Image credit: Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Several people have asked me if I watched Oprah's show on sex addiction last Monday.  The answer is "sort of."  I don't watch Oprah much, and apparently Oprah likes it that way.  I missed episode, and while there are clips on YouTube, I can't seem to get video of the full episode for love or money.  Unlike, say, my beloved Colbert Report, Oprah is not available for viewing online.  And unlike other favorites, her show is also not available for purchase from iTunes or Amazon.  I think Oprah is now going to have to be part of my next 4th Step, because the resentments, my friends, are growing.  It does not help that she didn't give me a car.

However, I did get to watch about twenty minutes of her talk with Dr. Drew Pinsky and three participants in his show, Sex Rehab (which is available for viewing online), which was more than enough to spark a few thoughts.  It was heartening to see sex addiction being discussed on such a major, mainstream program, but one of the points I liked best was one that I don't think the show did a very good job of emphasizing: that sex addicts are average people from all walks of life.

Before I discovered that my own husband, Mark, was an addict, I had this very specific idea of who addicts were and what they looked like, which could be summarized as: they were people not like me or the people I knew.  Addicts (I thought) live in chaos and violence and excess, visible to all.  They were either rock stars trashing hotel rooms or drunks in trailer parks beating their children or they were living under bridges.  And that is how addiction can look.  But it can also be hidden as obsessively as it is displayed.

One of the reasons I started blogging was to show the world that addiction can look pretty darn normal from the outside.  Unlike the cast members of Dr. Drew's show, my husband is not a porn star or a professional surfer or a model or a rock star.  Who are we?  I'm a mom and a wife; Mark is a dad and a husband.  I have a college degree and (back in my work—for—pay days) had a nice white collar job, as does Mark.  We have neighbors and friends.  You could have gone to high school with either of us.  We could live next door to almost any one of you.  Our kids could go to school together.  Mark could be swapping stories with one of you at an office cafeteria or a sandwich shop at lunch today.  I could be standing in line next to you in the grocery store later today.  We're no one.  We're everyone.  We're anyone.  We're not what I thought we would be.

But it's hard to show that on Oprah or Dr. Drew.  I believe a segment of the show (one I didn't see) featured an average couple dealing with sex addiction, but that hardly offsets more than twenty minutes spent on B-list reality TV show celebrities.  Still, I imagine it's difficult to find someone who is not seeking (or embracing) celebrity, but is simply so dedicated to educating the public that they are willing to forgo their anonymity to talk about what addiction is like.  And what's even harder to show — something I didn't see on the show at all — is what recovery looks like.  Following people in active recovery around with cameras wouldn't make good reality TV, but I still think it makes the best reality.