Many Who Undergo Alcohol or Gambling Therapy Display Another Addiction: Sex : Sex Addicts Find Help in Group Therapy

Tom was a successful businessman who sought treatment for what his wife viewed as a gambling problem. He seemed bored until another patient told of the thrill of chasing women.

Tom, 35, sat forward, listened attentively, then astounded members of the therapy group with his own tales of womanizing.

Twelve percent to 14% of patients who admit themselves for alcohol, drug and gambling addiction treatment also show patterns of sexual addiction, say Bonnie J. Adkins and Julian I. Taber of the Veterans Administration.

Multiple addictions are frequently found among patients being treated for one addiction, such as alcohol, drugs, gambling or kleptomania, agreed Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist at University Hospitals of Cleveland.

Two decades of bringing sex out of the closet have increased the number of patients who enter sex clinics, said Levine. “We saw five or six patients in 1980, 20 in 1981, 125 in 1983. Every year the number goes up and up.”

Treatment includes group therapy, in which addicts hear others’ rationalizations and “see how they are kidding themselves, make them face what they are doing and understand the impact on the individual,” he said.

That is followed by individual therapy, and if patients are married, their wives get counseling. “Then we bring the couples together and eventually we hope to start treating children, but not yet,” Levine added.

Ninety percent of Levine’s patients are men. “It may be that males have more of a tendency to act while women keep such problems private and quiet and it usually doesn’t lead to violence for them,” he said.

At the VA hospital in this Cleveland suburb, everyone seeking treatment for compulsive behavior must write and read their life story in the first two weeks of the four-week program, making them face their problems, Adkins said.

Addiction has several possible causes, including such external influences as alcohol or changes in body chemistry, or there may be a genetic link because many addicts have addicted parents or grandparents, she said.

“There also is research on whether they become addicted to their own endorphins. When a risk taker begins (taking risks) his body shoots endorphins into his system. It’s a type of morphine, it makes them feel good,” Adkins said. “They like the feeling, so they continue the behavior to get the feeling.”

A number of self-help sex therapy groups have started nationwide in the last decade, operating much like Alcoholics Anonymous, she said. Sex Addicts Anonymous, which began in Minneapolis in 1978, has 35 chapters in that area. Sex, Love Addicts Anonymous, a California group, has about 400 chapters nationwide.

Sexual compulsiveness covers a wide range of behavior, including perversion, obscene phone calls, exhibitionism, voyeurism, pedophilia, sadism, cruelty, rape and masochism, Levine said.

He credits use in recent years of a progesterone known as Depo-Provera with helping many men regain control of their lives. But he also noted it produces such side effects as weight gain, high blood pressure and hair loss.

“But for some, that’s not as bad as the illness,” he said. “Perverse sexual behavior is a substitute for remembering trauma as children. They behave instead of feeling and remembering. We call it acting out.

“We try to help them remember and help them to feel.”

Levine said a typical sexual addict is a man who feels socially deficient, views himself as a loner who feels he was socially isolated as a child and teen-ager and who has a history of being abused psychologically, physically and sexually.

Adkins said she found no typical profile. “It cuts across so many personalities. It’s an illness.”