When I was around 14 years old, visiting my father at his new home in suburban Greensboro, NC, he had come down to the basement den where I was watching TV, and we started chatting. I don’t know about what. I had been in counseling during that time for depression, so the conversation may have unfurled from that topic or questions that were arising from within me through that process. Regardless, I only remember the part of the conversation where my father confessed to me that he had been a bad husband to my mom when they were married. He articulated this by then saying, “I probably slept with over fifty women while I was with your mother.” If you want to do the math, they had been together for about ten years, and not just any ten years; it was ten years during the height of the AIDS epidemic, meaning my mother was at an especially elevated risk.
There is something particularly disturbing about being a fourteen year-old girl and receiving an admission like that from your father. Even though I had always been one who wanted to know anything and everything, I can still feel the way my body recoiled. His admission felt dirty, obtuse, and like a jolt on the energetic umbilical cord connecting me to my mother, though I am sure that was not his intention. But wanting to maintain a present moment bond with my father, established by his transparency and the time he was giving me, I dialed down my disgust and muted the sting inside of me so that I could continue to listen to him share. Even as the thought what kind of father says that to his 14-year-old daughter at a peak time of her own blossoming sexuality or ever? flashed across my mind, I held space for my father to tell his stories.
If you ever wonder how your throat chakra gets shut down over the course of your life, as women (and men) who do energy and chakra work commonly come to discover for themselves, this is how it happens. When we are told or shown something heinous by a primary caregiver or parent, in our formative and tender years of becoming, and we trap that vulgarity or shame or egregious behavior inside of our own bodies, without being safe enough to voice the impact it has on us or to say, definitively, “How fucking inexcusable”, the body takes the hit for us. And where words would have been important to protect our best interest, silence takes the job instead.
My dad’s office/workshop area was also in that basement, and hanging beside his pegboard of perfectly organized tools, alongside surf, tennis, and golf memorabilia, was a framed poster of a thin, stereotypically attractive, female tennis player walking away from the camera with her tennis skirt lifted by her own hand, exposing her bare ass. I have since come to learn that the photo is called Fiona’s Pose. It was an iconic ‘80’s shot of 18-year-old pro tennis player, Fiona Butler, and over two million copies of it sold.
When we were lucky, my father would invite my sister and I into that space at nighttime after everyone was in their robes and pajamas and he’d talk to us about life – our lives, his life, stories, questions to see how we were doing. We’d sit in these tall, canvas, folding director’s chairs that he got from his casual furniture rep business and soak in every drop of his attention because we were so hungry for it. The feeling was typically one of warmth, and I would go to bed filled up with the possibility of my own enoughness and being briefly seen by my father.
But that damn picture was there, broadcasting confusing messages about my father’s sexuality and desires; the same sexuality which had cheated on my mother more than fifty times, the same sexuality which had resulted in an affair with the woman who was our stepmother by then, the same sexuality that would become enraged at me a short time later for losing my virginity as a teenager. What were we to surmise about our value as young women…as girls? Something was incongruent, and that something was my father. And because of that incongruency, there were almost never totally safe spaces with him. But children don’t just look at confusing messaging from a parent and think what does that mean? They think, what does that mean about me? And they don’t think it consciously as much as subconsciously. I subconsciously thought about it when I looked in the mirror, when I discovered the power my own sexuality could have over other people, and when I decided that being beautiful and wanted meant being safe.
Not once in my life did my father’s sexuality have anything to do with me directly; it was all indirect. For the most part, my father’s sexual life occurred on its own adult terms away from reality as I knew it. But his infidelities and promiscuity reached beyond the misogynistic boys will be boys paradigm and into what I now suspect was sex addiction. At the very least, it was an aversion to real intimacy and a compulsion for control. Never-the-less, that poster did not represent light-heartedness, body liberation, or appreciation of the female form. In the context of a father having deep, reflective conversations with his young daughters who were starving for his approval, connection, and for their specialness to be acknowledged by him, it was an emblem of my dad’s disconnection, shortsightedness, and a sort of deviancy which felt like it had cost us and our mother quite a lot. But of course, I said nothing. Instead, I devoured my dad’s attention and quietly developed my own disordered behaviors around sex and love addiction, which would motivate many of my decisions as a young adult, ultimately taking me to my own bottom in my thirties.
Before I introduce this topic, it’s important to me to say that I have never, not once, in my life been the victim of overt sexual abuse. I consider myself lucky, though I don’t believe in luck and it isn’t even the right word. But what I mean is that I am starkly aware that I am the exception among women in these times. Having said that, as is true for each of us, I have been greatly impacted throughout my life by covert sexual abuse and the pyramid of sexual violence that is outlined by sexual assault work and theory. This includes objectification, cat-calling, being dosed, being stalked, and being exploited. And some of my covert sexual abuse was self-induced due to normalization of abnormal sexual behaviors.
Today I consider myself a recovering love/sex addict. The love addict part is less embarrassing to say out loud, though I’m aware that it can conjure images of crazy. And yes, it can look and feel like crazy. The sex addict part is far more dubious, as I’m aware that to the listener it can feel like being let in on a shadowy secret, something that feels slinky and part of a voracious appetite for pleasure that is frowned upon for women, but especially in the South where I’m from and live. Here, we do not speak about what happens in the bedroom, unless we’re out with our gay or liberated friends. And we definitely do not want to know about the sexual desires and habits of our parents, unless we have actualized ourselves in a way that finally sees them as human and sexuality as sacred.
But yes, the sex addict part can be shadowy, secret, slinky, and voracious. But it’s actually a cry for love without the risk of having to be truly, deeply vulnerable on the inside and without having to get in touch with and vocalize what our real needs are and expect that they be met because we finally know our real worth. It’s an intoxicating substitute for the deeper, unconditional, sustainable connection that we long for, but can’t access. The ASAM (American Society of Addiction Medicine) currently defines addiction as the pathological pursuit of reward and/or relief by substance abuse or other behaviors. For me, it was a source of pseudo-nurturing, relief from disconnection of all kinds, a place to exchange emotional intensity and unresolved emotional pain, and an area where I could locate a sense of control and enoughness. For me, it was always entwined with love addiction and had no value if the two were not connected.
The first time that I heard about love/sex addiction was in my thirties, while I was a single mother who had just entered recovery and didn’t know it. (More on that later.) I was watching Oprah, the most influential, beloved talk show host to ever live, interview the singer, Alanis Morissette, who had been popular in the mainstream grunge/alternative music seen my teenage years, and had since grown up to become a spiritual person engaged in interpersonal healing. She used the words love and sex addiction and I nearly fell out in the floor at her description of what had also been my own life experiences in this arena. I came to be surprised at how little was known or shared in the public sphere about this topic.
Love addiction is marked by codependency, a governing fear of being alone, avoiding emotional intimacy while obsessing over it, mistaking intense sexual relationships for love, infatuation at first sight, total immersion into the love object, poor boundaries, self-neglect exchanged for external focus, and many variations of relationship sabotage. I once heard it said that of all the addictions available to us, this one is the loneliest. I can’t speak definitively to that comparison, but I can say that it’s hella lonely when the pleasure part is replaced by pain, which rarely takes long.
I consider myself in recovery from both today, not because I’m in a thriving marriage of seven years and have done a lot of attachment and codependency healing work, but because I am very capable today of intimacy, self-love, self-created happiness, autonomy, self-honesty, emotional sobriety, and vulnerability, and I choose these qualities and states of being regularly for myself. But I’m aware that there still lives inside of me a girl who wants to be more important than Fiona’s pose or my father’s fifty +, and she occasionally forgets that I’ve taught her that she is.
Sometimes when she feels unseen or unvalued for any number of reasons, she recalls the hit of being totally enraptured with another person, a man. She remembers it as an enticing and promising salve even if temporary and not promising at all. And sometimes, though rarely anymore, she sees that missing piece in someone else’s eyes and the bells inside go off as a warning. But she loves and knows herself too well for the risk to be worth the reward, or even worth much thought at all, and sees the reward for what it is, which is just psychological and spiritual bankruptcy dressed up briefly as abundance.
Today I am spiritually full, even if my father was not. I am full in love. And therein lies a key: you are allowed to be full in the places where your parents or caregivers were empty or had a significant deficit. Enoughness is not something that anyone else gets to take from you, so if you willingly gave it away at a time or age in your life when you were more vulnerable or innocent, you can always get it back by learning that it’s inherent. It just might take a bit of work to believe this, but you are worth however long it takes and whatever it takes to remember that you can’t be cheated out of your value, not by one person or one person and 50+.
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