To everyone else, it probably looked like a regular summer’s evening. Couples and families enjoying the beer garden, people playing cricket on the green – and I was being handcuffed in the passenger seat of a 4×4 by a man I barely knew.
My name is Leesa, and I’m a recovered sex addict.
I was 32 years old, and we’ll call the man Simon. I was fresh out of a divorce, and I had met Simon two weeks earlier on a website for people who were into BDSM (that’s bondage, dominance, submission and masochism, for the uninitiated).
Up until this point, I had spent most of my adult life being told that my sexual tastes were weird. Aged 17, when I asked my first boyfriend to spank me with his belt, he looked at me as if I’d just asked him to flay a kitten. The boyfriend after him thought a bottle of lube counted as foreplay, so getting him to indulge in the dark arts was out of the question. Then, at 26, I met a very kind, intelligent and funny man who later became my husband. I knew from the get-go that we weren’t sexually compatible, but by this point I had figured that a full and fun sex life wasn’t on the cards for me anyway. So I stuffed my kink in a drawer and hoped that it would stay quiet while I got on with the business of life. Shockingly, it turns out that ignoring your needs and preferences isn’t a sustainable long‑term plan. Over time, that thing I’d stuffed in a drawer started whispering for attention. I masturbated constantly in an attempt to keep it quiet, but it wasn’t enough. The whisper turned to shouting, and it started trying to claw its way out. Within a few short years, it took all my energy to keep a lid on it. I knew I could either leave or have an affair. So, aged 32, I found myself crying over a decree absolute, determined never to make that mistake again.
Freshly single, I went straight to where the kinky people hung out online, and that’s where I met Simon. I was deeply uncomfortable at first. Talking about my fantasies with a stranger was no easy feat, and the thought of getting naked with someone I barely knew was pretty revolting. But I had denied my sexual needs for so long that I was hell-bent on pushing through. So, after two daytime meet-ups where we discussed hard boundaries and safe words, Simon booked us in for a four-hour session in a house on a residential street just outside London that had been converted into a BDSM dungeon.
We went for a perfunctory drink in a local pub on the evening in question. While Simon made small talk, I looked around at all the other apparently normal people enjoying the balmy summer’s evening with their partners and families. I felt so very other, as if there must be something wrong with me because I hadn’t been able to make that kind of thing work in my own life.
“You’re not listening, are you?” Simon asked, breaking me out of my rumination. He looked mildly amused and not at all bothered about being ignored. It had been pretty clear from the off that Simon wasn’t interested in me as a human being. The “let’s get a drink first” had been wholly for my benefit. He was 16 years older than me, and had told me he’d been doing this a long time. I imagined this was his usual routine with the skittish ones.
“Yeah, I was,” I lied. Then I gulped back my wine, Simon led me to his car and slapped on the handcuffs. He drove us to a spectacular – and very clean, I might add – dungeon. He led me inside, inspected the whips and paddles, and we got down to business. Well, I should say, he got down to business. I was more of a prop than an active participant. He barely looked at me throughout. The only time I saw emotion in the man was when he orgasmed. I got my orgasms, too – several. There was no doubt about it, the domination got me off. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t attracted to Simon. In a way, I wasn’t really focused on him either. I just wanted him to keep doing what he was doing. After spending so many years trying to resign myself to my hunger, I could hardly believe I was finally experiencing the things I had been fantasising about. I didn’t want it to stop.
When Simon dropped me off at the train station at the end of the night, there was a creeping sense of emptiness. The experience had been entirely transactional. I now realise I also needed warmth and connection, but at the time I thought that I just needed more sex.
Simon had been clear that he didn’t do relationships. So I kept seeing him casually while searching for something more long-term that would give me a steady supply of the kink I craved. I tried the regular dating apps, but it was tricky trying to guess whether a man might share my tastes. Some men said they were up for trying BDSM, but didn’t come through when we got down to it. Nothing kills your buzz faster than a limp spanking. Others were very much on my side of the fence, but talking about sex that early on rarely set the stage for anything meaningful. And, let’s be honest, I wasn’t in the most emotionally healthy place, and like tends to attract like.
This is where things got tricky. I had very little connection with many of the men I was meeting. A solid part of healthy BDSM play is the cuddles afterwards. The official term is “after-care”, and it’s when the dominant heaps affection on the partner who has taken the punishment. Closing the loop, if you will. But because I wasn’t making meaningful connections, the guys would usually leave afterwards, and I’d be alone with my bruises. Just when I was at my most vulnerable, I would feel abandoned. That would send me reaching for comfort, meaning I’d have to go again, only with more internal pain to add to the pile.
Gradually, my need for physical pain became more and more central to the whole experience. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, but when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen. It was proof on a visceral level that I existed. The first time Simon slapped me across the face, I didn’t like it. It hurt. Pain still feels like pain even when it turns you on. But when he pulled his hand away, I felt adrift, alone, and I immediately wanted him to do it again. In a warped way, it felt like love.
By this point, I had become a pretty terrible friend. I went to a housewarming dinner party once and spent most of the night sexting a man from the toilet. And I missed my stepmother’s 50th birthday party because I was out of it on painkillers, after a man twisted my arm so far behind my back that I ended up in A&E. I wasn’t even aware that I was being selfish or flaky. I thought about sex constantly, and when I wasn’t having it I was masturbating myself into oblivion. I would tell myself that I’d get up and start the day after this last one, only to still be there an hour or more later. And it didn’t stop there. I masturbated in toilets, in my car, and I once went to a five-day silent retreat and barely left my room. The physical surge of the climax, mingled with the crushing deflation of once again failing to hit the spot, drove me relentlessly. Several times over the years, a few friends tried to have a quiet word with me about what was going on, although none of them knew quite how bad things had become. I brushed them off, assuming they just didn’t understand my kink. I also questioned whether they would have been so concerned if I were a man behaving the same way. And while I’m sure there were elements of both those things, it was also true that I was not in a good place.
For the first few years, I thought my only problem was the lack of a steady sexual supply. But one morning, as I climbed out of bed after a particularly rough session, I caught my reflection a full-length mirror. My body from the neck down was a collage of purples and blues, interspersed with angry red lines from a variety of whips, front and back. I was horrified. It was as though the pain that lived in me had gained expression through my skin. Something inside me was screaming. But even as I crumpled into a ball on my bedroom floor, I had no plans to stop.
I would like to say there was one pivotal moment that changed everything, but I’m not sure that’s how it works. There were many moments, and I don’t think recovery is ever linear. But I can tell you the exact thing that drove me screaming to a therapist’s office. I’d had a bad day in a long line of bad months, and years, of the same. I was lost, lonely and utterly miserable. So I called Simon and asked him to beat it out of me.
“No orgasms this time,” I told him. “Just hurt me.” I wanted something so extreme that it would obliterate everything else.
He hit me in the face the second I opened the door, then he dragged me into the bedroom and set about doing what he had come to do. I felt like a rag doll, being thrown around with no autonomy. That was when I caught the words, just before they tripped off the end of my tongue. Please, just kill me.
There was no denying at that point that something was very wrong. I didn’t want to die, but I had nowhere else to go. I wanted to kill the pain that lived in me, and the only option left seemed to be to kill its host. Me.
I screamed my safe word at him, along with a few words of profanity. He stopped straight away, mumbling, “OK, hang on”, as he untied me from the bed. Simon had never been one for cuddles, and this time was no different. So we gathered ourselves up, had a very civilised, if slightly awkward, chat about what we each had planned for the week, and he left.
At this point, I still couldn’t have told you what my problem was. I had heard the term sex addict and thought it was just something famous men like Tiger Woods had come up with to excuse their infidelity. I knew I had an extremely high sex drive, and thought that the problem was finding suitable partners who could keep up with me. But I also knew that I was desperately unhappy. So I called a therapist and turned up week after week. During one of those sessions, my therapist handed me a book called Facing Love Addiction, by Pia Mellody. I scoffed. Sex and love addiction weren’t real, and even if they were they had nothing to do with me. When I spotted myself in its pages, it was a revelation.
It turned out that the root of my problem wasn’t sex at all. It was my pattern of relating, the people-pleasing, attention-seeking version of myself that I brought to relationships. I had put all my energy into figuring out who another person needed me to be, in the hope that if I did everything right I could avoid abandonment. This never worked, of course. You can’t make genuine connections without bringing your actual self to the table. Over time, all those unmet needs had globbed together and created a monster.
It’s worth saying that plenty of people enjoy BDSM without it morphing into anything remotely harmful. I spoke to Dr Paula Hall, the clinical director of the Laurel Centre for sex and porn addiction, and the founder of Pivotal Recovery, which provides online courses to help people overcome compulsive sexual behaviours. She told me that “the type of behaviour is not what defines an addiction. It’s the dependency on it.” BDSM, or indeed any sexual preference when done between consenting adults, is perfectly normal and healthy.
I also spoke to Andrew Harvey, a BACP-registered psychotherapeutic counsellor working with clients struggling with compulsive behaviours and addictions. Both he and Hall were clear that treating sex addiction isn’t about pathologising normal sexual behaviour. And let’s not forget that women are at particular risk of being culturally shamed for expressing their sexuality. Harvey told me that when he starts working with a client, he begins by exploring why that person thinks their behaviour is a problem. He said: “Sexual expression is healthy. We mustn’t go straight to addiction.”
So, when does it become a problem? The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) recognises the term compulsive sexual behaviour disorder (CSBD), describing it as “a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges” and behaviour, despite negative consequences. There is some debate in the mental health field about whether we are talking about an addiction or an impulse control disorder. With addiction, you are chasing the object of your craving. With an impulse control disorder, it’s about doing things because you feel compelled to, regardless of how it feels. Both are characterised by a loss of control, and the problem is very real.
A large-scale, cross-cultural study was completed in 2023 to estimate global prevalence of the disorder and develop screening tools. The study found that 4.8% of people globally showed significant symptoms consistent with CSBD. This included 8.17% of male participants, 2.42% of female participants and 6.46% of gender diverse participants. This is not solely a male issue.
Despite this, the problem isn’t well understood in the mainstream. As already mentioned, there is a prevailing myth that sex addiction is something that has been made up to excuse infidelity. But, in fact, infidelity has no bearing on whether the criteria are met for CSBD. Nor is it true that all sex addicts are promiscuous. Hall tells me that many sex addicts aren’t actually having much sex at all. What is true of all sex addicts is the obsession with sex.“It’s the dependence, the preoccupation,” she says.
Once I opened my eyes to what the actual problem was, I worked through the 12 steps and remained abstinent from dating and sex. When I asked my therapist how long I had to be abstinent, they said: “Until you are no longer asking that question.” Because as long as my focus was on when I could have sex again, I clearly wasn’t ready.
Eventually, I learned to sit with the pain. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that was the way through for me. Because every time I sat with my feelings instead of rushing to a distraction, I was telling myself: I’m here. I’m not abandoning you any more.
Then it was time to put it into practice. All the therapy in the world will only take a person so far. Real change came from making different decisions every day. This meant leaving a date when a man told me he thought arguments bring spice to a relationship. I’m all for open communication, but if you need conflict for things to feel good, then I’m not the girl for you. I also accept that I’m no good at casual sex. I mean no judgment whatsoever here. Plenty of people have a wonderful time with casual sex. I even envy them a little. But it doesn’t work for me. I need my partner to hang around afterwards, and I’m upfront about this.
Which brings me to the really good news. Recovering from sex addiction doesn’t mean you can never have sex again. Nor does it mean you can’t enjoy whatever your kink or fetish happens to be. You just enjoy it for what it is – pleasure, fun, a wonderful part of the human experience – as opposed to using it as a coping mechanism that takes over your life. Hall says sex addiction isn’t actually about the sex. It’s about the pain you’re trying to soothe or avoid. Once you heal that, you can enjoy “the whole fruit bowl of sexual experience”.
As for me? I’m still kinky, and I still enjoy sex. But now I treat my body and my heart like they matter. Because they do. This means I only have sex within the context of emotionally safe, trusting relationships. And if I don’t have one of those, I can live without it. There are still times I find myself masturbating more than usual – what’s usual for me, anyway. (There is no “normal” amount, by the way. You do you.) But now, instead of reaching for a dating app or finding a dirty number in my phone, I call a friend or walk my dog.
Connection had to start in my relationship with myself. Then, I gradually brought a more authentic, boundaried version of me to my friendships. From there, I developed more meaningful connections with others, and for the first time in my life I felt as if I were standing on firm ground. Eventually, I got to a place where I felt solid enough to invite another being into my life. So, I got a dog. A miniature dachshund by the name of Pluto, who has taught me so much about unconditional love (though he still needs to work on his boundaries).
A couple of years ago, I got a text message from Simon. He was driving through my town and he wondered whether I’d like to hook up. It was easy to say no. These days I love and respect myself, so I couldn’t conceive of sharing my body with someone who doesn’t feel the same. Also, Pluto needed a walk, and he’s the boss of me now.
