How Did I Get Here?

By JP

When I started this journey last year, I didn’t understand my addiction. I thought is was as simple as me being a bad person who wanted to watch men and women have sex. I didn’t have the capacity to understand the full extent of my addiction and how it hurt my wife. Fortunately my wife kept pushing me to get to the “why” of my addiction.

My first therapist just told me to quit it, but he was also the one who told me I was cured back in 2015. The second therapist was honest and said she couldn’t help me. My third therapist just wanted me to feel good about myself and stop beating myself up. By this time my wife had discovered that there are specially trained Certified Sex Addiction Therapists. The closest CSAT was an hour away. She wasn’t accepting new clients, but agreed to help me after I saw an intern in her office. She has helped me get to the “why” of my addiction. It all started with my childhood trauma and my first exposure to porn. She helped me look at and resolve my childhood trauma with EMDR. This helped me to be able to have empathy, be able to hold my wife’s pain, and not go into shame and anger. I am not the same person I that used to be. I still have a lot of work to do, but I’m in a better place than I was a year ago.