Part Two – My Life As A Sex Addict

 

By: Cameron Sprinkle

The morning after my confession to Karissa I woke up and couldn’t figure out where I was. Then I remembered that I was sleeping in a friend’s guest bed, and it hit me: what had happened the day before wasn’t a nightmare—it was reality. The emotion was similar to the moment when you wake up the morning after having a death in the family and realizing that yes, that person really is gone. That really happened.

I had just devastated my wife and everyone I care about by committing a sin that I had bitterly hated people for doing in the years prior. I erupted into deep soul wailing and agony, and felt so much anguish that I thought I would just disintegrate into a million tiny pieces.

How in the world did I end up here.

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One thing I want to clarify before I go on: the goal of this post is not to generate sympathy or compassion, or to absolve or excuse any of my sinful decisions. Also, I am writing from a place of wholeness, fullness, and healing! My goal is not only to share my personal story but in doing so provide insight, clarity, and understanding about how a sex addiction develops.

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I was an awkward kid. I loved art, music, and movies, and I enjoyed being by myself.

I enjoyed childhood, but I also had numerous damaging events happen, including sexual trauma, trauma connected to my hearing loss, and growing up with a dad who was very hurtful. He was a different person then, with plenty of valid issues and wounds of his own.

By middle school I would say I already had a father wound and an inferiority complex.

When I first saw a topless woman on tv around age ten, the immediate rush of euphoria I felt led me to go get my cheap film camera and come back to the tv and take a picture so that I could keep that image. After the show was over and the high subsided I crashed into panic and shame, and threw the whole roll away so that no one would find it. What my young brain learned: “That felt incredible, and I am deeply ashamed of it; I want to do it again because I like how it feels, but I’ll have to hide it.”

The mis-use and misunderstanding of sex is what it means to be sexually broken; I was sexually broken at age ten. 

When I was fourteen this awkward, introverted kid who didn’t fit in got an acoustic guitar for Christmas. This event changed my life, because two things happened at once: I stepped onto a path of God-ordained gifting, and I suddenly had something that the world valued very much.

Music came very naturally for me and it wasn’t long before I was playing classic rock songs by ear. I always believed that dad loved me, but this was the first time I ever felt like he really liked me. He’d call me from my room to show off my guitar-playing to visitors, and that felt great. At school I created an identity for myself around my musicianship and eventually even became an unlikely homecoming king.

My relationship with my Dad worsened, however, and I became my mom’s emotional support in high school as their marriage struggled. I never had any close guy friends, always preferring to be friends with girls. They were more mature, easy to talk to, and weren’t obsessed with Dave Matthews. But the acceptance, kindness, and safety I felt with them confused me (already processing things improperly–see my mental health guest post) and I would develop emotional feelings for girls very easily. It seemed like they weren’t as interested in me, though, and looking back I think it’s because they sensed my instability.

In high school I had begun to secretly purchase swimsuit edition magazines and things like that, but eventually when we got internet the high went to a whole new level because now video was available. I got caught on one occasion, and my dad made me feel terrible. I’m sure it was a projection of his own feelings of failure as a father in some way. But that was it, lesson learned: I’ve got to get better at hiding. My system adapted and advanced. When I got to college and had completely unsupervised internet access, I was off to the races. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t want to stop.

I had major heartache several times in college. My junior year I lost my virginity because I was desperate to keep my dysfunctional relationship with my girlfriend after she cheated on me. I thought it might attach her to me emotionally. Instead she left me anyway and I felt like I had gambled and lost my family inheritance. Not understanding God’s true heart for sex, I grew up thinking that sex was dirty and virginity was value, so I think that was when my identity went from knowing I was a guest at the Father’s table to feeling like a scoundrel in the alley. Still allowed into heaven, but just barely. I wasn’t one of the good guys anymore. This launched me into a deep loneliness and depression, and I leaned hard on my addiction to medicate my pain.

My next relationship, still more dear to me than the previous one, ended when I confessed my pornography addiction. My girlfriend was shocked, and after seeking counsel from her bible study leader came back to me and said, wisely and painfully, “I can’t walk through this with you”.

Devastation. Dismay. That summer was a golden season in my walk with God, as he picked me up and stood me upright, giving me hope again. Along the way I made passionate attempts to deal with my addiction, at one point getting rid of my computer and using just the library computers for homework. But when I came home for the summer I fell back into it again. I met with two or three adult men, including pastors, and talked to them about it. But no one really knew what to do. There weren’t any answers. I created an accountability group for myself, but then I kept failing anyway and ended up feeling more shame.

It was then that I entered a relationship with a friend I’d known for a year, Karissa Beer. We were going to be amazing together, I just knew it. Only obstacle: I kept my addiction to myself. She looked up to me, and I loved that. I didn’t want to lose that, or her. And if my experience had taught me anything, it was that nothing good ever came from confession.

A year after we were married I joined a small staff at a church of 400 in Hamilton County as a worship leader. I quickly began assuming additional creative and communication roles and responsibilities, so I learned graphic design, videography, photography, and website development, and I also picked up drums and piano as additional instruments. I was excitedly loading up on new talents and I didn’t know how to process it. The truth is that while I truly wanted to stay humble, my massive insecurity was mis-processing it. I was unintentionally creating an egotistical creative monster.

Using all my talents for the kingdom of God felt like when a quiet teen named Peter Parker became the amazing Spider-Man. It felt good to help people, and it felt good to feel like I was really good at something. The problem was that I had never learned to be ok with just being Peter Parker. In the Homecoming movie Peter says, “I’m nothing without my suit!” and Tony Stark sagely replies, “If you’re nothing without the suit, then you’re nothing with it.” I was terrified to lose my spidey-suit. I was terrified for everyone to find out I was just Peter Parker, because then I’d lose my place in the world and go back to being unknown and unloved.

Meanwhile the church was growing, and Karissa and I were well-loved and supported. Then two things happened that began to put immense pressure on my emotional immaturity and my addiction: the church went multi-site, and Karissa and I entered a season of infertility. I wasn’t prepared for the immense challenges that would come with either one.

Having to hand off a campus to brand new staff members felt like giving away a child, and brought about my first anxiety attacks I’d had in my life. My passion was making me control-hungry and power-hungry. I was being given more and more leadership of the church but I felt a disproportionate amount of ownership, and every day I felt that the weight of the whole church rested on all of the things I did and how well I did them. I got worse and worse at handling conflict with staff and began alienating people who were once friends. My addiction itself was kind of maxed out, barely stimulating my brain, yet I felt enslaved by it. I answered to it. I remember once saying out loud, “Do I have to?” as I obeyed yet again. And the more influence I had at the church, the more I hated myself. None of these people would still love me if they knew who I really was.

At home I was expecting Karissa to supply enough of my love language affections (words and touch) to convince me that I was lovable, whereas deep inside I believed I was unlovable. Perhaps if she could prove it to me, I would believe it. My issues made marriage worse and worse, and still my warped heart believed that I deserved to feel special, and I loathed Karissa for not making me feel loved.

I was burning out nearly every relationship I had with my negativity, cynicism, and general fatigue. I was physically and emotionally exhausted all day, every day. Every relationship around me withered until I had one person left who saw things the same way I did. She validated my frustrations at work, and she thought I was very valuable; she was the only one who still seemed to appreciate me. I am heartbroken to say that I was her son’s mentor, and I was leading a men’s group that included her husband prior to and during the affair.

Emotionally I felt like a wandering, terrified child who was at long last taken in and cared for. We thought we were caring for each other but we were actually using each other to give ourselves purpose and value because we were lonely. I was delusional. All the warning signs were flashing, the rumble strip was growling, and the guardrails were violently scraping the side of the car…but my addiction had numbed me, and it was like I was relationally drunk driving. Eventually I went over the edge of the cliff and had a short-lived free-fall before the inevitable catastrophic crash and burn.

During the three-month affair my ego was skyrocketing, yet it was the absolute worst I’d ever felt about myself.  At one point I collapsed alone in a hallway at the church building and cried a deep wailing, painful soul-cry that would be replicated the morning after my confession. I still remember how the thin, cold carpet felt on my face. My very soul felt like it was dying a slow, torturous, excruciating death, being gruesomely ripped into pieces.

Right up to the last day I thought I could still get away with it. I’d outsmarted people and hidden my sins since I was ten years old. Self-protection was the law of the jungle, and I was a sophisticated liar. It was never conscious—I never thought to myself, “I’m going to manipulate Karissa”. It was more like a paranoid spy that trusted no one; a highly advanced defensive mechanism.

But God ran me down. I felt the walls closing in that last week, and then I finally knew the game was up. I wish I could say that I confessed out of conviction, but it was actually out of necessity. My affair partner confessed to leadership and I was then forced to go home and tell Karissa.

That began a season of life more excruciating than I could ever have imagined. I was hysterical for days. It was like Bruce Banner waking up after The Hulk had gone on a rampage through a city. I could not believe the devastation that I had caused. And sadly, I would not see it clearly for several weeks. I was so sad for Karissa but I could not see past my own misery and despair. There was a shock phase where I couldn’t comprehend what was really happening or what I’d really done to everyone, and during that time I was incapable of wrapping my mind around what other people were going through. That caused damage in my relationships, in some cases irreparably.

I wanted to die, and I contemplated suicide. Scarlett was too young to be impacted–she’d never have to even know I existed; Karissa would get over it eventually and find the great guy she deserved. The pain was unbearable.

Eventually Karissa came back to live at our house and I went to stay with my parents for a week. I slept on a tiny bed in my old bedroom. The poetry of it haunted me. Across the room was the built-in cabinet where I had hidden the swimsuit magazines under my clothes as a teenager. This was where my addiction began, and now it seemed to be gloating from within the same walls, which seemed much smaller now.

I had gone out on this wild ride of trying to prove something to myself to the world, only to land right back in the same room as a complete failure. That was rock bottom. I was desperate for help, and ready to do whatever it took to get well.

Navigating next steps was an incredibly difficult and confusing process. With the help of our two counselors, a couple mentors, and our parents, we finally decided that I would go to a Christian crisis recovery center called His High Places in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was about a month after my confession when I left for the eight-hour drive at four in the morning. It was a beautiful, clear night, and the bright, full moon comforted me and made me feel God’s presence. It felt like he was lighting the night just for me, because it was so bright and I was the only one on the road. As I drove away I said to God out loud, “You and me, man.” I was nervous, because I didn’t know what awaited me three states away. I just knew it had to work.

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The final part of Cameron’s story will wrap up in Part Four. Subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss tomorrow’s post from Karissa: Part Three: Grounds for Divorce