David Duchovny, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton… sex addicts? What is Sex Addiction?

“Sex addiction” is a term thrown around without much understanding. It catches our attention because of the famous people who receive press publicity due to their adulterous or sexually deviant behavior. For example, it was recently reported that the actor David Duchovny, who is married with children, entered rehab for sex addiction. In addition, just a few months ago, Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York got a great deal of publicity, and ultimately resigned, due to sexually “deviant” behavior with prostitutes. And we all recall the publicity that Bill Clinton received for his dalliances.

Let me start out by saying that, in my opinion, most of what is termed to be “sex addiction” is not addiction at all. It is instead a psychologically driven behavior. In English vernacular, people would say that someone who presents with a compulsive behavior is an addict. But having multiple sexual partners is different from alcoholism or drug addiction, both of which are physical / biological dependencies on substances and both of which result in withdrawal (a set of physical symptoms) in the absence of the substance. Although having multiple sexual partners looks like addiction because of the person’s repeating behavioral pattern, the underlying reason behind the behavior is usually not biological and is not always clear.

So how are we to understand this sexual behavior, especially coming from men who have so much to lose? From my practice as a Psychiatrist for over 40 years, I have learned some of the underlying hidden motivations that lead individuals to have multiple sexual partners and extramarital affairs. Here are some of the causes:

1. You grew up with a very rejecting parent – To protect against future rejection, you are likely to not become too emotionally connected with a partner. Having many affairs is one way to achieve this emotional distance and hence maintain your emotional safety.

2. You have a parent or sibling who was or is too dependent on you for fulfillment – In future relationships, you might feel an anxiety about being burdened by your partner’s needs, just as you were burdened by your parent’s needs. Again, creating distance is a way of communicating to your partner not to depend on you too much.

3. You were raised by an authoritarian controlling parent and were required to be excessively submissive and obedient – This may cause you to be fearful of being controlled by your partner. Having many affairs would protect you from being controlled and taken advantage of.

4. You have a parent or sibling who may have been excessively competitive with you for the attention of the opposite sex parent – To protect the parent or sibling from feeling envious of you, you fail in your relationships by having many partners.

5. You have a parent who lives vicariously through your sexual exploits, and you fulfill their needs by demonstrating your sexual promiscuity over and over.

6. Your parent was overly moralistic and critical of sex – You protest against this by rebelling and doing the opposite. You communicate your resentment of your parent’s Victorian morality by having as many affairs as possible.

7. In families where a parent or parents had affairs, their behavior sets an example, “a role model,” of how to behave. For example, in the Kennedy family, Joseph, the father of John, Robert and Ted was very promiscuous, and all of his sons followed suit.

8. If your parent is disdainful and contemptuous of the opposite sex, you may follow suit as a way of not feeling better off or superior.

9. Your parent excessively required you to always please or rescue him or her, and you felt that it was your responsibility to make that parent feel good – You may make it your mission to make the opposite sex feel good, and hence you may get into multiple relationships not because you care about the other person, but because it makes you feel good to make someone of the opposite sex feel good.

As you can see there are many underlying subconscious motives for having affairs. I have worked with many clients dealing with this issue, and it has been my experience that when they come in for therapy, once they identify what the underlying dynamic is, they are able to gain control over it. Please post or email me with any questions.

How Irrational Guilt May Hinder Forgiveness

CNN recently wrote an article, “Choosing to Forgive – or Not,” in which they presented the case studies of Bob Livingstone and Ellen Girt. Bob lived with his physically and emotionally abusive father, who stopped talking to him after he hit back. For 25 years, after his father’s death Bob was unable to forgive him. Ellen witnessed her father physically abuse her mother and has not been able to let go of her anger towards her father for his abuse, nor at her mother for taking it. As a result of her situation, Ellen has suffered from stomach problems and has difficulty trusting people.

Although both individuals were able to achieve forgiveness, as a psychiatrist, I wanted to analyze what might have hindered their ability to forgive in the first place. For 25 years, Bob blamed himself for his father’s misery and stroke. Lack of awareness over the amount of guilt he felt could have hindered forgiveness.

Although Ellen expressed anger at both her parents, I got the sense that she was angrier with her mother than her father. Many women who witness abuse are bothered by the fact that their mothers tolerated abuse and seemed helpless. Since children take cues from their parents, ironically, Ellen may have learned that it is wrong to stand up for herself. What is unclear in Ellen’s case is whether or not her father treated her better than he treated her mother. If she was treated better, Ellen would likely feel even worse about her mother’s mistreatment. She certainly seems to carry a great deal of guilt over her inability to protect her mother from her father. This is quite common among children from abusive families. Though the article does not go into detail, given her experiences, I suspect Ellen may have a history of difficult relationships with men. I wonder if all of her relationships fail because she sabotages them out of guilt for being better off than her mother.

The similarity I see between Bob Livingstone and Ellen Girt is that they both seem to feel irrationally responsible for their parent’s pain and suffering, leading to irrational guilt. It is very common for children to feel that they have “caused” their parents or siblings terrible pain just by being themselves and doing the normal things that children do. Very often children deal with this irrational feeling by attempting to rescue the parent or by becoming a victim themselves. As may be the case with Ellen’s relationships, children from abusive backgrounds may feel that they deserve to suffer as payback for having “made” their parent or sibling suffer or for not having stopped the abuse.

It is much easier to forgive a person’s actions than to forgive the feelings that those actions caused you to have about yourself. For adult survivors of abusive environments, guilt from blaming themselves for being the cause of their parents’ suffering, or for being unable to stop their parents’ suffering, makes them feel terrible about themselves. They carry this particular guilt and the negative feelings about themselves into adulthood. In such cases, an unwillingness to continue feeling guilty over having contributed to their parents’ pain, real or perceived, can hinder forgiveness. As in the case of O.J. Simpson, tremendous guilt over behavior, in his case cheating on his wife, Nicole, gets turned around and focused on the flaws and misdeeds of the other person. When, after their divorce, Nicole starts having relationships with other men, O.J. seems to turn the intense guilt he felt over betraying her into an intense hurt over her betraying him. In the same way, children who survive abusive environments may turn the guilt they feel over their irrational thoughts of hurting their parents into an intense hurt over their parents hurting them. Even though this is done in an effort to protect themselves from feeling intense guilt, this unconscious behavior makes it tremendously difficult for them to let go of this hurt and forgive their parents.

In these scenarios, to achieve forgiveness, Livingstone and Girt would need to identify the roots of their irrational guilt and release themselves from feeling responsible for their parents’ pain. Once they do this they would be able to forgive themselves for being unable to “save” their parents. After forgiving themselves, hopefully forgiveness of their parents would follow.