Today, we return with Casey Arrillaga, a man in long-term recovery and author of numerous books, including ‘Mommy’s Getting Sober’ and ‘Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions.’ Casey is a social worker and addiction counselor with Windmill Wellness and co-host of the podcast Addiction and the Family: Finding Recovery Together. Today, Casey does an excellent job of teaching about sex and love addiction. You might want to listen to this episode twice, as it is packed with information.
Don’t worry; I have linked all the resources he mentions in my show notes, which are found on embracefamilyrecovery.com attached to each podcast.
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See full transcript below.
00:01
You’re listening to the Embrace family recovery podcast a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Intro: Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today we continue our conversation with Casey Arrillaga who details his recovery from sex and love addiction. Casey openly shares his story and delves into complexities of addiction, discussing topics ranging from setting boundaries to the effectiveness of recovery programs. Let’s get back to Casey.
01:10
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast
Margaret 01:27
When did you reach this stage, of there is going to be enough versus never believing there’s going to be enough?
Casey Arrillaga 01:36
I don’t know if I could put a date on that one specific moment. But I will say that has been part of the process of recovery. And I first, depending on how you define recovery, so to kind of pick up a little bit of the story when I was 20, I don’t know if I exactly hit bottom, I was again, not aware of the addiction, but I was aware that, you know, I was having one of the college relationships where it was just all sex, that’s all it was. And I recognized like, even this is not doing it. Like, I’m not this is not cutting it. So, I walked away from any kind of romantic or sexual connection for about six months, I just thought I need to reset my brain. I didn’t know anything about the biology to say reset my brain. But I was just kinda like, I need to figure something out. Because I still had that sense like, well, if there’s a problem, it’s got to be me, what am I not getting right? You know, anybody I’m attracted to turns out to be bad news, I can easily pick out the sickest person in the room, I would now look back and say what I didn’t know then, which is I can pick out the other person who went through the trauma and didn’t have it resolved. And I can still now spot that person in the room. But I no longer go running in that direction. It’s more like okay, yep. See that night where we’re going? So, I made this decision. okay, I’m working on me. And I will say, even when I broke up with the young woman, where it was a purely sexual relationship, and I had a very familiar conversation at that point about, like, it’s not you, it’s me, and you know, I just recognize we’re not working out very well. And she said something that no one had ever said to me before about a relationship, which is, did it ever occur to you, we could work on some of this? And the correct answer was, nope, never crossed my mind. My project to work on me was very much a solo project still. So, she drops this bomb. And it isn’t like, I would look back and be like, oh, wow, we could have worked on that relationship. We just weren’t the right two people. But I did come out of it. And so, at the end of that six months or so, I said, okay, I have what I would now identify as a standard, and a dating plan. And so, the standard was, I’m not going to date anybody who’s not working on themselves. That is the deal breaker. That is the, if you got this going on, great. If you don’t, there’s nothing else to talk about. There’s no second date. You got to be willing to work on yourself and work on the relationship. I’m willing to work on me. And I’m 20. So, I’m like we can get through anything. That might be a touch optimistic, but nonetheless, it felt right.
Margaret: Fits at 20.
Casey Arrillaga: My standard was we’re not going to sleep together for the first month, which was also, again, kind of a new thing. So its this idea of like, okay, if I’ve got these two things in place, maybe I will not make all the mistakes I’ve always made. And I dated a few people. But as musician, I was also, you know, writing songs with people and collaborating and stuff like that. I was writing recordings with one particular person and started to notice after every rehearsal when we were talking that, you know, she was talking about like, she sees his therapist and talking about her family dynamic, and I’m gone like, oh, you were on the wavelength. This is great. Boy, am I going to screw up this great recording partnership. If I tip the hat that I think she’s kind of cute. But I did eventually, because I knew I needed to say something and she said, hey, me too. And we were off and running. We got well, like, she would now identify that she also is a recovering sex and love addict. And so, like it’s excellent that we were engaged with him for months. We were married five months later, and we’ve been married over 34 years. But that’s partly because she said, hey, if we’re gonna get married, we should go see my therapist. And I kind of painted myself in a corner because I talked a good game. But I hadn’t ever let anyone else in on that level. So, it really kind of scared me. But after about three to six months of therapy, I was really warming up to it and started deciding everyone needed to see a therapist. And we did therapy with that therapist was brilliant Lee Strassman, we saw her for six years. And she is still one of my heroes. She was a licensed clinical social worker, I’m now a licensed clinical social worker, I had a phone call with her like 30 years later. And one of the things I said, you know, as we were talking, I said, wow Lee I never realized how much I imitate you. Like some of the things you’re saying, those are the things that I say to my clients, and I love it. She said, oh, honey, I’m just imitating George, my old therapist, we just pass it along. I thought like, okay, cool.
Margaret 05:53
Why was she your hero, what would you say was what made her your hero?
Casey Arrillaga 05:59
She was very straightforward about things that I had trouble talking about. She had fantastic insight. And my wife and I like to say, you know, everyone’s got kind of a superpower, my wife superpower is love. And I’m, I don’t say I’m jealous of that. But I’ll say I admire it, and I aspire towards it. But my superpower is insight. And that has not always been a great thing. It made me a much more effective sex and love addict. But, you know, there’s that 10-year-old saying, oh, wait, it’s me. And if I change, things will get better. There’s that insight. And so that’s always been there. And I’ve used it for good, I’ve used it for addiction. But she just had it in a beautiful way. And I’ve seen some therapists were like, by the end of the session, you figured out what the problem is. And Lee would be on the problem, the first five minutes, and then we spent the rest of the hour working on the problem. And I’ve never really seen a therapist before. I think my parents tried me do a couple of people. But it was always like one session and like, what’s wrong with the kid and no one can figure it out, and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure there were people that tried to help along the way. But Lee was somebody where we just connected. And that therapeutic report is so important. But I picked up on her insight I picked up on her just being straightforward about things. It was never any shame about anything. She was just like, oh, honey, you know, it’s, it’s whatever. It’s what people do. And by the way, I’m doing a terrible imitation of her accent. If she hears this, she’ll probably throw something at me. She’s from Long Island. I can’t do a great Long Island accent. But yeah, she was just somebody where, I used to think of her as being enlightened. And she would laugh and say, I’m working towards the light. And she goes, no, honey, we’re not getting enlightened. We’re doing therapy. But it felt like that it felt like somebody opening up the curtains and saying, here’s all this stuff. And let me just name things for what they are. And she was right. So much of the time.
Margaret 07:47
There was something in her that allowed you to take the mask off, be vulnerable.
Casey Arrillaga 07:55
She just saw right through it and would name it. But in a way that was gentle and loving. It wasn’t like rip it off in front of your girlfriend, because a lot of it was couples therapy, remember, so I’m sitting next to the young woman that I’m planning on marrying. And this therapist who just like, shines a spotlight right through my heart was never like living out my fear of okay, I’m gonna expose all this stuff to your fiancé. It was just more like, well, have you noticed this, or it sounds like that. Or she’d do a lot of guided imagery, which today has morphed into internal family systems therapy, but it was very much that same idea. And she did it wonderfully. So, she would draw the answers out of me. She had the right questions. I had all the answers. And she was very clear on that one as well. And that’s something that I try and transmit to all my clients as well, like you have all the answers. I have the questions. I have context, you have content, I will ask and it’s up to you what you want to answer. But I also had, yeah, I’ve been on this growth path for about 10 years that point. So, I had some sense once I got over the initial distrust and discomfort of like, cool roll up our sleeves let’s do this, and just jump in and go after it. And so we got along, really well.
Margaret 09:08
It’s very cool. I don’t know where you stand on spirituality, though. I recognize one of your titles touches on it. I think that people are put in our path when we don’t necessarily expect it. No, it’s going to be such a pivotal relationship. And I call those Godwinks, higher power moments, whatever, where you put in the path of somebody who gives you such gifts to help you understand yourself. And it sounds like Lee was that for you.
Casey Arrillaga 09:35
She was one of two people. The second one was, in terms of that kind of relationship was a second therapist that I saw some years later, Maggie Bryant, and then she was one who in the first five to 10 minutes of the session said have you ever heard a sex addiction? And my answer was like, no. But now that you’ve said that out loud, like okay, I’m gonna hang out with people who go to 12 step meetings, or I have a lot of people that have gone to 12 step meetings for a while and dropped out and relapsed, you know, because if I’m an active addiction, I’m going to hang out more with people who are in active addiction than not. But I saw Maggie for three years. And she was again, just amazing. And same sort of thing, a little bit of a different energy, but the same basic idea of just being able to see right through things and name something and knew what to do with it. Like if I was like, okay, you’re right. Wow, I didn’t see that. What do we do about that? She say, like, Okay, here’s what we do about it, and had great tools.
Margaret 10:36
So, let’s talk about sex and love addiction for the population that may not know it, identify it, believe it. Like, let’s cover it a little bit, if you don’t mind. Like, what is the definition that you would share for people out there who this may be their first exposure to that being a possible addiction?
Casey Arrillaga 10:54
I would say that the best framing that I’ve heard, and I’ve heard this at a recovery meeting, somebody said, really, it’s an affirmation addiction. I’m addicted to affirmation. And for me, I would say for me personally, sex and love were two ways to mainline that affirmation. That was just here’s the purest form, because that was my earliest exposure.
But I’d also point out that, and this is why I think there’s debate in the field and researchers saying, well, we looked at the brain, we’re not really seeing it. Because people for instance, I just speaking, frankly, about all this stuff, they’ll focus on the orgasm say, well, you can’t develop a tolerance, and there’s not really withdrawal and stuff like that. But if that’s not really what it’s about, if it’s really about, I need somebody to tell me, I’m okay. And that’s either going to come through sexual conquest, whether I am conquering or being conquered, it’s going to come through that idea of I am wanted, I mean, my drug of choice would really be that look that somebody got in their eyes that like, I’m not sure I can be okay, without you, Casey, I would eat that up.
Margaret: Right.
Casey Arrillaga: You know, and if I saw that in somebody who I was not even otherwise attracted to, I would go out of my way to gravitate towards that person, I didn’t even want anything to do with them. Except they had that look in their eye where they wanted me. And so okay, I’m just gonna try and reel that in. And it went right back to, you need to get their attention, hold it as long as I can, get as much as I can as fast as I can. And you better bet their withdrawals.
Margaret: Yeah
Casey Arrillaga: Sex and Love Addicts can tell you, there are heavy withdrawals, when the object of your affirmation goes away, for whatever reason. And even people who are, you know, cranking through people and all that kind of stuff, and just thinking, okay, so it’s not any one individual person, there may be the constant novelty of new people. But take that supply away. And you’re gonna find somebody curled up sweating in a ball in the corner, in the fetal position, because you’ve taken away what they think is keeping them alive. And yet, going back to Judith Grisel, there’s never enough, there’s no amount of that. That you feel like, okay, now I’m satisfied for more than a couple minutes. And then it’s back into withdrawal. And people will tell you about, you know, being with a romantic partner, and they’re still thinking about the next person, you know, having sex with someone and in the middle of sex thinking about the next person, or the next time. It’s got all the hallmarks, as far as I can tell, there is withdrawal. There’s definitely tolerance. You know, people talk about, well, you can’t really die from an overdose is like, no, but there’s a lot of suicide.
Margaret: Yeah.
Casey Arrillaga: It’s kind of like gambling, addiction, or compulsive getting spending and stuff like that. There’s a lot of suicide.
Margaret 13:40
And there’s a different level of shame around sex addiction, because in love addiction, because we live in a society where we can’t talk openly about this on a good day, right? So, there’s a lot of judgment and stigma about it. I want to ask, it’s amazing when you’re telling me your definition, and you’re describing it, I’m hearing from me, I’m a food addict. I’m hearing the same stuff around food, and then parallel it over to substances, you know, using and thinking of the next use, never having enough preoccupation, withdrawal tolerance. I mean, it is all universal.
Casey Arrillaga 14:13
Yeah, and doing the work that I do now. You know, I work with people who are coming off of heroin, who are coming off methamphetamine, of course, tons of coming off alcohol. And I’m very lucky at the treatment center where I am at, Windmill Wellness Ranch, we get to have a focus group that’s about sex and love addiction. So, I get to run that once a week. When I was first approached about this, like years ago, actually at a different treatment center. I was really nervous about like, oh man, what’s it gonna mean professionally, like what’s gonna look like if I run this group? And as is like having it feels like it needs to be done? Because there’s so many people who are chemically addicted to other things that don’t recognize that this one has been going along for pretty much their entire lives, way before they got their hands on a drink or a different drug. You know, because alcohol is just a drug or alcohol or any other drug long before that they were into food, they were into sex, they were in the love. And again, love in this case is not like beautiful romantic, it’s usually more like romantic obsession. And the sex usually has more to do with power than anything else. It’s not maybe what people are thinking of it. But also, another aspect of you mentioned food addiction, I think food addiction, and sex and love addiction, we’ll just kind of go up into one thing. You know, those two addictions, I think, are the toughest, because they’re the only two things we can get addicted to that are natural, normal part of the life process that we need to survive. We’re genetically programmed, every single human being has a certain amount of genetic programming to say, you need this. And you can now say there are people who identify as asexual or aromantic, who are just like, I don’t get it at all. So, I’ll just say yes, there are some outlying people where like, maybe none of this applies. But even then, they need food to survive, right? There’s something there, there’s something with your body and your brain say you can’t be okay without this. And it turns out, you can get addicted. That’s a horrible combination. It really is. And all of those cases. There are a lot of people, you’re right, who look from the outside and say that’s an excuse, and especially sex addiction, it’s an excuse for bad behavior, you’re just coming up with some reason to eat all you want. Or you’re coming up for some reason to sleep with whoever you want, or to date a whole bunch of people at the same time, or to spend hours in romantic fantasy. It’s just an excuse. But I can tell you as I’ve been sitting in the rooms of recovery with people around this stuff for 24 years now. Nobody in there is looking for an excuse. They’re desperate to get out of it. And that is one of those basic things about addiction. Does it make your life worse?
Margaret: Yep.
Casey Arrillaga: Are you desperate to get out of it? And do you find that when you decide to, its not as easy as you thought.
Margaret 16:46
Right. Those three should be highlighted.
16:50
This podcast is made possible by listeners like you.
Bumper: I have exciting news my former guest of the Embraced Family Recovery Podcast William Cope Moyers the author of ‘Broken’ from episodes #43 through 45 in case you want to go and revisit his powerful episodes, has another book available to be pre-ordered with the release date of September. William’s new book is entitled ‘Broken Open’ and the description includes the following:
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17:50
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Margaret 18:00
So again, another person sitting out there listening going, okay, I can jive with this is an addiction. Where do you get help? Like you just said, you call you put the food, love and sex together? Because those are, “things everybody has a need for “ to survive? What is recovery look like? Where do you find help? What is abstinence? If you use that model from a recovery standpoint.
Casey Arrillaga 18:26
Right. So, this is a thing that I talk with my clients a lot when we do this group is this is not an abstinence based recovery, which in some ways is tougher. Because with alcohol or cocaine or whatever you’re like, you know, or gambling, which is acknowledged as an addiction.
Margaret: It is.
Casey Arrillaga: Within the psychiatric community, anyway, the secret is stopped doing that. And that’s a tough call. This is not easy to just stop. But if I go to someone who’s like a meth addict, and I say what you need to do is do three bumps of meth today, but don’t do more than that. That’s really, really hard.
Margaret: Correct.
Casey Arrillaga: So, you know, I’ve heard people in Overeaters Anonymous, that’s one place that people go around food. There are other food recovery programs. There’s 12 Step programs for practically everything out there. So, off the top of my head Sexaholics Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Love Addicts Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sexual Recovery Anonymous. Those are five 12 Step programs I know off the top of my head that would deal with those things. Love Addicts Anonymous is the one where it’s kind of all under one tent.
And by the way, with those, some of the differentiators between them are the sobriety definition. Because Sex Addicts Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, both say, sort of define you what your own abstinence looks like. But there’s a big Asterix next to that saying consult with experienced members of the program so you don’t just talk yourself into something that sounds kind of okay but still allows for a lot of destruction of self and others.
So in SLA, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, they would talk about setting bottom lines, these are the things that would be the equivalent of an alcoholic drinking alcohol. This is the thing where you know, like, if you do this, you have definitely crossed the line. And step one of every 12 Step programs, as we admitted, we were powerless over fill in the blank, and it made our lives unmanageable. So, you could look and say, what am I powerless over? In other words, I tell myself, I’m gonna stop, but I don’t I tell myself, I’m gonna do a little but I do a bunch. If I start, I don’t know where it’s going to end. And also that make my life unmanageable. So, these things are also going to lead to destruction of self, others property, lifestyle, legal status, self-esteem, all that kind of stuff. If it’s got both of those going on, I would tell somebody, that’s probably a bottom line.
SLA will also often talk about like middle lines, these things that lead to bottom line behavior, and those top lines, what are you healthy behaviors? So, we’re not just focusing on what’s negative, but sort of what do you need to not be doing? What leads you to doing the things you shouldn’t be doing? And what are some things that are really healthy in your life that you can be focusing on instead? Because recovery is pretty hard if all you’re thinking about is don’t do this? Don’t do this, don’t do this. You have to think about what did not want to just am I running away from, what am I running towards?
Now point out 12 Step Recovery is not the only game in town, probably one of the best-known sort of alternatives would be Smart Recovery. And although there are others out there, Smarts, the largest and best established of the sort of, we’re not a 12 step programs, but they run on the same basic principles. And the cool thing is the research shows they’re just as effective. So, it was a yearlong study. That is, I’m gonna say within the last four or five years, where they showed that Smart Recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous, LifeRing Secular Sobriety and a group called Women for Sobriety, which I had never heard of before the study. All four of those track people for a year. They’re all equally effective. But there were some big factors that they noticed in common.
One, they all say, let’s get together with other people who are struggling with this thing, and support each other.
Margaret: Right.
Casey Arrillaga: So, they identified four major factors. One is have you been to a meeting in the last month. Second was have you gotten phone numbers of people, so you can talk to them in between meetings? So, it’s not the meeting is the only place I see someone, but actually, I have other opportunities to reach out. Third one was have you volunteered to help with the meeting in any way? And the fourth one was, have you volunteered to lead the meeting.
With Smart Recovery, to become a smart facilitator has to be running this thing, but then if Smart Facilitator is running it, they can say, hey, John, do you want to come up? You want to come up to the board and like, you know, show an exercise and stuff like that? And Smart Recovery does have at least one meeting that I’m aware of or classification meeting? What do they say? A smart recovery for maladaptive sexual behavior is like some certain way they phrase it, but it basically comes down to okay, so that’s a sex and or love addiction meeting, using smart recovery tools.
And one cool side note, if people are saying, hey, where do I start? What do I check out? They’ve actually found if you’re doing 12, step, and smart together, your odds go up. Where you run into trouble is if you’re bouncing between them, like well, I don’t like this one, because it got hard. So I’m gonna try that when i That one got hard. Let me bounce back. Those people statistically don’t do as well. So, if you’re going to, you know, try a few different meetings, try a few different programs.
Now keep in mind, again, Sexaholics Anonymous, they hand you your sobriety definition, which is, first of all, they only focus on sex. So, they’re not talking about love, romantic obsession, any of those things, strictly sexual things. They’re going to say no pornography, no masturbation, no sexual activity at all, except for your heterosexual married spouse.
Margaret 23:38
Kind of missing a big population there, don’t you think?
Casey Arrillaga 23:40
It’s kind of specific, which led to a big fight between their World Service Office, and the guy who started the program and wrote the book, because he still owned the copyright of the book. And the last I had seen, which is, you know, some 20 years ago, they were in a bit of a knife fight, because the World Service Office said, we’re not going to publish the book, if it says, it can only be a heterosexual marriage. And he’s saying, well, then you can’t publish the book. And so, they want the basic text. So, I think that actually is what started Sexual Recovery Anonymous, they said, We’re gonna give you basically the same basic definition, but just a loving, mutually committed relationship. So that widen the tent, Sex Addicts Anonymous will give the same basic model I said, for Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, except they say your inner circle, your middle circle, your outer circle. Inner circle would be the same as the bottom lines, the things you’re Yeah, that’s my addictive behavior that I’m trying not to do, etc. Yeah,
Margaret 24:31
Yeah is normal. When people hear this, they think, Wow, that sounds like a PhD study and trying to figure out what I am, who I am, what I do, what’s healthy, what’s not healthy. I mean, it sounds like a lot, of having to really get honest with self, which is true in every 12 Step program, but like, it feels more complex. Is that fair?
Casey Arrillaga 24:55
Well, I’d say the only really complex thing about it is that you’re not actually abstaining. The complex thing is you have to figure out how-to live-in balance with something where you’ve probably never had balance that you can ever recall in your life, or your balance went completely off the rails and off a cliff. So, it may sound more difficult than it is, you’re right, the most difficult and I say complex thing is being as honest as you can for yourself and recognize that it’s not like you’re going to define these things, and there they go, they’re carved in stone, you can never change them. But saying, let’s find a starting point.
Margaret: Right?
Casey Arrillaga: After all, if you show up in the rooms of one of these programs, you’re there for a reason, you know, there is something you do that is not working for you. Whether it is looking at pornography, and again, tolerences build, you’re looking at pornography, and maybe you’re looking at more and more, you know, pushing boundaries, stuff, maybe you’re starting to look at stuff that’s illegal, maybe you’re looking at stuff where you think like, wow, I’m gonna go to prison. They’re there for some reason, or somebody else might spend again, hours on romantic obsession, they’ve almost killed themselves twice over a lover leaving them, you know, whatever it is that it looks like, whatever it is, that’s happening. There’s some reason you’re there. Whatever that reason is a fine place to start for you bottom lines, what’s the thing are things that you absolutely know you need to stop doing? Or you are going to die literally or spiritually or psychologically? What’s got you here?
Margaret 26:14
And is it true when you look at something that is not abstinent based around sex and love addiction? One of the things that I remember hearing along the lines of the trainings and such I’ve done was, when is it getting in the way of functioning in your normal life, like when it is so out of balance? That you’re physically hurting yourself, that you’re maybe not getting to work, that you’re not showing up in relationships? Is that a big factor in again, figuring out what is okay and what is not okay, what is healthy for you, when you’re trying to establish that boundary or that inner circle for your recovery?
Casey Arrillaga 26:53
I’d say that’s, again, that’s probably the starting point for people is to look and say, you know, what is wildly out of balance. But this is, again, one of the reasons why I would tell anybody starting off, like, again, I’ll just go to the one that sort of the big umbrella program Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. They have a pamphlet called ‘Setting Bottom Lines’ that will just walk you through it, and have lists of things that people have noticed before and made bottom lines that you can look at and go like, oh, you know, a few of those do apply for me. Like I hadn’t even thought about how much I’ve been impacted by this behavior. Which I’d say right now, one of the biggest things that I see is dating and hookup apps are just like crack cocaine on your phone.
Margaret 27:31
Similar, to gambling, right? Everything’s online, everything’s accessible in your hand. Same with pornography, there’s no way to avoid it, in that when I came through. And I don’t know if we’re about the same age, when it came up. It was like an odd magazine, and maybe a VHS tape if one of your friends had one. Now, it’s like you look online, and that fast, it’s changing. I’m sure. The journey around pornography, gambling in a drastic way. You must have seen a huge change in your time of being in recovery.
Casey Arrillaga 28:02
It has been huge. And for the record, I’m 55. So yes, when I got into recovery, I would say that, for the most part, if people wanted pornography, either your friend had something, or you had to go to an adult bookstore downtown, which was usually pretty sketch, all this kind of stuff. And I would say right around the time I got into recovery, internet, pornography was just sort of becoming a thing. Like, there were no online videos that didn’t exist. But you know, you could download a photograph if you had enough time. And you know, went got a cup of coffee, while the photograph downloaded. And you’re probably going to be somewhere we had pay for it. But now yeah, there’s like an unlimited stream of free pornography, online, and people who are willing to do whatever online to get attention or monetize it in some way.
So yes, it’s one of the blessings and curses of the internet is it connects everybody who’s looking to connect with each other. And so, where there’s a customer, there is a supplier.
And if again, if I’m gonna say there’s probably a lot of people in sex and love addiction, who are working in the sex trade, and I don’t have any like moralizing stance around sex work, but just the idea that like, the vast majority of people who are involved in that kind of work are people who are, who need recovery, not necessarily around sex and love addiction, I would say there’s probably plenty of that. But also, people that are not recovered from sexual trauma and abuse that are replaying the trauma and abuse. And that will be motivation enough. So yeah, they’ll post a whole bunch of free pictures. And of course, once anything’s posted online, it’s there forever and will get circulated wherever it happens to go. So yeah, there’s this unlimited stream.
But then with dating slash hookup apps, there’s a very large supply of people who are looking to have anonymous sex, or to get deeply romantically entangled and people can get then to outrageous emotional affairs, and I have friends in the program who have said like, yeah, I was sleeping with prostitutes. I was dating multiple people. I was in multiple online relationships, just chat relationships with people all over the world that we’re all about romantic obsession. Some of them we didn’t even know each other’s true location. It wasn’t about like, let’s go hook up, it was just about getting that constant stream of affirmation. And all of this, you know, while the person in question is married, right, and, you know, I was in greater and greater accelerating addiction for the first 10 years of my marriage. And in there, I did start drinking alcohol. So, so much for my promise to myself.
Margaret 30:43
Yeah, well, that’s just evidence its disease in my humble opinion, you know, because you were adamant you wouldn’t. You never would want to hurt yourself, or people, you love it, you had a disdain for it. And that wasn’t enough to stop you when you found it. And it was giving you whatever you needed at the time, and then takes over and takes you down a path that’s out of your control. Because if you could have stopped it, you would have. Just like the sex addiction when you’re in the relationship with your wife for 10 years, or the sex love addiction.
Casey Arrillaga 31:10
Yeah. So, alcohol was what people know, alcohol burns, it was very, very much gasoline on the fire of my sex and love addiction. It was from the first step of alcohol; my brain would just start to accelerate in that direction. And I would give myself permission. I saw a guy walk out of a treatment center one time during the intake screening, because he suddenly realized that if he was there to detox and get sober from alcohol, which was his intention, that he wasn’t going to be able to pick people up as easily. And on that basis, he packed his stuff up, and he packed back in a suitcase, and he got in his car, and he drove away from his recovery. Because he realized if he got sober in this one area, he wouldn’t be able to act out in this other area. And that was too scary. So that was watching sex and love addiction take somebody out.
Margaret 31:54
No doubt co-occurring addictions are true.
Casey Arrillaga 31:58
Yeah, oh yeah, I think it’s all one big thing called addiction. And these are just the particular way it manifests, which is probably partly genetic, partly, you know, environment and how those things interact and all that kind of thing. Why does one drug or behavior hit a certain person, whereas another one does another one. My wife who is in recovery around food also was just at a big convention for Overeaters Anonymous. And she said, yeah, it was like, you know, whatever. 50 women and three men, and I think like, okay, so the more socially sanctioned, more admitted, I don’t I know plenty of women in sex and love recovery, for sure.
But something else to think about, you know, talk about genetics. Everybody doesn’t have the same number or ratio of tastebuds on their tongue. And there are some people where the average person might have like 1000 tastebuds in a given area. Some people have 10,000. Some people have 100,000. They call them super tasters. And most of them are women.
Margaret: Interesting.
Casey Arrillaga: So, what I say that like some people have a genetic push, where they’re more responsive, I mean, men are famously more responsive sexually where it’s like, okay, so there are there are more male sex addicts? Probably. Or they’re just more men, that will admit it. Hard to say. Are women who will say you have a problem with food and never talk about all the other stuff? More men who are like yeah, I have a problem with sex, but I’m not gonna talk about other stuff. We don’t know just like, all the stats on women are more prone to depression or, like almost all psychology it’s based on self-report. Do we know that more women are depressed? Do we know that more women are willing to admit that they’re depressed?
Margaret: Right
Casey Arrillaga: and there’s really currently almost no way to tell the difference?
Outro: Join me again next week for my final conversation with Casey, as he openly discusses recovery within his relationships, family, and career. We also discussed the books he’s written and the inspiration he had to become an author.
Margaret 34:20
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability and sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret swift Thompson. Until next time, please take care of you!
