Nick T thought he’d reached bottom when he dived into the dumpster next to his home at 3am to root out a porn DVD he’d hurled in there in self-disgust at his compulsive masturbation habit, brought it in, cleaned it off, made use of it then tossed it back out. He did that three times that night.



But Nick’s real rock bottom, he later realized, came when he was on a business trip to Tokyo and went through his call-girl routine.

“I would check into my hotel room, pace around as the obsession built up, pick up the phone to order a prostitute, then curl up in the fetal position terrified that she would show up, and equally terrified she wouldn’t. After she’d visited, I’d be so unhappy, fretting that I’d need to get tested again for STDs and knowing that I’d spent money that I needed to get my daughter a pair of shoes or something,” he said.

In Tokyo that time, after the sex worker left, he was so stressed out he opened his laptop to surf pornography.

“That’s what I would do when I was stressed. Then I finally had the epiphany: ‘This is completely ridiculous.’ So instead I Googled ‘sex addict’ and within two months I was in counseling,” he said.

This is something Anthony Weiner might relate to. On Monday, the politician, 53, was sentenced in New York to 21 months in prison. He pleaded guilty in May to one count of transferring obscene material to a minor, after being involved in virtual sex encounters via Snapchat and Skype with a 15-year-old girl.

Now, Weiner will be able to add inmate to his inglorious list of titles, after felon, fallen US congressman, pilloried mayoral candidate, failed husband and blighted father. Not to mention that his final fall from grace was perhaps a factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential defeat, after emails on devices he shared with his high-powered wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, came under scrutiny by the FBI late in the campaign.

Weiner’s defense memo to the court describes his crime as arising from “untreated addiction … an uncontrolled sickness … compulsively responding to … a curious high school student” whose online approach he at first rebuffed then later responded to “with his judgment clouded by disease”.

Few may feel sympathy for Weiner, preferring to conclude he’s not suffering from a sickness but is merely “sick”.

While many consider sex addiction to be a sexual disorder, it is currently not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

“If I’m driven to rummage around in the dumpster at 3am for a DVD, there’s something wrong in my brain, I’m ill … it’s mental illness, whatever you want to call it,” Nick said.

In 2011, the charismatic married Democratic congressman Weiner tweeted a link to a lewd photograph of himself to an adult female follower on Twitter, and was obliged to resign. In 2013 he dropped out of his “comeback” race to be mayor of New York City after similar conduct. He later sent out racy pictures of himself, including one while his and Abedin’s toddler son was on the bed with him.

“Weiner has followed the same pattern: he initially denied his conduct; he suffered personal and professional consequences; he publicly apologized and claimed reform. Yet he has continued to engage in the very conduct he swore off,” prosecutors told the court.

Weiner and Abedin are currently divorcing.

“Addicts are all assholes, we do things you just can’t believe, and we rationalize and justify it and most of us need to have a horrible thing happen to make us get help. Sometimes even being arrested isn’t enough,” said Greg T, in his early 40s, who chose not to use his full name.

Greg is a middle-school teacher in the Seattle area. He married his college sweetheart, a “super” conservative young woman, but at night while she slept he would be on the computer getting off to porn that involved men being made to suffer by a dominatrix. He was “on his way” to hiring a sadist in real life, he said, but his wife was too close to rumbling him, and he sought help. Also, although he was not attracted to pre-pubescent or adolescent children, he was attracted to 17- and 18-year-old girls, the kind he encountered in his old job as a high-school teacher.

“I’ve never acted on that but I didn’t want to work in that situation, so I sought recovery,” he said.

That was five years ago. He said that seeing a trained sex addiction counselor and taking a classic 12-step program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous was the answer for him, although being “sober” means giving up damaging sexual compulsions, not avoiding sexual contact altogether.

Greg says he knows two fellow teachers, one male and one female, who’ve been fired for sleeping with students, and has a friend who’s been arrested for similar behavior. Greg, who is recently divorced, is relieved he sought help sooner rather than later.

“Jay Parker saved my life,” he said. Parker is a sex addiction recovery specialist and his outpatient program in Seattle, No More Secrets, is well known in the field.

“These are not sociopaths or psychopaths, they have a conscience, they know right from wrong. It’s very difficult to deal with, but it is treatable,” Parker said.

He explained that, as with so many addictions, and as willful and hedonistic as it may seem, sex addiction is rooted in emotional trauma in childhood. That could be as simple as an eight-year-old stumbling on his father’s porn collection and becoming secretly obsessed with its unhealthy objectifications, especially in a household where parents are distant or in a messy divorce. Or it can be as serious as a child being sexually or physically abused, or witnessing domestic violence. Experts estimate that 10% of children thus exposed will become sex addicts, Parker said. Any addictions among parents or grandparents may contribute.

Michael Morton, clinical director of the KeyStone Center, a residential rehab for “sexual compulsivity and trauma” in Chester, Pennsylvania, said that the neurobiological damage from trauma can lead to anger problems, impulsivity and compulsivity, and cuts off addicts’ ability to empathize with those they are hurting – indeed, psychologically punishing – along the way.

“There are a lot of family dynamics in the making of a sex addict,” he said. Clients at KeyStone go through family therapy as well as individual therapy, including bringing parents in for sessions with their adult children “even if mom is 94”, and specialized therapy techniques such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which can help the brain safely bury past traumatic events.

Morton also warned that “the digital age is a breeding ground for the next generation of sex addicts” with their habits poisoned early on by ubiquitous internet porn.

Nick T, meanwhile, is a successful marketing executive and has not “acted out” with porn or sex workers for many years. His second wife knows his whole history “and loves me to bits,” he said. Nick T is a pseudonym.

But growing up in the Pacific north-west, at 11 Nick found a VHS porn tape in his parents’ dresser. His brother was nine and they both watched it. “It never affected him, but some people are wired differently to others. I was completely electrified and it got me hooked. My childhood was very chaotic, there was divorce, dysfunction,” he said. He was especially fixated on a “glorified rape scene” on the tape and from 11 he was compulsively masturbating multiple times a day.

Jay Parker said: “There is so much deep shame involved. That’s when it goes underground and you’re living a double life.”

In college, Nick’s sex life was nothing but masturbation, though on the surface he became the hilarious, charming, drunken romantic.

“I was a serial love bomb, falling instantly head over heels in love and ratcheting it up to 10, super intense, wooing and romancing the heck out of her, talking marriage really quickly when I barely knew her – but not having sex, I was afraid of having sex with an actual person, my only sex life was with myself. Within a couple of weeks, I’d dump her,” he said. As he got older, he started hiring sex workers . Later, he sought help as both a sex and a love addict.

Greg grew up in Montana. His mother was an alcoholic. At 13, his parents divorced and his mother went off with “a bad guy”, taking Greg’s little brother and sister and leaving Greg with his father, “who came from a long line of men who were very good at working hard but very bad at communicating or showing love,” he said.

A few years later, Greg’s mother’s new man killed her, and himself. Being raised by his father, Greg spent most of his time in the house alone. Porn and the fantasy of love became his refuge.

“Deep down, we hate ourselves,” he said of sex addicts.

It’s hard to square that when watching the documentary Weiner, about Anthony. The viewer sees him bossing Abedin about and putting her down, then being visibly mesmerized by his own image on TV, even when the news item is about his own scandal.

“Grandiosity,” said Parker, describing Weiner’s deluded arrogance and narcissistic behavior, his hollow contrition. All part of the addiction, he explained. All treatable, when and if he’s ready to “do the work”, he said.

John R, 62, who withheld his full name, has spent 20 difficult years working on his recovery from sex addiction. He mentioned relapses along the way, false promises, denial, cravings, self-loathing, and the painful “truth and reconciliation” involved in facing himself, the roots of his condition, the effects on his loved ones and the way forward. The boy he raised in his first marriage doesn’t speak to him “because of how I treated his mother”.

His rock bottom involved several visits to a series of brothels in Mexico, all while when he was working in construction administration for companies as illustrious as Disney and Motorola. For him, sex outside the marriage and porn at night was as good as crack cocaine, and just as addictive. In therapy, he talked about growing up in the Washington DC area with his detached, strictly religious parents, and memories of being molested by his father and by a priest.

“Eventually you have to talk about what happened to you and own your shortcomings and weaknesses, and work on your self esteem. That’s really hard for famous people and there’s no anonymity. The first time I went to a sex and love addiction meeting I knew three people there and I was scared shitless. But it’s worth it,” he said. “For you and your loved ones.”