I’ve told this story before, and it has evolved as I understand it more and more. I hope this is a faithful telling of my experiences. I hope you might find something in it that you can relate to.
Before I knew I was gay, definitely before I ever accepted it, I had another identity that eclipsed everything else. As a young teen, I wasn’t the most cautious about clearing my search history and by 14 my parents confronted me about my “deviant” online behavior. You’d think a couple of adults who found a teenager’s online gay porn collection would conclude this was a pretty clear indication of my homosexuality. For my conservative Mormon parents, it didn’t mean I was gay at all, it meant I had broken my brain. I was clearly just sick, influenced, corrupted. It was impossible, or, more accurately unacceptable, to be gay. We needed a scapegoat, a diagnosis, something to fix. Enter porn addiction. This became the epicenter of my life and my only real identity; porn addict.
I don’t really think this was an incorrect label. The combination of shame, repression, trauma, and denial fueled my compulsive relationship to porn. However, this label was not given out of serenity, courage, or wisdom. It was a scapegoat, a smokescreen, and a mask. It gave me, my family, my church, everyone something to say and permission to keep the rest unsaid. It was more of a gag order than an authentic admission.
For most of my young life, I was terrified that if people saw the full truth about being gay, I would lose love, safety, and belonging. Instead of learning how to be honest, I learned how to hide, manage perceptions, and tell people what I thought they needed to hear. Over time, dishonesty stopped feeling like dishonesty to me. I convinced myself that as long as I meant well, intended to change, or eventually “fixed” things, I wasn’t really lying. That mindset hurt people I loved, but mostly it damaged my ability to connect authentically with people. From a young age, I would split myself in two and only show people the half I wanted to. I don’t think there is any way to do that and not feel broken.
A lot of my unhealthy behavior became tied up with shame, secrecy, fear, and, of course, compulsive sexual behavior. For years, I understood all of that through the lens of addiction. Specifically, the version of addiction and recovery that the Mormon faith prescribed. Later, after coming out and doing trauma therapy, I genuinely believed I had healed the deeper issue underneath it. In many ways, I had. Parts of my life became healthier and freer than they had ever been before. I abandoned the label of addiction and felt vindicated doing so. I wasn’t a porn addict, I had been hurt and traumatized. This new shoe fit, and wearing it was a huge relief. The relief of being able to walk away from the label of addict is part of why it was so hard for me to admit when things started getting bad again.
Moving on with my life I went back to school to study clinical counseling and become a therapist. I met a beautiful, kind man and feel deeply in love. Around 10 years after coming out, if you looked at my life from the outside you’d see a great job, an attractive husband, a close group of friends, a cute home, a lazy dog and a mischievous cat. I was also so deeply entrenched in compulsive sexual behavior that my life was becoming totally unmanageable.
When my ex would catch me in lies, it felt like my world was collapsing. I eventually found a therapist and, after describing my behavior honestly, he said “yeah, sounds like sex addiction.” I hated hearing that. I did not want it to be true. I think part of me felt that if I accepted it, it meant I was fundamentally broken all over again. So even after recognizing I had a serious problem, I stayed in some kind of denial for a long time. Looking back, I think I started living in two contradictory realities at once. On one hand, I was terrified of losing the people I loved, which made me hide more, lie more, and avoid honesty at all costs. On the other hand, I felt safe and deeply loved in my life and relationships, and that safety became part of how I justified my behavior to myself. I kept believing I could contain everything, manage it privately, and eventually stop before the consequences became real. I couldn’t.
The old rules I had lived by had come back in full force: tell people what they want to hear, and never allow yourself to sit with pain, fear, shame, or discomfort for longer than you have to. Whenever I felt exposed, anxious, guilty, lonely, or ashamed, I reached for something that would numb me or make me feel temporarily free. The more dishonest I became, the more shame I carried. The more shame I carried, the more compulsive my behavior became.
It began with sexting and hiding it. Then camming and lying about it. When my ex told me it was hurting him and making him feel unwanted and unimportant, I promised to stop. I promised to stop every time he asked me to. I did not. I repeatedly chose secrecy over honesty, even while watching the damage it was causing.
Over time, the behavior escalated further into cheating, anonymous hookups, cruising, and increasingly risky and compulsive behavior. I would binge, immediately try to shut the shame down with avoidance, denial or justification, promise myself it was over, and then repeat the cycle again. I became increasingly compartmentalized; split in two all over again. I would act in ways that violated my values and harmed people I loved, then try to shut the door on it emotionally and pretend everything was normal.
One difficult truth I have had to confront is that a lot of my compulsivity became tied to transgression itself. Basically, I got hooked on breaking a rule, or the feeling of doing something I “shouldn’t.” As a kid growing up in shame and repression, even small forms of sexual expression felt dangerous, forbidden, and emotionally charged. I remember shaking so hard my teeth would chatter just from typing something erotic in a search bar. I think over time my brain became wired to seek intensity, secrecy, and risk. As my shame around sexuality decreased in healthier ways, my compulsivity adapted by seeking other forms of intensity and rule-breaking instead. I used to try to dismiss these instincts as sexual quirks and pass them off with jokes. That does not excuse what I did. The powerlessness I felt makes it more heartbreaking to me, not less.
As things escalated, I became desensitized to behavior and content that I always recognized as deeply unhealthy, risky, and inappropriate. I was unwilling to admit how unmanageable my life had become. Toward the end, there were moments where I barely recognized myself or the life I was living. I can only imagine how disturbing and disorienting it must have been for the people around me when those realities came to light. I also understand that the deepest harm was not only the sexual behavior itself, but the deception.I repeatedly denied reality to people who trusted me. I did not trust anyone to see my whole life. I manipulated situations to preserve my own safety and avoid consequences. I made people question their instincts, their trust, and their understanding of our relationship.
In all the work I have done to learn and heal, there has been one piece that I have struggled the most to accept: porn addiction was just the tip of the iceberg to my deeper codependency and love addiction. I hated that term. How could love be the problem? Porn and sex were the problem, love was the solution! Wasn’t it? My entire life I had treated compulsive sexual behavior like my one and only problem. What I didn’t notice was that I never really saw changing my behavior as the solution. The solution was my relationships. I saw everyone around me as better, more righteous, more worthy. I didn’t need to change, I just needed to earn more love. Growing up, I saw my family and church communities as saviors. Everyone became a surrogate for God and atonement. They were perfect, I was broken. It wasn’t my role to recover, it was my role to be ruined.
I remember one particular session I had with the first real therapist I had who introduced me to trauma therapy. I must have been really down on myself that day because she stopped me and asked “R—–, why are you trying so hard to convince me that you are a bad person?” My answer was “because if I’m not, the people I love hurt me for no reason.”
If I wanted people to be perfect saviors, I needed to be the perfect sinner. As beautiful as my marriage, my ex, my job, and my friends all were, I didn’t notice that I had fallen into the trap of turning them into perfect saviors. I lifted up the fantasy of my life and began denying myself and my authentic experience. I stopped thinking as a “me” and only thought in terms of “we.” I became more and more codependent to that dynamic and more and more entrenched in all of my old maladaptive coping strategies. I didn’t realize how desperately I began to want to be rescued, just as I had when I was young. The problem with wanting to be rescued, is you need to believe you are helpless. You need to foreclose on every strength, value, and even authenticity. If you really want to be rescued, you have to prove you need to be. In this whole process, it was the hardest to let go of the desire to be rescued. Now, I know I am powerless but not helpless. I cannot do this alone, but no one will do this but me.
