Ready to Heal: Breaking Free of Addictive Relationships. Sarah Elisabeth Boggs
her to stay for just a few more minutes. She always stayed, grateful to be wanted, yet feeling “icky” inside.
When Heather was six, her mother and Joe had a baby. Heather recalls the day her mother returned from the hospital with her new baby brother. She desperately wanted to stay home from school to be near her mother and see the baby, but Joe forced her to leave. When she got to school, she pretended to be sick so the school nurse sent her home. Joe was so enraged that he sent Heather to her room for the entire day and wouldn’t allow her to be near her mother or the new baby. Heather felt shut out, condemned to be an outsider in her family.
Soon after her brother’s birth, Heather discovered Joe’s pornography collection. To soothe her loneliness, she learned to masturbate in the bathtub thinking about the images that she had seen in the magazines. Heather remembers spending what seemed like hours in the bathroom, finding comfort and pleasure from her orgasms. She felt immense relief that she could console her loneliness by herself.
Her performance in school continued to exceed that of her peers. In high school she made outstanding grades and excelled on the debate team. She was proud of her accomplishments because her mother and Joe liked to boast about her to their friends. But deep inside, Heather felt inadequate and alone. She never felt good enough. During her freshman year in high school, she developed a crush on a boy named Mark who was a star on the football team and liked by everyone. Even though he never dated Heather, he flirted with her. His attention fueled her adoration. She memorized everything about him—including his license plate number and class schedule—and went to great effort to be near him, even changing from the Methodist to the Catholic church he attended. At fourteen, Heather, like Maria, began showing signs of addiction. She was using a relationship to compensate for horrific feelings of isolation and pain.
When Heather was sixteen, Mark became sexually interested in her. They began a sexual relationship, but Heather never felt like his girlfriend because Mark insisted they keep their relationship a secret, separate from school activities. This left Heather feeling ashamed and rejected. She felt constantly challenged to do more, be more, try harder to earn Mark’s love, just like she felt with her mother and Joe. Heather accepted what little attention she could get from Mark because, for her, the deprivation was familiar. She was repeating the events of her childhood all over again.
When Mark left for college, Heather’s behavior changed. She began having sexual encounters with boys she didn’t even like. When Mark came home during breaks, she dropped everything to be with him and have sex. When Heather graduated from high school, she moved to Washington, DC, to be with Mark. She enrolled in the same university. Just as in high school, she and Mark continued their secret sexual relationship. Mark had a girlfriend, so he only called Heather when he was drunk and wanted sex. To hide her unmanageable feelings for Mark, Heather’s sexual behavior escalated. She began having sex with numerous men to avoid thinking about Mark. She slept with men she didn’t care for or barely knew. If a man wanted to become closer to her emotionally, she dropped him.
In therapy, Heather relates her romantic life in brief spurts: “I only slept with guys I felt better than. I would meet one guy for breakfast, another for lunch, and another for dinner.” Heather seduced men she met in restaurants, internships, libraries, or bars. She kept a list of how many men she had sex with. The list included married men, friends’ boyfriends, and brothers of previous boyfriends. These were men she felt were “beneath” her. Heather explains, “I knew I was gaining a feeling of power with this behavior, but it came with so much pain because deep down I still yearned for Mark.” In therapy years later, she wonders if the pain of her addiction to Mark created her sexually avoidant behavior. “I think deep down I told myself no one would ever have that kind of power over me again, so I never let anyone get close.”
What Heather is describing is the desperate attempt to heal her first loss—the loss of maternal attachment. The pain of losing her mother’s love and growing up in a neglectful home left her brain craving connection and love. The experience of being abandoned by her mother profoundly affected her ability to trust anyone and form close relationships. She repeated this trauma of deprivation with Mark, constantly trying to earn love and find his acceptance, unconsciously duplicating the painful relationship she had with her mother and Joe.
After repeated failures to get her needs met, Heather masked her pain with sexual acting out. She gained a sense of control with seduction and flirtation, feeling new power with each man she had sex with. Her sexuality became the substitute for self-development, providing her with grandiose feelings that numbed her feelings of inferiority. She traded sexual power for authentic power.
Incidentally, Heather’s list of sexual conquests is a common feature for girls and women who become addicted to sex. Keeping a list is one indicator of a growing sexual addiction.
Tori
Tori is the third child born to parents who thought they were finished having children. They already had a son, eight, and a daughter, seven. Tori’s father was an anesthesiologist while her mother stayed home to raise the children. Their relationship was chaotic and intense. Tori’s father was not sexually faithful to her mother, and Tori’s mother exhibited signs of being desperately addicted to her husband. As a result, Tori grew up in a household suffused with sexual energy and violence. She can’t remember a time when sex was not on her mind and when she wasn’t also feeling fear. From as early as she can remember, she knew her father wasn’t faithful to her mother. Her earliest memory took place when she was five years old and she walked into her mother’s room to find her swallowing pills. Her mother was crying. She yelled at Tori, “Get out of here.” Tori recalls being frightened and confused. Later, Tori realized that this was her mother’s first suicide attempt after she had just learned of her husband’s first affair.
Tori witnessed a great deal of violence by her older brother. She recalls, “What I remember most about growing up is the physical violence between my brother and sister. My brother was mean, and from him I learned that men are violent. He was also using drugs. I just thought he was scary.”
Tori’s brother had a lot of power in the house. When a teenage boy sets the tone for a home, the younger children aren’t safe. Since Tori’s father was unavailable and her mother was struggling to survive, Tori was left to fend for herself. She learned she couldn’t rely on anyone to keep her safe, much less comfort her.
Tori learned to masturbate at an early age. She doesn’t recall how or when she learned, but just that it was always her companion. She stated, “It was like breathing. I just always did it and didn’t think anything of it.” Tori’s story is similar to Maria’s and Heather’s in this way. All three learned as young girls how to self-soothe through masturbation.
When young girls are masturbating, it can be a sign of early childhood sexual abuse. However, in each case, none of the women remember being sexually abused. What is clear is that each girl lacked a safe, nurturing parental attachment. As a result, we can assume that all three girls were under intense stress and fear. Without proper bonding and attachment, the girls found a way to comfort themselves and ease the high levels of stress hormones generated by excessive fear and loneliness. Masturbation became the substitute for human connection.
Tori’s sister left home at age fifteen when Tori was only eight. She remembers being thrilled to have her mother all to herself. Her hope was to finally receive attention and care from her mother. When Tori’s siblings left, however, her mother became obsessed with opening up her own bridal shop. Tori was left to get herself ready for school each morning, and she came home in the afternoon to an empty house. At this point, she discovered new ways to soothe her loneliness. She began reading erotica and watching “real sex” on TV. “Thank God there was no Internet in our home at that time,” she exclaims in therapy. As a woman in recovery, she now understands that her sexual and fantasy addiction would have been much more extreme with the avenues available online today.
At age fourteen, Tori’s life began to spin out of control. Her mother learned of another one of her husband’s affairs when she found a sex toy in his suitcase and a receipt with a young woman’s name on it. Tori’s mother flew into a rage and rallied her daughters to accompany