Sexual addiction, often referred to as compulsive sexual behavior, involves persistent sexual thoughts, urges, or behaviors that feel difficult to control and continue despite negative personal, relational, and life consequences. These behaviors are not primarily about sex itself, but about regulating internal states such as emotional distress, attachment insecurity, shame, loneliness, anxiety, or disconnection. Over time, they interfere with intimacy, honesty, trust, health, and overall well-being.

Sexual behaviors in addiction are often compartmentalized, transactional, or disconnected from emotional and relational presence. You may seek validation through intensity, conquest, fantasy, or control rather than mutual connection. While these behaviors can temporarily alter mood or relieve distress, they are typically followed by withdrawal, emotional collapse, shame, and a return of the underlying pain that originally drove the cycle.

From a relational and attachment-based perspective, sexual addiction reflects an intimacy disruption rather than a failure of character or morality. Recovery involves moving beneath behavior to understand the attachment wounds, protective strategies, and emotional regulation patterns that sustain compulsivity, and developing the capacity for honesty, presence, secure attachment, and authentic intimacy. Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) is a structured questionnaire originally developed by Patrick J. Carnes to help identify patterns of sexually compulsive or addictive behavior that may be causing distress or harm in someone’s life. 

Contact me to discuss your experience and consider a private assessment.

Sexual addiction and its many expressions are, at their core, disruptions in intimacy—with self and with others. Its origins are often rooted in early developmental and family-of-origin attachment wounds, neglect, and trauma. Parts of the psyche learn to cope, manage, distract, numb, compartmentalize, or regulate emotional pain through sexual and relational acting-out behaviors. These behaviors are inherently disconnective and dissociative. They are frequently shrouded in shame and denial and often move underground, hidden from others and, over time, from the self.

Addiction is a once-adaptive coping strategy that has outlived its usefulness and now perpetuates harm. It is rooted in the past and fiercely guarded by protective parts of the psyche. These parts may rely on denial, rationalization, minimization, or distortion to avoid exposure, responsibility, or full awareness of the relational dishonesty, harm, and betrayal that are occurring.

These patterns do not excuse behavior, nor do they remove responsibility. Rather, they represent unconscious survival strategies learned in response to earlier relational injury and held in the deeper psyche and limbic brain. As Carl Jung observed, transformation requires making the unconscious conscious—bringing what has been hidden into awareness so that we can move toward wholeness and step out of repetitive patterns that diminish our capacity to live from our authentic self.

Recovery begins with awareness, honesty, and accountability. Paradoxically, true empowerment requires surrender—not of responsibility, but of entitlement, self-centered control, and defensive certainty, allowing deeper emotional truth and responsibility to emerge.

The recovery path asks for deeper introspection, courage, and a readiness to look within. It requires taking ownership of one’s actions while approaching the underlying wounds with compassion, curiosity, and responsibility. From this place, lasting change and authentic intimacy become possible.

You may be facing rupture, despair, dysregulation, confusion, and a relational crisis that feels overwhelming and unbearable. The discovery of a hidden sexual double life fractures core attachment needs and disrupts your sense of security, safety, identity, and reality. It creates a loss of trust that cannot be repaired with words or promises alone.

Betrayal trauma occurs when the person you rely on for emotional safety, attachment, and trust becomes the source of harm through secrecy, deception, or violations of relational agreements. 

Because the injury comes from someone relied upon for safety and connection, the nervous system responds with fear, confusion, and loss of trust in both the relationship and oneself. Betrayal trauma is not a weakness or overreaction—it is a normal neurobiological response to the loss of safety within an intimate bond.

Though you did not ask for this crisis, it offers a difficult and clarifying invitation: to individuate from a partner who is unsafe until they have done the recovery work needed to restore honesty and trust; to step away from the negative messages you may have internalized; to reclaim your self-worth; to name your boundary needs; and to clarify what is truly non-negotiable for your wellbeing. It is a call to strengthen what needs strengthening within yourself and to claim what your relationship requires—not only to survive, but to thrive.

T. S. Eliot, in Part II of East Coker, speaks of disorientation as part of the path itself toward transformation. Collapse and existential unknowing mark a liminal threshold. The way forward is a descent that precedes real formation, moving through individuation toward relational repair.

The outcome of your relationship is unknown. I often encourage partners to allow themselves a full year before making major decisions about the future. This gives space for healing, clarity, and a more grounded, non-reactive understanding and decision. 

Intimacy Is Always Defined Within the Relationship 

Here is one way I understand Authentic Intimacy. It is not a fixed definition, but something meant to be integrated, reshaped, and brought to life within your relationship. This is the recovery work couples are engaged in as they heal, rebuild connection, and move toward a more honest and secure relationship.

• Authentic intimacy is a living process shaped within the relationship itself, formed through honesty, emotional presence, and shared meaning over time. It emerges when partners are available, responsive, and engaged with one another—a meeting place where each person’s authentic self and the space between them become a co-created field of safety, connection, passion, and being truly known.

• Longer Understanding: Relationship intimacy is a living process that is defined within the relationship itself, shaped by the intentions, agreements, and emotional presence of two people over time. Drawing from Sue Johnson’s work in Attachment Theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), authentic intimacy involves the ongoing capacity to be accessible to one another, responsive to emotional needs and bids for connection, and engaged in the shared experience of the relationship, even when discomfort or uncertainty arises. Drawing from Martin Buber’s I–Thou relationship and Gestalt contact, authentic intimacy is understood as a way of meeting—person to person—rather than relating through roles, defenses, or projections. It is the capacity to be present, available, and responsive to one another in real time, allowing mutual influence and genuine encounter. In this view, intimacy is not something you achieve, but something that emerges through contact—when both partners show up as they are and allow themselves to be affected by the other. It is both the space between two people and the space they create together, formed through honesty, vulnerability, and mutual meaning-making. Intimacy is not simply closeness or sexual contact, but the felt sense that your partner is emotionally present, available, and there for you. When these qualities are missing, couples often default into protection and distance, even while longing for connection.

There is a bit of mystery to relationship intimacy.  Not unlike quantum physics: the closer you look, the less certain the object becomes. Yet clarity of intention, purpose, and vision in relational intimacy is needed. 

Many couples operate from a faulty or misguaded intimacy template, often unconscious, living out old messages and expectations that eventually become disruptive. Many are locked into patterns that long for connection but default into defended and protective stances when those needs go unmet. The yearning for connection never disappears. Something feels off, a kind of False Self Relating, and the path toward the desired attachment connection feels lost. An uneasy status quo settles in.

Often the starting place is to describe what intimacy is not in your relationship. 

Authentic intimacy is multilayered. It has its own wave–particle duality: the space between two people and the space they join together. It is the shared meaning-making between partners through everything they bring to the relationship, including attachment and sexual histories, nervous system capacities, personal values, imperfections, and beauty. 

Authentic intimacy is a vulnerable act of connection. We could call it courageous intimacy. It is a spiritual journey as well as the daily act of filling the dishwasher.

Sex is not necessarily intimacy. Many people carry confusion about this truth. A number of men in my office have said, “Sex is love for me.” Sex can be a vibrant and essential part of connective intimacy, but sex without relational and emotional openness and vulnerability is not intimate sex. One man said to his partner, after years of compartmentalized and transactional sex, “I want sex to be an extension of my connection with you. No closed gates.”

I do not define intimacy for couples. There is no single understanding of intimacy or one way to reach it. It is shaped by the explicit and implicit intentions and agreements between two people. Every relationship, spoken or unspoken, forms its own relational contract.

Qualities that support authentic intimacy include:

• Honesty and trust

• Mutual respect

• Attunement to self and other

• Knowing your partner is there for you

• Accessibility and presence

• Safety

• Passion and spontaneity

• A sense of partner mystery

The deeper question is: Do you have the awareness to use what your relationship mirrors back to you? Can you examine yourself, be honest, and take personal ownership?

A relationship is a place to become more self-aware and accountable.

A place to rediscover your self-worth and authentic self.

A place to practice connective empathy with your partner, to be generous, to tolerate discomfort, and to enter the unknown.

Should you begin with Individual Recovery Therapy, Partner Individual Therapy, or Couples Recovery Therapy?

When sexual compulsivity, secrecy, or a double life is present in a relationship, I recommend working with a Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist (CSAT) to receive an accurate assessment, appropriate treatment, and a clear recovery path. 

Many couples come to see me after working with providers who were not trained in sexual addiction and betrayal trauma, which often leads to ongoing relational harm and leaves the core sexual problem unaddressed.

A thorough assessment is necessary to understand what has taken place and what recovery requires for both partners. When the acting-out partner begins the assessment process, I ask that their partner attend one of the first three meetings. Without this, the relationship can remain imbalanced—one partner doing recovery work while the other continues to carry the pain of betrayal, unanswered questions, and unresolved mistrust.

Effective recovery requires assessing what each partner needs individually and what is needed together. This includes naming what has occurred with full honesty, addressing the impact on both partners, and aligning the recovery process with shared values, intentions, and relational goals. From there, we can determine whether individual therapy, partner support, couples work, or a combination of these approaches is the most appropriate path forward.

There may be situations where one or both partners are already working with other therapists. In those cases, coordination of providers and services is often necessary, and referrals to additional or specialized care may be recommended to ensure treatment is effective. This assessment helps determine the appropriate level of care and supports a coordinated and well organized treatment process.

The Liminal Intimacy Recovery Program is designed to help you stay in meaningful contact with your partner and your relationship while engaging in your individual recovery process.

I have developed a recovery model that supports both partners and the relationship itself. Beginning with a thorough assessment, I work with each partner individually while also attending to the needs of the relationship as recovery unfolds. Together, we design a personalized recovery plan that is responsive to your history, your current crisis, and your shared intimacy needs and goals.

This integrated approach helps stabilize the relationship through confusion, betrayal trauma, triggering situations, and the disruptive patterns that keep couples circling the same painful terrain. It offers a way out of denial, shame, and defensiveness—and a movement toward honesty, self-reflection, emotional stability, and authenticity. From there, the work supports the possibility of rebuilding a foundation grounded in secure attachment and fulfilling intimacy.

I also work with individuals in recovery as a primary focus. As part of the assessment process, I request that partners attend one of the first three sessions. At key points in recovery, partners may also be invited to participate in individual sessions to assess relational challenges, progress, and areas needing support. In later stages of recovery, couples therapy may be offered to strengthen connection, repair ruptures, and cultivate authentic intimacy.

I have counseled and guided individuals and couples through the wilderness of sexual addiction, betrayal, intimacy disruption, and attachment trauma. It is not an easy path—but it is one that can be walked. Together, we design a recovery program shaped by your participation, your values, and the relational future you are seeking.

Liminal intimacy is the space between relational rupture and repair—a threshold where uncertainty exists and the future of the relationship is not yet known. When addiction, secrecy, or betrayal can no longer continue, crisis becomes a turning point. Out of that disorientation, a new path can emerge—one that asks for honesty, responsibility, presence, and curiosity about yourself and your relationship.