sexual material and advances.
This book is based on actual clinical experience, research, and interactions we have had with people seeking help. We have highlighted specific issues, changed names, and combined tales to both underscore the topic being examined and to protect the identities of the persons involved. But overall what is written represents the people and the real problems we encounter in our professional lives every day.
If you are seeking information about and/or relief from addictive sexual behaviors for yourself, for a loved one, or for a client, this book is for you. It doesn’t matter if you are married or single, male or female, straight or gay, or anything in between. If your life has been adversely affected by your own or someone else’s digitally driven compulsive sexual behavior, then the information contained herein can help you to recognize, understand, and heal your problem.
INTRODUCTION
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND OUR EVER-CHANGING WORLD
When I was in school, it took me two days to type my senior term paper. Every time I made a typing error, it took me about five minutes to fix it. And this was after I’d spent twenty or thirty hours in the school library, poring over the card catalog. Yesterday my granddaughter started her paper at 9 a.m., and she was done by 3 p.m. Her research took about twenty minutes, and any changes she wanted to make took about half a second. As a grandmother, I don’t know if I’m in love with digital technology, but I sure would’ve liked it when I was in high school.
—Martha, sixty-four, grandmother
When I was a kid, my dad worked overseas for three months at a time. Home for a month, gone for three; home for a month, gone for three. We sent letters back and forth every week, but most of the time it felt like he wasn’t a real part of our family. And I know that my mom really felt abandoned. Today, I’m in the armed forces serving overseas, and it’s totally different for me and my family. I see my wife every day on Skype. We talk about everything using webcams and texts, as if I’m right there with her. Last week she took her iPhone to my kid’s baseball game and turned on the webcam. I watched the whole game. It was awesome. I even went to ice cream with the family afterward, even though I’m thousands of miles away.
—Ray, thirty-seven, Army ranger
Statistics tell us that there are well over two billion Internet users worldwide.1 Asia leads the way with more than a billion users. The United States has over 273 million users (more than three-quarters of the population). The least technologically developed continent, Africa, has just over 167 million Internet users, which is about 15 percent of that continent’s population. However, the number of African users is rapidly growing, increasing by 3,600 percent since the year 2000. Overall, more than one-third of the world’s population is online, and that percentage increases daily.
For those actively involved in life online, it is difficult to fathom human existence before the Internet. If you travel a lot for work or pleasure you are undoubtedly grateful that smartphones, webcams, and social media provide easy and inexpensive ways for you to keep in touch with family, friends, coworkers, and the world at large. Digital technology is also incredibly useful if you’re in or developing a long-term, long-distance relationship, as texting and webcams allow you to interact as often as you’d like and in many of the same ways as when you’re in the same room. Even if you’re single, digital technology is a boon, allowing you to seek partners and e-date—even to have virtual sex—with less focus than ever on who lives or works where. Today people residing in different countries or even on different continents can realistically meet and fall in love, with the vast majority of their relationship facilitated by digital devices.
It’s not all about romance, either. Today, instantaneous access to breaking news and other current information is virtually unlimited. Online discussion groups allow free exchange of ideas and support for thousands of hobbies, interests, and personal concerns. People with chronic illnesses can greet their doctor with computer printouts detailing the latest treatments for their specific medical problem. And, perhaps most important of all, digital interconnectivity lets us witness and even participate in historic events from far away. In short, more people have more access to more “life” than ever before. And they can find all of it easily, instantly, and usually for free.
QUICKENING THE PACE
Have you ever watched a classic movie or read a nineteenth-century novel and been disappointed at the molasses-slow pace? Did you know that current television programs and movies have more and shorter scenes than those made just a few years ago? Rapid scene changes have become our entertainment norm. Inexorably, and without being aware of it, we have grown accustomed to a much faster pace in books, on television, and on the silver screen. And thanks to the Internet and other forms of digital technology, this quickening pace has spilled over into nearly every facet of our existence. These days we just don’t have the time or the patience to wait for much of anything. We want what we want and we want it right now, and digital technology obliges.
A hundred years ago the tempo of life was very different. A visit to a relative who lived ten miles away was a major trip. It required an entire weekend to get there, visit, and return. Today that’s a fifteen minute drive. A one week turnaround in response to a letter was once considered quick. Today, emails and texts arrive instantly and can be responded to in seconds. It used to be that major news events took many days to fully reach the public. For instance, after the “unsinkable” Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the north Atlantic on April 15, 1912, it was several days before most people in the United States were aware of the tragedy. In contrast, almost a century later, on January 15, 2009, when U.S. Airways flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River, much of the world watched the rescue of passengers either online or on television as it happened.
THE PORNOGRAPHY EXPLOSION
Here is a basic fact about being human: as a species, we hunger for stimulation and gratification. These are actually part of the primary drives that ensure our species’ survival. For instance, if we don’t eat and have sex—both of which are usually highly stimulating and gratifying—we don’t survive. As such, it is hardly surprising that digital technology, no matter its original purpose, is sometimes adapted and used for sexual gratification. One of the more obvious manifestations of this is online pornography.
Nobody knows exactly how much digital porn is out there or how often it is viewed. Reliable porn-related statistics are hard to find, primarily because the highly politicized nature of porn causes profoundly different sources to occasionally distort the real numbers. For example, the porn industry encourages the idea that it has billions of users worldwide. Such a perception helps to foster porn’s legitimacy and to raise potential advertising revenues. At the same time, anti-porn activists also tend to quote inflated figures in an attempt to point out the “all-pervasive” nature of the pornography “problem.”
What is crystal clear, regardless of distortions in the actual numbers, is that more people than ever can access an ever-expanding selection of sexually explicit materials in many ways. Furthermore, access to sexual content is no longer limited to private settings like a person’s home or office. In short, pornography is now ubiquitous—accessed anytime, anywhere, with content ranging from seemingly benign traditional pinup-type photos to graphic videos depicting extreme sexual violence, degradation, and more. Yes, the digital porn explosion has caused many traditional porn outlets—adult bookstores peep shows, and XXX movie houses—to wane in popularity, but porn itself is more popular than ever.
ONLINE SEXUAL EXPLORATION
Pornography is hardly the lone digital sexual outlet. The anonymous,
