By the time Lance Tracy realized he had an addiction to pornography, it had almost cost him his marriage. He started attending a church recovery group to address his increasing obsession with searching for and looking at pornographic images on the Internet. Lance kept an online journal to document his recovery process, and it was that journal that his wife, Amy, discovered on their home computer.
"I knew he was going to a recovery group but I didn’t know what it was for," says Amy. "When I came across the journal entry, the magnitude of it really hit me and I kind of woke up."
Amy confronted Lance about his problems with pornography. Lance admitted that at the peak of his addiction, he was looking at porn as much as six to eight hours a day.
"My wife absolutely, and admirably, did not stand for this," said Lance. "The way she looked at it, it’s really a form of cheating on someone. Not physically, but emotionally."
Amy forced Lance to go to an intensive five-day inpatient program for sexual addiction. Lance says he came back from that program as a changed person.
"It took an intervention for me," says Lance.
"Most professionals’ understanding of sex addiction as a whole is that it lands somewhere between 3 and 8 percent of the general population," said Robert Weiss, the clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles.
Weiss has spent 14 years in the field of sexual addiction. He believes some people can look at pornography recreationally, without becoming addicted, but a typical addict can spend anywhere from four to five hours a night and six nights a week looking at porn.
"It’s kind of like eating," says Weiss. "Eating is a healthy thing, but eating a whole lot is not such a healthy thing, and it’s the same thing for a sex addict. They do what other people do, only they do way too much of it."
The obsession with pornography has increased with the advent of the Internet. The Internet gives potential addicts easier access and more privacy to find and look at pornographic images at their home or in their office.
"Internet pornography is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction," says Weiss.
Darrell Brazell struggled with his porn addiction for 15 years. Brazell’s struggle became even more pronounced when he decided to become a minister. He got married in his senior year of college when he was already in the ministry. He didn’t tell his wife about his addiction at first, but revealed his problem after the explosion of pornography on the Internet fueled the fire of his obsession.
"I had already told my wife a couple of times about it, but I don’t think she realized how bad it was," says Brazell. "I ended up hearing another pastor talk about his struggles with porn during a sermon. That’s when I started coming clean about my story to other people."
Brazell has been a recovering sex addict for five years. Now, he runs a church recovery group at the New Hope Fellowship in Lawrence, Kansas. Men and couples come from hundreds of miles away to join the group, and Brazell says it’s important for both the husband and wife to join in the recovery process together.
"We have 33 guys active in our recovery group and a little over half of the guys’ wives are involved in the group," said Brazell. The guys whose wives are participating in the group are making great strides. The guys whose wives are not participating in the group — only half of those guys are making strides."
Sex addiction counselors agree that the spouses of sex addicts need to go through recovery just as much as the addict. The impact of sex addiction is sometimes harder on the spouse than on the addict.
"When a spouse comes in, they feel like they’ve been betrayed," said Weiss. "They feel like they’re violated every time you go online and look at those images."
Amy and Lance continue to go through therapy to deal with Lance’s sex addiction, and Lance has started a recovery group at his church to help others deal with their addiction.
"It is like night and day," says Amy. "Lance has just grown up in so many other ways. He has become a mature man, and I respect him so much more, and I am just really proud of him. And it’s helped us emotionally to become much more intimate and to be more real."
Lance is a filmmaker who has directed commercials and feature films during his career. He used his experience with sex addiction and recovery to produce, write and direct a new feature-length documentary on the subject, called "Adult Entertainment." Lance is negotiating with distributors to release the film later this year.
"It was a way for me to kill the demons I was dealing with," says Lance.
The prognosis is good for couples like the Tracys and the Brazells, as long as they continue to monitor the problem and remember that people who are vulnerable to addictions are going to be vulnerable all their lives.
"Most couples who deal with this, in my experience, stay together," says Weiss.