How do you explain?

When I first arrived here, one of the first things I did was to look into some kind of support for my addiction.

Not an easy thing to do.

First, it's hard thing to admit that you're helpless about anything, but as hard as it is to admit to yourself what you are, it's harder to tell your family. I'm sure my family would have rather heard that I was hooked on alcohol, pills, gambling..something they could understand. Something that they'd dealt with before in their family experiences.

But, telling them that I was a sex addict...that was a whole different thing.

I might as well have run into the room and shouted "snowshoe!" with Gila monsters strapped to my feet.

It made no sense to them...it was only something they'd seen on 'Law and Order' it didn't happen to good, happy, normal real people.

It certainly didn't happen to their son.

They couldn't wrap their heads around it..it was too different, too weird, too dirty.

My mom tried to help, she gave me a list of crisis hot line numbers just in case I thought I was going crazy or wanting to kill myself.

Not the help I needed, but an attempt to help nonetheless.

I realized that explaining any of this to her was going to be a neat trick.

How do you explain to the woman who drove to little league practice and never missed a game that you cruised personal ads looking for anonymous hookups?

How do you explain to the person who tucked you in at night and painted a map of the solar system on your bedroom wall, because you were interested in astronomy that you're driven to distraction by these dark, scary impulses and needs that take up all the time in your day that you should be using to do other things?

How do you explain all the random encounters that you squeezed in between errands, putting yourself and your family in harm's way, in parked cars, at stranger's homes, at your home, with women who, otherwise, you would have had nothing to do with, all in the name of doing it 'one more time'?

How do you explain how you could justify and rationalize all of it?

How do to explain to anyone that once the thrill of the chase, the rush of the climax and the high of doing something "bad" are gone, you can't get away fast enough and you hate yourself and the entire world?

How do you explain how much you hate yourself when somehow they still don't?