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Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Hey there, Before we start today's episode, I just want to say that you are going to be hearing from some wonderful Mma Mea voices over the next few weeks as I work on another project. Hollywayen Wright, Claire Stevens, a Nama Brown, who is the executive producer of this show, are all going to be sitting in my chair for a few weeks and doing the same wonderful interviews that you know and
love from No Filter. There are some great conversations coming your way about red and green flags in relationships, sex and porn, addiction, escaping from a religious cult, narcissism, sobriety, and more. You'll be hearing from me soon. Enjoy.
When I was single and trying to feed those addictions, it was incredibly isolating. I mean I spent a lot of time on people away so that I could spend more time at home feeding the addictions. I mean, watching porn can take up the whole day.
For Mamma Mia, this is No Filter and I'm Naima Brown. Sitting in for mea and today we're going to be talking about sex and porn and shame and self discovery with a really incredible, very brave woman. Erica Garza was only a teenager in nineteen ninety five when the infamous pam and Tommy Lee's sex tape exploded into the world. For anyone who doesn't know, that's Pamela Anderson of Baywatch and Tommy Lee, the rock star drummer from Motley Crue.
They were married at the time, and it's worth mentioning that they didn't release this tape themselves. It was stolen, there was a big lawsuit. It's a very interesting story in its own right, but nevertheless, it did leak and it was a massive cultural moment. I was sixteen and I remember it well. I never actually saw it, to be honest, but there was no escaping knowing about it because it was kind of the first sex tape that
went viral when the Internet was still very young. For Erica, the tape became an obsession, one of many obsessions she had with various pornographic clips and videos and images. This obsession would become an addiction, as would sex and interestingly
and importantly shame. Erica has written a memoir about her journey with sex and porn addiction called Fittingly Getting Off, and the conversation you're about to hear will definitely challenge not only what you think sex and porn addiction looks like, but also what recovery looks like. Spoiler alert. For Erica, it doesn't mean giving up sex or porn. I started this conversation by asking Erica about why we're so much more accepting as a culture of men who experience sex
and porn addiction. We treat it just like its kind of normal boys will be boys' behavior, but we still attach so much taboo around the stories of women who experience the same thing. Why Here's Erica.
After I started writing about this stuff and coming out into public and sharing it, I received so much email from men and women that were saying the same things. And I started going to like sex and love addicts, anonymous meetings and same thing men and women in the room. There was usually more men, but men and women were saying the same things as far as how the addiction began, how it progressed, so there were a lot of similarities. The only thing is that I think women aren't talking
about it enough. And if you don't see or hear other people talking about these things, it's hard to be the first person to stand up. What is your family going to say? What are people going to think at work? What are people going to say in the comments? I mean, there's a lot of hate and jokes that would come up around women that I don't think would come up with men. Like you said, they would just say high five. You know, he's just this lithario whatever done wan doesn't
work the same. And I think that even if we're just talking about sex, not even sex addiction, it's the same idea, this idea that women are somehow not as sexual. Men are always trying to get sex from women, and women are always trying to say, well, I have a headache or whatever, and it's just not the case. And I think that this idea that women are not sexual or women can't become sex addicts will change the more
that we decide to talk about it. And I'm hoping that by sharing my story and making sure I'm not blurred and any kind of interviews that I do, whenever I talk about this stuff, I make sure that I say my name, I say I'm a normal person. I'm married, I have a child. You know, I try to break through these these ideas of what they think a sex addict is supposed to look like. I've gotten so many questions like, well, were you sexually abused as a child?
Were you sexually assaulted? And men don't get the same question. And there's this idea that women something bad has to happen to them for them to go down this path, and it's just not the case.
Which is exactly where I kind of want to go to next with you. That creates that shame, that embedded shame into women as sexual beings right from the beginning,
And I want to read something that you wrote. What I got was an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was twelve years old, and my methods of getting this only became darker and more intense, so that it reached havoc on all aspects of my life until I became a shell of a person, isolated on a path to certain destruction.
And I want to hone it on and start at that timeline now for you at twelve years old, because to read your memoir, it becomes very clear that shame came first. Shame came before the sex addiction, the love addiction, the porn addiction. Talk to me about twelve year old Erica and what you were exposed to and thinking about at that time.
I grew up in a Catholic Latino household in I was born in eighty two from the nineties. I was twelve, and in that environment, nobody ever talked about sex. I also went to Catholic school, so at school and at home, nobody talked about sex, except to say that it was something bad, something dirty, or something that only happens between a man and a woman to make babies. It did not happen between a girl and her water faucet, as
I discovered in the bathtub at twelve. And when I made that discovery, I remember thinking that it was like I found the secret that I wasn't supposed to find, and it was exciting and gratifying, and I wanted to do it more and more. And I don't think there's anything addictive about that or abnormal about that, totally normal stuff, sexual explorations. But after I would have the orgasm, there would be this overwhelming shame and guilt and fear that
people would find out what I was doing. And I've always said that I think shame has driven my addiction, and I often wonder if I had just known about sex and known that what I was doing was totally normal and other kids were doing it, that I probably wouldn't have gone down that path. And around twelve years old, that same year that I started masturbating, I was also diagnosed with scoliosis, which is a curvature of the spine, and I had to wear this backbrace to school that
I couldn't hide under my clothes. It was very obvious, and I turned inward became really shy, socially anxious, withdrawn and then I started getting bullied at school, which just made it all the more worse. And what I think shifted my normal sexual explorations into something problematic was that I found that masturbation was a nice escape from that. When I would masturbate, I would get a break from all that I could just tune into my body. It
was almost like mindfulness, like meditation. I could just tune into my body and everything else shut off. But unlike mindfulness, where afterward you're calm and relaxed and you have more focus and clarity. I would be filmed with that shame again. I would feel so much guilt, and I didn't know how to separate those two feelings, and that would carry over into my sex life, into the kind of poor and I watched later. I didn't know how to feel
sexual pleasure without feeling sexual shame. They were very much intertwined.
And where do you think that knowledge that shame was? In that instance? The correct response came from you talk about growing up in a you know, a conservative Catholic family and environment, but you also talk about not having sex education and not knowing much about your body. And so where did the message come that this pleasure is inherently shameful, or that this feeling or this act is inherently shameful.
I think I picked up on little clues along the way. Whenever somebody was being intimate on TV, it would be like, oh, shut your eyes, look the other way, no discussion about it afterwards. So of course that's like, what's going on? You know, I want to know? And becomes way more interesting.
And then I remember this time. My mom hates when I tell this story, but I remember this time driving in our neighborhood and there was a lot of teenage pregnancy in my neighborhood and my mom pointing to one of these like sixteen year old pregnant girls in saying don't ever let that happen to you, and then pointing to my crotch and saying, don't let anybody ever touch you down there. And that just been so humiliating, so scary. And you know, my mom had she was a young mom.
She had my brother when she was eighteen, and I think that she probably had those same messages from her parents. And if I wasn't getting those messages, then it was just silence. And so when something is not talked about, that also sends the message that it's too bad to talk about to dirty.
Yeah, it's not a big leap from those messages, those conversations, those moments to shame.
Is it right?
Yeah, As a fellow teenager of the nineties, I did have to laugh when I was reading your memoir about the softcore on cable TV at night. That was a real moment, you know, before the Internet, before all of the things that came footing into your life later. But you know, at twelve, where did you find I suppose what we would just generally refer to as porn. You know, where did you find these visual aids?
Well, it's exactly that I found it on late night cable TV. First, Shannon Tweed was the actress from the nineties that I will never forget. And then the Internet started coming out. We got our computer, first computer in the living room. I think it was like ninety six or something like that. It was dial up internet, you know, so we have that whole like static sound. And it started off just with cybersex. So I moved from cable
TV to cybersex. And then suddenly there were pictures that I could download, and those took forever to download, and that was kind of part of it, this like anticipation of what I was going to see, and because the computer was in the living room, also having like this fear that somebody would come and find me, so this like adrenaline rush was part of it. And then holding those images in my head until I was alone in the bathroom or in my room, so that just kind
of furthered the anticipation. And then you know, as technology became more sophisticated and porn became more accessible, speeds were faster. I can suddenly have streaming videos. I had my own laptop. Now I could take it into my room. And just as you know, the Internet was becoming a more accessible, porn was becoming more accessible, my problems were also getting a little more complicated. And so I really trained my mind to look at porn as a crutch, as an
escape route. And later, when I started getting attention from boys in high school, then that just kind of played into that I treated boys the same way that I would treat porn as just like an escape route, something that was going to take me away from these feelings.
It's interesting you talk about that, you know, the waiting for an image to download, or the fear that someone might stumble in and catch you, and those kinds of things. And again going back to that feedback loop of pleasure, shame, pleasure, shame, because you're right about something I'd never thought about before, which is this idea of shame addiction as well, that that rush of shame, just like any other rush, became
something that you were seeking out as well. Tell me a little bit about that feeling.
Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with adrenaline, This feeling that I'm doing something wrong, this feeling that I might get caught and I whop. Sure we'll get into this later. But I still watch porn now. So I don't have any sort of ideas about porn being bad, and you know, I'm anti porn or whatever. I think that you can use it in a healthy way.
But I can tell the difference between watching it from a place of shame, which is filled with this like dark, heavy adrenaline fuel feeling, and when I'm watching it for pleasure because I simply want to, not because I need to. And that's a really subtle difference, but something that I had to learn along the way. And another dealing with the shame is that I would start to look for clips that would give me that dose of shame and pleasure.
So I would look for like clips that were degrading to women, clips where I felt like, yeah, like women were getting hurt or you know, slapped around, told terrible things. And then I would look for men who would treat me that same way. And it was all to get that same adrenaline rush that like I'm better than this, but this is all I deserve, you know, Like I shouldn't.
I should be going for somebody who treats me, well, I shouldn't be watching this kind of porn, but I would do it, and it would give me that double dose that shame and pleasure at the same time, because I didn't know how to separate those two things.
And so this process, this habit, this experience that began at twelve, it carries through, you know, through your your high school years, your teen years, and you're right about wondering whether or not your parents suspected anything, but you don't think that ultimately they did or what do you think that they knew about what was happening in your life at that time.
I think they were too busy to even think about it and probably weren't as knowledgeable about how these things work, how addictions work, and sex addiction. I mean, nobody was even really talking about it then. Porn addiction that wasn't that wasn't really a thing because it was also new, so they wouldn't have known. I think what they know now, well now they know because of my book, But they like to make jokes now about like, oh, now we know what you were doing behind closed doors when we
were having like family parties. It's like a big joke with my family and like whatever, I'll be light about it too because it makes it less awkward. But yeah, I really think that they just didn't know or they were just too busy.
And it never occurred to you to kind of compare notes with your peers with friends. You know, you must have wondered whether the other kids your age had stumbled upon what you stumbled upon, whether it was the faucet in the bathtub or you know, the slowly downloading images in the early Internet, but you never you never asked why not.
No, it was terrified of people finding that out, even like finding the right words to bring up that conversation just seemed like the furthest thing from normal, and everyone
would label me as weird. I mean, I didn't want to be that person because I felt so ashamed of it, you know, Like I said, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, and I remember as part of like before I got my back brace, they had to do all these X rays and I remember the feeling of being in the hospital gown and the X ray technician being in the other room looking at my X ray sheets and thinking they were going to be able to tell that I'd masturbated just by looking at those pictures and also thinking
that I got scoliosis because I masturbated in the bathtub. I thought like the way that I had my body in the bathtub, and I thought my parents were going to find out all their church friends, Like it was just this horrible thought. So yeah, the idea of bringing it up to anyone was mortified.
I mean, yeah, that's beyond shame, that's terror. That's real, like existential fear. Tell me about those first chat rooms that you joined and how that changed and started to kind of guide you to the next level of this experience for you.
So I was a really lonely kid, like I said, when I got my back brace, I started getting bullied, and so I was really introverted, socially anxious. And when I would go online, it was much easier to talk to people. I could think about what I was going to say, I could backspace edit, so all of that was really easy. And then when I started to find you know, people that would ask me, you know it was it would always start off like asl I'm sure
you know that the age sex location. It would start off like that, And so I became really familiar with the lingo that was just some exciting way to connect with somebody, but also kind of feed into those sexual feelings and explore a little bit and learn something. I felt like I was actually learning something that was going to be valuable later on.
Did you have a sense of how dangerous and manipulative those spaces could be at that time?
Not? No. I would always say that I was sixteen, even though I was twelve and thirteen, and sixteen is still really young. But I would think, like that makes me seem older, and it didn't seem to matter to the people I was talking to. Who I mean they said they were They could have been kids too, who knows. I mean, they could have been like three teens, but they would sometimes say they're like forty or thirty or whatever, And it didn't matter to me. And I had no
idea that it was something that was dangerous. We never exchanged any sort of like phone number or address or anything, thankfully, but now, like as a parent and knowing what I know, like watching enough like crime documentaries, like yeah, that's really scary stuff. But I wouldn't have known then. It was all just so new at the time, the Internet. We were just learning this stuff as we went.
After this short break. What happens when the Pam and Tommy Lee sex tape drops like a grenade into Erica's world? And how did her porn addiction also turn into a sex addiction as she got older? And then fast forward, I think you're about fifteen sixteen, maybe around this time where the cultural phenomena that had a massive impact on all of us, that was the Pam and Tommy Lee sex tape drops explodes into the world, really explodes into
your world. Tell me about how that the visuals and the experience of that sex tape impacted you.
Well, I definitely got to see a lot more than I saw on Cinemax. Late at night, I found the tape in my brother's room, his girlfriend at the time. I would hate out with her. She would hang out with me more than she hung out with him. But so was she.
Well, you and she had a really interesting experience together around that tape, didn't you.
Yeah. Yes, So, so he was somewhere and she decided to watch it with me in my room and then she decided to sleep, And so watching the tape, obviously it was like thrilling that remember, that adrenaline rush was there, but it also wasn't so I wasn't too ashamed because somebody was watching it with me, so it made it less bad, Like whoa, Okay, she's a girl, I'm a girl, Like we're sharing this, it's not so weird. But she was more like giggling about how like funny it was,
and I was like getting turned on. I'm like, okay, keep it cool, you know, don't masturbate here, like save it for later. And then that night she decided to sleep over that night and my parents, me and the good Catholic parents they were, they wouldn't let my brother and her sleep in the same room, and so she would sleep in my bed. We'd slept together before like that,
and it didn't seem like a big deal. But something about the tape being on my mind and obviously on her mind because she told me to kiss her or she she kissed me first, sorry, and then she told me to kiss her back, and I mean that was like my first kiss and it wasn't really like no tongue or anything. It was like a peck, but still like mouth to mouth kiss my brother's girlfriend. Sexy tape
on my mind. It was it was exciting and I liked it, but but yeah, I think my reaction to it was just kind of weird, like I didn't know what to say. I said something really stupid. I forget what I just turned around and we never talked about it again or anything like that. But yeah, very much inspired by Pam and Tommy.
Well and I do you know, fast forward to your acknowledgments. I loved that you thank them and your acknowledgments, you know, for what they brought, what they brought to your life.
But so interesting because you know, those kind of early experiences, those experimenting that we do in our you know, in our teen years, very normal, but you know again, because you had this deep well of kind of hidden shame that started to intersect with a few other I would say kind of maybe obsessions correct me if I'm wrong.
In your life at that time. One was discovering your sexuality, a kind of desire to really understand yourself better and where your desires were coming from and what they meaned, and to desire a real obsession to lose your virginity.
That became almost a kind of quest the eer on, but so informed by the porn that you've been watching and the experiences you'd had up to that point, tell me about how you were kind of weaving together all of these different parts of your psyche at this time and such a young and so about sixteen seventeen.
Now, yeah, I mean I didn't kiss a boy until I was sixteen, and then I lost my brisin after that happened. I remember feeling when that happened, like, oh, somebody finally likes me, because I had spent so many years feeling so disgusting and weird and deformed because of my back, and so anytime a boy gave me any sort of attention, I mean, it made me feel top of the world. I felt special, I felt pretty, And so when a boy kissed me finally, I was like, Okay,
check that off my list. But now the next thing has to happen. And I had saved up so much knowledge. I felt like I was just going to be this, like, you know, this powerful woman in bed, like all the porn stars I'd seen. I'd learned so much, and so I feel like I was willing to give it to anybody who was going to give me that opportunity. And that happened. I got like a job and as a waitress in the local restaurant, and a guy who was twenty six. I think I was sixteen and he was
twenty six. Yeah, Like he came around in his like fancy convertible BMW and took me out, and we took me to motels most of the time. I don't even really remember going on dates. Really was like go to the motel And yeah, I very much saw it as this check mark that I needed on a list of things to do that obviously I was curious about, but also I thought it would give me. It would it would make me into a different person, It would make
me more valuable. Is being wanted like that, And of course that feeling doesn't last long.
And it really seemed to mark a shift for you from you know, what had up to that point been this very cerebral kind of private shame and porn addiction loop into what would become sex and love addiction. Right when it when it left the virtual spaces and now it was in the real world. You were having sex, You were a sexual woman. How did that that kind of jump across to the other side of the road change you?
So, I first want to say I never stopped watching porn, so that was always part of the experience, but boys and men being wanted like that, that just became another addiction. When you hate you as much as I hated myself, I felt like I needed that proof that somebody liked me and thought I was worthwhile. And a lot of times I would look for people after that relationship, and then I was in my twenties and steven, so I'd meet these guys and I would treat them the way
that I looked at porn. I would try to find somebody who would, you know, say degrading things to me, and sometimes have to like urge them, like here's what I want you to say to me, so I can feel this. And it was always this feeling of like I'm just this slot, this trashy pore that they want to use. And I liked this feeling of being used. I don't know if I liked the feeling. I mean, it would give me that an adrenaline feeling, but it was also this like that's all I thought I really
deserved was just to be used like that. So I would, you know, sleep with guys who I knew wouldn't take me out of dates. They would just come and have sex with me and then leave and probably go on dates with other girls, and that feeling of being used felt very much like the shame and pleasure that I would get out of the porn scenes that I watched. It was almost like I was trying to recreate what I had seen in my real life experiences to get that shame and pleasure all the time.
And it's so interesting, Erica, because and I know that this is something that you discovered, you know, on the other side of this journey when you when you began to heal. But going back to that, that idea of the assumptions that people have around why women might find themselves addicted to sex, addicted to love, addicted to porn, and the assumption that the that there must be some kind of abuse or some kind of core trauma that sets you on this path. Because you you write about
coming from a very loving family. You for a while interrogated whether or not there was something that might have happened to you that you had just kind of tucked away, you know, in the recesses of your mind. But that wasn't really your experience.
Was it.
So you know, where where did this idea that all you deserve was to be treated poorly come from?
I think it all started with that back brace and getting bullied at school. It may seem like something so small and insignificant compared to things like sexual assault, sexual abuse, and I mean, so many people who have read my stuff and heard about my story will always come at me with like, oh, you're just a spoiled little brat. You had everything you ever wanted as a kid, nothing bad happened to you. All this kind of stuff. But
trauma is not a competition. So I mean, if something hurt me and made me feel like I was less worthy as a human being, less valuable, that's valid. I can say that that is traumatic because it was. And it's really important for me to push that message because the messages I was getting was, like I said before,
it was like something terrible must have happened. You must have had this abusive childhood, and it made me think that maybe I did, Maybe I had had these repressed memory because I wasn't seeing that story reflected back to me. So it was really important for me to communicate that addiction can come out of ordinary trauma. And my trauma was really ordinary. Yeah. I had a loving family who provided for me. We took vacations, I went to college, I got a job, like all the normal things you're
supposed to do in your life. I mean I had that. From the outside. If you were to look at my life, it's like, well, well what happened, Like what's your problem? But that really hurt me as a child, and I never dealt with it at the time, and I never learned the coping skills to deal with it effectively. And so I carried that tool, the only thing I had, which was born and then sex with me as my escape route, as my tool, as my way to self soothe,
because I didn't have another tool to use. And it would take many, many years until I was an adult and able to go to therapy and able to talk about what was going on and face myself and read self help books and all the stuff you have to do, all the work to say, okay, well that was real.
And as you say, you carried it forward. You carried it forward into your twenties, your early adult life, and you go to unis or to have more experiences, and you write about the fact that drugs and alcohol intersected with your life at this time, and that you really had these deeply worn habitual grooves, you know, the poor
and masturbation, drinking, casual sex. Was there a particular moment or encounter that made you stop and think, this is an addiction, this is a problem, or I don't have control of this.
So with something like sex addiction, it's really hard to reach a bottom. A lot of people ask me like, what was the changing, Like what was the moment that you shifted and you know it started to change. I feel like it was more like a voice in my head that got louder and louder over time, instead of one specific moment. I could reach into my memories and think of several things that you know, would awaken that
voice in my head. But then I would hush it and go and do something else destructive, like sleeping with my high school teachers. That was one thing that I put in the book. I mean I was graduated. It wasn't while I was in high school, but that was one thing that I did that I felt weird about after when I was looking in Hawaii, Like I said, these guys would come over and have sex with me and then leave. Another thing that made me feel like this,
you know, something's wrong here, something's going on. And then I think it was more ending up at the same place in relationships over and over again, and making the same mistakes over and over again, and thinking okay, like feeling empty and wanting that emptiness to go away, and knowing that it wasn't serving me anymore. And so the shift for me happened when I was thirty. So I was like, I saw the decade ahead of me and thought, Okay, I'm going to make this decade better than the last.
What needs to change? And I just feel like, sometimes you have to be at that point in your life where you're ready, And I was ready at that point, or I decided to be ready to like, Okay, let let's do some reflection and figure out what's going on. And in order to do that, it took you know, all the work, all the therapy and sex and love addicts anonymous meetings where I was able to finally face those things.
Before you got there, you write really eloquently about this kind of being torn between these two realities, which is that sometimes your approach to sex and sexuality and porn,
your relationship to those things, could feel very liberating. Whether there were moments that felt like you were in control or that you were making a choice and that kind of oscillating between that idea of this like currency as like I'm the cool girl, I'm cool with sex, I'm cool with porn, you know, to those moments of going, oh, actually this is harming me and just swinging between those
two realities or those two experiences. Tell me how these addictions showed up in your life as something that you had to manage and integrate into your day to day. You were in UNI, as you say, you were working, you were studying. What did it feel like to have to kind of manage these addictions or to feed these addictions whilst you were also living your life and reaching other goals.
Well, when I was in a relationship, it was very easy to feed those addictions because I had somebody who was there that I could have sex with all the time. And it was even better if it was somebody who wanted to watch porn with me, because we could do both. You two of my favorite things that would take me like put me back into my body and get me out of my head. When I was single and trying
to feed those addictions, it was incredibly isolating. I mean I spent a lot of time pushing people away so that I could spend more time at home feeding the addictions.
I mean, watching porn can take up the whole day if you're trying to find the perfect clip and then you found it and then you try to top it with another clip, or if you're pursuing somebody to have sex with, and you know, I would have this whole ritual of like grooming my body, going out, flirting with someone just the right way, and then you know, having sex with them. It was all part of this, Like, yeah, it was all just this way to try and escape, and I feel like I managed it by sort of
pushing everything else away. I would often neglect schoolwork, I would neglect my job. I feel like I could have, you know, written a lot more than I did. And definitely friendships. I think friendships is what suffered the most. I had a lot of difficulty making platonic friends because it was much easier to flirt with somebody then I have a conversation, a friendly conversation, much easier to have sex with someone than actually become emotionally intimate. Those things
were just so much easier. And then yeah, I would play it off like I'm just a cool girl. I'm a cool girl who watches porn. I'm a cool girl who lets you come and have sex with me and
leave like I'm not going to make a big deal. Well, I liked that idea of not being this dramatic, clingy girl, and I would be kind of stuck between those feelings of like wanting them to stay so that I could feel, you know, wanted for a little bit longer, but then also wanting them to leave because if they stayed, then they were going to see that I was actually this disgusting, broken person and not knowing how to find that midpoint and be way too scared of any sort of intimacy.
You talk about how you could lose a day looking for that perfect clip. You know, it's very interesting, isn't it How any addiction follows these patterns, right, It's like a drug addict could spend a day trying to get that hit or trying to find that their source. What was a perfect clip for you at that time?
Oh god, it was changing all the time because mine is that part of it in a way, like yeah, only work once, you know, like.
Is it that thing of like Okay, tell me how that really worked for you?
I mean well sometimes, yeah, sometimes only work once sometimes I mean I really liked it, and we'll come back to it. But yeah, that's absolutely part of it. Is just like a you know, a drug addict will need a little bit more in order to you know, get that high, and an alcoholic and they start to hold her liquor and they need a little more to get
the buzz. I mean, it's the same thing. So I would watch more and more, but then also, yeah, try to top whatever I had watched with something that was just a little more degrading, a little more sicker, And I really found those fetishes. I don't want to say the categories change from the very beginning when it was all just like, oh, cheerleaders with their teachers or something, which is like, oh, I was a teenager. So it was like, you know, relating cliche porn in a way. Yeah, yeah,
like vanilla porn. And then all of a sudden, it was like a hundred guys, you know, taking some woman into a warehouse and doing wells of degrading things to her. And it's scary because once you get to that point, I mean, it becomes very limited what you find like stimulating.
After a while, I would just feel numb, numb, numb until I found that one that gave me that feeling, and then feel sickened with myself afterward, and then yeah, I have to find something sick aroun until I was exhausted or you know, had to be somewhere for work or something, or I was sore. I would often like end up physically sore because I had masturbated so much.
So you're getting older, You're accumulating more of these traumatic experiences like you just described. It's getting harder and harder for you to, I suppose tell yourself that you have control over these elements of your life. Tell me about Elliott and that relationship.
So Elliott was somebody I met when I was living in Hawaii. He lived in New York, and at that time in Hawaii, I was feeling I was just like seeing these guys like on a merry go round, Like I would just like have these guys on a rotation of like guys who would make me feel really used, and in a way I was using them as well, but I wouldn't have admitted it then. And then I saw Elliot as a ticket out of that. I thought, oh,
this like in today. He was a lot older than me, as well, he's like thirteen years older, had this important job, lived in a really cool city very far away from where I was, so I saw him as a ticket out of that and thinking like a clean slate, I went to New York with him, and then I ended up feeling really intimidated and all those feelings of like insecurity and low self esteem just came rushing back. I didn't have a job because I moved, and yeah, just
feeling really intimidated and threatened. And then he asked me to marry him, and I remember thinking like, oh god, why is he into me? Like I have no idea he's this important man, and thinking that the only thing I had to offer him was sex. So I better at least, you know, be awesome in bed. And he was recovering alcoholic and so he was able to see early on, I think, And it just got worse over time that I was using sex as a coping tool
for all of those feelings of insecurity. I didn't know how else to connect with him.
He was the first parson to suggest to you that you were a sex addict. To use that language.
He did, Yes, he said it. He said it to me. But he also said it in not a very kind way. It was like, during a fight while he was out the door, you're a sex addict, you know, do something about it. So we broke up shortly after that because it was much easier to break up than to actually face the idea that I might be a sex addict. But that stuck with me for a long time. Was like, oh maybe I am. You know, I'd always felt like I had an issue, you know, with sex, and felt
all that shame and felt bad about it. But to have an actual name for it and to have somebody who had his own addiction call it out and me, it was very confronting. But I wasn't ready to face it just then, so it was it was still be several years before I was ready to actually go into a meeting and say to other people, Hey, I think I might be a sex addict.
When we come back the low point that finally drove Erica to get the help she needed, and what recovery looks like today, stay with us. Around this time. You write about, you know, exposing yourself to a lot of healing modalities, getting into yoga, getting into the teachings of certain people that offered you something to help you see
yourself and see your life in a different way. But that didn't mean that that was that you stopped these behaviors that day, right, that you got better the first day you went to yoga.
Right.
It was years of kind of integrating these things that you were. You know, you were still exposing yourself to these deeply worn kind of neural pathways that you'd created from twelve years old, whilst you know, exploring a healthier, newer way to live, different way to live. But it would take a long time for that new thing to be stronger than the old thing, didn't it.
Yeah, Well, I mean sex. When you were addicted to something like sex, it's not something that you could just stop. I mean, I guess some people will go abstinate, But it was something I still very much wanted to do and wanted to integrate into my life in a healthy way. So I had to find a way to you know, do both things. And it takes a lot of experimentation, exploration to find a way to have balance with both those things. And I often tell people who ask me, like,
what should I do? I think I might be a sex addict. Is like, okay, meetings are a great place to start because you get to see other people who are like you and say those things allowed that you may not have said to anybody else. But you don't have to stop at meetings like if that's not your thing,
like be willing to try lots of other things. And like the thing about yoga, it sounds very cheesy, I'm sure like a yoga sa me, Like I know a lot of maximums are like in my book that way, like e Price you ready pray love and moved to bali and did yoga, and it's just like it really minimizes the fact that doing something like yoga, I also did kickboxing, Like those things put me in my body and gave me something else to do with my body, gave me another outlet and that was a nice replacement
for you know, instead of going to porn, I can go and stretch out in yoga, and that just that's how you know, a lot of times, how you can replace addictive behavior is our how to stop addictive behaviors by replacing it with something healthier. And so I think you have to try a lot of things to find
what combination works for you. And obviously therapy and writing about it was a big thing for me, and then not just writing about it, but writing about it and then sending it out into the world, publishing it and exposing myself that way. Those were all like practices for me to just get real about what was going on, to say to other people, what's going on. And once you voice these things, and they have a little less power over you because now they're out in the open.
And the worst thing for me seemed like being found out, like I didn't want anybody to find out was doing that. And then once I put it out there and made the choice, then you know that fear was gone. You know it.
But there was a gap for you, wasn't there between kind of going right, Okay, I'm probably an addict. These things are a problem. They're not really serving me in my life. Before you were ready to go to meetings, tell me about the low point, the point where you said, okay, it's now or never.
When I was living in New York, after it broke off with the guy I was engaged too, I got into another relationship right away, and that was also a pattern of mine. It was just like relationship to relationship, and then between those relationships lots of casual sex and then pouring that whole time. Those are my little patterns.
And so I jumped into another relationship right away, and this person was very present, very loving, very kind, and I didn't know how to do with that kind of relationship. I really, I mean, we spent three years together and I felt like this might be the person I'm going to marry. But anytime I felt like we were getting a little bit too close or he'd find out something new about me, then I'd push him away. And so then I ended up destroying that relationship, as I had
done so many times before with relationships. And my thirtieth birthday was coming up, and I remember being in this place of just feeling like, oh, here we are again, same place I ruined another relationship, and I could see how it was all going to play out. You know, I'm going to just go back to sleeping with guys who just make me feel used. I'll probably jump into another relationship and it just seems so exhausting and pointless
that I knew something had to change. And I know that's not really like a low point, like I said, with sex addiction, it's hard to find a bottom. It was more like, Okay, enough's enough. I want something better for my life.
I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, sometimes a low point really is tigue at the idea of knowing what's coming is just more of the same.
Right, Yeah, And you know, I think it is possible to have people, you know, they spend a lot of money on prostitutes or you know, they can they can go into financial ruin. They could you know, cheat on their partner and ruin marriages and lose their job and they're you know, using corn it work. I mean, there's all sorts of really really huge things that can happen. But for me, yeah, I mean, it's that ordinary, going
back to the ordinary trauma. It was pretty much a boring story of just being on this like hamster wheel and wanting to get off because that's not as dramatic, but it's still real and valid, Like my life is still a waste, like slipping through my fingers. I'm still not making real connections with people. I'm living this very dull, sad, lonely life. And I wanted something different, and so thirty just seemed like the great place to do it. And so I went to Bali. Yes, I did eat, pray, love.
And so that you ate, prayed and loved.
Yes, I did. Yeah, I read you pay love, and I said, I want to do that. And so I was working remotely at the time so I could take my job and went to bali and was committed to not being in a relationship. I'm just gonna do yoga like Elizabeth Gilbert and Rye and be healthy. And for about a month that is what I did. I was like, you know, did lots of meditation, reiki and all sorts
of really cool New age things. But then I met I met a guy who was there who was also dealing with addiction, and there for the very same reasons. He was there trying to get clean, trying to change his life. So we were both sort of in this same sort of space of wanting to change and being ready for change. And that person is now my husband.
So we connected right away, and I made the choice to just be honest and authentic from the start, and that took a lot lot of different things along the way, which one of them was admitting that I was a sex addict. And he's the first person that I told that I thought I might be a sex addict. Toe instead of running away, he wanted in and know more, and that just seems so shocking, like, oh, wait, you don't want to run away from me, I haven't scared you.
I was like, no, it actually brought us closer together. And I loved the way that that felt, and it really felt like, Okay, this is something I need to be doing. This feels right. I feel this sense of relief. And so I kept finding different ways to expose myself and keep saying that aloud. And saying it aloud helped me get a grasp on how it started, how it got worse, just have that sort of reflection that I needed in order to know what to do next.
In diluting that shame, right, Like, every time you tell your story, did it feel like shame and its ability to kind of sink its claws into you got a little less strong?
Yeah, sharing my story and then also just researching it, just finding out and like going to meetings and hearing other people talk about it.
And so what does sex and Love Addiction Anonymous teach as a recovery process and what does your recovery look like?
So at the very beginning of my recovery, I thought it had to look a certain way. I thought that okay, recovery means monogamy. Recovery means like taking a really long break, if not monogamy, then taking a really long break from sex and spending time alone reflecting or monogamy. No porn ever, again, stay away from things that might trigger me. I had this really fixed idea of what recovery was supposed to look like, and the thing is, it looks different for everyone.
And after a bit of time, I realized that that wasn't really serving me, that I didn't feel as authentic, and I started to ask those big questions of you know, had I felt okay with exploring my sexuality as that twelve year old girl. Had I not felt that shame? Would this all be different? Would I not have had an addiction? Would I've just been this sexually empowered person. And I don't think having a lot of sex makes you an addict. I don't even think watching porn every
day makes you an addict. It's how you use those things and how you feel about those things when you use them. To me, that's what set me down the destructive path. And I feel like I still want to be a sexually empowered person. My husband and I watch porn sometimes. My husband and I we experiment with non monogamy sometimes, and those things I don't use them as escape routes anymore because I have healthier methods. You know.
I realized that I could still be this sexually empowered person without blowing up my life, without line of people, without cheating. If I'm just honest, I'm and I say, what's really going on? I don't use an escape route.
And it sounds it's so interesting to me. Tell me a little bit more about you know that it sounds like the missing ingredient from addiction to an empowered, deliberate life where you explore desire and sexuality and pleasure and a healthy way like you're describing now with you and your husband, is shame. The missing link? Is it that it was it shame that turned those behaviors into addiction?
I think absolutely, yes, one hundred percent. I think my addiction was less about sex and much more about shame. I think if I had just felt okay with masturbating, knew that this is what people do with my body is mine, I could explore it however I want. You? Which are the messages I try to give my daughter? You know, like your body is yours, you know, take care of it, but nothing you can do is ever
going to be bad about your body. And if I'd gotten those messages, those you know, sex positive messages, I don't think that I would have used sex that way. Yeah, it would have been this this you know thing that I might have done a long time of, like when I was like twelve, I'd wanted to do it all the time as a kid, just discovering it for the first time. But I don't think I would have used it as a crutch because so much of that was
like trying to get away from that shame. And you know, like I said, I would have the orgasm and then I would fill all that rushing back again and the only way to escape it was to reach again for it. But if I didn't have that, I don't think I would have needed to so desperately cover it up again with another orgasm. I think it really set off the chain effect.
When you're not coming from a place of shame and you're coming from a place of healed wholeness, which sounds like is really where you are?
Now?
What kind of porn do you like now?
Well, it really depends what kind of mood I've been, and sometimes, I mean I find the whole thing really boring, which is a really weird place to be. Like, sometimes I'm really in the mood. Sometimes I'll watch it with my husband and yeah, I mean it changes all the time. But I don't go and like search for the perfect clip. I also just don't have time to like spend all day looking for the perfect clip.
But motherhood makes you know, any addiction a little bit more complicated that you don't have all that time to to seek it out. But I suppose what I'm asking is, you know, whilst there was a time when you were in the in the kind of depths of your addiction where it was a form of self harm, you would look for those clips that validated that sense of unworthiness in you. You would look, as you say, for clips
that kind of brutalized women to a certain degree. Yeah, do different things, to use the title of your memoir, get you off now in that sense?
Well, I think that those clips that I would go for the reason that they became so extreme after a while, so dark, like they would be taken to weird places that don't really get me off now, is because I was just watching so much of it, and now because I don't watch so much of it stimulate, Like I'm more sensitive to stimulation, so I'm not always looking for this thing to top it and top it and give
me that feeling. And also I'm not really searching for that adrenaline feeling anymore, this feeling of like, oh I'm bad, I'm going to be found out, like nobody's going to find me out, like I have a lock on my door, you know, Like I don't. I'm not after that feeling anymore. I'm more after just I don't know, like like it changes all the time. It's hard to describe.
I understand there is Yeah, none of us have you know, none none of us want the same thing every day. That would be very boring, right, And none of us are stimulated by the same things every day. It sounds like your your brain's ability to have a stimulating experience has almost been recalibrated. Yeah, so that you don't have to keep seeking that next, bigger.
Thing, right. And I also just want to make clear too, like those kind of like rough degradation that that isn't necessarily like I'm not trying to like label that is bad. I don't want to kink, shame anyone. Some people are really into like BDSM and that sort of thing, and that's perfectly fine if that's what you're into. Doesn't mean that you're an addict or something's wrong with you. But for me, I felt like it was always just trying to top things with more extreme, more extreme, more extreme.
And now I just I don't really have that search anymore, or that desire to search like that.
In your recovery with a husband who can relate because he's also experienced a similar addiction, have there been moments in times over the years where one or the other of you has fallen off that proverbial wagon.
No, we are pretty good about recognizing when we're feeling triggered, and you know, we might make those decisions that could be destructive, and we've gotten really good at talking to each other. I mean, of course we feel we feel triggered sometimes part of you know, being an addict and having that sort of past. But I mean as far as falling off the wagon, I like, to me, that kind of suggests like like there's really destructive, like like falling out, like things blow up in your life.
And I we have antiquated language even in and even like for me to afraid of the mission in that way, is that like did the nineties call and want my question back? Like, what's a better what's a better way to ask that question?
I don't know, No, I think that's the best word for it. But I guess we all have different ideas of what falling off the wagon means. And you know, like with with sex addiction, like in a relationship where we have sex, it's it's hard to fall off the wagon. Like I haven't cheated, I don't cheat on my husband, I don't lie to my husband. I haven't like spent days in bed binging on poorn secretly. You know, those kind of things would would seem to me like maybe
falling off the wagon. I haven't, but I have felt triggered, and when I do feel triggered, luckily, I have ways to deal with those triggers and healthier ways so that I don't blow up my life.
So yeah, and I'm fairly curious to know, because I you know, we're living in a time where a lot of people, in a lot of different ways are rethinking what relationships look like, what families look like, what boundaries and parameters around marriage or commitment looks like. And you know what a few years ago would have been quite taboo. You know, these ideas of consensual non monogamy is now becoming a little bit more mainstream. We have better frameworks
for understanding these things. I'm curious to know. You know, I'm not asking for you to tell me the personal details of your marriage, but I'm curious to know how non monogamy is another bead on the chain of your healing, and how opening up your marriage to non monogamy has helped you to stay in a place of sexual health and well being.
I think it's reclaiming that empowerment that I wish I had felt way back when I first made these discoveries with my body. I think it's letting go of the shame. It's another step in that direction of saying this feels good to me, this feels healthy, This doesn't feel destructive. This is something I want to do, and I want
to do it with my husband too. I mean that may evolve over time how we approach this thing, but for now, we only approach this together, and it takes a lot of conversation, a lot of boundary setting, and I think that's also really important when it comes to healing is being able to have these authentic and challenging conversations. But yeah, it's really just saying I want to continue being a sexually empowered person and experimental and it's okay to be that even if you had an addictive past.
I get to define what this recovery looks like.
Erica, you mentioned earlier the advice that you give when someone reaches out to you and says, I wonder if I have a sex addiction of porn addiction. What is the advice that you give if someone wonders if they're loved one, if their partner, if someone in their life
is struggling with these addictions. Because sometimes people can make things worse even with the best of intentions, Right, how do you advise we approach someone in our life if we're worried that they're struggling with something like this.
I think maybe talking to a therapist first before you even approach the person, because you don't know what everyone's dynamic is a little bit different. You don't know if that person is going to react in a defensive way, if they're not ready to face those problems. You don't know if they actually even have an addiction unless you have a thoroughly researched addiction. So I think the first step is for you yourself to go to a therapist and talk about your partner and what's been going on.
And they should probably have a pretty good like based on what they know about your history and what you've told them about your relationship, they'll have a pretty good recommendation on where you go from there. I think bringing up those conversations with your partner can be really delicate, and there's a lot of ideas about you know, sex being these like cheating maniacs. There's a lot of you know it has been in the news, like the Harvey
Weinsteins of the world. And I don't think that most sex addicts are out to hurt other people and cheat on their partners. I think they're more likely to hurt themselves than hurt the people around them, and so I think to be gentle with them and to find a way with your therapist to approach them with care and kindness and empathy is the best way forward. Not to go at them with any kind of accusation.
I think that's really good advice before this conversation and before reading Erica's book. I had never actually heard of the concept of shame addiction, had you. I didn't actually know that shame is something that we could be addicted to, and now that I do, it kind of illuminates a lot of things for me. There's so many stories I've heard a lot of them here on this podcast, with people who have struggled with so many things, various addictions,
various behaviors. To think that maybe they were seeking shame in some way brings a lot of things just into sharper focus for me. I also really love how sex positive and sexually adventurous Erica still is, and that she and her husband are exploring things like consensual non monogamy. I think it reminds us that recovery doesn't look the same for everyone, and it really comes down to how we feel about ourselves at the end of the day,
whether we respect and value ourselves. So interesting to think that the same behavior could be bad for us if we were doing it from a place of shame and self loathing, and good for us if we're doing it from a place of you know, self love and care Erica is a busy mom, but she did tell me that she might write another book about non monogamy and what she's learning from opening her marriage, and if she does, I promise we'll bring her back onto No Filter or
should that be an amazing story. As always, we've popped all the links that you need in our show notes, including how to get your hands on Erica's book and some resources that she's sent through in case this triggered anything for you, or you feel like you might need a little bit of guidance and support. Mia Friedman is a host and creator of No Filter. It was fun. It's not a little daunting to step into her very
pool shoes today. The executive producer of No Filter is me Naima Brown, And like I said in the intro, if you don't know about the pam and Tommy Lee story, I really recommend you watch Netflix documentary Pamela.
It tells the whole story. It's so great.
Audio production and sound design is my Tom Lyon and he loves these taboo smashing stories as much as I do. More stories equals less shame, and less shame is good for all of us. Thanks for listening.