The Truth. Neil Strauss

never happens again. I need to understand how I could have done this to someone I love so much.

      Suddenly, Ingrid throws her arms around me and we embrace tightly, with as much pain as passion. Tears spring from both our eyes and make trails on the other’s cheeks.

      The first tears are sadness. The second are relief. And the third are the most dangerous of all: They are hope.

      Lorraine is a bird-like woman in her fifties with long shaggy gray hair, taut lips, a big beak, and incongruous thigh-high black boots. The wounds of whatever struggle she went through still show in the lines on her face.

      “I’m here to tell you that sex addiction goes away,” she announces to us. “The compulsion stops. It’s not like alcohol. You can get past this. Recovery, if you work at it, will take you three to five years.”

      At first, the words sound reassuring. But then I realize that if you work hard enough on almost any behavior, it can be changed in three to five years. I suppose another term for recovery is just behavior modification. There could be twelve-step programs for biting your nails, picking your nose, saying “I’m sorry” when you’re not really sorry, and, perhaps more dangerous than cheating on a spouse, texting while driving.

      Lorraine tells us, as she’s probably told every addict who’s passed through here for the last decade, that her alcoholic father would lock her in a closet for hours at a time when she was three; that she was molested by a priest at age twelve; and that she spent most of her adult life as a codependent, stuck in a marriage to an abusive, alcoholic husband. She was one of those women who couldn’t leave the man who beat her—until he drank himself to death.

      When Lorraine was here twenty years ago, her tag was blue.

      “What I just presented to you was my timeline,” she explains. “And all of you are going to do your own timelines this week. Who here has childhood trauma?”

      Everyone raises his hand except for me, Adam, and Santa Claus, who probably didn’t hear the question.

      Lorraine stares at us incredulously. “Trauma comes from any abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Think of it this way: Every time a child has a need and it’s not adequately met, that causes what we define as trauma.”

      “But by that definition, is there anyone in the world who doesn’t have trauma?” I ask her.

      “Probably not,” she replies quickly. “We link and store any experience that brings us fear or pain because we need to retain that information to survive. All you have to do is touch a hot stove once and your behavior around hot stoves changes for the rest of your life—whether you remember getting burned or not. So think of anything in your childhood that was less than nurturing as a hot stove, and when you encounter something similar as an adult, it can trigger your learned survival response. We have a saying here: If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.”

      I look around the room. Everyone seems to be drinking this in. I suppose we’re all broken in some way, whether or not we choose to admit it to others—or to ourselves.

      “Most people think of trauma as the result of a serious assault, disaster, or tragedy,” Lorraine continues. “But a small trauma, like a parent criticizing you day in and day out, can be just as damaging because it’s happening on a regular basis. Think of it this way: If one big-T Trauma is a ten on the scale and a little-t trauma is a one, then ten little traumas can be just as powerful as one big Trauma.”

      Lorraine is blunt and severe, perhaps even more so than Joan, but there’s something about the way she speaks that I trust. She doesn’t seem to have a chip on her shoulder, nor does she sound like a member of the Moral Majority. And at least I’m finally learning something, though I’m not yet sure how it will help me be faithful to Ingrid.

      “When children experience trauma, they tend to absorb the feelings of their abusers and store them in a compartment in their psyche that we call the shame core. It contains the beliefs I am worthless, I am unlovable, I don’t deserve. Any time you feel one down—or inferior—to someone or you feel one up—or superior—those are false beliefs generated by your shame core. Because, in reality, every person in the world has equal worth and value.”

      Charles interrupts, “But I’m thinking of you as better than me because you’re an expert on this topic and you know so much more than me. So what should I do?”

      “And how do you feel about that?” Lorraine asks. “I’m standing here, a middle-aged widow, telling you how to live your life. I’m telling you I know more than you do and I’m one up to you.”

      “I feel anger,” Charles says.

      “Exactly. To survive painful beliefs and feelings, we often mask them with anger. That way, we don’t have to feel the shame behind it.”

      I look at Joan. She’s watching Lorraine with a frown, rapping her pencil against her knuckles. “The payoff of anger is mastery, control, or power,” Lorraine continues. “So the anger makes you feel better and one up. And when you use sex to restore power or feel better about yourself in a similar way, this is what’s known as eroticized rage.”

      Eighty-eight percent of sex addicts, she tells us, came from emotionally disengaged families. Seventy-seven percent came from rigid or strict families. And sixty-eight percent say their families were both distant and strict.

      “Being overcontrolled as a child sets you up to lie as an adult,” she concludes. “So the theory of sex addiction is that when you feel out of control or disempowered, you sneak around and act out sexually to reestablish control and regain your sense of self.”

      This is where she loses me. “Can you give a specific example?” I ask.

      “Well,” she replies with what appears to be a touch of condescension, “what’s your story?” Or perhaps it’s not condescension, it’s caring, and my shame core is just flaring up.

      “I cheated on my girlfriend.”

      “Strict mother?”

      “Yes.”

      “Mom wasn’t emotionally available, so you’re taking out your dick and using it to look for love. And sex is healing the anger at Mom for not being available.” She speaks quickly and confidently, as if my story is exactly what she knew it would be.

      “So I fuck other women to get back at my mom?”

      “And to have an emotionally safe way of getting the affection, acceptance, and comfort you never got from Mom.”

      “I don’t know. It felt like my mom was always there for me.”

      She strokes her hair, which is as prodigious and thick as Rick Rubin’s beard, and asks a question that will alter my entire understanding of my childhood: “Was she there for you … or were you there for her?”

*Sources for these and other facts in this book can be found at www.neilstrauss.com/thetruth.

      STAGE II

      ▪ Adapted Adolescent ▪

       I SEE ANOTHER LAW IN MY MEMBERS, WARRING AGAINST THE LAW OF MY MIND, AND BRINGING ME INTO CAPTIVITY TO THE LAW OF SIN, WHICH IS IN MY MEMBERS. O WRETCHED MAN THAT I AM!

       —ST. PAUL

       Romans 7:23-24

      Chicago, Thirty Years Earlier