But since therapists are susceptible to the same biases as the rest of society, the potential for female hypersexuality is often outside of their awareness or comfort zone, so they may not recognize sex addiction in female clients or know how to help them. That was Alison’s experience. Unlike many of the other women she met in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), Alison never had a problem identifying herself as a sex addict. She can’t remember a time when she didn’t feel like something was wrong with her. Her body began developing when she hit puberty at early age, and she was overwhelmed by the attention she was getting from older men. At the same time, her mother was experiencing a “sexual awakening” of her own, Alison says, and she recalls adopting some of her mother’s behaviors, like dressing and acting provocatively. Then, she says, “As early as junior high, I started having one boyfriend after another, lining one up before I dumped the last. In high school I started cheating on my boyfriends, which was a pattern that I repeated until I got into recovery.”
After a four-year period of abstinence from these behaviors, she began a new job, where she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with a co-worker. “Thinking I was in love with this person I started pulling away from my husband, but my therapist told me the things I was describing to her about my relationships were out of her realm of expertise,” she recalls. After buying Charlotte S. Kasl’s book Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power, and identifying with many of the stories in it, Alison began attending a 12-step group for sex addicts. A fellow group member referred her to Linda Hudson, and she began treatment. At its most intense, a week in Alison’s recovery included one or two individual therapy sessions, a group therapy session, three to five 12-step meetings, several daily calls with her sponsor and peers, as well as journaling, reading, step-work, prayer, and meditation. She estimates that she spent $16,000 on recovery in one year, but says “it was totally worth it – and tax-deductible.” But she got worse before she got better.
“My acting out really escalated towards the end, even after I got into recovery,” she says, but she’s grateful for the way her life is now. Three years after entering recovery, she’s currently a stay-at-home mother to her first child, and she feels fortunate that she’s been able to salvage her marriage. She maintains her sexual sobriety “by not crossing my bottom line, which is no sexual contact outside my marriage.” Each addict’s definition of sexual sobriety is different depending on the nature of their disorder, but it’s generally understood as abstinence from the addict’s problematic or “bottom-line” sexual behaviors, not necessarily total abstinence from sex.