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."

I remember watching TV when I was about seven or eight and seeing what must have been an after school special in which a character stopped drinking alcohol and got "the DTs." His eyes bulged in panic as he tried to swat invisible bugs from his arms. I couldn't figure out what he was doing, and it made me anxious. My father explained that when people drink a lot for a long time and then stop suddenly, they can have hallucinations. And that was my first lesson in withdrawal (see, who said TV doesn't teach you anything).

When my husband went through withdrawal, he wasn't coming off alcohol and it didn't look like what I had seen on TV, except that it was just as frightening. In fact, it seems strange to say that someone can experience withdrawal from sex addiction at all, because sex isn't a chemical one ingests. Yet, one of the hallmarks of addiction is withdrawal, and sex addiction is no exception. When my husband started recovery, after years of using sexual behavior to alter his moods, he stopped all sexual activities outside of our relationship, including porn and masturbation, and with that, his happy flow of brain chemicals stopped and withdrawal started.

I was in our living room one day early in his recovery. It was summer. The sun was shining through the window and a few tiny flies buzzed lazily against the screen. Mark saw the flies and started to panic. "Where are they coming from? These flies. Where are they coming from?"

"I don't know. There do seem to be a lot of them around lately."

"They're everywhere. I killed them yesterday, but there are more today. The flies just keep coming and coming. They never stop. Where are they coming from? Why won't they stop?" his voice was getting increasingly panicky and I was starting to get frightened.

"I don't know, honey."

"Flies come from dead things. There's death everywhere. It's me. Death is following me. I'm surrounded by death. They're coming for me. The flies are here for me. Why won't they leave me alone?" His eyes darted around the room as he talked.

"Honey, you're really scaring me," I said, "I think you need to call your therapist."

"I'm scared too." He started sobbing. "I'm going to lie down and then I'll call." He left the room, still muttering to himself about the flies, and I felt panicked. I sat on the sofa and cried into my hands. Who was this man ranting about flies? Had he lost his mind? Was I safe? Was he safe? I was frightened to check on him, frightened not to. But before long I heard him on the phone, and shortly after he emerged from the bedroom.

"How are you feeling? Did you talk to your therapist?" I asked.

"Better," he said, "and yes, I called. She said that I'm going through a lot of changes now, that when you have behaviors that are with you your whole life and you suddenly stop, it's hard for your body and mind to handle that change. She said the transition is going to be rough. She said..."

"It's withdrawal," I finished, and I wanted to smack myself for having been so blind.

"Yes," he said. "I'm so scared, baby."

"I'm scared too," I said, as I rested my head on his chest and let the tears soak his shirt.

"We'll get through this. I know we'll get through this. We'll get though this," he said. Whether that was to reassure himself or me, I don't know, but I know we did get through it. That initial craziness faded, the flies disappeared, and we're still here, working.