Is Tiger a Sex Addict?

Maybe, maybe not. We ask experts—and learn from one sufferer what it's really like

Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 2:23 pm

In the time since revelations of Tiger Woods' extramarital activities first surfaced, armchair psychologists have thrown around the term "sex addict" to explain the legendary golfer's behavior. And leading in to his public apology, Woods was reported to be attending a clinic to "treat" a sex addiction. But chronically hooking up with nightclub hotties on the road doesn't necessarily mean someone is addicted to sex, experts say.

Addicts' behaviors are compulsive and escalating, and continue despite negative consequences, says Sharon O'Hara, the clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles. O'Hara, who's treated sex addicts for almost two decades, says their actions take over their minds, causing sleeplessness, anxiety, and a loss of focus at work. There's also a great sense of shame because often their behaviors go against their personal beliefs and values. This can lead to severe depression.


"Sex addicts live lives of deception," O'Hara says. When they're out seeking sex, they often enter a dissociative state, almost as if they've gone through a door into another world, she says. After their craving is satisfied, they shut the door and return to their families. "When they become concerned with keeping their second life from others, this leads to guilt."

But it can be hard to resist the temptation. The chemical changes in sex addicts' brains are the same as people with other addictions. Sex addicts continue to seek out the "high" they experience, pursuing new women and, as that novelty dies out, more women. Despite the list of alleged mistresses, O'Hara says the Woods situation doesn't sound like sex addiction. "If I had to hazard a guess, I don't think it's sex he's really after. It would appear he's seeking adoration."

But right now, there simply isn't enough public information to accurately assess if Woods suffers from sexual addiction, O'Hara stresses. Regardless of Woods' actual state of mind, read on to discover one man's account of what sexual addiction is like.

The Crippling, Unquenchable Lust of Addiction
By Drew Dorr

The first time Jessica discovered the illicit phone records and receipts and a hard-drive history chockfull of indiscretions, we were in the midst of planning our wedding. She smashed a potted plant on the driveway and stormed off into the night; I stumbled after her and fell heavily against the hood of my car and thought, "Here we go again."

When she caught me again, only months later and after we had partially rebuilt what had been torn down, I was less prepared. Moments after she hung up on me, blinded with tears and wild with anguish, I unfastened my belt and strapped the cool leather around my neck. I mounted the swivel chair resting innocuously in front of my computer, the electronic diary of my transgressions, and placed the flat end of the belt between the door and the doorway. As I reached behind my head to tighten the belt, I heard the casters squeak against the linoleum.

For many years I had been subsumed in one form of fantasy or another. Given contemporary American culture, informed by the Internet, gonzo capitalism, and unreality television, which perpetuates fetish and self-indulgence of every kind, this tale shouldn't be that shocking. The opportunity at one's fingertips to court fantasies of all shapes and sizes to sublimate misery and insecurity is mind-boggling, and for some the pull is nearly gravitational. So it was no surprise that by the time I stumbled into a therapist's chair, the diagnosis was very clear: love and sex addition with a concentration in malignant narcissism.

Sex addiction is unique in that it is "a disorder not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association" though it's one about which many in the medical field are growing increasingly concerned. Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., is one of those. The foremost expert on sex addiction, Carnes has estimated that just under 9 percent of men in the U.S. are sexually addicted. Like most addictions, sex and love addiction often springs from dismal legacies: a pedophilic uncle, an alcoholic great grandfather, or a virulently controlling mother whose own history as her stepdad's whipping girl leaves dark stains on generations of genetic fabric. Nestled within this history lie compulsions that arise from attempts to hide or deny the addiction. Identify an addiction and you've got some digging to do.

My own compulsions had fallen below the radar. In my eyes and in the eyes of those from whom I'd kept this other part of me hidden, things appeared to be going swimmingly. And for many years I worked hard to justify my behavior: I was simply "being a man." Men ogle, are lascivious at times, because we're hard-wired that way. I believed, as anyone who becomes dependent, that even as I was spending hours a day on porn sites, forgoing exercise, work, and relationships for some intensely vacuous yet fully engrossing experience; even as I was signing up for online dating services when I was engaged; even when I was engaging in tawdry phone conversations just weeks before my wedding; and even when I was catching evening trains to meet women in Boston, weaving ever-widening spirals of prurient fantasy and betrayal, that things were under my control. In reality, my world had begun to crease and fray. Hollow-eyed, I was losing sleep . . . and ground. I grew more critical of my fiance and sabotaged her—and us—by setting unreasonable physical and emotional expectations. I'd begun to telegraph a not-too-distant crisis, but the signals were fuzzy. And so I continued.

It was on a cool autumn evening when it first struck me that I might really have a problem. I spent the afternoon at the beach with my fiance. Moments after we kissed goodbye I fired up three screens on my computer: on the first, I wrote Jessica an "I love you" note; on the second I surfed porn; and on the third,, I hastily confirmed a date with a woman I was to meet for a drink that evening. Later, halfway through the date, my cellphone safely on "silent," I found myself gunning through the usual routine: asking yet another stranger sitting across the table poignant, sensitive questions ("Do you find social work satisfying?"), appearing charming yet mildly self-deprecating. I sipped my chianti with affected insouciance and glanced up. My "date" flushed and smiled broadly. I had bagged another with nary a shot. I was transcendent. I was sublime. I was thrilled. I was disgusting.

This is the profile, the pathology, I came to realize as my own. Most men love sex, but there is a line between enjoying sex, and its peripheral pleasures, and sexual addiction. In sexual addiction long periods of time are devoted to sex-related activities. Sex addicts feel unable to manage sexual behavior or even reduce its incidence. People with love and sexual addiction often use sex and serial relationships as an escape from other problems such as anxiety, stress, depression, and social isolation. It was about even more than this for me. I wanted euphoria, intense distraction, and transcendence without mess, responsibility, or consequence. My thirst for these became crippling and unquenchable.

To pass off an addiction as a victim's scourge is cowardly and altogether insufficient. Since the dissolution of my engagement, since the start of my long and dark therapeutic journey, I have begun looking closely at how I and other men—particularly those my age who are in supposedly monogamous relationships—operate within various social and professional arenas. I have grown sensitive to the high-pitched whine of self-obsession, and the dreary self-absorption that justifies addictive behaviors. I watch men interact with their wives and girlfriends and catch them glancing over and around their partners' heads at heavenly visions of thigh and breast, transforming individual parts into sweeping sexual landscapes. And I feel sorry for them, just as I feel sorry for me—a lonely, 37-year-old besotted desperado in a sort of musical chairs fiasco, standing alone as the record spins the same stupid song over and over again.

Addicts sleep with their neighbors, co-workers, secretaries, and clients. We bed the neighbor's cousin, the supermarket cashier, the bank teller, the receptionist, and the addled barfly's squirrely girlfriend. We find ourselves in Wal-Mart parking lots in mid-February, near freezing in Volvo station wagons, furiously hammering away at the boss's daughter as our denim-swaddled ankles jockey for surer footing. We have sex with 19-year-old British au pairs in leaky shower stalls even as our girlfriend's panicky voices ring through the wall, inquiring about our whereabouts. We score phone numbers on the way to restaurant washrooms as our dates order tiramisu. We intercept and deliver cell calls from and to random women as our fiances select wedding stationary just five paces away. It's thrilling and terrifying, and we risk everything and anything to score a 7-second blood meal while we watch in horror as the last course devours us slowly and certainly.

My relationships all had the same shelf-life: the good ones lasted about 1 to 2 years, the not-so-good, 2 weeks to 2 months. I was friendly and outgoing, seemed committed to my work, to my friends, to my health. I was dismissed as a Seinfeldian bachelor: too picky, finicky, quirky, and independent to sustain a relationship. After the breakups, there were always horror stories and I shared them all: This one was too demanding; that one came from a psychotic family; she wasn't intellectually curious; she would make a lousy mom. Many of my friends even confirmed my misgivings, and someone always suggested that I had probably "dodged a bullet" by breaking up with my woman du jour. They were certainly on to something, but they had imagined the wrong person ducking for cover. The real problem was that I was careening from relationship to relationship in a desperate attempt to soothe and distract myself from myself, service my ego, and grapple with my inability to be the person I imagined I should and could be, that others wanted me to be.

Sometimes my "relationships" ended on the phone, sometimes in the bedroom. Some women had little compunction about hooking up, while others made it clear that they were "looking for more" even as they adjusted their skirts and reapplied makeup. Two things were certain: The relationships always ended, and it was usually my doing. When I received e-mails and voicemails, they were seldom pleasant, and those berating me for being a "prick" or a "coward" confused me. They had the wrong guy.

Sexually, no woman was enough to satiate me or to service my engorged ego. I was charming and sensitive, yet disarmingly coy and clever enough to seem somewhat sexy and self-assured. For a long, long time these were the tools I used to tinker with others' lives. What I did not and could not imagine was not only how destructive this was to the women who came and invariably went, but how those same tools were dismantling the foundation of my own life, one brick at a time.

Now that I'm single, once again, I consider my behavior not so much as an easily diagnosed "disease" or addiction than as a destructive coping mechanism. And if I'm mindful, I can feel its nubby hands, clear as day, working at me. Sometimes I can shrug it off, but other times it takes pure strength to put down the phone, turn off the computer, or tell my date "goodnight" rather than invite her upstairs. The only way to prevent a series of horribly destructive behaviors is by working to assimilate the psychology behind the action that creates them and then accommodate new thoughts and actions accordingly. Did my transgressions reveal the mind and heart of a wholly depraved individual or simply the messy footprints of a troubled, aging lothario who had lost his way? I only know that it doesn't help me or anyone else to evade responsibility for the hurt I've caused myself and countless others.

There is help out there for my types, and regardless of the poison we choose, all junkies are looking for the same fix: to fill a void, often left by long-standing insecurities, fears, and an inability to create and sustain healthy, meaningful relationships. There are a number of programs that respond to these cries, the most famous and successful of which is Sex Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), which has proven successful at using a simple yet profoundly powerful 12-step formula to help addicts reconnect and regain some control. Call it erratic psycho-social or psycho-sexual behavior, call it deviance, aberrance, or fallout from some psychic wound. Or call it addiction. Regardless of the label, whatever erupts is volatile and entirely destructive, sweeping in its ability to inflict wide paths of destruction, and unchecked, we junkies will seek out our fix at the price of our very lives.

But back to the beginning. Though my story does not have a killer ending, it has a hopeful one. I talked myself down from the noose, but even with my belt and chair a safe distance away, the moments, days, and months that followed mark the lowest period in my life. I was tapped and shattered, a heaping mess of human fallibility. It had become pretty clear that unless I dealt with whatever it was that was enabling my destructive behavior, eventually I was going to cross some line and kill myself or get killed.

After calling nearly every close friend I had, I fell heavily into a troubled sleep. When I awoke I phoned a number of therapists and, later, after playing each message on my machine over and over again, I settled on one that sounded like the best "fit." I entered therapy twice a week, bumbled through a few sessions of SLAA, and poured through three particularly prescient and practical books on addiction. I went to church. I spent a lot of time with friends and reconnected with my family. I reluctantly pulled the plug on the Internet. And I ran. I ran every day after work until I nearly collapsed and then I'd run some more. I did everything and anything I could do to avoid doing what I'd been doing, and simply to fill those hours that were once occupied. I begged Jessica for forgiveness and another chance and, because she was lonely and confused, she took me back for a while.

There is no silver bullet or one-stop-shop with sex addiction. And though I continue to struggle with my demons, I have come to recognize that a relationship can be created with one person and hope may be discovered in places other than beneath a bra or between the sheets. It takes courage, honesty, will, and a huge amount of support. With my hand to the fire each morning, I have begun to find peace and possibility in what I once thought the most unlikely of places: myself.

Tags: sex