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Deconstruction, disability, and sex addiction:
Embracing the narrative perspective
by Gary Nixon, Ph.D.
Abstract
The disease model of addictions has expanded from its original
alcoholism base to include many substances and processes. Twelve
step groups have flourished in North America. One area that has
rapidly grown in the last twenty years is sexual addiction. The
use of the disease model privileges the pathology discourse while
focusing on deficits of clients, and ignoring context. A hidden
discrimination can take place in which the sexuality of a disabled
person is pathologized as "sexual addiction." Deconstructing the
label of sex addiction and moving to an experience near approach
such as narrative therapy can honor the notion that people are
veterans of their own lives and respect the personal resources
people have. A case study was presented to highlight the recruitment
into the identity of a sex addict of a disabled person and the
importance of deconstructing this label. The narrative therapy
technique of externalizing the problem was used to show how the
"sex addict's" story could be re-authored in an experience near
way leading to new possibilities and opportunities.
Tom's Dilemma
Tom gathered up his courage as he looked over from his dishwasher
and asked the server, "Wanda would you like to go out with me
tonight." Wanda laughed nervously and said, "You've got to be
joking," and went on her way to serve a table. Tom quietly swore
under his breath as he loaded another tray of dishes to put through
the restaurant dishwasher.
A simple rejection, perhaps, but what if we were told that the
dishwasher was a 47 year old physically disabled person who was
a "sex addict." The story of what was happening would change.
We will pick up Tom's dilemma of being diagnosed as a "sex addict"
later on in this article.
Witnessing The Power of Labels
n my teen years, I witnessed the marginalizing power of labels.
I watched my own mother go from a functioning, heart-centered
nurse and mother to a "mentally unstable alcoholic" who barely
could scratch together a subsistence. She and my dad had divorced
but my physician father with his medical connections arranged
a psychiatric consultation that established my mother's craziness
and unfitness for motherhood. He also arranged for a one-sided
split in assets, so my mother left the marriage penniless, crazy,
and childless. This all happened in the early 1970's before the
feminist movement had hit small town British Columbia. So, for
all the years of service my mother had given to the family and
dedication to her three sons, she had been totally pathologized.
My mother's story left me with a haunting memory of the reality
of the power of being marginalized as I saw with my mother how
crushing the weight of dominant discourse labels could be.
After a brief and unhappy legal career, I jumped on the humanistic-existential
bandwagon in graduate school with heroes like Rogers, Maslow,
and Yalom and focused on issues of authenticity and the quest
for wholeness. As I started to work with clients, I noticed something
was off with my work with a certain sector of my clientele. Certain
populations such as those people with intense mental health issues
or people from certain culture backgrounds not aligned with the
dominant culture, had elements in their stories that I was not
addressing in my focus on individuation and self-actualization.
Even after my securing a faculty position in Addictions Counselling,
I knew that something was off as my memory of my mother's descent,
which ended with brain cancer, still haunted me. I began to suspect
that my own position was a reflection of the status quo and in
many ways denied the reality of the lived experiences and barriers
of people living outside the dominant stories of the status quo.
People sensing my predicament recommended that I needed to check
into the work of Michael White. I signed up for a Michael White
two-day narrative therapy workshop in Calgary. Michael started
the workshop by contrasting experience far expert pathologizing
language and experience near client friendly language. I remember
laughing at the time at mental health professionals and their
DSM-IV language who totally bought into their assessments and
objective truths. Ironically though, I did not realize how much
experience far language was part of my own game through the new
emerging professional field of addictions counselling. I have
previously explored my work with narrative therapy in the area
of schizophrenia (Nixon, 2000), but now would like to turn my
focus to addictions, and in particular, sexual addiction.
The Expanding Turf of Addictions
The addictions profession, like many areas of specialization,
is in a turf war. It is an expanding field. Originally, it consisted
only of substance abuse but recently it has focused on gambling,
the internet, eating disorders and sex. Sexual addiction is one
area that has gained attention over the last two decades especially
with the highly popular work of Patrick Carnes (1983, 1991). Carnes
has written about how the cycle of sex addiction with the fantasies,
the rituals, the acting out, and the inevitable despair is a similar
cycle to substance abuse. With a focus on the importance of 12
step groups, the disease model of addictions has firmly become
entrenched in the area of sexual addiction. A "sex addict" has
the disease of addiction that can never be cured but only monitored
for the rest of that person's life.
It is amazing the power behind assessing somebody and coming
up with the proclamation, "You are an addict." Addictions professionals
have a "street-wise" refinement of the truth-telling status of
objective health professionals. Typical lines include "You can't
con a conner" or "I have already done it all." Thus, any resistance
to the proclamation of addict status is merely a sign of denial
and an indication of the disease of addiction. Miller and Rollnick
(1991) suggested that the attitude of the treatment professionals
is that "addicts are liars" so there is no need to hear what they
have to say.
Sadly, there is a whole underbelly of this discourse that is
missed as White (1995) observed, "This mantle of truth makes it
possible for us to avoid reflecting on the implications of our
constructions and of our therapeutic interactions in regards to
the shaping of people's lives" (p. 115). Thus, as Law (1997) observed,
this privileging of disease and pathologizing ignores other descriptions
such as those arising from histories of abuse and oppression.
Thus, we become blind to the effects of disability, violence,
abuse, racism, sexism, heterosexism, class and privilege in our
lives.
A Case Study: Tom's Recruitment Into
Being a Sex Addict
We will now return to the case of Tom briefly discussed at the
start of this article. This case study is presented to show how
a shift to a narrative therapy stance can thicken and enrich the
counselling process as clients choose preferred stories about
themselves. Tom came to counselling, desperate. He announced at
the start of our first session that " I need help because I am
a sex addict." He was a 47 year old Japanese-Canadian man with
a limp caused by polio when he was a child. He had a full-time
job at a restaurant as a dishwasher. He lived alone in a bachelor
apartment. He had been in counselling previously and had been
told he was a "sex addict."
When Tom came to see me that first day I asked him, using an
approach articulated by White (1995) and Sanders (1997) in working
with adolescents with substance abuse problems, how was he recruited
in to this problem based identity of a "sex addict." Tom told
me that he had rented some porn videos and gone once to a massage
parlor. He also has been very desperate to have a girlfriend and
had asked many different females out with disastrous results.
He also had an abusive and troubled childhood. This was enough,
in his previous counsellor's eyes, for Tom not only to have certain
problems in living but to be confirmed as a "sex addict."
Something struck me as odd. Hastings (1997) observed that people
with disabilities have to contend with a somewhat hidden yet "bone-deep"
discrimination. For instance, it is strange that people with disabilities
are seen to be sexually neutral and "ordinary sexuality is regarded
as overcompensation, or trying to 'prove' something" (p.8). Tom's
sexual and intimacy forays with his polio induced limp, his intellectual
slowness, and his dishwasher socio-economic status were not recognized
as Tom's struggle for intimacy but instead given the status of
being the works of a "pervert." Cheryl White (1997) asked an important
question, "How can we, as non-disabled people, take care not to
contribute to a sense that all of a person's identity and life
is bound up in their experience of disability while also creating
space for the acknowledgement of the real effects of the experience
of disability?" (p.44). This seemed an important question as it
seemed clear that if this was a non-disabled person, one trip
to the massage parlor, and a few videos may indicate problems
but would not confirm the person as a "sex addict." Where was
the pattern of regular, compulsive, out of control behavior?
The pathologizing of Tom as a "sex addict" gave Tom an explanation
as to what was going on for him. But was this a helpful story
for Tom to internalize? If he truly were a person with an out-of-control
addiction, recognizing that he was an addict would improve the
quality of his life. I asked him an important question identified
by Sanders (1997), "Does this identity of being a sex addict hold
you back from what you desire in life?" Tom immediately responded
that it was hard sometimes because what he really wants is a girlfriend,
and he gets all weird if he starts thinking that he is a sex addict
when he asks a woman out. He gets self-conscious and awkward and
ends up stumbling over his words. And then, when his date request
gets rejected, he really feels humiliated.
I invited Tom to tell me more about his life in an experience
near way. What were his goals and hopes and wants? Tom told me
that he gets really lonely and what he really would like is to
have a girlfriend. He had found it hard to make social connections
in the restaurant as the servers did not really talk to the dishwashers.
Sometimes he was very attracted to a server but his attempts to
make conversation would be snubbed. This made him mad and angry.
Sometimes, he would swear under his breath.
Five years ago, when his counsellor told him he was a sex addict,
and needed to go to 12 step meetings, at first he was shocked
but then he found he enjoyed the companionship and connections
he made at those meetings. He met people that were struggling
like him. Ironically, he preferred the co-dependency focused Al-Anon
meetings the best rather than the sexual addiction S.A. meeting
as the Al-Anon meetings were mostly populated by females, and
he could try to make some connections. After a while, he also
got the idea that he should join a church and he started going
to a progressive one and found he enjoyed the Sunday and Wednesday
sermons and post-session teas.
Still Tom's acute sense of things not being right for him did
not go away. He still felt frustrated in his attempts to find
a girlfriend. He sometimes would go down to a pizza joint and
buy a pizza and a beer and if there was a woman alone there he
would try to make conversation. Occasionally, he would go to a
nightclub, and sit and listen to the band and see whom he could
meet. Still, however, he could not shake the sense of feeling
rejected and lonely.
To help Tom get a perspective on what the problem was in his
life, we decided to look at the problem using the narrative therapy
technique of externalizing the problem (Nixon, 2000; Tomm, 1989;
White, 1995).
Externalizing The Problem
We used a simplified fourfold approach of naming the problem,
mapping the influence of the problem, looking for unique outcomes,
and planning for the future (Nixon, 2000; White, 1995). So, firstly,
we had to name the real problem. Tom had been told the problem
was that he was a sex addict. This was an identity which he had
introjected. Instead of this experience far label, I invited Tom
to look into his own life, as a veteran, and see if he could put
the finger on what the real problem was for him? What had he been
struggling with all of these years. He said, "The problem is I
am desperate for a girlfriend." We laughed. It was that simple.
So, I asked him how he could put that in simple problem terms,
"I get desperately lonely," he replied, "that's my huge problem."
As for a name than, I suggested, "desperate loneliness." Tom laughed
and agreed.
The name caught the situation for Tom. As he looked over the
last eight years, he had been very troubled with "desperate loneliness."
Next, following the fourfold approach of externalizing the problem,
we moved on to the second phase of mapping the effects of this
loneliness. How had "desperate loneliness" shown up in Tom's life?
Tom had found living alone in a bachelor apartment a life of creeping
loneliness. He had worked as a dishwasher and he found that isolating
because even though there were lots of people around he could
not connect with the servers on staff and stayed mainly in the
dish pit. Even worse, though, he found it hard returning to his
apartment. The transition from a busy restaurant to a lonely apartment
was always very acute. Sometimes, he would come back to his apartment,
and his loneliness was so piercing that he had to get out. So
he would go down to the local Boston Pizza and sit there and buy
himself a small pizza and a beer. Occasionally, there would also
be another single person there, a woman, and he would try to strike
up a conversation with her. But he was desperate and he would
move to the uptake of asking her out too fast. Inevitably, he
would be rejected and feel crushed and order some more beer and
just sit in his pain. The pain would get so bad sometimes that
he thought the only answer would be to see a prostitute, and after
finishing his beers he would walk down to the red light district
and peruse the streets for a while before deciding to not go through
with it and then he would walk dejectedly back home. By the time
he got back home, his desperate loneliness would feel almost unbearable.
Sometimes, he would gather his courage and try to go out with
people for coffee after the 12 step meetings but found it was
very awkward if he asked a fellow member out as he was breaking
the rules of the 12 steps groups and doing a "13 step" maneuver.
In the end, it left him feeling hopeless and resigned to his desperate
loneliness. His attempts to deal with his "desperate loneliness"
seemed to backfire in his face.
Tom had done a nice job of mapping the effects of his "desperate
loneliness." We moved on to consider unique outcomes, the third
phase of externalizing the problem. When had Tom defeated the
problem of "desperate loneliness" in the past? In what situations,
had Tom been able to resist the pull of "desperate loneliness."
Tom found that going to support meetings had been helpful because
he had been able to meet people in a structured environment, with
lots of social interaction involved. He had gone to Al-Anon meetings
and S.A. meetings and found the relationships talk of the Al-Anon
meetings very interesting. After the meetings, they usually went
for a coffee and Tom really enjoyed that.
I asked Tom if there were any other groups he enjoyed? He had
started going to a growth group on Thursday nights and each week
the facilitator would present on a different topic and the group
would talk about it. He found the people there that he met really
interesting. Tom also said his new church was helpful. He really
enjoyed the Sunday and mid-week services. Inevitably, there would
be a tea social after each service and it gave Tom a chance to
connect with people.
To get away from the preoccupation with possible romantic connections,
I asked Tom about what connections he had made with other men.
Tom stopped for a minute, perplexed, and then his eyes lit up
as he told me about the friendship he had been able to make with
an older man at his church. He got rides to the services with
him and they would talk about the sermons and human growth. He
did not want to take the relationship for granted and sometimes
he would give the person gas money. He also really enjoyed connecting
with the facilitator of the group he went to as he was very friendly
and was open to talking for a few minutes after the group.
I asked Tom to look at the strategies he was using with non-romantic
connections such as the two males he just described. Something
was different about these connections. They were much more relaxed.
"Desperate loneliness" had not taken over. Maybe these unique
outcomes could teach us about what would work for Tom as we looked
down the road into the future.
We switched our efforts to the fourth phase of externalizing
the problem and that is planning for the future. Focusing on the
strategies that had worked in his male relationships had given
Tom an idea. Perhaps he could more easily defeat "desperate loneliness"
if he just focused on making connections. This would take the
desperation out of his loneliness. So, just as he had been able
to make male friends easily by "going with the flow" with them
and being appreciative at the same time, maybe he could start
making connections with females the same way. He had just met
a singer at a nightclub he went to that had been friendly to him,
and he was about to ask her on a date, but maybe instead he could
just let the friendship develop. Similarly, after an Al-Anon meeting
maybe he could just relax and enjoy the coffee and connections
and forget about asking a female out on a date. Likewise, with
his church he could just keep going to the sermons and teas, and
just try to connect with people and let things develop naturally.
Maybe, he could even use this strategy at work with the waitresses
and forget about asking them out on a date but just try to be
friendly and enjoy a relaxed working relationship.
Tom left that day with an array of strategies that he felt could
work for him in defeating "desperate loneliness." He booked an
appointment for a month down the road to check-in with how things
were going in defeating "desperate loneliness."
A month later, when Tom came to see me, he reported feeling out
of the jaws of "desperate loneliness" for the most part. He had
just focused in making connections over the last month and this
had taken the pressure off. He had gotten closer as a friend to
the singer. He continued to enjoy the church and his male friend
there, and had been able to make some new connections there. He
had enjoyed the coffees after the Al-Anon meetings. The growth
group had been going well and he had continued to enjoy his relationship
with the facilitator. The biggest change had happened at work
however. By not focusing on a possible romantic connection, his
relationships with the servers had vastly improved. Work had become
more fun. He did report though, he did not have a girlfriend yet,
but strangely he was not so desperate about it. With Tom having
some momentum in his life, we decided to leave the door open for
Tom to check back with me if he desired.
I did not see Tom in counselling again, although I did run into
him with a group of people at a coffee shop one evening. He came
over and talked with me for a few minutes but then he said he
needed to get back to his group. Tom still did not have a girlfriend,
but he was spending time with a woman from the kitchen at work
from time to time. He told me he still had not totally defeated
"desperate loneliness" but was enjoying his social connections
and was hopeful for the future.
Embracing The Narrative Perspective
As we saw with Tom's story, a turn to narrative therapy is desperately
needed in the addictions field in which so much silencing of the
client goes on. Emerging from the social constructionist perspective,
narrative therapy emphasizes the historical and cultural aspects
of knowledge and rejects the notion that there is an official
objective version of the truth (Freedman & Combs, 1996; Gergen,
1994; White & Epston, 1991). The narrative therapy process of
collaborating with clients invites a deconstruction of a therapist's
expert perspective and "truth-telling" status. As White (1993)
observed, "Deconstruction has to do with procedures that subvert
taken-for-granted-realities and practices" (p. 34).
In addictions, once a client has been assessed as an "addict,"
this person is seen to have the disease of addiction for life,
and any behaviors are interpreted through the lens of addiction.
As we saw with the Tom who received the pronouncement of "sexual
addict," the person's life becomes thinly described. Narrative
therapy, in contrast, emphasizes a return to client friendly experience
near language in which notions of desire, whim, mood, goal, hope,
intention, purpose, passion, concern, belief, and other experience
near terms are openly embraced and conversed about (White, 1995,
1997). With Tom, a narrative approach allowed us to return to
something he knew well, talking and working with his struggle
with loneliness and his desire for intimacy.
Rather than experts interpreting people's lives, narrative therapy
recognizes that people are veterans of their own lives. The emphasis
is on people telling and re-telling preferred stories of their
own lives. In this way the unique, contradictory, and personal
aspects of a story are engaged. White (1997) observed how thin
descriptions exclude the interpretations of those who are in those
actions. In our case, Tom was actually excluded from the description
of his own life. Moving to a "thicker" narrative description allowed
Tom to talk about his struggles, personal resources and community
connections he has made in trying to defeat his loneliness. Multiple
contextualizations of life can be created that contribute to a
richness of narrative resources. Tom did not even realize how
many community connections he had made through attending support
groups, churches, and counselling groups in his struggle with
loneliness and how persistent and resourceful he had been. As
White (1997) explained, "These narrative resources contribute
significantly to the range of possible meanings that persons might
give to their experience of the world, and to the range of options
for action in the world" (p.16).
Tragically, as we saw here with Tom, the expert description of
the "disease" of sex addiction which is promoted by the addictions
counselling industry can produce a dismemberment in which so much
of personal and community membership is severed to make way for
the thin descriptions of people's lives. Too often, as White (1995)
recognized, "persons come to believe that the problem speaks of
their identity - so often problems present persons with what they
take to be certain truths about their character, nature, purposes,
and so on, and these truths have a totalising effect on their
lives" (p.22). Tom began to believe that he was truly a "pervert'
which made it very awkward for him to ask a woman out on a date.
The narrative stance of facilitating clients to move away from
internalizing conversations in relation to what they find problematic
to externalizing problems and conversations allows people to objectify
their problems and "exoticize the domestic" (White, 1993). By
having externalizing conversations with the problem as a third
party, people no longer identify with the problem as their identity
and open up to a multitude of resources in dealing with the problem.
In this way, White (1995) observed, "through externalizing conversations,
the problem is to an extent disempowered" (p.23).
We saw in the case study presented here how Tom's externalizing
the problem got behind the label of "sex addict" and instead opened
up the conversation to the lived experience of his struggling
with "desperate loneliness" in which his resources and connections
to the community were honored. Tom's story also points to the
danger of pathologizing difference in that a disabled person's
attempts at starting a romantic relationship are identified as
the acting out of a "sexual addict" or "pervert." Rather than
being swept away by disconnected expert grand pronouncements,
opening up to the narrative perspective allows us to respect the
richness and resources of our clients as well as ourselves.
References
Carnes, P. (1983). Out of the shadows: Understanding sexual
addiction. Minneapolis, MN: CompCare Publishers.
Carnes, P. (1991). Don=t call it love: Recovery from sexual
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Gergen, K. (1994). Realities and relationships: Soundings
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Hastings, E. (1997). Hidden disability discrimination. Dulwich
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metaphors to addiction. Dulwich Centre Newsletter, (2-3),
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with young persons captured by substance abuse. In Nyland, D.
& Smith, C. (eds.), Narrative therapies with children and adolescents.
New York: Guilford.
Tomm, K. (1989). Externalizing the problem and internalizing
personal agency. Journal of Strategic and Systemic Therapies,
8(1), 54-59.
White, C. (1997). Endnote from the publishers: Exploring the
responsibilities of non-disabled people. Dulwich Centre Newsletter,
4, 44.
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White, M. (1993). Deconstruction and therapy. In Gilligan, S.
& Price, R. (eds.), Therapeutic conversations. New York:
W.W. Norton.
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Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.
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Submitted by
Gary Nixon
Assistant Professor, School of Health Sciences, University of
Lethbridge
Email: gary.nixon@uleth.ca
Author Biography
Gary Nixon, Ph.D., after a brief legal career, completed his
doctorate in counselling at the University of Calgary in 1993.
Originally, trained in the humanistic-existential counselling
perspective, he has over the last five years been excited about
the contribution of narrative therapy in his work with clients
with addiction and mental health issues. He joined the Addictions
Counselling faculty at the University of Lethbridge four years
ago.
Mailing Address
School of Health Sciences, University of Lethbridge
4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta T1K 3M4 (Canada)
Phone
Phone: 403 329-2644
Fax: 403 329-2668
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