When Sex Addiction Is Reclaiming Your Identity

Issue Fourteen

He came in slouched. Shoulders folded forward.

Voice quiet, almost apologetic.

“I’ve been struggling with sex addiction for years,” he said.

“I thought I had it under control, but it’s back again.”

He looked defeated — a man at war with his own desire.

Ashamed, exhausted, ready to surrender.

As we spoke, I listened not just to his words, but to what lived underneath them.

We began to trace the thread backward — to where it all began.

He first discovered porn as a teenager.

Later, he began seeing sex workers.

He said he didn’t know why — that it just “became a pattern.”

But as we explored, a deeper truth surfaced.

Each of those choices wasn’t just about pleasure or impulse.

It was defiance.

A way to push back against the suffocating moral and emotional constraints he’d grown up with.

A way to feel — even for a moment — that his choices were his own.

He had been trying to reclaim an identity outside the edges of a moral value system that didn’t feel right to him anymore.

He had grown up in a strict, insular family and community.

He was denied the right to choose what he believed, how he dressed, who he spoke to, what he learned — especially about his body.

“I was always told what to do,” he said, looking down. Then, after a long pause, almost whispering:

“But it was as if the porn websites were the only ones asking me what I liked. What I wanted.”

There was shame in the way he said it. And something else too: a quiet plea to be understood.

Because for him, porn wasn’t just a compulsion. It was, in a strange way, the first space where he had a voice.

A space — however imperfect — where choice belonged to him.

Later, when he began seeing sex workers, something similar happened.

The encounters were not transactional in the way we’re taught to assume.

He described them as deeply emotionally nurturing — moments of true intimacy.

“They listened,” he said.

“They let me talk about anything I wanted. things that mattered. Not just sex. Everything.”

What he was seeking wasn’t escape.

It was sanctuary.

He had never been given the tools to explore intimacy safely.

So he sought it in the only places that felt free from judgment.

He hadn’t been “addicted.”

He had been claiming freedom in the only way he knew how as a young person.

Tears welled, not from sorrow, but recognition. For the first time, he wasn’t condemning that boy — he was thanking him.

When that realisation landed, something extraordinary happened.

He sat upright.

His shoulders opened.

His voice changed.

He said, “I actually feel proud of that boy now. He was trying to be free.”

And in that moment, the shame that had weighed him down for years — the guilt, the disgust, the endless self-criticism — began to dissolve.

What replaced it was a spark.

A sense that something once buried was now waking up.

I could feel it: the beginning of a different story forming.

But I didn’t know yet how it would end.

Recovery doesn’t always require a diagnosis.

Sometimes, it just needs understanding —

the language of desire, the reclaiming of its energy,

the spark that says,

“I exist. I choose. I matter.”

When we understand that even our most complex and uncomfortable patterns are a language — a map —

we begin to meet ourselves, and our past,

with curiosity and reverence.

And from there, we find our way back to ourselves.

As he stood to go, he paused —

then smiled, a small, knowing smile.

He said — words I’ll never forget:

“If I could claim my identity once… I can do it again.”

He left my room transformed.