Kidnykid's Full Review: Sue William Silverman - Love Sick: A Woman's Journ...
LOVE SICK is about how sexual addiction affects a woman.
The author, herself a sexual addict, starts out the book by talking about her last day in the real world, before she enters treatment. She begins by detailing her last pre-treatment sexual encounter, with a man named Rick, and a talk with her therapist, Ted, about her need for treatment. Then, the author talks about her encounter with her parents, who have been funding her therapy with Ted, despite the fact that she is married (and presumably has some sort of health insurance to help with the expense of therapy). Because she has a history of abuse - which is detailed in another book - the conversation about therapy and her need for inpatient treatment is a painful one. That prior history of abuse has caused her to ask for money for therapy under false pretenses; it is a consistent part of her addictive behavior pattern that she does not know how to be honest with the people with whom she purports to be intimate. (Her husband apparently does not even know about her repeated affairs; they sleep in separate rooms both before and after her inpatient stay.)
While in inpatient rehabilitation, she is essentially forced to deal with her addiction. She is also forced to deal with the potential for an eating disorder. Her rehab stay occurs in a women-only unit - that is to say, all the patients in the inpatient unit are women, by design of the powers that be at the treatment center - and a part of the protocol for the inpatient unit is that all the women's food intake is monitored. It is assumed by the staff that everyone there has a problem with anorexia; the patients are expected to clean their plates and not engage in bulimic behavior patterns as a way of remaining thin. (The reason why the staff assumes this behavior pattern to exist is that since the women there are all sex addicts, they are all thought to be trying to remain thin and sexually desirable as a way of maintaining their sexual addictions.)
There are bumpy times detailed in LOVE SICK. The author talks, in a brutally honest fashion, about her own defection from treatment to chase after a man who works as an orderly in the sexual-addictions unit. (She isn't the only patient to chase after this man, either; her first roommate at the inpatient unit, a woman named Jill, also goes after him with a vengeance. It is made obvious to the reader that Jill, unlike the author, has little interest in recovering from her sexual addiction.) This orderly eventually gets fired, when the author reports his complicity in her addiction to Ted.
Like every author, this one has not written the perfect book. For one thing, the focus on 12-step approaches to therapy can be annoying (at best) to those for whom 12-step programs do not work. (Read my review on the book 12-STEP HORROR STORIES, a book which proves this point to my satisfaction.) This is something the author of LOVE SICK is too sick to consider when she is in the inpatient unit.
There is also the probability - unintentionally reinforced by the emphasis on God in most 12-step programs (which are an important component of almost every addiction-rehab unit in America) - that a certain type of sobriety is going to be enforced by treatment. Allow me to explain why.
When you enter rehab for an addiction (and there are increasing numbers of sex-addiction rehab units in America), I have stated in prior reviews that you will almost universally be forced to attend 12-step programs in those units. This means you will get exposed to a lot of talk about God. In and of itself, this will definitely be offensive to atheists in treatment, a fact which does not deter treatment personnel from insisting on this facet of treatment.
In addition, whether the patient likes it or not, he or she will be implicitly expected to define sexual sobriety. Although most 12-step groups for sexual addiction talk about individuals defining their own sexual bottom lines, there is also some implication in therapy that certain sexual behavior patterns are harmful. You may, for example, be subtly encouraged to give up sadomasochistic behavior patterns in the belief that these are automatically either harmful or sexist, or both. If you just want to give up an addiction without giving up certain behavior patterns (like sadomasochism or homosexuality, for example, depending on the treatment unit), you may be labeled "noncompliant." I feel this is the medical equivalent of telling someone they're not Christian if they haven't prayed the sinner's prayer, and I don't feel this has any place in a treatment center which is supposed to be medically-oriented.
Finally, other Epinions reviewers are right about this book not giving the reader any sense of the author's biography prior to the events of LOVE SICK. The assumption on the part of the author is that one is supposed to read her prior book to gain some sense of significant events in her life prior to her addiction. (That book has a title roughly similar to BECAUSE I REMEMBER FEAR, FATHER, I REMEMBER YOU.) The problem with that assumption is that her prior work is not widely available; I had personally never heard of this author until I saw LOVE SICK pop up in the self-help and recovery section of my local bookstores. This means, in short, that the author should have given a very brief recap of her abuse at the hands of her father in LOVE SICK. Many experts feel that prior sexual abuse is an important risk factor for sexual addiction, because it gets a youngster thinking (erroneously) that one needs sex as the sole appropriate expression of love. (In other words, if a child is sexually abused, he or she is considered more likely to think that he or she has to have sex with everyone he or she loves in order to feel that they love him or her.)
Having said all that, I appreciated the author's honesty about her recovery. It sounds to me as if at least that much has changed in her, which is a good thing.
To sum up, this is a book I'm cautious about recommending, which is why I'm giving it an "average" or 3-star rating. If you don't want to hear the brutal details of sexual addiction, or are against the use of the 12-step approach in treatment, this book is not for you.
Silverman, associate editor of the literary journal Fourth Genre , recounts her journey of recovery from sex addiction. Her memories of her childhood,...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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