Keystone (Day 70 of sobriety)

Happy Thanksgiving to all, especially to Keystone, which very likely saved my life, and I do mean that literally.

Two years ago at Thanksgiving I was a resident of the Keystone ECU sex addiction treatment center in Chester, PA, just outside Philadelphia. It's an amazing program, and I learned more about myself in 40 days than I had in 30 years of therapy (off and on). I haven't stayed sober, but that's not on Keystone, it's on me. About half of the guys I was in treatment with have stayed sober for two years, and anyone who knows anything about sex addiction knows that is an amazing success rate.

I picked Keystone over other programs because it's the only one I could afford: $12,800 for 30 days (the length I initially signed up for). I know that may seem like a lot, but it's half of what most of the other programs charge, including the one in Mississippi where Tiger Woods went. I was worried why it was half the price, whether the program wasn't as good. But all of these sex addiction facilities, including Keystone, were started by Patrick Carnes, the guru of sex addiction, author of the seminal (not semen-al, get your mind out of the gutter) book, Out of the Shadows. No, the reason Keystone is so much cheaper is the facility: A huge drafty stone mansion more than a hundred years old, with no pool, no weight room, no grounds to speak of. The residents have daily chores -- cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming, dusting -- and once a week on Sunday afternoon we did "spiritual cleaning," 2-3 hours of scrubbing the place top to bottom. Yep, we paid good money to be maids. So are you expecting a picnic in treatment? I think the austere environment actually helped us; we weren't there to play around in any way, shape or form.

The program included 5-6 hours of group therapy a day, individual counseling 1-3 times a week, and 12-step meetings six nights a week. Intense is an understatement. Different individuals were the focus of various group therapy sessions, which included such things as reading to the group our life history, including our addiction history, which had to be a minimum of 20 hand-written pages (most guys wrote 30-40); reading to the group a list of all our victims and how we victimized each one; having another resident read to us a "cost letter" mailed from a loved one describing the hurt our addiction had cost them; and lots of role playing ... that wasn't playing at all. I shouldn't even call it role-playing, because it was deadly real.

One of the weekly sessions was called psychodrama, run by an absolute genius therapist named Nancy who we affectionately called Yoda behind her back. She was less than 5 feet tall, kind of dumpy, with a high-pitched little girl voice and a rather insane laugh. She would walk in and we would greet her with a combination of awe and fear. We didn't know ahead of time who she was going to pick to be the subject that day, or what she had in mind, but we knew that whomever she picked was going to experience one of the most profound two hours of their life.

Nancy would call on someone and have them take a chair by her in the front of the room, and she would ask a series of probing questions, like what was the greatest trauma you ever experienced, or how did your parents treat you as a child, or who would you most like to say something to about your life. What was amazing is that SHE didn't have a plan of what was going to happen, either! Based on the answers to the questions, she would set up a scenario. For me, it involved my parents and my older sister. Then she would ask for volunteers from the group to play those roles. One at a time the volunteers would sit in my seat, and I would sit in theirs, and I would act the part of the relative while the volunteer portrayed me. So as my father, I screamed at the housemate in my chair, who cowered like a little boy. This was just the beginning, a "training exercise" so that my fellow sex addict knew how to portray my Dad. Then he took his seat back and I took my seat back. Once all the players had been trained, Nancy would present an actual situation from my childhood. "OK, let's say that you played outside in your good pants and ripped them and now your Dad is mad about it." And we would act out the drama. Except it wasn't acting. The feelings were absolutely real: I felt like I was 8 years old being verbally abused by my father. And I had the opportunity to say to him all the things I was afraid to say, that I have had a need to say for 50 years!

I know this all sounds a little silly, but it felt as real as a heart attack. In most of these role-plays, big tough sex addict guys wound up crying like babies. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

And that was just the beginning. Once the trauma was re-experienced, Nancy would find a way to help us heal. For me, she said I needed to be "born again," and she didn't mean in the Christian sense. She meant born again as a child who believed in his intrinsic self-worth, rather than a child filled with self-loathing because of the loathing imparted by his (my) father.

Now you're going to think this next part is really stupid. She had a bunch of guys sit on the floor in two rows, back to back. One of the guys and a female therapist sat in chairs at the end of this row. She said that the rows of guys were the birth canal, and the couple at the end were my parents -- but loving parents instead of what they had been. And my job was to make it through the birth canal. So I got down on the floor on my belly and started trying to push my way through the guys. But Nancy told them to make it hard for me, so they were pushing their backs against one another so it was extremely difficult to get through; I mean I was truly fighting to move forward, and it probably took me 10 minutes to move 10 feet. Now I know what you're thinking, how ridiculous this all sounds, a guy squirming on his belly through a line of other guys. What a bunch of new-age psycho-babble, right? Wrong! When I finally "emerged" from the "birth canal," and my parents were there to catch me and hold me and soothe me, well I absolutely broke down. And in the arms of my new "parents," my self-image changed DRAMATICALLY. I no longer think of myself as a "bad boy" who can't do anything right and has no control over his life and could be verbally or physically abused at any moment. I now think of myself as an intrinsically good person who has made some bad choices and hurt some people he wishes he hadn't hurt.

I've tried to describe this as best I can, but it's one of those things where you have to be there. When I was crying in my "parents' arms," everybody else in the room was crying, too.

I have no doubt that without Keystone I would be facing "jails, institutions and death," as they say in NA (Narcotics Anonymous). I was definitely on that road. My thanks, on this day of thanks, is opverwhelming.

There is no experience like being in treatment. I made half a dozen friends for life, guys that I talk with on the phone at least once a week, even though I haven't seen them in a year and a half (we did have a reunion in May 2009). I know I may never see some of them again. And yet I know I can call on them any hour of the day or night and they will pick up the phone and listen ... and accept me no matter what I have done ... and hold me accountable for my behavior ... and remind me of the tools I have to stay sober.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was the best $16,000 I ever spent, and all other residents I know say the same thing. Oh yeah, why the extra dough beyond the original price? Because they asked me to stay an extra 10 days. Pissed me off royally at the time, but they said I had not progressed enough and they wouldn't give me a "full graduation" unless I stayed. I could have left -- I didn't have legal issues like some of the guys who had to follow the therapists' recommendations -- but of course they were right: Those last 10 days had the most impact on me, including the psychodrama, which they had refused to do during the first 30 days because they said I was not ready to handle it. I know, you're thinking this is just a way to squeeze more money out of this poor sap. But it wasn't. These are BRILLIANT therapists, and I don't say that lightly, having been involved in the field myself. When they say you need to stay longer, then you need to stay longer -- and that happens with probably about half the clients.

So I accepted that recommendation. Unfortunately, I rejected another -- which was that I should not go straight home but rather into a "halfway house" for sex addicts. My therapist told me that my marriage was toxic, my wife codependent, and that significant changes needed to occur in that relationship. But I didn't listen, and now ... in the next couple weeks I will be officially divorced. But that is the subject of another post sometime in the future.

If you are a sex addict -- if you are powerless over your sexual acting out and your life has become unmanageable -- then get your ass to Keystone. www.keystonecenterecu.net/

You will never be the same. You'll be better. And you will have ...

Hope