How I Found Spirituality in Recovery From Compulsive Sexual Behavior
A Personal Perspective: From childhood adversity, to sexual compulsion, to spirituality.
Posted October 15, 2025 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
In traditional 12 Step addiction recovery, participants are asked to find a way to believe in some form of spirituality or "Higher Power" (HP). I wondered about the existence of "God" during my pattern of sexual acting out. Was God there when I was looking at porn, going to massage parlors, or hiring sex workers? Was God there condoning my behaviors? Was God compassionate towards my plight? Does God really care about those who will do anything for an orgasm to the point of hiring women who may have been trafficked? Tough pill to swallow, huh? I sure didn’t believe it since I was the perpetrator.
It didn’t start that way. If anything, I felt I was a victim of circumstances. I grew up as a Chinese immigrant in a predominantly Black neighborhood. We were poor, so my brothers and I got berated for getting hurt (parents didn’t have insurance), received free lunch at school, and stole money from our parents to buy treats for ourselves.
Crime in our neighborhood was rampant, and fear was the common theme. Our parents worked nights at Chinese restaurants, and we had to fend for ourselves without adult supervision. I learned early on to distract myself through fantasy and finding things I could do compulsively. It started innocently enough: endless hours playing with Star Wars Action Figures, watching television, or playing basketball by myself. Department store catalogs also offered a refuge from those bleak circumstances. I could fantasize and obsess about a cool toy, a CD player, or a new pair of Nike shoes, and whatever fears, insecurities, or emotional pain I had of feeling inadequate got buried and kept out of conscious awareness.
As kids, we would stumble onto pornography on scrambled cable TV (scrambled refers to a signal that has been intentionally encoded or altered to prevent unauthorized viewing). The images were distorted, and you could barely see any nudity, but you could hear the moans. I was transfixed by the allure of it all. Occasionally, you’d stumble across an old Playboy in the neighborhood, but mostly I was left to my imagination . That itself was a powerful drug. Yet imagination left me wanting. I desired the whole enchilada, a real woman!
Once college arrived, it was a testing ground for everything: alcohol , marijuana, and sex. You name it, I've tried it. Drugs and alcohol just made me sick. Sex, though, felt good. I felt loved for the first time. It was often brief and casual. The fear that if a woman really knew me, she’d find me lacking in some way and then end the relationship. That fear was all-consuming, so I would intentionally end relationships. It was a means of staying in control without the risk of emotional intimacy .
After college, I embarked on a journalism career . I was the first one in my family of three generations to go through the American educational system from kindergarten to college graduate. This was an enormous burden to be the role model of success for everyone in my family. I was already starting on the proverbial wrong foot since journalism wasn’t valued. Knowing this, I steeled myself even more to prove my worth to my family. I was determined not to give up, even when I was living in the middle of Ohio, hundreds of miles away from home.
Lonely , scared, and petrified of failure, I clung to what I knew best. Basketball and sex. I played obsessively during the day and at night scoured bars to find casual sexual partners. It was a lot of work, and rejection was hard. The easier substitute came in the form of erotic magazines and porn videos. This felt even better, a similar high but without the risk of rejection.
In Ohio, I dated the first Asian woman I came across, a Korean woman from an affluent, “Americanized” family (her parents were college-educated in the U.S.). We dated for a year, and despite my reluctance in relationships, we got married. It was a marriage born more out of fear than love. I was too scared to be alone, and marriage at least gave me a sense of stability, let alone Asian credibility.
Three short years into our marriage, my then-wife caught me looking at pornography on our computer. In quick succession, we got divorced , I was laid off from my news reporter position in Los Angeles, and I was shamed for my behaviors. I felt like a degenerate. The divorce rocked me. My job loss was equally hard. I plummeted even further into the abyss of addiction. It knew no bounds: webcams, sexual massages, and even hiring of sex workers when overseas (they may have even been trafficked).
When my recovery started more than 20 years ago, spirituality was hard to integrate. I felt abandoned by any "God". But in the years to follow, I began to trust that God was always there. He was by my side during my childhood of fear and cultural estrangement from my family and society. He was beside me during my marriage and divorce. He was weeping for me in my vain search for validation, adequacy, and love through sex. He doesn’t dismiss my desire to honor my heritage and family. But he also insists that Asian shame doesn’t need to keep me shackled.
Recovery and healing don’t just happen. We need to have the humility and willingness to acknowledge past hurts and the impact they’ve had on our thinking and behaviors. Yet, recovery is possible for those who are courageous enough to confront hard truths about themselves and, oftentimes, their families, cultures, and societal messages they received.
Clients report once they stop focusing on themselves in recovery and focus more on the spiritual aspects, recovery of any addiction (alcohol, drugs, etc.) comes easier. For example, the term "surrender" is what they report as being very helpful in a spiritual sense. Learning to let go of the need to control relationships, the need to be liked, and other manifestations of control has aided their growth. Learning to also "accept themselves unconditionally" is another milestone of spirituality as recovery isn’t a perfect road. Clients learn to accept their journey, knowing they may fall prey to their addictions in recovery but also learning even when they're falling as long as they stay the course, they're at least falling forward into the knowledge and understanding of grace and unconditional love, the way God intended.
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Sam Louie is a therapist in Seattle who specializes in multicultural issues and sexual compulsivity.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.