When Frank was 13 years old, he began secretly watching sexually explicit videos. But growing up in a religious family in Southeast Asia, he hid this growing addiction. Instead, he would watch, rewind, and rewatch “sexy” scenes in secret—successfully keeping his...

In 1999, Tina was sitting in an Al-anon meeting because of a brother struggling with an addiction to drugs and alcohol. It was during that first meeting when, reading over indicators for co-dependency behavior, she initially realized she might have an issue herself...

Patrick’s drinking started in the late 1960s and continued for nearly fifty years. He was part of a family of drinkers: his father, both grandfathers, and all of his siblings drank. Patrick often drank during social outings, where one or two drinks would turn into ten...

The most vivid childhood memory for me is traumatic. I was four, my sister was three. My sister Rita and I went to Marion, Ohio, to stay with my mother’s only sibling, her older brother, and his wife. While there, my uncle raped me. At the time, I didn’t know what was...

When I was a student at university, I participated in a complimentary counseling session with a therapist. During the introductory assessment, I indicated that I had purged the night before. My therapist scheduled a follow-up appointment. At the end of the semester,...

Although Barry had his first beer when he was on a Boy Scouts camping trip as a teenager, it was not until after he graduated from college in Houston that he started to drink regularly—after he got a job as a merchant seaman, a lifestyle that enabled alcohol to become...

While Daniel was first exposed to porn in high school, when he would steal looks on his father’s computer from time to time when alone in the house, it wasn’t until college when his addiction to pornography and masturbation would fully emerge. “All my friends were all...