Image credit: Photo by Martin_Heigan on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Years ago, I met a woman who, when she was disagreeing with her partner, would tell him, "That's not my reality."  She had a way of saying it that implied there was a real Reality (hers) and some alternate Crazytown Reality (his).  You had only to hear those few words and know that he was totally batshit and she not only had a PhD in Reality, she was the president and CEO of Reality.  In recovery, I've found myself clinging to similar mantras — most often "that's not my experience" or "that's not my truth" — and often (admittedly) with that same snarky undertone of superiority for protection.  It's been hard to let go of feeling threatened when other people see things differently, but I find I do feel better when I am able to simply state where I am, let other people be where they are and not tag on, in a whisper, "P.S. I'm right."

I had a bit of that "I'm right" feeling when I was reading the article "Sex Addiction: A B.S. Excuse for Not Thinking" by psychologist Michael Bader, who writes:

"Traditional addictions like those to alcohol or heroin always involve the presence of tolerance and withdrawal; that is, increasing amounts of the substance are required to achieve the same effect, and in its absence the addict suffers an increasingly painful psychophysiological state as the body and brain rebound. But when it comes to sex addiction, physiological tolerance and withdrawal are usually not present, and if they are, they don’t govern the addict’s life in the same way that, say, opiates do. Sex addicts get anxious when they can’t get their "fix" they don’t go into DTs."

My first thought was, "Ha!  WRONG, Michael Bader!  Sex addicts do experience both tolerance and withdrawal!  No, not the DTs, but if you want to get technical about it, heroin addicts don't experience the DTs either; that condition is specific to alcohol and barbiturates.  So there."

After all, I had my own experience to back me up.  I saw first hand how my husband Mark required increasing amounts of the substance to achieve the same effect: how his porn use and affairs escalated over time.  About a year prior to learning about his sex addiction, I discovered him engaging in pornographic online video chats.  When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me that he couldn't get the same feeling from looking at pictures that he used to, so he escalated to video, but then he found that video by itself wasn't enough and he really needed interactive video to get that same feeling.  If I had known about addiction and tolerance at the time, I might have realized then what was going on.  Instead it just seemed strange, confusing and disturbing that he wasn't satisfied with just pornographic images anymore, that he seemed  to want more and more.

And when Mark stopped porn use, masturbation and affairs, he did go through withdrawal, and it wasn't just a little bit of manageable, run-of-the-mill anxiety.  He thought death was coming from him in the form of houseflies. He screamed.  He cried.  Sometimes he seemed suicidal and sometimes enraged and violent.  It was real.  And it was terrifying.  The fact that he'd hidden so much from me made me feel as if I didn't know the man I married, and the way he acted — completely unlike anything I'd ever seen from him before — in those early weeks of recovery only added to my fears that the man I shared my house with was a stranger, capable of who knew what evils.

I know the way my world used to look, and I know how it felt to have that all turn upside down, and I know that concepts like "addiction" and "tolerance" and "withdrawal" were what helped me make sense of things again and set my world right.  So when someone says those don't exist or minimizes them, I feel my world tilting again.  And I want to set it right by making Michael Bader wrong, but there's another way: I can let Michael Bader have his own experience with sex addiction, and I tell my story.  I can look at that paragraph and say: "That may be someone else's experience.  And that's ok.  There may be 'sex addicts' who don't experience tolerance or withdrawal, or who don't experience it the way Mark did.  In fact, maybe most so-called sex addicts don't.  That doesn't change me or where I am.  That's just not my experience."

And sometimes I can even say it without adding "P.S. My experience is the right one."