"The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" – Oscar Wilde

Dr. Douglas Weiss is an authority on sex addiction. Not only is he the president of the American Association for Sex Addiction Therapy, he’s a former sex addict himself – now successfully sober for more than 21 years. Weiss, an author, speaker and the clinical director of the Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., has appeared on Oprah, Good Morning America and 20/20.

His latest book, Addicted to Adultery: The Other Reason Spouses Cheat, couldn’t have been more timely. It coincided with Tiger Woods's announcement that he's a sex addict and his subsequent move into a rehab clinic in Mississippi. And it doesn’t stop there. Our pop-culture landscape more than ever resembles a brightly lit Sodom and Gomorrah. The key indicator? Infidelities abound among the beautiful people.

Ethan Hawke was rumoured to have cheated on Uma Thurman with their nanny, and then Jude Law, trendily enough, cheated on Sienna Miller with their nanny. Eric Benet inexplicably cheated on the flawlessly beautiful Halle Berry and was reportedly treated for sex addiction at one point in the marriage.

Naturally enough, non-famous and much less beautiful people are following suit. For instance, research from the Journal of Research in Personality suggests that roughly 30 to 60 per cent of all married individuals in the United States will engage in marital infidelity at some point during their marriage. All this madness lends credence to Dr. Weiss’s observation: “I think we’re going to see either total deterioration of our society due to sexuality or there will be a re-establishment of sexuality having meaning.” The smart money, alas, is on the train wreck.

TORO caught up with Dr. Weiss to discuss sex and neural pathways, the naturalness or unnaturalness of monogamy and one man’s erotic attachment to cows.

Q: I realize that you’ve been studying, treating and writing about sex addiction for over 20 years – and yet, suddenly, this topic is everywhere.
A: We can actually go back and thank people like Bill Clinton because he really put sex addiction on the map. Before that we had a few religious figures who had fallen, but Clinton brought it to a mass audience. And since, we’ve had the various governors, and of course the top sports figure in the world getting help for his sex addiction. So yes, it certainly is becoming more mainstream.

We have tons of 12-step support groups for sex addicts but we’re going to see more and more of those. And, actually, Canada needs more as well, as I have a large number of Canadian clients who call me on a regular basis and who come down and see me for treatment. So Canada could use some more.

Q: Is it your belief that sex addiction has always been around but that it has gained more attention as celebrated figures get into high-profile sex scandals.
A: It’s always been around. You can go back thousands of years and find sex addiction. But what’s happening is we are getting a better handle on it and understanding the neurological aspects to sex addiction, and [learning] more details about what’s happening in the neural pathways and just how that happens and why they get hijacked.

For instance, alcoholism, too, has been around since the beginning of time. But then in the 1930s they started looking at it as a disease and understanding it and studying the brain and seeing how the THIQ [Tetrahydroisoquinoline] in the brain actually makes the person want to drink more and more. So now we have the science to understand and treat alcoholism and it’s an acceptable and understood process.

And we’re now in much the same stage of the sex-addiction movement. We now have a solid scientific understanding of how and why it occurs.

Q: I definitely want to discuss what scientists have found out about sex addiction. But first let me ask you about Tiger Woods. He recently announced that he is seeking treatment for sex addiction. Based on what you know of his predicament, would you characterize him as a sex addict?
A: Well, I’d say he believes that he’s a sex addict. And when you look at the profiles of the people that he picks, it suggests that he’s a type of adulterer that we call the “hunter cheater” in my book Addicted to Adultery. The women fit a very specific profile: they have a certain age range, a certain look, a lower economic standing. There are a lot of parallels in his victim profile. He’s an opportunist but with a very specific set of requirements that he’s after – they have to be gorgeous, a certain race and a specific socio-economic status. Those are his girls.

Q: What’s the difference between a sex addict and someone who is, for instance, just very high-spirited and has an active sex life?
A: That’s a valid question, because you can certainly have a guy or gal who just really enjoys sex, and that’s wonderful. The difference for the sex addict is that it’s about connecting to it – to the sex, not to another soul. So the sex addict disconnects and goes to an altered state, and even during sex with a real person will often go into a fantasy world to connect to an object. And so the addict is trying to get a hit, get a fix. They are not trying to connect to give themselves to somebody.

Q: What causes someone to become a sex addict?
A: There are several dimensions. Eighty per cent are survivors of sexual abuse, so that is a factor. The other 15 or 20 per cent get there largely through the biological process: They get the orgasm and they attach it to an object world, and they do that thousands of times. And so they develop that neural pathway and hijack their pleasure highway to connect to an object. And we call those biological addicts.

We’ve got six types: the biological; the psychological, arising out of abuse and abandonment issues; sexual trauma; spiritual-based sex addicts, i.e., looking for God in all the wrong places; the anorexic sex addict, which could be a whole other article at some point and which, interestingly, is very prevalent in the Canadian population – most Canadians who suffer from sex addiction are sexually anorexic. (And the other two groups that suffer from the same malady are cops and pilots. These are people who avoid emotional and spiritual and physical intimacy with their spouse but yet act out with pornography or others.) And then, finally, there’s also the mood disorder individual who has chemical depression, manic depression or cyclothymic disorder and they actually use the ejaculation or orgasm response to medicate themselves neurologically, and in the process they become a biological sex addict.

Q: You write that the endorphins and enkephalins that flood our brain upon orgasm create a “pleasure cocktail” that may well be four times more powerful than morphine and that this chemical bath, and the images that trigger it, has a profound impact upon the prefrontal cortex. Can you elaborate, especially in regard to the role that this plays in sexual addiction?
A: The way that sex was designed was that when you had that hit you would literally glue to the soul of the other person, not just the body. And that’s what would help keep the marriage bond as you go through life and raising kids and all that pretty difficult stuff, all the ups and downs. And so there’s a neurological attachment – even, one might say, a neurological glue that bonds you to your spouse.

But you can also bond to the wrong things. I’ve treated men that thought that cows were attractive, literally, because they were ejaculating and using cows for sexual purposes. It doesn’t matter what’s at the other end as long as you’re looking at it. And that’s why people develop fetishes. You get the athlete wearing women’s clothes. We had a guy like that in the States about 10 years ago. So how’d they get there? Because when they were 10 they neurologically reinforced the bond to women’s clothes.

Q: That being the case, what are the ramifications for pornography and a similarly Pavlovian response?
A: Then it’s the pornographic images that become the neurological glue, and they can weaken you to the point where you seek a prostitute or a woman that’s more on the cheap side. And if you look at Tiger Woods’s prototypes, they look like the pornography kind of people. And so the probability of neurological reinforcement leading into that direction is really high.

Q: You write that there are not only physical prototypes or triggers but also emotional prototypes that sex addicts pick up on – i.e., “a sex addict can smell emotional energy, similar to a shark smelling blood.” Can you elaborate?
A: Yes, you can smell a weak woman. You can smell a borderline personality disorder. You can smell a needy woman and an uncared-for woman. You can smell it, working through a kind of sixth sense. And the sex addict thinks, “Oh, I can do that.” They sense the opportunity, and opportunity shows up in those ways.

Q: I’d like to move on to some broader questions that relate to the topic of sex addiction. For instance, there was an interesting article this past November in Maclean's magazine entitled "What Canadians Really Believe." A national survey by Angus Reid Strategies revealed that Canadians had, for the most part, progressive attitudes toward sexuality – with two thirds stating that gay relationships, sex between unmarried men and women, and having babies outside of marriage were all “morally acceptable.” Yet just 15 per cent of respondents condoned marital infidelity. Do you find that surprising?
A: I met a woman from France recently who was shooting a documentary and she was espousing all sorts of progressive ideas, much like what you just presented – it’s okay to have babies outside of marriage, and sex outside of marriage and so on. And when I meet these kinds of progressive-minded individuals I say, “OK, so you’re married and it’s OK for your husband to have a girlfriend half your age and to have a child with her, right?” And the reply is always, “Oh no, no, no – I don’t mean that.”

My point is that there are people who are OK with sex destroying the lives of others but just so long as it doesn’t destroy their own lives. In other words, there is a position that, philosophically, we don’t want to be anyone’s judge and so let’s just let everyone do what they want to do – which is OK, but there’s always this caveat: if you’re marrying me, you better not do anything with your sex organs that I don’t know about.

So I feel that there’s a duplicity there in the sense that we are sexually progressive philosophically but we are sexually conservative relationally. And that’s the disconnect that our Western world is moving toward because of sexual addiction. So there are sexual rules and standards that apply to me and to my family but not to the rest of society. And I think we’re going to see either total deterioration of our society due to sexuality or there will be a re-establishment of sexuality having meaning.

Q: While there seems to be a moral consensus that cheating is wrong, it nonetheless seems to be quite prevalent. I found research that suggested roughly 30 to 60 per cent of all married individuals in the United States will engage in marital infidelity at some point during their marriage. Further, the authors of this piece suggested that these numbers may even be conservative, when you consider that half of all marriages end in divorce and that people are more likely to stray as relationships fall apart. How do you account for such a high rate of marital infidelity when it is, by all accounts, morally unacceptable?
A: Well, let’s suppose you have 50 per cent of the men sexually addicted in a culture. A good portion of them are going to wind up in adultery. Now, here’s the thing about looking at these kinds of numbers: a) there’s no one doing in-depth studies on sex addiction, and b) if there were, people would lie about it. So there’s really no foolproof way of assessing that.

However, I do think that since the advent of the Internet we can statistically show that child molestation has gone up. We can statistically show that sex crimes have gone up. So we could conclude on that same continuum that sexual infidelity would probably have gone up too. I think that’s a logical jump. But I can just tell you first-hand that sex addiction is really growing. Let’s put it this way: I have job security.

Q: How do Canadians compare to Americans in regard to the various ways that sex addiction is being treated?
A: Canada is probably about 10 years behind the States in terms of recovery groups. On a related note, I’m the president of the American Association for Sex Addiction Therapy. And we’ve got some Canadians in our organization who are getting certified; I’ve got two in supervision right now. But we need therapists to get certified in this because we find a large number of Canadians either flying down or phoning in to get treatment in our practice.

Q: Do you think that human beings are naturally monogamous?
A: I think that can only be answered, probably, in a broader context of the spiritual norms of a culture. Whether they are tribal Indians or Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or whatever. But we do see in every culture an influence toward monogamy. So if you took the populations, regardless of religious beliefs, polygamy is rare. Now I’m not saying that we all practise serial monogamy. We just divorce and remarry. But the idea of one man, one woman is universal. It is best for one man and one woman to raise a child. So the case for the natural state of man does incline toward monogamy.

Q: You say the natural state inclines toward monogamy and yet in all societies and even what we might call the more traditional or even fundamentalist societies there seems to be an appetite for sexual variety – even in the face of the most extreme punishments imaginable, like stoning, the severing of appendages, exile, burning at the stake, etc. – which suggests to me that the desire for sexual variety is a deep-seated characteristic of human beings.
A: I think that in a lower state of mankind sexual impulses run out of control but that in a higher state there is a desire for a sexual relationship that has meaning. And a lower state desires a sexual relationship without meaning. And those lower and higher registers exist in every culture.

Q: Let’s talk about practical considerations. If you think that you may be a sex addict, or if you suspect that your partner is a sex addict, what’s the best course of action?
A: If they think they’re a sex addict they’ve already tried to stop. They are living in a secret world and have guilt about what they are doing and feel conflicted. If they’re the partner, they feel helpless and overwhelmed because they’ve confronted it several times and it doesn’t seem to change. Those would be the emotional states of both those people.

For the addict, they can go on our website and for nine bucks they can find out what type of sex addict they are and the practical steps for each type. There are also free newsletters that they can get, along with support groups in various Canadian provinces.

Q: Sex addiction is something that you’ve experienced first-hand. Can you tell me about that personal journey, and how it shaped your practice and informs your work today?
A: Well, I was conceived in adultery, and that’s not a good start. And then the guy who got [my mother] pregnant abandoned her. I was put in foster homes. I was sexually abused. So I was susceptible to sex addiction from pretty much the first DNA cell. And by the time I was in high school I was living with a 22-year-old model. I mean, I was totally out of control – drugs, sex and all that stuff. So getting sober from sex addiction before sex addiction was recognized was a little more challenging than it is today. Today there's much more material, there are counsellors that can help and so on.

I became aware of sex addiction when I was going to school and working in a treatment centre. And I thought, “Wait a minute, this all sounds familiar.” And then I just began applying the principles of having accountability, being honest and trying to work through all the various steps, and I just got sober. I identified the tools and applied them. And that’s what people need to do, and why it’s good to know what type of sex addict you are so that they can get better.

Dr. Weiss offers three-day intensives and telephone counselling from his office in Colorado Springs. He also speaks internationally on men's, women's and couples issues. To receive more information on these services follow the links above or call the Heart to Heart Counseling Center at 719-278-3708.