Indiscretion: Callie Douglas - Book Four

Chapter Thirteen

My second appointment of the day was with Harold Hanson. He was a staffer, a patient who I had been seeing since I had first started with the RPD. He was being treated for sex addiction and, although he was a little sleazy at times, he was generally a nice guy with a wicked sense of humour and a fabulous smile. I always looked forward to my appointments with him.

"You know", he began with a smile, "I was reading about Mick Jagger the other day. He has slept with over four thousand women."

"That's hard to believe. That's a lot of women."

"It is. I'd have to get a lot more sexually active to sleep with that many women. I think he's my new hero."

"You're working on this, remember? It isn't fair to your wife or to yourself to give in to your addiction like that."

"I know, but that isn't why he's my hero. Did you know that he slept with his therapist?"

"His sex therapist?"

"Yes."

"Then his therapist wasn't very good, was she?"

"I don't know. Apparently she was good. He had her more than once."

"Where do you find out this stuff?"

"Google."

"I'm surprised that she'd admit to that. It would throw her credentials in the garbage. After all, would you want to go to a therapist who was willing to have sex with you?"

"Hell, yeah. Do you know how hard it is sometimes, no pun intended, to talk to someone as good looking as you about sex and not be able to follow it up with actions?"

"Thank you for the compliment, but as your therapist I'm supposed to be modelling behaviours that you can emulate in your life, not hopping into bed with you."

"Who said anything about a bed? I was thinking your couch."

I started to laugh. "You can keep on thinking it. It's not happening."

"But that's part of my problem, isn't it? That I keep on thinking about it."

"Not necessarily. If you were addicted to alcohol, you could think about it constantly and it wouldn't be considered a problem. It's only when you begin to drink excessively that there's a problem. The same goes for drug addiction. It isn't a problem if you're just thinking about taking drugs. It only becomes a problem when you actually take the drugs. You might make yourself uncomfortable thinking about drugs or alcohol all the time, but it won't be a problem unless you actually follow up your thoughts with actions. It's no different with a sex addiction. You can think about sex all you want. That's just a sign of an overactive interest in sex. There isn't essentially anything wrong with that. However, it's when you act upon those thoughts that it transfers from an interest in sex to a sex addiction."

"So I guess what I'm hearing is that I can think about sex all I want and that's okay."

"Yes, it's okay. Where it falls into the gray area is that constant thought about sex will make it more difficult to not act upon those thoughts. It's as if you really enjoyed food. If you thought about chocolate cake all day long, so that the thoughts were all consuming, you would become very interested in having chocolate cake. Then, when you were actually given a piece of chocolate cake, you would gobble it up and look for seconds. Comparatively, if you were thinking about something else all day, you would enjoy the chocolate cake just as much but it would be in perspective. You wouldn't need to eat it until you burst. The same goes with sex. If all you can do is think about sex, then it will be very difficult not to act upon those thoughts. Not impossible, which is why I'm not saying you shouldn't think about sex. However, it will make your life uncomfortable."