How I came to work with high-performers grappling with sexual addictions

In my earlier days of being a trauma therapist, I found a joy out of working with complex cases.

Reoccuring childhood trauma?

Adult children of borderline mothers?

I absolutely loved- and still love- working with them. Given the location of my original in-person practice, I found myself working with a lot of high achieving, career driven, and high profile individuals. I grew great appreciation for their dedication to doing the work- the satisfaction of working with individuals who were really ready to dive in, and if I said do x,y,z you beat they tried it!

As a trauma clinician offering a lot of EMDR, I’d work with sexual assuaults daily, and I was aware that sexual assualts of any nature can warp one’s sexual desires, interests, behaviors, and relationship to intimacy.

I also began to come across a pattern with my successful male clients. High stress, high pressure jobs, trauma, secret sexual compulsions and shame. It started to all make sense. Traumatic or stressful upbringing- parent’s fighting, or mom’s unstable moods, created a sense of instability and insecurity within the client as a child. Males traditionally are expected ‘not to have emotions’ leaving them with a lack of learned skills for how to handle emotions other than numbing or stuffing them down- until they can’t any longer.

The child is introduced to porn- commonly at an age too young for the nervous system to process appropriately. Porn becomes the escape- the private feel good secret that while hiding in his room from the household’s emotional or physical danger- alone in his room and watching porn feels like security…and now the start of an unhealthy copping mechanism begins, eventually pushing into an addictive, unwanted habit.

This continues, in secrecy, the child becomes an adult, adult life becomes more stressful, throw on there a high demand job and that old maladaptive copping skill of compulsively watching porn, unhealthy sexual activities- feeling gross, feeling shame, feeling like he can’t control it- it grows and grows. Until the individual is “caught” or “comes clean” to a partner because they cannot live like this in secrecy, wrestling an addiction, anymore.

Talking about sex, sexuality, trauma, shame, porn, sex addictions; these are some of the most vulnerable topics for folks to share. It takes someone to be so brave, honest, and trusting of me to come to therapy with these topics. It became my greatest honor as a clinician for folks to trust me and the therapeutic relationship this deeply, and be so brave. So it began, my passion for working with individuals dealing with compulsive sexual behaviors, and behaviors getting in the way of intimate relationships.