Addict Nation (18 page)

Two hallmarks of love and/or romance addiction are grandiosity and drama. When Edwards teamed up with his mistress, Rielle Hunter, the pair whipped up a staggering display of both. His obsessive relationship with this woman he met on a street corner destroyed his political career, his marriage, and his reputation and branded him as a serial liar, a cheat, and a cad the world over.
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Healthy Versus Sick Love

How do we distinguish between addictive love patterns and healthy ones? I would define healthy love as being grounded in self-love, which is totally different from narcissism. If you love and respect yourself, if you have integrity, dignity, and autonomy, then you don’t need to
use
a love relationship to bolster your fragile ego, or indeed
use
it for any purpose. It just is. Healthy love involves sharing yourself, exposing your core being, communicating with your lover, and supporting him or her as a life partner with
no
ulterior motives. Easier said than done.

In addictive love, the lover is used as a
tool
to achieve goals, enhance self-image, or solve internal problems. The act of love becomes a
portal
to escape, just like a drug. This is something I’ve seen myself do over and over again and just recently, after researching this subject, was able to see this pattern objectively and put it into words. For example, I’ve often felt an enhanced sense of self-esteem when I was seen out with a very attractive lover. Beauty is fantastic! But when you “use” your partner’s beauty for your own purposes, as opposed to simply celebrating that beauty for what it is, then you are engaging in an addictive love pattern. Being obsessed with your lover’s looks (or your own) might even be described as a
beauty blackout
! Addicts are often desperate to stuff painful internal issues and will sometimes compensate for their inner turmoil by making everything look perfect on the outside.

“Our brains have the ability to manufacture their own chemical ‘hits,’ which are just as addicting as ingested substances, perhaps even more so.”

—Dave, recovering sex addict

Risky Behavior Enhances the Love Addict’s High

One big reason love and sex addicts create so much drama and practice risky behavior is that all that excitement enhances the high. In short, the addictive lover uses the relationship like a bottle of booze or a pill. In
Is It Love or Is It Addiction?,
psychologist and addiction specialist Brenda Schaeffer writes, “It has now been confirmed that the rush of intoxication is associated with the neurological release of endorphins and many other mood elevators . . . In addictive love, we unconsciously use the objects of love, sex, or romance to stimulate the chemicals in the brain to produce the high . . . we arouse ourselves with the excitement, fear, rage, or melodrama that exemplify addictive love.”
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In this respect, it appears John Edwards was on a bender.

The shocking sex scandal reached a crescendo when word broke that a
sex tape
allegedly existed, purportedly involving John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. The Washington beltway gasped, along with the rest of the country. Who in their right mind would even think about making a sex tape with their secret mistress when they were married with children and trying to become president of the United States? The only answer I can think of is: a love addict, or a pair of love addicts. What a nifty way to ratchet up the endorphin-producing excitement, fear, and dramarama the love addict craves.

Romance Versus Recklessness

Our culture indoctrinates us to become love and romance addicts. It’s what sells movie tickets and the books we read around the swimming pool. Love addicts have a compulsion to romanticize ordinary situations, seeking out fairy-tale story lines by embellishing mundane reality with fantasy, which creates the rush. For women, a common fantasy is being rescued by a strong man who will become their champion and magically solve all their problems. What did Rielle Hunter tell
GQ
magazine in her sit-down to discuss her relationship with “Johnny”? “I had this thing in my head like a lot of women, where you want your man to stand up on a cliff and scream ‘I LOVE HER.’ You know, the knight in shining armor.”
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That was the fantasy. The reality was her scandal-plagued lover, Johnny, was married and going on national television trying to smooth it over by telling the American people there was only one woman he ever loved, his wife, Elizabeth. Rielle says after one such pronouncement John called her to apologize, allegedly adding, “It doesn’t mean anything.” Again, the split-screen life, maintained through lies, is such a hallmark of addiction. And it creates so much wreckage.

Sometimes I look at these scandals and try to give the participants the benefit of the doubt, wondering,
Hey, it’s messy love, but could it
still be love
? Why can’t addictive love or addictive sex be compatible with true love? Because you can’t express truth while swimming in a sea of lies! At the heart of profound love is truth, sharing with someone else the truth of who you are, opening up, revealing, becoming vulnerable, letting the “other” see you without a filter. Deception, by definition, means hiding, misrepresenting, building walls, and presenting falsehood as truth. Lying kills intimacy because at the moment you should be sharing, you’re withholding. When lying is a way of life, it destroys your ability to really love anyone.

With Almost All Addicts, Lying Is a Way of Life

Tiger Woods’s deception increased exponentially as his cheating— and his apparent disease of sex addiction—progressed. It would seem he was not just lying to his wife, but also to his alleged mistresses and to the public. Days before his sex scandal broke, the superstar father of two young children was asked by a TV interviewer, “Family first and golf second. Always be like that?” “Always,” Tiger replied, essentially lying to a global audience.
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As a bevy of waitresses, strippers, swimsuit models, nightclub hostesses, and porn stars came forward claiming to have slept with Tiger, some of the alleged mistresses expressed shock, saying they thought they were the
only
mistress with whom he was cheating on his wife. A porn star who goes by the name Joslyn James released a slew of X-rated text messages in a bid to prove her claim that she had a three-year relationship with Tiger, during which time she insists she was convinced she was the only “other” other woman. While she may be guilty of naiveté, Tiger’s alleged behavior took “compartmentalization” to new depths. He masterfully kept each woman ignorant of the others as if they were toys to be put in separate drawers. It was a
tour de force
of organization . . . until the toys came to life.

Rationalizations “R” Us

Addiction becomes the dictator of the mind, body, and soul, the authoritative voice that commands the addict as a dictator would his slave. The commands go through the addict’s mind and come out as rationalizations. Addicts are the most superb rationalizers because they constantly practice at justifying bizarre and outrageous behavior.

When Tiger Woods emerged back on the world stage after more than a month in rehab, he gave the following speech.

Tiger Woods, Press Statement, February 19, 2010

“I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only of myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.”

In one breath, Tiger listed many of the key themes surrounding addictive behavior: a sense of entitlement, a sense of being different, a sense that the normal rules don’t apply, which twelve-step programs call “terminally unique,” and a disrespect for the boundaries of conventional behavior.

A Key Tenet of Recovery Is Making Amends, Apologizing

In recovery we don’t just apologize when it’s convenient to do so, but—especially—when it’s inconvenient. We also don’t withhold apologies because we feel that person has also hurt us or is somehow unworthy. Making amends is one of the most powerful steps in sobriety because it allows us to reconnect with another person, shed our painful guilt, and begin anew with a clean slate. It’s all about taking responsibility for “our” actions and keeping our side of the street clean. It really doesn’t matter what the other person did or who he or she is.

Several of Tiger’s alleged mistresses insist they really believed they were in a serious relationship with Woods and—in the wake of revelations of an avalanche of sexual indiscretions—say they, too, feel betrayed. Some have wept on national television. X-rated film star Joslyn James demanded an apology from Woods.

“He saw her several times each month for three years. He sent her over 1,000 texts. He told her, ‘The great thing is, we have a lifetime of this,’ and ‘You please me more than anyone ever has or ever will.’ . . . He needs to apologize because he told her that he loved her, that he was only with her and his wife, that there was no one else. . . . She’s not like a used Coke can that some people throw out their window as they’re driving along like, ‘OK, let’s just forget about that.’ No, this is a human being that has feelings.”

—Gloria Allred, attorney for Joslyn James
(aka Veronica Siwik-Daniels) on
Issues,
February 19, 2010
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These women may be what cynics describe as “low-hanging fruit,” the easy prey of a rich and famous man, but so what? Tiger apologized to his wife, his children, his fans, and even fellow golfers. Why not apologize if you’ve been intimate with someone under false pretenses and they feel hurt? Tiger’s apparent refusal to say “I’m sorry” to these alleged mistresses speaks to his continuing objectification of these women, his treatment of them as factotums who were there to serve a function. But he’s not alone. Despite all the advances women have made, misogyny is still rampant in America. You might even say sexism is a cultural addiction all its own. Today, most Americans continue to favor one gender over the other despite the hurtful or damaging effects on the society as a whole.

America’s Porn Habit

There has been a sea change in our culture in the last quarter of a century. One difference? Pornography. Pornography exploded when VCRs arrived in the late 1970s, allowing consumers to take it home and watch it without the fear of being observed by a neighbor or colleague. “The first thing that a lot of people did when they got their VCR was rent or purchase an adult movie.
Deep Throat. Devil
in Miss Jones
.
Behind the Green Door. Debbie Does Dallas.
That’s what they asked for,” a porn-industry trade magazine publisher told
60
Minutes
, adding that, until the advent of home video players, “most people had never seen an adult movie, because they had to go out in public, to a theater, to see it.”
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Although statistics in the porn arena can be unreliable, given the shady nature of the biz, it’s estimated that—today—Hollywood releases something like 11,000 pornos a year—nearly twenty times the number of mainstream movies released in theaters.
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Porn’s popularity went into the stratosphere with the arrival of the Internet, which made graphic sex available with the click of a mouse. It is widely reported that more than 70 percent of men in the eighteen to thirty-four age bracket visit a pornographic site in a typical month.
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Don’t believe it? Just Google the word “porn.” One hundred fifty
million
links will pop up.