene ends with her storming off, shouting “I want a divorce” over her shoulder. Backstory is layered, the presenting problem at least 2-fold: 3 years ago, he was caught cheating on her, getting caught on film with another woman at a party—pictures and video posted online—then they went into couples counseling. He stopped the affair, acknowledged the pain he caused and listened to a lot of podcasts on that subject, has passed 3 polygraphs since, and generally lives in the proverbial doghouse. After a year of little more than mea culpas he says he started bringing up in couples therapy how she mistreats him…as in the flower arrangement instance. She admits she can cross a line and be harsh sometimes but says it’s because she’s still angry and traumatized about the betrayal of their marriage through his infidelities

D: (pause) So, what’s the issue? Doesn’t that make sense? She’s been traumatized by his betrayal, now she’s sensitive to his not talking about things with her, so she gets upset because, as you might think as an analyst, the flower thing is a substitute for the affair-seeking plus keeping it secret and ignoring her. The task is for him to acknowledge the links there, show that he understands why she’s upset, and apologize for the fact that he doesn’t share his thoughts with her while he goes about doing whatever he wants to do…

G: I agree with what you’re saying to an extent: I’ve no problem with acknowledgements, the apologies, especially for not sharing his thoughts, and I appreciate your “it actually isn’t what it is” attitude towards the seeming source of conflict, the flower arrangement. However, your position still presumes a unilateral disorder, likely grounded in, as you might put it, “old school” addiction narratives: that person has THE problem, etc. Anyway, the thing is this: he says the abusive language got worse after discovery of his affair-seeking, but the condescending attitude, her talking down to him, is long-standing, is almost as old as the relationship itself so it predates the betrayal, and to compound the problem with irony, when he brings this up either with her or with therapists—and they had at least one episode prior his acting out pattern, he claims—both his wife and therapists dismissed the subject

D: Well, I’m not sure I buy that, especially if they were in therapy before the sex addiction or just cheating behavior started. As for now, I generally think it’s a problem to muddy the waters of treatment, focusing on matters that could be just a way to excuse the acting out behavior

G: But that in itself strikes me as a splitting response—that is, a black and white way of looking at the problem. You deny the possible or maybe likely complexity of the problem because it takes focus away from a singularly defined task, and also because that background complexity appears to justify acts of escapism. No one is saying that. That’s rather what you are inferring from the speculation of an old relational dynamic for which both parties bear responsibility, even if those responsibilities are rendered asymmetrical by the betrayal of infidelity. In my “clinical experience”, a variety of problems get shelved and obscured by the specter of sexual betrayal: betrayals relating to substance use, money, parenting choices, to name some issues. Only the specter of violence supersedes sexual betrayal as a source of clinical attention. Indeed, this may be the principal reason why cheating or sexual betrayals perpetrated by women are marginalized in most models pertaining to these problems. What’s the priority? The safety of a partner discovered in her cheating behavior by an angry, or otherwise abusive male. I have no evidence of this bias per se, but maybe you can tell me: if you had a female client who had cheated on her male partner, would you insist on that honesty agreement and pressured disclosure if she said she was afraid of his temper?

D: (wearily pausing) I don’t know. Maybe you’re right in one sense about this being complicated, and maybe that’s because there isn’t a moral equivalence about these kinds of situations.

G: Wait, what do you mean by that, moral equivalence?

D: Well, basically that women have more cause to be afraid of men’s anger than the reverse

G: So, what are you saying? Does that set up a double standard with respect to honesty agreements? Do you employ “man up and get honest” interventions with male acting out partners, but then refrain from coercive rhetoric with the fewer female subjects you treat?

D: I don’t think of it as a double standard. Again, I think this is a moral equivalence issue

G: How about we call it rationalized asymmetry. There. I’ve coined a new piece of therapeutic jargon

D: Yeah, I don’t know. Like I said, I just think we’re getting into the weeds here on some of these issues. People come to me, they come to you, wanting help, practical help mostly, with what to do when they’ve done something, maybe a lot of something, that they feel bad about and they want to make a repair, express their love despite whatever other feelings they have, move on and be happy. That’s what it all about, I think, and all I can say is that I think my empathy model has helped a lot of people to find spiritual wellness, forgiveness, peace, and overall happiness. Exactly how many people, I don’t know…just…

G: Countless people. Yes, I know. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Mr. or Doctor Sakmanov

D: How about coach Dave?

G: Sure, anyway this has been an episode of Getting Real About…well, I’d say psychoanalysis, or formerly sex addiction—not sure what to call this at the moment. It isn’t quite what it is, maybe. Thanks for listening

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July 22, 2025 · 6:41 pm

Tools

I read your email earlier today and it’s been on my mind most of the afternoon–in between sessions, at least. I took some notes, wanted to retain elements as I wrote back: there was an incoming text. You immediately confessed. I was struck by what was tacit: the other woman, you’ve been caught, etc. Then the quick fallout. You leave the house. A custodial split is arranged. NO talking–par for the course, it seems. The next bit tells me where you’re at in my podcast series: you’ve thought about the Madonna/Whore split. Your wife’s the Madonna, the total saint. But you’re sexually incompatible, meaning you’re not asexual. 

Who knows what your rep is with her. Hypersexual? The dichotomizing would fit with how far apart you seem from each other. So, the psychological splitting became tangible. She wanted a divorce. You wanted to reconcile, but perhaps you didn’t know how to start the conversation. Actually, I find that most (usually men) in your situation know how to start the conversation: apologies, promises, reassurances, etc. It’s what comes next that’s the problem. It’s good that you don’t blame your wife for your acting out with a consensual partner. What’s not good is that you and your wife never resolved your differences about love and sex. For that you’re both to blame. 

That doesn’t mean the fuller conversation’s easy. It’s hard for a myriad of reasons, some of which implicate parenting rationales. Example: “Let’s not fight in front of the kids. It’ll be traumatic for them”. Great. I guess that means they’ll learn how to resolve conflict via peers, the internet, or some other magical influence. Actually, it means they’ll learn to say “I’m done with…” when they have interpersonal problems of their own, accept forgiveness when they don’t agree they’ve done anything to merit forgiveness, or offer forgiveness under similarly false pretenses; outsource their needs for love and sex, possibly abuse drugs, largely because dealing with difficult people is…well, too hard, it seems.

The sociocultural context you indicate does matter, as many of my podcast commentaries argue. I imagine you may have felt inhibited from raising the issue of sexual incompatibility, afraid you’d be rebuked for having excessive or perverse sexual needs; for objectifying women, or oppressing them with sexual entitlement; for “having only one thing on your mind”. There’s little to suggest that men in our progressively-minded society will feel in any way affirmed for feeling unwanted by their female partners. The concept of Narcissism, weaponized as it is in pop psychology circles (it’s amazing how many therapists actually know very little about theories of Narcissism), is employed to critique masculine ego and tame men’s desire. 

You ask a compelling question about how betrayed partners might reconcile. Where is the gray, you ask, in between profuse mea culpas and frozen impasses? These are the toughest of your questions. I don’t have a simple answer. I’ve worked with some betrayed (female) partners who come to recognize that the Narcissism in their marriages was shared–meaning, they’ve fell in love with and admired the strength in their male partners, their “winning” qualities. This is an important sociocultural point because pop psychologists who lament that men “don’t get in touch with their feelings (they mean vulnerability)” tend to overlook how traditional and even feminist women collude with that phenomenon via their attractions to stoical, ambitious, not observably vulnerable men. Reconciliation? Consciousness is where it starts, I’d say. After the apologies and assurances have been made, and each party has taken its share of “time-outs”, or employed other “tools” of how to manage feelings, then the task is to STOP managing feelings and instead really get into those thoughts and feelings like you’ve never done before. Question is, how bad is everyone willing to feel to get to the truth?

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February 23, 2025 · 8:30 am

Bumper sticker treatment

I’ve heard it before a thousand times. I wrote about it in a book that was published three years ago by a prominent exponent of modern psyche literature: Rowman & Littlefield, now Bloomsbury. Getting Real About Sex Addiction could have been written twenty or thirty years ago, largely because not much has changed in that time. Some who toil in the field of sex addiction think that much has changed in that time because they weren’t in the field prior to that point and think that the things they observe and talk about weren’t being noticed before they came along. Well, some things, like bumper sticker treatment, have not changed at all.

              A woman calls me up, asks if I treat sex addiction, as my web profile suggests I do. I confirm that I do, though I add that I don’t presume that condition upon meeting a prospective patient. Rather, I assess a person’s situation over time, explore the meaning of concepts like addiction, compulsion, voyeurism, monogamy, sexual freedom, etc. “Uh-huh”, says the woman. “What about integrity?” she asks, which signals that she’s either done some reading on these subjects or else had a conversation or two with a sex addiction specialist. I think this because SA specialists like to use words like integrity while claiming they aren’t judgmental and aren’t looking to impose their morality on anyone. That means they think masturbation isn’t as sinful as religious zealots think it is, that pre-marital sex is normal and healthy, and that habitual porn use might be okay as long as one isn’t lying about it to an intimate partner. Pause. That is an area of moral judgmental, they might concede: don’t lie, or keep secrets and then lie when confronted about said secrets. Actually, that’s not a moral judgement, they’ll amend. It’s merely ethical, or it’s about values, which is conveniently broad and ambiguous. Ethics is not the same thing as morals. Ethics is morality light, and it’s humanistic, vaguely feministic, as opposed to being hoarily patriarchal and otherwise over-doggish.

              Anyway, my woman caller sort of blocked out of her mind the bit about exploring meaning because she’s already determined certain meanings. She dissociated, some might offer, on the hint of uncertainty—an aspect of her trauma, perhaps. When trauma is invoked in this context it’s another way of saying that thinking has stopped when something cognitively dissonant arises. She’s already diagnosed her husband as a sex addict having checked boxes on an online questionnaire and then watched videos about narcissism, which is often tagged as a sex addiction companion. “It’s not a diagnosis”, I say pedantically, referring to sex addiction, not narcissism. It doesn’t matter. It might as well be a diagnosis as far as this caller is concerned. She thinks several other labels are diagnoses also, all because someone has attached the word disorder to a series of bad words. She says she’s done her research. That doesn’t mean scholarly, peer-reviewed professional psyche literature. She’s been listening to a podcast about betrayed partners comprised entirely of female subjects, and speaking to a sex addiction specialist who delivered a familiar chestnut of preliminary telephone consultation: “his behavior has nothing to do with you”. It’s hard to say when this greatest hit of infidelity treatment intervention was first drawn from the pop psyche toolkit. Claudia Black’s Deceived, published in 2009, featured a chapter that was headed by the phrase, and I’ve heard it quoted back to me countless times since, at least. Apologists for this brand of proto-counsel will staunchly defend the necessity of making such a pronouncement early in a treatment episode, even before it has properly begun. The rationale includes the following: the importance of reducing blame that is typically directed at impacted partners, which includes the likelihood that the sexually addictive pattern has been lied about for protracted periods, possibly years, and that the betrayed partner has been made to feel stupid or crazy for having harbored suspicions of secretive, unfaithful behavior. Beyond the compulsivity of the behavior itself, this pattern of lying, of obfuscating (SA specialists like that word too) constitutes a form of psychological abuse tantamount to an act of rape. Therefore, it is necessary to validate the long-denied suspicions and declare a new era of healing wherein all assertions by the designated sex addict are taken with a fat grain of salt.

              Just one or two…or three, four, or five things to inject here: firstly, as suggested earlier, this assessment category—sex addiction—is not exactly an exactly defined condition, let alone something that can be pronounced with ironic impulsivity. So, as an introductory intervention, the treatment-orienting, bumper sticker pronouncement—“his behavior has nothing to do with you”—is predicated on an assessment of sex addiction that has not been properly made when this pearl of support is typically delivered the first time. It is an a priori, or presumptive supposition. Were a range of unfaithful behaviors cast as hitherto unknown, in which case the full scope of the behavioral pattern would also be unknown, the behaviors might be characterized as non-addictive, maybe aberrant, and therefore imbued with relational meaning: it was a “revenge” affair; the unfaithful partner was feeling lonely because the so-called impacted partner was verbally abusive, neglectful—in other words, the unfaithful behavior was very much to do with them, as it were. As the reader might glean, or know if having read my 2-year old blog entries or a handful of my podcast episodes over the last couple of years, this narrative is largely reserved for women who present for infidelity or sex addiction treatment. Actually, back up: the presumptive narrative is such that a would-be female patient would likely not be cast as a sex addict so quickly unless they were self-identifying as such.

              This is the real reason why sex addiction treatment is dominantly aimed at men—nothing to do with “lesser resources for women in psychotherapy”, which is a BS cover story promulgated informally by sex addiction cognoscenti who either ignore that most psychotherapists are now women, or they tacitly believe that anyone who hasn’t earned one of their precious sex addiction merit badge certificates is not really qualified to indoctrinate the consumer base with their bloated assumptions and derivative theories. The theory and meta-psychology on the gender disparity is as follows: many social workers, couples therapists, psychologists, etc., hold a semi-educated view that Freudian theory remains applicable to masculine sexuality and ego while asserting that it doesn’t apply to women. That Freudian theory holds that the human mind operates in a more or less economic manner, discharging libido, seeking to achieve a state of homeostasis that controls or lessens stimulation, including excitement and restive anxiety. Humans “discharge” is the idea, ultimately seeking equilibrium. The psyche or mental apparatus, as Freud put it, experiences vicissitudes, quotas of affect, a primarily quantitative manifestation of desire and need. Many still believe heartily that this theory of mind adequately explains masculine mentality, or at least masculine sexuality, therefore male sex behavior is not relational: “he” seeks pleasure regardless of context, or emotional state, much less the qualitative state of an intimate relationship. Ergo, the phenomenon of sex addiction, including the prejudice that it exists much more in men, is simply a derivative of this roughly one-hundred year old economic model of the mind.

              See, somewhere in the mid-20th century, along came object relations theory (a subdivision of psychoanalysis), plus humanistic and feminist influences upon modern psychology, to assert that not all minds work like this, and that women’s minds certainly don’t work like this, and that we should all think more positively, more wholesomely, more relationally, about what drives the human soul, whether we think religiously/spiritually about these matters or not. So, while “boys will be boys” ideas are readily grafted onto psyche assessments and verbose theoretical pronouncements, those of girls and women are nuanced to integrate elements of social conscious/unconscious forces: societal influences, the oppressive sexist external, not so much an impinging libidinal “drive” from within. For at least fifty years, the foot soldiers of our mental health army, including myself, have been trained to think that problems besetting the feminine are borne of social forces that are inhibitive, not an internal, biological compulsion, or a biological drive supplemented by an internalized social force that privileges rather than inhibits. Fifty years! That’s a long time to consider how things have changed or should change. It’s a long time to recite bullet points, learn the jargon, the right vocabulary, answer the questions correctly on an exam, or write the correct thing in an academic paper, or post on the Psychology Today letters to the editor, or more latterly, their popular blog-spaces, sympathetic, progressive ideas about psychological phenomena.

              Phenomenology is a big word signifying a rabbit-hole topic about why things are as they are, and how we as a collective got here in this state of affairs, as Esther Perel puts it. Bumper stickers, like letters to an editor, are likewise anachronistic, if better for the near-sighted. Blogs seem passe also, buried in the internet miasma. Tik tok and podcast presenters: these are the carriers of messaging these days, not writers. And the message is a formulaic, mini-essayistic delivery, something that will fly off the tongue and serve as a validating selling point—sorry, intervention tool—for a consumer who says they need treatment in order to learn something new about themselves, something they don’t understand, something previously unconscious…ya know, something that will make them feel better (NOT!). What do you want to hear? If you’re a provider, meaning a therapist, a social worker—a sex addiction “specialist”—what are you prepared to say if something rare happens, like a man calling you up for a consultation who claims that his wife is a sex addict, and he is a betrayed, impacted partner? The chestnut phrase coined by advocates, not neutrals, will come to mind. You know how it goes: “his…wait…her? His”, you start again, stammering because your tongue is letting you down, confused. Her behavior has nothing to do with you. Would you think it? Could you say it if you did?

And do we have to lean in further to gender stereotype to find what’s truly axiomatic amid bumper sticker thinking? So, as stated, I’ve heard the catch-phrases a thousand times. I’ve pushed back with something I’ve said maybe a hundred times, and written at least once before in, ya know, that book I mentioned. It’s this: of course, the person engaging in the behavior of taking their sexuality outside of a committed relationship is solely responsible for that likely repetitive behavior. The “acting out” person needs to own that, as SA specialists say, and not blame a partner for having gained weight or becoming conservative in their sexual tastes, or whatever the trope on this part of the debate is. Incidentally, the term “acting out”, widely used now in psychotherapy, was first coined by Sigmund Freud in 1914 as part of a paper that introduced another seminal term and idea, the “compulsion to repeat”. The concept of acting out refers to action (behavior) that unconsciously replaces thought, feeling, and memory. Okay, all that’s already too long for a bumper sticker, and simplistic treatment providers who con people with catch-phrases that make them feel better are reinforcing defenses when they, in effect, say you don’t have to look at your part in this. What’s this mooted “part”? It’s part two of the axiom, the twist if you like:

Addicts, non-addicts, cheaters, co-dependents, wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, theys and thems–whatever label you’re using to describe yourself: if you’re in a committed relationship then you have and have had a responsibility to talk, listen, and do those activities properly, as in think about what someone is saying to you, as in empathize, suspend for some indeterminate period how you think, even how you see the world. In psychoanalysis, this is termed “taking back projections”–yeah, I know, another catch-phrase. Take a look at your reactions to events, notice your struggle with dichotomies of good versus bad, villain versus hero, perpetrator versus victim, instead of good and bad, the idea that heroes and villains are contained in each of us but often projected onto others. No, once again, I don’t mean you’re responsible for someone else’s affair-seeking behavior or porn use. If you read this and then think, “so, you’re saying it’s my fault”, then you’re illustrating my point about the problem of dichotomizing. I mean that you’re responsible for the many problems in a relationship that you don’t want to deal with.

Try to explore the antecedents of your trauma responses and then notice that “….has nothing to do with you” in the context of an intimate adult relationship is a profoundly wrong suggestion. You think this is blaming, trying to get you to listen, and to think about what you bring to a flawed relationship? If you’re an impacted partner, you think this is “disrespecting” or not understanding your trauma? Okay, do a little research on that topic (trauma, I mean), and I don’t mean re-reading your favorite chapter in a self-help workbook. Actually, do a fair amount of research, act as if this is worth your time. Read American Psychiatric Association criteria for PTSD and find categories pertaining to avoidance of distressing stimuli, what afflicted persons do, repeatedly, to avoid uncomfortable feelings, alternating between states of dissociation, which essentially means emotional cut-off, hyper (meaning excessive) and hypo (under-reactive) states of arousal. Do a Wikipedia search on a man named Sandor Ferenczi, who wrote about trauma, childhood sexual abuse and how that impacts people in adulthood, nearly a hundred years ago. Revitalizing Freud’s once proposed and then renounced Seduction Theory, he paved the way for generations of traumatologists by arguing that episodes of trauma are not self-contained but rather re-enactments of developmental trauma, likely spawned in childhood. You’ll find that addictive states and those of trauma are eerily analogous, at times crossing over in individuals, otherwise blended within a dyad (a couple) in which the pathologies only appear to be segregated. This is probably why afflicted people tend to find and bond with each other, feeling compelled to repeat something forgotten.

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October 3, 2023 · 6:11 pm

Scarlet Letters are really blue

That sex addiction is an excuse for licentious behavior is itself one of contemporary society’s displacement arguments. It’s also a displacement to argue that sex addiction treatment is a coded endorsement of monogamy. It is. But this argument is only half made on behalf of the religious. What progressive-leaning, anti-religion commentators won’t add is that the monogamous implications of sex addiction treatment are made on behalf of the largely monogamous women who comprise the majority of impacted partners, who find in sex addiction treatment a partly-medical, partly-psychotherapeutic premise for an overreaching critique of masculine sexuality: the too frequent demands for sex of heterosexual men; the objectifying, “performative”, “penetrative”, but not “intimate” sexual needs of misattuned, inattentive, sexually remedial men.

Why am I going here in Getting Real About Sex Addiction? Well, I might not have had I not been encouraged to explore what editors and early readers described as “intersectionality”. Of course, they meant that sex addiction treatment intersects with matters of social justice in a way that draws attention to how social groups like women are disadvantaged in treatment circles, not how they have tacitly garnered allies and are seated at the side of righteous authority, being cast as “betrayed” or “survivors”, in keeping with monogamous agreements and trauma model theories. So, I did a naughty thing in mine and Joe Farley’s book and went the other way. The reason: I didn’t want to write a load of trite BS, basically. I know about the hoary biases that society and the medical establishment have aimed at girls and women over the decades, but at the risk of being glib or seeming dismissive about that which I haven’t endured personally, that’s not the zeistgeist that is in place within the field of sex addiction treatment, nor is it likely the trend in a profession now dominated by women (numerically, at least); and by the way, that “trend” has been in place for some time now.

Sex addiction treatment, its principles or underlying assumptions, intersect with our protean sexual mores, our notions of what is objectifying treatment of human beings, for example, because many practitioners in this field, and in the wider field of psychotherapy, routinely attach their interventions to thoughts about what is happening in the culture at large, all in the name of concepts like intersectionality. There can be no doubt that in some quarters, the matter of sex addiction is attached to movements against sex slavery, or so-called gender-based violence, and that protests against such phenomena are aimed against a sex addiction treatment population that is dominantly comprised of heterosexual men. The treatment of sex addiction—the invoked theory, if you like—is girded by psychoanalytically-derived observations of obsessive sexual fantasy that casts sex partners as sex objects, treating persons as interchangeable bodies and images, or part-objects, as they are also termed.

This dovetails with a feminist critique of masculine ego primarily, hence the pathologizing of men more than women in sex addiction circles—a reactionary trend. The pathologizing of women, by male practitioners especially, is largely discredited in the current discussion of sex addiction. To assess a female patient as a sex addict is to risk being branded a slut-shaming misogynist, perpetrating an iatrogenic, traumatizing intervention, thwarting the fragile sexual freedoms of women. If a female therapist were to assess a male patient as a sex addict, she might be branded a misandrist, but this is less likely, if only because most people, including many mental health professionals don’t even know that word. Such is the bumper sticker, Twitter (or “X”)-speak vocabulary of many in our society. Meanwhile, opponents of sex addiction treatment like to pretend that sex addiction theory is a fabrication of religious zealots because it is politically correct to scapegoat religion for all of the guilt and shame that stems from our neurotic relationship to sex.

The guilt and shame that feminists might like to induce in male sex addicts, or men in general, is not called guilt and shame when such feelings emerge. Not typically. Dodging religious associations with those words, they’d call the phenomena something else—justice, probably. Only in this respect would I concede that our book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, is anti-feminist, because no less than any impacted partner of a sex addict, I do not like being gaslighted. Though not religious myself, I don’t think it’s right that religion takes so much on the chin in sex addiction treatment when social justice is the real moral lens of the field and has been for some time. Secondly, if you think that male sex addicts, or that masculine ego in general deserves a moral reckoning, I may say fair enough. But let’s stop pretending that treatment protocols, which have practitioner sex addiction specialists standing with polygraph machines nearby, full disclosure confessional exercises, all-day, or all-weekend workshops, and provisional labels of sex addiction (which is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association) plus gratuitous extras like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (which is), are privileging its subjects. Stop pretending that your nomenclature is anything other than pejorative, and that your scarlet letter agendas haven’t turned blue.

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September 5, 2023 · 5:45 am

Theory filtered through politics

With choppy rhythm plus an aversion to run-on thought, the following sentence begins a paragraph in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction (I shall blame Joe for the choppy rhythm): “Undercurrents filter down into therapists’ offices, lurking as assumptions that inflect counsel”. This teasing opinion, one of many offhand expressions in our text, signals a critique of what lies in the cuts of sex addiction treatment. Via jargon, popular or theoretical, and often derivative of older, more esoteric theory, sex addiction specialists (and others, to be fair) impart a repertoire of ideas reflecting biases, and psychological theory, like scientific data, is a tool of manipulation; a means to an end.

In this blog, I’ve made numerous allusions to psychoanalytic theory or psychodynamic technique without giving many examples of either. Partly, the reason is that theory and especially interventions are hard to represent out of context, meaning case illustrations, and case illustrations are lengthy and, I suppose, not blog-worthy, though I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. I guess I mean something similar to my use of the word “teasing”: I’m introducing a book, not delivering it in serial form. Anyway, it seems apt to give illustrations of theoretical ideas, especially ones that can be represented economically. I’ve decided as much as I begin my latest and likely final perusal of copyedits and notice a certain pause upon the concept of reaction formation. It is a pause of sustained interest, not doubt.

Reaction formation is one of several fraught concepts in the Sigmund Freud lexicon: meaning, it is controversial, but that only depends upon its application. That in turn means that reaction formation is subject to bullying; it is a kicked around idea, used to represent standard thought, establishment thought, ill-advised thought…taken for granted thought. If you’re not an avid reader of psychoanalytic literature, you won’t know the term, but you’ll know its meaning. You’ll have observed its application, even employed it yourself, on countless occasions. Basically, the concept refers to a reversal of feeling based upon a defensive position that counters an uncomfortable thought and feeling. Wait, what does that mean? Well, it means something derived from a famous line in a Shakespeare play: “the lady doth protest too much”. When you take a position of opposition to something—a position of moral offense or disgust—a psychoanalyst will suspect that your offended position conveys the opposite of your desire, as a defense against a wish that is incompatible with ego, Superego, etc.

In our text, I make reference to reaction formation numerous times. The reason, as you might imagine, is that sex addiction, porn addiction, sexual deviancy, or just plain sex, is subject to moral objection, of course. In (fact?), what incurs moral objection or disgust more than sex, or that which falls under the general heading of sex? Anything? Notice I’m adding the word disgust to the term moral objection. This cues an example I noted in the manuscript: a man prone to sexually addictive habits, including certain “perversions”, elicits disgust from his wife, which he in turn finds arousing. This is an example of a paradoxical reaction—a reaction formation—to an adverse stimuli: to counter the unpleasant with a pleasure reaction, thus defending against anxiety and revulsion. More commonly, we tend to understand reaction formation as something like the wife’s reaction: a reaction of moral disgust to the sexual demands of her husband. Moral indignation: men only want one thing, etc.

What we suspect of her isn’t nice. It isn’t politically correct, to cue the secondary purpose of this entry: to indicate the selective application of this commonly known phenomenon with an obscure name. In the current zeitgeist, it is likely deemed sexist to interpret arousal from revulsion…at least as it pertains to what heterosexual men perceive in women. And don’t get me wrong. It is politically incorrect for some sensible reasons. Perceiving arousal within rejection has rationalized innumerous episodes of sexual harassment and assault, no doubt. Therefore, to rebuke an interpretation of reaction formation within a sexual rejection is to prevent danger. But that is about censoring thought due to fear of its behavioral corollary—not so much to cement a counter-truth that would govern the thought itself.

When reaction formations are deemed less dangerous, or else when they seem to represent worthy retributions, they are given a pass. In the realm of sex, we might therefore consider the issue of homosexuality. Within the history of psychoanalysis, and likely beyond amid a dominant heteronormative culture, homosexuality has been deemed a reaction formation, or again, as something like it. Freud offered that a same-sex sexual orientation results from a failure to properly identify with the opposite-sex parent; in the case of boys (Freud’s focus), it represents an excessive identification with a mother such that a boy would mirror her sexuality and thus aim libidinal interest at men. Mainstream society more or less agreed with this idea and at some point (possibly before Freud, for all I know) coined a derisive shorthand for this phenomenon: “mama’s boy”.  To be gay is to fail at acquiring a Superego, which in a dominant heteronormative culture means adopting the conscience and moral repertoire of the traditionalist, largely patriarchal system.

However, Superegos change because culture changes, and in the 21st century, within the largely diversified as well as secularized world of psychotherapy, Freud is often chastised for his sexism while his anti-religious positions are for the most part forgotten or ignored. As for homosexuality and the perception of that trait, another kind of reversal has taken effect, possibly a reaction formation of another kind. So, think of the following example: a man exhibits moral objection, even disgust, at the advances of another man towards him, and issues a rebuke to the offending figure. A commonly held opinion is to cast the man exhibiting the disgust as a homophobe. He is exhibiting a reaction formation: a reversal of idea to counter feelings within himself about which he is uncomfortable. He does not have a phobia in a medicalized sense (he doesn’t have panic attacks, necessarily), so the use of the term phobe or phobic is figurative and offhand. However, the assignment of reversed affect is in earnest.

And so, these examples illustrate the infiltration of social mores into psychological theory. Indeed, they illustrate how theory is subordinate to culture and historical change, whether that change is institutionally imposed, or else populist. Science has its data, its facts, and sometimes those facts define phenomena. In psychology, data is thin and is often spun to designate truth. Instead, it defines a surface layer of truth while an interior truth is left to speculation, theory, interpretation and bias. Speculation and theory represent what we want them to represent, only the “we” is variable. Some think the we is more inclusive than it once was. Probably. Or maybe. More substitutive, I’d suggest.

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August 1, 2023 · 7:38 am

Glancing Views of Peripheral Matter

Within psychoanalysis, much has been written about perversion. Ever since Freud’s 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we’ve wondered about child sexuality, and while inclined to attribute sexualization to childhood trauma, we (meaning, psychoanalytic thinkers) still consider that unconscious oedipal and pre-oedipal fantasy remains significant in psychosexual development. Addiction, especially sex addiction, has taken a back seat to perversion in analytic literature, with few even bothering to address the topic of addiction, thinking it derivative, perhaps, of the Freudian lexicon. They may be right. Meanwhile, practitioners and theorists outside of the psychoanalytic tradition dominate the sub-field of sex addiction, which more or less compelled a distracting polemic in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, published in 2022. In that milieu, which markets to a consumer (patient) base that generally seeks practical, short-term treatment options and is thinly aware of deepening analytic approaches, professionals like me work to tear away from bad objects that have hijacked standards of concept and intervention, acting upon zeitgeist notions of what men owe women, especially.

This is why some of the suggestions that inflect our non-fiction, fitting in between the lines of other narratives, offering readers a glancing view of peripheral matters, might disorient yet give pause—have them consider a reversal. There are comments here and there, footnotes that add density to offhand assertions, especially those that pertain to childhood sexual abuse, perversion—ya know, the mooted etiology of men’s preoccupation with porn, prostitution, or deviant sex. I allude to the intimate relationship between a mother and child, of a mother’s seductiveness, her influence upon psychosexual development. My comments are provocative, if hardly original. Readers looking for attachment history accounts of abusive or neglectful fathers or mothers may nod in recognition of some familiar verbiage, but they may recoil as they read theories that go way beyond what standard attachment theory proponents offer. Take Graeme Taylor’s 2019 article, “Creativity and Perversion: waiting for the muse”: published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, this paper offers a case illustration of an adult male who presented with depression plus a fetish for giant women, which began as a foot fetish when he was three years old. The man spent time drawing pictures of giant women, which represented a perversion (a “distortion”) of a once observed talent. The patient’s mother had once idealized her son’s artful abilities, but pushed him in his adolescent years in ways that met her narcissistic needs. Pressured to accommodate her, the patient lost his sense of identity, ceasing to draw creatively and pursuing an unrewarding career in book-keeping, seemingly in denial of himself. He disavowed his gift and his sexuality, eschewing sublimation while he acted out a dread of annihilation, turning it into pleasure.

Though he kept drawing, the patient’s depiction of nude or giant women was a part-rebellion, as his mother had been prudish, disapproving of nudes and not allowing him to watch films with scenes of nudity or violence. Jealous mother, we might think. Meanwhile, in his adult life, she was intrusive with her own physicality, kissing him on the lips whenever they met. Further, the patient’s father was a passive man, seemingly unable to take a firm stand with other people, including the patient’s mother. Guilty that he was not utilizing his talent to its fullest extent, the patient was nonetheless stifled, dreading separation from his mother but acting subversively with respect to her wishes for him, the guilt countering the aggression he felt. The giant woman fantasy was a source of comfort for the man, allowing him to deny unacceptable feelings of hate for his mother; indeed, to transform such feelings into sexual excitement. A reversal.

In Getting Real, I reference this kind of reversal, backgrounded as glancing illustrations of emotionally (perhaps physically) incestuous mothers who represent bad internal objects while good internal objects (passive or absent fathers) are missing. In Taylor’s essay, he draws from numerous sources to describe the role of a muse: a traditionally female figure that represents either an equal or an internal good object that facilitates creativity. He disagrees with analysts who believe that the focus of treatment (of perversions) might focus upon the sexual and generally physical inadequacies of the subject. In this Adlerian-sounding formulation, the subject counters feelings of “being small” (and therefore not gratifying the seductive mother) with fantasies of largesse. From the analytic perspective, creativity requires a degree of aggression, which in turn requires an identification with a potent object, or else an introjection of a good-enough mother, as conceptualized by Winnicott. A traumatizing, not-good-enough mother fails to contain her young child’s terror and emotional pain, and the child’s image of her becomes fused with the mother’s rage, plus the oral and anal-sadistic impulses that the child projects onto her. The Medusa-like figure fosters annihilation anxieties which generate helplessness, plus an ongoing struggle to sublimate, but it does not inhibit the split-off rage via acting out behaviors.

Here, the term “acting out behaviors”, so common in sex addiction treatment circles and therefore in Getting Real, replaces the term perversion, more commonly employed by analytic writers, even though the term acting out connotes re-enactment. The terms acting out and perversion are more or less synonymous as they pertain to dynamics that subjects experience with their objects. However, as I wrote previously in “The biggest elephants slip out of sight”, the tendency in SA treatment, besides avoiding terms that suggest “judgement” (as if we couldn’t simply define perversion as distortion) is to assign acting out behaviors to a root-cause of castrating fathers rather than powerful, abusive mothers. More specifically, the tendency is to follow classical psychoanalysis in an unthinking way: blame the abusive (hitting, yelling) father, for that thinking retains the masculine identity of abuse, which is in turn ego-syntonic with populist thought. The shift in analytic thinking, which may not be a shift but rather simply a contextual alternative for flexible thinkers, reflects a Kleinian versus Freudian conception of childhood development wherein the nexus of development is the breast, not the phallus.

In one respect, I envy the likes of Graeme Taylor, or at least that’s what I felt reading his essay. See, as I read his analytic formulation of a fetish-obsessed man, I wondered about the backgrounded figures, like the impacted spouse of his possibly addictive pattern—the shadow consumers, as I have less flatteringly dubbed them. Regarding Taylor, I think, how do you do it? I mean, do you live in a psychoanalytic vacuum, cut off from pop psychology, the pull of the sex addiction zeitgeist? All this stuff about annihilating objects, oral and anal sadistic impulses, and not once do you mention the m word: misogyny. Remarkable. You’re in a different world, mate, assuming you’re not catching flak from circular arguments. See, if you cast a husband as Frankenstein to his wife, then you’re describing misogyny. You cast a wife as Medusa, then you’re describing misogyny. Get it? Okay, maybe Frankenstein is a more sympathetic character, but my point is that demonizing is perceived differentially. The men in my therapy groups, versus those who choose or whom I invite into analysis, live in a world of social justice, of love languages, mindfulness training workshops, not sweating small stuff and working the steps. Upon hearing the Oedipal theory, some would subscribe to the castrating father story (though they’d invariably refer to “abuse”, not castration), as the Kleinian theory is more emasculating. It says that men who suffer from perversions feel dominated by women, and some (though not many) in a group of men would admit to that. They are also less likely to report drawing giant women and masturbating afterwards.

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July 24, 2022 · 4:34 pm

Female Sex Addicts: the protected species

“In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put their faces there. Return to mother, Keith. But I don’t agree. I don’t think men want to put their faces there.”

“Let me tell you what women want. They all want to be in it. Whatever it is. Among themselves they all want to be bigger-breasted, browner, better in bed—all that. But they want a piece of everything. They want in. They all want to be in it. They all want to be the bitch in the book.”

                                                                 —from London Fields, by Martin Amis

So we come to the topic of female sex addicts and the social/political undercurrents that shape the treatment of them. Nowhere in the realm of sex addiction treatment is the specter of gender bias more apparent than in this supposedly lesser studied area. As we might say in our book (and we don’t typically, to avoid cheesiness), let’s get real about something: the average therapist in this country, and certainly in California, is not a patriarchy-imposing old white male with a bow tie dispensing turgid interpretations with an air of aloofness. It (or, excuse me, she) is a white female, educated at varying points over the last 50 years, who talks a lot about “systems”, aims words like boundaries, empowerment at women especially, which is code for go for that position on that soccer team, go for that job or promotion, make sure you’re making as much money as men, and only have sex when you really want to. With male patients that tactical stance shifts. With men the tendentious terms are vulnerability, intimacy, comprising a code that says go home, help with the domestic chores, cook a meal or two, pick up that daughter from soccer practice, and with respect to sex, “hey, have you thought about what she thinks is sexy?”

See, the problem mainstream society has with Freud is not just that he told women they have penis envy, or that men are superior to women (actually, he thought the reverse in some ways), or that he told some women that their sexual victimizations were all in their heads, reflecting their desirous fantasies, not the revulsion contained in their symptoms (we only know that because he copped to this, in a famous case called Dora). It’s that he and his followers continued to follow Superego guidelines which instruct boys to identify with fathers, separate from mothers, and more or less adapt to and follow a traditionalist path versus the noble trail of social revolution. Therefore, latter day progressives, if they are inclined towards psychoanalysis or the exploration of the unconscious, tend to prefer the likes of Jung or Winnicott, or modern inter-subjectivists who instruct men to fem up, support the levelling of fields, do the equality thing, which means surrendering to inequality in some contexts, which is what the field leveling alludes to. Well, as mine and Joe Farley’s book and this blog often imply, it’s problematic if understandable to treat individuals not as individuals but rather as group representatives. Our book is more about helping individuals, not systems, which paradoxically meant devoting considerable print to how sex addiction treatment programs subtly background individuals within a systemic framework. The stories of individuals are richer, if diluted by generalities, the intrusions of groupthink. As for helping, as I consider that task in itself, our book isn’t necessarily “helpful” in the conventional sense of healing anyone or anything, much less a non-leveled system, with anything except thought. As much as anything, we just wanna say how things are.

Years before writing Getting Real About Sex Addiction, I’d talk with female therapists who either specialized in sex addiction or else worked with individuals and couples whose lives were impacted by this much-debated, is-this-a-thing condition. If a patient in question was a partner of an identified sex addict, they’d be called an impacted partner, or sometimes a betrayed partner; once they were called co-addicts—not so much anymore. Female sex addicts were and are another breed of client, lesser spotted in treatment circles, or lesser identified as such, anyway. Called Love addicts, maybe, which sounds nicer: you love, not so much lust. As for their partners, they’d be called…well, I’m not sure what they’d be called, actually, especially if they are male. Angry, unforgiving, abusive or potentially abusive men, if the decrees of my female colleagues were to be accepted—not “betrayed” partners. See, female sex addiction is a relatively rare bird. Not much has been written on the subject. Supposedly not much research has been done, and our text only references one book that is entirely devoted to it: Marnie Ferree’s edited 2013 volume, Making Advances: a comprehensive guide for treating female sex and love addicts. Therefore, despite the widespread understanding that sex addiction is a “pathologizing” label, the paucity of study about female sex addicts is cast as systemic neglect of women. As a system we are denying help borne of stigmatizing labels. Reminds me of the reductio ad absurdum from Dr. Strangelove: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”

Humor. My deflection, my coping with absurdity, revealing yet also distancing, because humor reveals what is out of synch—that I am out of synch with the times. Like Italian cinema of the early sixties (yeah, I know—not exactly trending), I leave the surfaces of earnest realism (*my bicycle has been stolen!), and spend time with interior lives, the contemplation of what’s happening on the inside. Humor draws attention to the contradictions, presenting a surprise, which shames, embarrasses, causes us to cover our mouths, our eyes. We laugh. We laugh it off. I have tried to laugh off contradiction and absurdity, being out of synch with the times, the zeitgeist that psychotherapists like to think they’re in front of. Stigma. That’s the reason women don’t enter therapy for the treatment of sex addiction. That’s an opinion I’ve heard numerous times from my fellow therapists—women mostly. The likelihood that most SAs enter treatment under duress having been “discovered” (thus rendering the prospect of “choosing treatment” moot) is ignored by the former argument. Anyway, the argument persists: to identify as a female sex addict is to risk hearing epithets like “slut” or “nymphomaniac”. From whom would they hear this in sex addiction treatment? Scores of slut-shaming, patriarchy-imposing male therapists who dominate our field in 2022 while feminist-leaning women struggle to achieve a foothold in the profession? Hmm…regardless, I’m sure men have it way easier: they only have to put up with terms like “pig”, “dog”, “pervert”, “gender violence perpetrator” or “asshole” from their relatively forgiving, not-as-angry, traumatized and sympathetic partners, and maybe the labels sex addict and narcissistic personality disorder from therapists who have so worked through their countertransference issues and wouldn’t dream of using clinical language to disguise ad hominem attacks.

Sarcasm. Yes I know. Very declasse of me. Anyway, back to the narratives: female sex addicts are continuously neglected by a pathologizing sex addiction treatment industry, and—let’s not forget—also by impacted male partners who somehow neglect to employ that mythical plurality of patriarchy-imposing male clinicians. Or, unlike girlfriends and wives, they simply overlook the option of mandating their female partners into treatment with relational ultimatums, or polygraph exams or uber-dignified “full disclosure” exercises to elicit honesty, hold accountable the assh—sorry, the empathy-deserving afflicted. When will women be granted the kind of celebratory, loving attention that Tiger Woods publicly received, or that Anthony Weiner once enjoyed to the benefit of his political career, or that jettisoned Pee Wee Herman into a career strato…wait, what happened to him?

Okay, stop it now

The men who take part in my therapy groups have gotten the updated memos. They’ve been told they are privileged so their sexually addictive behaviors will be excused by a society that simultaneously deems their behavior objectifying and indecent, unlike female sex addiction which is more relational, part of a misguided yet somehow less abusive repertoire of self-discovery. Well, they’re not paying for it, you see. Notwithstanding virtue-signaling terms like “self-discovery”, which attaches so-called problem behaviors to the cause of sexual freedom, or capitalist hypocrisy (some things we shouldn’t pay for. Really? I can think of worse things than sex that we contentedly pay for, regularly), or the thin tissue of horseshit that our profession pathologizes female sexuality more than it does that of men, those who proclaim that sex addiction is an excuse think that what constitutes an “excuse” is any response to sexually deviant or acting out behavior that is anything less than punitive action—ostracism, incarceration, castration, etc.—and is tantamount to an unjust act of clemency towards those who act with exploitative and objectifying intent, especially towards women. Given how disproportionately the term sex addiction is aimed at men versus women, it’s transparent that the concept of sex addiction lends women a 21st century narrative via which they can derogate male sexuality: in particular, male partners whose frequency of desire outstrips their own, or whose non-monogamist thinking, at least, may be religiously or irreligiously impugned.  

Which prompts a return to female sex addicts, whom we still neglect with our helpful-if-pathologizing sex addict labels, even in an essay that was meant to be about them: in Making Advances, the authors argue, “women are different than men. Their brains are different, socialization is different”. Further, they assert that women do best when a therapist is sensitive to their attachment histories, injuries and attachment needs. Now, do they mean to imply that men’s needs are not governed by trauma and attachment needs, or less so? Perhaps not, but given that these recommendations were delivered in the same passage as the “women are different” platitudes, one would think an inference along those lines could be made. Imagine if books, pundits, podcast-pontificators started calling out misandry the way they call out the misogyny of male sex addicts. Imagine if they knew the word misandry. Imagine if they started calling what female sex addicts do hate, not trauma; misandry instead of the tendentiously circular “internalized misogyny”; “toxic femininity” instead of sexual empowerment; sex addiction instead of its ennobling synonym, love addiction. Would their treatment still be condemned as “slut-shaming”? Recently, I’ve been hearing of men and women leaving marriages, seeking divorce because a partner won’t accept transition to a polyamorous lifestyle. Is that not a betrayal of a contract? is it a form of sexual entitlement, of “gender-based violence”? I’d bet that a woman leaving a marriage under that pretext is hearing from a progressively-minded therapist, someone who otherwise espouses betrayal trauma something like, “well, you’re exploring different sides of yourself for the first time”—said with airs of sympathy.   

Referring to the mythos of the ages, I refer in mine and Joe’s book to the legends of Uranus and Orpheus to represent the images that men hold in feminist society as rapists, seducers, opportunists…gazers. Elsewhere, I expound upon the Madonna-Whore complex, a mythopoeic term coined by Freud to denote the dichotomizing (splitting) of women by men into irreconcilable images: the ideal of the nurturing, wholesome woman versus the demeaned, sexualized “whore”, reflecting a struggle to overcome unconscious, Oedipal taboos against that which stirs sexual feelings towards anything resembling the maternal. In deference to the modern zeitgeist, I could have pointed to the Minotaur, the half-man, half Taurus who rapes and cannibalizes a hapless female virgin in The Labyrinth—the sculpted image of which caused a stir when presented by modern artist Damien Hirst. What a fuss, but also what a capturing of man’s present-day image. This conjuring precedes the man, not the woman who enters sex addiction treatment in contemporary culture, for there is little in trending or mythopoeic thought that draws attention to the ways women dichotomize men. What? You don’t even know what I’m talking about? Well, does the term Saint-Brute mean anything to you? Don’t you love a man in uniform, the guy with the snarl and the six-pack abs, and not so much that “nice guy” whom you later (like, when it’s time to “settle down”) declare is sexy because of his “acts of service”? The guy who is the “right” choice even though he’s a bit dull for you? Getting warmer? Anyway, that’s sidelined, cryptic thought, and things will remain this way until unctuous yet well-positioned thought-shapers decide that fields have been sufficiently leveled, human beings can go back to being individuals instead of group representatives, and gender commentary in our media and academic circles achieves a state of genuine parity.

             So, what am I saying of my female colleagues, most of whom I don’t know closely, with respect to how they treat male versus female sex addicts? And have I truly examined my own biases when I treat men versus women? I’ll certainly admit that more men come to me with the term sex addict poised upon their lips, at least in part because the term has been directed at them. Women? Not so much. They utter the term nervously, querulously, as if performing a reconnaissance of themselves, the concept, of me as a would-be listener, and possible judge. They’ve talked to women before, you see, and they’ve felt something odd: a mix of pious adherence to the zeitgeist values of the day—that you go, girl ethos that would protect women from slut-shaming society, blended with a sense of a familiar disdain. The modern ethos can’t quite block it out, it seems, and the women I talk to still perceive it, still feel the sting of the old Superego within the post-modern “be accountable” verbiage. Me, I’ll reference the buzz words, the subscriptive jargon, but usually with an air of otherness—I’ll observe it, detach myself from advocacy, and remain credulous of something undiscovered. I’ll ask the same questions of women that I’ll ask of men. I won’t point fingers with moralistic intent, figuratively or not. I’ll ask what is the impact upon significant others rather than instruct, or educate. I’ll ask patients to think, not to substitute my thinking for an absence of it. But I won’t collude with reversed, neo-double standards that my profession pretends don’t exist**. If you’re a first-time reader of this blog, you may not know what I’m getting at. Or maybe you will. Think of it this way: it’s 2022, not 1989. Take a look around, have a listen. Note the jargon that prevails in the Psychology Today articles, the latest books by Rebecca Solnit or Terrance Real; what the bumper stickers say; what tweets get re-tweeted versus ignored or excoriated.   

*an allusion to Vitorio De Sica’s 1948 film, The Bicycle Thief

**Ask an average SA specialist why fewer women than men are assessed and treated as sex addicts and they’ll likely say that there are fewer resources for women than men for the treatment of SA: this is BS in my opinion as it ignores the fact that 70% of licensed psychotherapists are women; or else it implies that practitioners must have the relatively slight Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) credential (a referral base which may be lesser comprised of women) in order to treat SA. I think the plurality of women in the field of psychotherapy are more than capable, qualified (and certainly willing) to speak to women about their sexual behavior, whether it’s addictive or not, a problem behavior or not. BTW: SA specialists might also imply that SA is primarily a men’s issue, hence the disparity in care, though this sets up yet another circular argument within this field.

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May 21, 2022 · 3:45 pm

Freud’s Bar

Okay, not quite. Freud’s Bar is a forum, formerly live, more recently on zoom, sponsored by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, that brings together members of that body to present and discuss matters relating to contemporary psychoanalysis. This video is a near replicate of a zoom video recorded on 4/28/2022 and subsequently made available for SFCP members but not otherwise made available because of the institute’s policies. Sorry. So, this is an encore, sans the rapturous applause of a 40-deep audience, one or two of which asked questions at the end. The reader may wonder if my oft-indicated co-author, Joe Farley, made an appearance at this event. The answer is yes. Joe appeared, looking fresh and jovial, dressed in a black robe, looking a bit like a Jedi knight, to deliver a superlative take on his case illustration of Dan and Vickie, which he wrote for our book Getting Real About Sex Addiction, which we talked about in the presentation. Sadly, Joe does not feature in this low-tech/budget re-make, but do not despair. Soon we may be podcasting or youtubing our thoughts together, and Joe’s Yeti-like elusiveness will come to an end. In the meantime, give this a listen, perhaps make a mental note or two. Thanks

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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May 14, 2022 · 7:10 pm

The sex addiction excuse: the main points

Okay, I’ll make this entry relatively short lest ideas get lost in the mix, which is naturally a problem when issues are complex, as sex addiction is. There are many sides or aspects to the “is sex addiction an excuse” question, some of which I’ve referenced in other blogs so I’ll not repeat myself here. But so far the “excuse” question has not been the focal point of any particular essay so I’ve inadvertently buried the lede on this matter. Not any longer. Today I’ll express the point that gets some print in our book, even center stage in a later chapter that is about impacted partners. The book? Yes, you know, the one you’d know about if you had read any of the other essays on this blog. There’s only just over three hundred of them, after all. Take your time. What? Just write it again so you don’t have to read all of that. Well, you can get the title on any other entry of the last six months pretty much, but on the question at hand, here’s the deal as our current president would say: the sex addiction field is divided; that is split between forces that treat or advocate for sex addicts and those who more or less do the same for impacted or betrayed partners of sex addicts. I’m somewhere in the middle, having not gone to graduate school in order to change the world—meaning, I don’t consider myself an activist because my psychoanalytic stance, contrary to my writing, is not polemical in nature, though I do hold opinions activists tend to not like so they’d stick me in camps opposite to theirs anyway.

Here’s an example: I think that the “excuse” argument/position serves the defenses of both addicts and impacted partners, though because the excuse narrative is generally deemed a protection of the sex addict figure, my positing of an analogous excuse for partners will more likely annoy them as well as their activists. See, once again, the most strident among them think that sex addiction treatment is meant to be a unilateral challenge to the behaviors, attitudes, and underlying pathology of the addict, coupled with a dominantly supportive (meaning sympathetic) hand-holding exercise for the impacted-partner. This fosters splitting, a term that means something to psychoanalytic thinkers and less so to the public at large, much of which practices splitting on a daily basis. What is splitting? It’s binary thinking. It’s good/bad, perpetrator/victim; it is simplicity. It’s popular with those who covet simplicity because they haven’t the bandwidth for thinking when they are stressed. And they are frequently stressed so that creates a circular problem. Anyway, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, the first narrative is well known, and often true I might add: a person who calls himself an addict may do so to elicit sympathy, clemency from rightful consequences of their deceitful, disloyal behaviors (Judgy? No, I think that’s fair). Again, I think this “excuse” profile is a correct call out, but only for those who truly are dodging consequences, whether they are legalistic or not, and only pretending to take seriously their problems.

Now, to that other and much lesser spotted employment of the sex addiction “excuse”: How is sex addiction an excuse for an impacted partner of a sex addict? Well, firstly, consider and compare treatment feedback that addresses affair-seeking behavior versus sexually addictive behavior. Especially when the affair seeker is female, you would hear of a space yielded for a conflict resolution that recognizes a mutuality of relationship disorder; for a therapeutic process to touch upon relational issues, which by implication, both partners are equally responsible for. For evidence of this, read authors like Esther Perel or Alicia Walker who, in the shadow of a sex addiction field that aims treatment at men, assert ironies like “women are judged more harshly for their sexuality”. When the context is infidelity instead of addiction, one hears the so-called wayward partner saying things like, “I was lonely” or “I wasn’t getting my needs met”, and don’t be surprised if such positions appear legitimized by the neutral or activist authority that is the mental health intermediary. But if the affair-seeking is cast as a feature of sex addiction then all bets are off and the question of mutuality dissolves. Then responsibility falls squarely upon the addict while the impacted partner hears admonishments like, “his behavior is not about you”. This is why the label of sex addiction might (emphasis on “might”) be attractive to impacted partners, not just the would-be targets (sorry—subjects) of clinical intervention. What? You’re telling me that betrayed figures might choose a concept the ethos of which absolves them of any mooted “part” in the development of a problem? And lastly, might this potential secondary gain be one of the reasons why sex addiction has for many bumped the concept of infidelity to the curb as a condition of clinical concern?

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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April 30, 2022 · 5:26 pm

Isolation: treatment of an impacted partner

What about the spouse or partner of a so-called sex addict? Well, what about them, said sex addiction treatment programs for many years. That’s the narrative of advocates for impacted or betrayed partners—that their clients have been ignored by sex addiction specialists who privilege attention to the acting out party, focusing upon their needs while impacted others are told to back off, not intrude upon the afflicted party’s “recovery”. Well, this is a complicated issue so the pros and cons of partner isolation, or “backing off”, as I put it, bear exploration. Firstly, as someone who has worked privately, as in individually, and as part of a collaborative team for over twenty years, I’ll admit that I have supported the segregation of a partner’s program from that of an acting out figure on many occasions. The reason: there’s too much of a rush to “do something” when you treat sex addiction with a directly systemic approach from the outset of a treatment episode. Now, a possible point of confusion: problems relating to sex addiction may be systemic—meaning, that sexually acting out behavior aside, a couple shares responsibility for relational problems.

But the problem is that since impacted partners have been integrated into sex addiction treatment as part of a “systemic” approach, the field has more recently adopted a perpetrator/victim model that addresses angry women (mostly), promising them “accountability” (as often as not a euphemism for punishment, used to disguise aggression and therefore lessen guilt), and enabling splitting defenses that lead to binary conceptions, scapegoating sexually acting out figures while their partners are given a pass on most relational conflicts because they are “betrayed”. In this model most impacted partners are treated as victimized figures, repeatedly lied to or otherwise emotionally and perhaps physically abused—basically not responsible for most if not all problems between the couple. Now, there may be some who will retort that this take is unfair; that the model in fact expresses that perpetrator/victim roles are “fluid”, implying that impacted partners become abusive and traumatizing themselves. Yes. In plain speak, this means that impacted/betrayed partners exact revenge, feel righteous when they apply “boundaries” post-discovery of sexual acting out, but don’t generally, in my opinion, accept that mutuality contributes to a pattern of acting out. That violates the “his behavior is not about you” ethos, which is then generalized, so any abuse between the sexually acting out figure and the impacted partner is presumed to be unilateral. Interestingly, this tacit heurism doesn’t apply if the acting out figure is female in a heterosexual context. Only in that scenario will you hear sex addiction or betrayal trauma specialists speculate that the impacted partner (if male) is as much the perennially “abusive” figure in the relationship, if not more so. This is probably due to what I have dubbed a feminist tautology: feminine victimization is a redundancy; unless proven otherwise, it is treated as a given—one of the tacit rules within the intersectionality ethic.

If you’re an impacted partner (especially a female one) reading this you likely won’t like the ironic tone of what I just wrote, but the non-ironic, problematic thing is this: I’ve sat with a lot of couples over a lot years (in other words, not just people like you, Heather) and—quite simply—I’ve observed or else heard about the above-described narrative many more times than I care to enumerate. Regardless, this opinion will likely be the most controversial aspect of Getting Real About Sex Addiction because it flies in the face of current political correctness. The treatment of addiction intersects with social mores, but in our progressive zeitgeist only social underdogs get to be cast as scapegoats, not heterosexual men. This is why sex addiction treatment, which is primarily aimed at heterosexual men, more recently eschews the paradigms of codependency or systemic roles like “scapegoat”, which imply that addicted individuals carry the pathology of a system and are therefore not exclusively responsible for relational disputes. Now, to complicate matters, progressive SA specialists will argue that the opposite has been long-true: that the field’s bias has actually been to employ the codependency and scapegoat concepts so as to dilute responsibility and cast unfair responsibility on impacted and betrayed partners. If this was, say, 1989, I’d say they were probably correct, but my sense is that biases have been tilted in favor of impacted partners for some time now, likely because women now represent a majority of practitioners within the field of mental health care.

Anyway, Getting Real actually begins with an exchange between myself and an agitated partner of an identified sex addict. In that illustration, I observe the frantic efforts of the angry, scared discoverer of an unacceptable pattern of behavior. Amid demands for decisive and implicitly sooner rather than later change, I outline an approach that will point her in the direction of support groups, her own self-exploration, with lesser emphasis upon what she’d prefer: an auxiliary role in the oversight of her wayward husband. In a later chapter, I devote many pages to this woman, who had attended a partners’ support group but soon dropped out, dissatisfied; she then sought a “full disclosure” in couples therapy via a sex addiction specialist (CSAT), but found that dissatisfying also, her husband merely compliant, not sufficiently earnest or candid within that exercise’s largely structured protocols. For a year she languished alone, not leaving her marriage in a practical or physical sense, but nonetheless feeling more isolated than she ever had before. In her efforts to get closer to her husband, even rebuild the shaky foundation of their twenty-year old bond, she’d tried everything she could think of—everything except looking at her anger. That she did in individual psychoanalytic therapy, or so I chronicle in the book. It played out throughout our relationship, from the tense, testy consultation we’d once had over a phone, to a later, intensive episode in which her frustration emerged in the transference of our sessions*. We met twice a week at first, then three times per week at the height of our arrangement. I know. If you don’t know much about psychoanalytic treatments then you’ll likely think that excessive, or you might not know what transference is. Think of it this way: if you want to get to know yourself with the help of a professional, it’s best they see you as often as possible, for as long as possible. You see, that way a person’s real self has less chance to hide. It simply increases the pressure to do what we call the work.

             This woman—Anne is her pseudonym—thought that the work of therapy would be “supportive”:  she supposed, largely from her prior experiences in therapy that she’d be validated in her complaints about her husband; that she’d be encouraged towards various ways to “self-care”, accompanied by the half-presumption that she didn’t do this very well. She’d be introduced to legitimate if weaponized rhetoric: terms like “perpetrator”, “victim”, “survivor”, “narcissist”, and of course “addict” were all invoked by group peers, her former providers, mostly in reference to her husband. Headlining the psychoeducation were terms like “betrayal” and “trauma”—again, legitimate constructs but often employed in a manner that externalizes problems and circumscribes meaning, blunting efforts at self-exploration. Why look at yourself if someone else is really the problem? And please, I’ve heard the expressions that feign responsibility, from the offhand, generalized, “I know I’m not perfect”, to the backhanded self-blame of “I didn’t want to believe he was an addict” or the quasi, glib self-exploration of “why am I so attracted to abusive men? I know. I know…I have low self-esteem”. At first, Anne did indeed feel validated and supported by the treatment aimed at her. But soon enough she felt patronized, and was secretly aware that the story of her marriage wasn’t as simple as some were reflecting back to her. In her meetings with me, I validated one thing: her feelings of betrayal specifically relating to the acting out of her husband. Besides that, I offered precious little of what she ultimately found precious and unconvincing. That didn’t mean she would declare herself singly at fault for a broken marriage; she wouldn’t victim-blame or otherwise split so explicitly in her thinking.

             In part due to the frequency of our meetings, she couldn’t hide the angry side of herself, even though she tried, by masking her frustration in subtle gestures of devaluation, and later—upon my interpretations of these moments—by overt expressions of complaint; her paradoxical need for an understanding beneath attempts to push me away. Part of her frustration in life was sexual. Like many impacted or betrayed partners, she hadn’t wanted a cessation or diminishing of her sex life, the semi-inevitable result of having discovered her partner’s cheating and porn-binging. Unlike some who invert the “excuse” phenomenon so often assigned to self-identified sex addicts, she wasn’t citing the sex addiction discovery as a pretext for refusing sex when loss of sexual interest was an underlying truism**. Nor was she a hypocritical monogamist, claiming betrayal while holding post-modern values that cast skepticism on the exclusivist, women-subordinating institution of marriage but still extolling the values of the white dress. Indeed, one of the feelings she wanted to explore in our treatment was her lifelong struggle with jealousy, and just as Esther Perel writes in her book State of Affairs, Anne felt that overwrought support for her betrayed experience had served to obscure this recently valid yet historically neurotic trait.

             Among the standard maxims within our profession and culture is the belief that jealousy, a derivate of hate, isolates. And we think this whether we are speaking of racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny, or its lesser observed analogue, misandry. Hate, or the perception of it, leaves us cold and distant; we lose empathy, othering the people we don’t know, or we forget the people we once knew and loved, or felt dependent on. I was reminded of this watching an old film recently in a state of unwitting jadedness. Ostensibly, I was looking for escapist fare as I selected Casablanca, one of the great romantic flicks of the WWII era, but also a story with hate and jadedness at its center. Rick, Humphrey Bogart’s character, is a cynical American expatriate wounded by, among other things, a lost love in the form of Else, played by Ingrid Bergman. When she returns to Casablanca with another love (for another man) but a lingering regret for having ditched Rick years earlier, she attempts reconciliation, only to find him bitter and drunk. In the aftermath of their tense reunion Rick asks, in effect, what did you expect? See, he felt entitled to his anger. No arguments from her—just a blank, wayward gaze. Ultimately, Else checks out, looks away, says she can’t feel anything for him in the face of his hate, even though she accepts his right to feel that way. Hate. Betrayal. Compulsion. Jealousy. Whatever it was, it had isolated them physically, emotionally. Psychologically, they were correspondingly split.

*Transference refers to feelings and unconscious thoughts that emerge in the therapeutic relationship that are based upon past relationships, especially those with primary caregivers

** I’m aware that this observation, paraphrased from one similar in the book, will be offensive to some readers. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that such ulterior wishes describe all or even most partners of sex addicts who enter treatment for themselves. But I am suggesting that this phenomenon exists, that it presents often enough, and that those who think this isn’t a thing are in another kind of denial.

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