Loosening the grip of sexual addiction

THE BIG STORY Sunday, October 2, 2016 | magicvalley.com | SECTION B

PAT SUTPHIN, TIMES-NEWS‌

Dr. Matthew Hedelius gives a tour Aug. 22 of a group counseling room at Paradise Creek Recovery Center in Malta. The center sees a lot of unemployed college students who are flunking out because of their sexual addiction, he says.

Loosening the grip of sexual addiction Addiction explodes in smartphone porn age, but therapy offers hope for recovering other pleasures

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12%

Websites that are pornographic.

25%

Online search engine requests related to sex. That’s about 68 million per day.

35%

Internet downloads that are porn-related.

LAURIE WELCH lwelch@magicvalley.com‌

URLEY — Polite society doesn’t talk about them. A person’s sexual habits are considered private.

But when sexuality becomes compulsive it can cost a spouse or a job, even the person’s freedom. Addicts live in fear of someone finding their secret and the shame and stigma that would follow.

The number of people with sexual addictions is exploding as access expands to internet pornography, sex hook-up sites and apps and newly emerging cybersex technology, said Dr. Matthew Hedelius, one of the founders of Paradise Creek Recovery Center for sexual “There are clear addiction in Malta.

Around-the-clock access is in peodifferences in ple’s palms and as easy as a swipe of brain activity a finger across a smartphone screen.

Hedelius, who has treated indibetween viduals suffering from trauma and patients sexual compulsivity for more than 20 years, said hallmarks of sexual who have addiction include compulsive mascompulsive turbation, indulging in excessive sexual behavior pornography, chronic affairs, exhibitionism, dangerous sexual practices, and healthy prostitution, anonymous sex and volunteers. voyeurism.

Patrick Carnes, considered one of These the country’s experts, estimates about differences 6 percent of the population faces sexual addiction. Sixty percent of those mirror those of are men and 40 percent, women. drug addicts.”

Carnes received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Dr. Valerie Voon, Advancement of Sexual Health for a neuropsychiatrist his work in sexual addiction research at the University of and rehabilitation and has written Cambridge books on the subject. He founded an inpatient center for sexual addiction in Arizona and pioneered the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals, which trains certified sex specialists.

There is no clinical psychiatric diagnosis for sexual compulsivity, and some experts argue that it does not exist. But doctors such as Hedelius who treat people struggling with the issue say there’s no doubt that it does.

Researcher Dr. Valerie Voon, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Cambridge, said sexual addiction is similar to a drug addiction.

INTERNET PORN USE

40 MILLION

Americans who regularly visit porn sites.

70%

Men ages 18-24 who visit porn sites at least once a month.

11

Average age of first exposure to internet porn.

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

At his home in Burley, Lonnie Hardy talks Sept. 1 about the sexual addiction that cost him job productivity and his wife and stole years from his life.

Her study showed the brain activity of people with sexual compulsivity exposed to pornographic material is similar to the brain activity in people with addictions who are exposed to drugs or paraphernalia.

“There are clear differences in brain activity between patients who have compulsive sexual behavior and healthy volunteers.

These differences mirror those of drug addicts,” Voon said.

Hedelius said it isn’t known whether the differences in brain activity were there before the addiction or the addiction caused the changes.

“That’s the realm of future research,” he said.

A life laid bare‌

The consequences of compulsive sexuality haunt Cassia County 59-year-old Lonnie Hardy daily.

His short gray hair picks up the late-afternoon light as he settles nervously onto his red leather couch, art pieces at his back. He laughs and makes a joke to delay briefly the discussion on such a difficult topic.

MORE INSIDE: When does sexual addiction overstep the legal line?, B2 | How to get help for sexual addiction, B2

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Women who use internet porn.

Thanksgiving Most popular day of the year to watch porn.

Sunday Most popular day of the week to watch porn.

Source: Robert Weiss, a licensed clinical social worker and senior vice president of the National Clinical Development for Elements Behavior Health. He oversees addiction and mental health treatment programs at more than a dozen treatment facilities, and he is the author of several books about sexual addiction.

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Times-News

When does sexual addiction overstep the legal line?

LAURIE WELCH

Idaho’s maximum penalties for sex crimes: Indecency and obscenity: 6 months in jail, $1,000 Prostitution: 6 months in jail, $1,000 Patronizing a prostitute: 6 months in jail, $1,000

lwelch@magicvalley.com‌

‌RUPERT — One of the darker sides of sexual addiction emerges when compulsive sexual behavior crosses legal lines.

“The way I see it most all of the people involved in sex crimes are addicted to sex in some way or another,” said detective Sam Kuoha of the Rupert Police Department.

Often during the investigation of sex crimes, search warrants are issued for suspects’ phones and computers.

“I’ve yet to find one of these cases where addiction to pornography was not an issue,” Kuoha said.

When search warrants are issued for drugs in a house, pornography is “almost always found,” Minidoka County Sherriff Eric Snarr said. “It seems to go hand in hand.”

But just when does compulsive sexuality cross the line from personal business to a matter of justice?

Sexual activity is illegal anytime it involves a child younger than 18, including the electronic transmission or possession of nude photos or solicitation of the child, Snarr said.

Sex with other adults becomes illegal if a person is buying or selling sexual favors or the compulsion leads to indecency, rape, abuse of a vulnerable adult, video recording someone without their knowledge in a private space or human trafficking.

Even adultery and fornication remain crimes in Idaho. About half of U.S. states, including Idaho, still have adultery laws

SEX CRIMES’ MAXIMUM PENALTIES

Rape: Life in prison Adultery: 3 years in prison, $1,000 Incest: Life in prison Fornication: 6 months in jail, $300 Sexual penetration with a foreign object: Life in prison Video voyeurism: 5 years in prison Human sex trafficking: 25 years in prison Sex abuse of a vulnerable adult: 15 years in prison, $25,000 Sex abuse of a child younger than 16: 25 years in prison Ritualized abuse of a child: Life in prison Sexual exploitation of a child: 30 years in prison, $50,000 DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Lonnie Hardy, who served a prison sentence for arranging to meet a 14-year-old girl for sex after meeting her in a chat room, talks about his life and some of his decisions Sept. 1 at his home in Burley. on the books, and Idaho is one of about half a dozen states with fornication laws.

Sexual compulsions can also lead to a long list of other illegal activities.

Kuoha said officers often hear about sex workers in Rupert, but those reports tend to take a back seat to higher-priority cases.

Cases of adults trying to prostitute children are a different story; those become top priority.

Of Kuoha’s 10 active cases in mid-September, he said, half

involved a sex offense or a child pornography charge. “And those cases are very labor intensive.”

Rupert officers also find evidence of pornography in just about every narcotics case they investigate, he said. “Pornography is so much easier to obtain now, and it is also so accessible to children.”

Kuoha has dealt with several cases where teens and preteens appeared already to have sexual addictions.

“The sex drive is part of human

nature, but it has been blown out of proportion with porn,” he said.

If children send nude photos of themselves over the internet or phone they could be criminally charged — even if they were badgered or coerced into sending the photos, Kuoha said.

The reactions Rupert police see from youth caught sending nude photos range from shame to indifference.

“Kids generally don’t have a clue what the ramifications are,” he said.

Sexual exploitation electronically by child: 6 months in jail, $1,000 Lewd and lascivious conduct with a child younger than 16: Life in prison Sexual battery of a child younger than 16: Life in prison Enticing a child, first offense: 6 months in jail, $1,000 fine Enticing a child on the internet: 15 years in prison Disseminating obscene material to minors: 1 year in jail, $1,000 Source: Idaho statutes

How to get help for sexual addiction ‌Treatment programs for sexual addiction include outpatient, inpatient and aftercare, along with self-help groups. Help is also available for the addict’s partner.

Take a sexual addiction screening test at www.recoveryzone.com.

Find a certified sex addition therapist at 480-575-6853 or www.iitap.com.

Paradise Creek Recovery Center in Malta offers a free assessment: 1-855-442-1912.

Find a 12-step group to supplement treatment with a certified sex addiction therapist or online counseling at LDS Hope and Recovery: www.ldshopeandrecovery.com.

Sex Addicts Anonymous, a 12-step program, holds meeting in Twin Falls. Information on the meetings: 208-991-4722. Information on electronic SAA meetings: https://saa-recovery.org.

Visit www.GentlePath.com for an online catalog of books and tapes on sexual addiction.

—Laurie Welch

PAT SUTPHIN, TIMES-NEWS‌

‘Sex addiction is a very difficult thing for many people to understand in our culture,’ Dr. Matthew Hedelius says Aug. 22 at Paradise Creek Recovery Center.

Addiction From B1

Reporter Laurie Welch has covered news in Minidoka and Cassia counties for nearly 20 years. She enjoys bringing stories to readers that help people improve their lives.

A quick smile and gregarious nature belie the pain this issue has brought.

Hardy talks candidly about his shortcomings and the poor choices he made despite knowing better.

At one point the addiction swallowed his life. He acknowledges that he’s scared talking about it and worried about what people will think, about how they will react.

Other addicts share that fear.

Sexual addiction causes people to wince. It’s uncomfortable.

Messy. Some things are better left stuffed under the sofa, out of sight.

It’s easy to judge someone who let his life get so out of control.

“I don’t want a brick thrown through my window,” Hardy says.

He’s already paid the price.

The addiction cost Hardy job productivity and a spouse, stole

years from his life and harmed relationships with family members. It cost him three years and nine months of freedom after his 2005 conviction for trying to meet a 14-year-old girl for sex after meeting her in a chat room.

The hot sidewalk searing into his face as he was arrested nearly matched the heat of his shame, and the memory is never far away.

Years of introspection and therapy since then aid him in untangling his thoughts and controlling the behavior. But he aches with loneliness. Only a few women are willing to date him after he tells about his past.

“It made connections with people extraordinarily difficult.

I had connection problems with people before, massive connection issues,” Hardy says. “What it does to me now is it makes me more keenly aware of every loss.

I’ll date someone, think it’s going OK, and then they go away for whatever reason and that’s hard.”

Hardy wishes he could maintain lifetime friendships.

“Using porn prevents you from having those connections,” he says. “There’s no reason to go out and be truly connected to anyone.

You just don’t care.”

What is this addiction?‌

Sexual addiction, Hedelius said, is chronic and characterized by a compulsive drive to sexual behavior. It gets in the way of education, career, religion, family pursuits and interests and eventually costs the person in all of those areas. It is marked by multiple relapses as the person tries to control the behavior.

“Most people we see have an element of pornography in their addiction process, but they also have an area that tends to be their primary template for acting out,” Hedelius said.

A sexual template is the blueprint of what a person finds sexually attractive.

An addict tends to get obsessed with one part of his or her template. Someone with a primary template of voyeurism may like

looking in people’s windows or trying to look up women’s skirts on the stairs. Other people have chronic affairs and try to get people to fall in love with them. They have sex with the person once, then lose interest.

Hedelius said sexual addiction crosses every religious, economic and professional boundary. His patients are unemployed college students flunking out of school, retired professionals and everything in between.

Eventually, many addicts’ lives come to an abrupt stop due to the addiction: Someone is caught looking in windows and it’s reported in the newspaper, or the IT specialist at work catches them looking at online porn.

“Those are real-life scenarios,” Hedelius said.

Some addicts trying to hide their behaviors create fake addresses and names, which also helps them feel removed from their actions.

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Dr. Matthew Hedelius says treatment at Paradise Creek Recovery Center in Malta can cost between $20,000 and $30,000.

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“Do that long enough and you will eventually get sloppy and you will get caught,” Hedelius said.

What’s happening in the brain?

People get greater psychological and neurochemical highs during the anticipation of something than during the actual experience.

“Internet pornography is the same. The brain gets higher amounts of dopamine prior to the click when the person is wondering what’s on the next page rather than seeing what’s really on the next page. So people are left with an element of disappointment,” Hedelius said.

That leads to the chase of the next high.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers.

The release of dopamine in the brain is always higher with a firsttime experience than with subsequent experiences. Someone trying to recapture that rush of first-time excitement requires more and more stimulation, which leads to the progressive nature of the addiction.

Mirror neurons in the brain also play a role in how people become addicted to pornography. These neurons fire when a person acts and when they observe an action performed by another, Hedelius said.

They allow people to have empathy and to experience a movie or a ballgame as if they were one of the characters or players.

“We know it is television or just a game, but we experience it like it’s real. That’s what makes internet porn so powerful,” he said.

Internet pornography has been on a fast track since the mid-1990s.

In the 1980s a pornographic magazine had maybe 40 pictures, which a person looked at for a few minutes a few times a month. Now an internet porn user is exposed to 60 pictures a minute and by the end of an hour can see years’ worth of pictures a magazine user would have viewed 30 years ago.

One of the next waves is virtual-reality porn, Hedelius said, which will make paper porn look prehistoric and take people farther away from establishing real connections with people. “It will be porn on steroids. A person will be able to reach out and feel things like they are actually there.”

Experiencing this pornography will be as intense as any real-life sexual experience, he said. “The frightening thing is it is so covert that parents won’t know and spouses won’t know.”

But human beings need meaningful interactions and connections with other people.

“We are hardwired for connection,” he said.

Pornography in any form does not provide that.

A client room sits vacant at Paradise Creek Recovery Center, which usually accepts between one and seven clients per recovery session. Sessions last four to six weeks.

Paradise Creek Recovery Center Nestled on 16 acres 10 miles south of Malta, Paradise Creek Recovery Center draws people from across the country seeking recovery from various types of sexual addiction.

The eight-bed center was once the Strevell train station, moved in 1972 and converted to a ranch house.

The house was remodeled to suit the needs of clients.

The center, which has a corporate base in Logan, Utah, opened in July 2014 and offers clients four- to six-week treatment options costing $20,000 to $30,000. The Malta facility is the company’s only inpatient treatment A wall at Paradise Creek Recovery Center displays a facility for sexual addiction; the company operates a quotation from Albert Einstein. mental health facility in Logan.

Dr. Matthew Hedelius, one of the Malta center’s owners, said client numbers rise each year and the center has had as many as seven clients and as few as one at a time.

The center has 11 staff members, including Hedelius and his partner, Dr. Todd Freeman, along with medical

Pretty as a picture‌

When a person first starts engaging in sexual compulsions, the behavior can seem innocent enough, maybe even controllable.

As for a lot of people, Hardy’s interest in pornography began as a teen.

His Boy Scout troop had a trash cleanup route in the Heyburn-Rupert area, and he sometimes came across a pornographic magazine and spirited it away in his pockets, making sure even his buddies were unaware.

“Everybody had stuff, right?”

Hardy said.

That’s where the secrecy began.

Because he was not close to his parents or siblings, he often spent a lot of time alone. Through those magazines he learned about sex and how men treat women. Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, porn had

staff, clinicians and support staff who cook, clean, transport clients and care for the lawn.

Most clients fly into Salt Lake City and are brought to the center by the company’s shuttle. Clients undergo intensive assessments and individual and group counseling and learn to enjoy nature in the remote setting.

an aspect of violence.

And with the porn use, feelings of guilt and shamed rained down.

Everyone with a Christian upbringing, Hardy said, is taught that it is wrong.

Hedelius said many people who struggle with sexual addiction experienced abuse or trauma in childhood. A lot of early-life psychological and relationship traumas affect the attachment or connection someone feels with others. Those attachments make a person feel safe and connected. If something happens to fracture them, the person goes through life chronically looking for some type of attachment to heal the wound.

“That’s where sexual addiction comes in,” he said, “because sexuality is one of the most intimate behaviors we can engage in and one of the most intimate behaviors that

will produce a feeling of attachment and security rather quickly.”

So the person pursues a prostitute or a sexual relationship with a woman at work to heal the fracture, but it comes up empty.

“It’s the same thing with porn,” Hedelius said. “People leave their sense of reality and they think they are really having a relationship with the person.”

A slide to hell‌

Hardy began masturbating daily to pornography but thought the behavior would stop when he married at 18.

It soon resurfaced. Periods of remission were followed by binges — going to sex shops and stocking up on expensive pornography.

“I’d then feel ashamed and guilty and throw it all away,” Hardy said.

After years of a love-hate re-

lationship with dirty magazines, he started exploring the newly expanding internet in the mid1990s.

He found porn on the internet always accessible and began spending time in newly emerging private chat rooms, having sexual conversations with women.

“It got worse, much worse. That’s when the struggle really began in my marriage,” Hardy said. “I withdrew from my wife and I wasn’t paying attention to her. Pornography is an intimacy thief. Anytime you are involved in pornography and it is not something your partner agrees to, it’s stealing. If I would have spent that time learning how to communicate with her, I would have been so much better off.”

Using pornography, Hedelius said, gets in the way of having proper empathy for spouses and children because the porn user begins seeing people as objects.

“It really comes down to a matter of that person’s feelings don’t count and the worth of that person becomes what I can get from them sexually,” Hedelius said.

In 2003, Hardy’s marriage ended. When he moved out of the marital home, his use of private chat rooms and porn became unbridled. At one point he spent 100 hours a week watching porn and chatting online.

“I was chatting and doing anything except what I was supposed to do. I would sit there at the computer until I couldn’t go anymore, fall asleep and wake up in the morning, work 30-40 minutes — just enough to gather enough info to send reports for work — and then go back to it,” said Hardy, who retired from the U.S. Army after 23 years as a frontline soldier and a scout.

In the chat rooms, Hardy began talking to women who were younger and younger and engaging in conversations with them about “mundane stuff to everything sexualized,” he said. “Seeking younger women started out by my being rebuffed by women of my own age of 45 at the time.”

One interesting thing about the internet, Hardy said, is nobody ever says no. And if they do, it’s easy to find someone else who will say yes. It’s easy to normalize just about anything if a person is around it long enough.

“I was so involved with pornography and chat rooms that I became desensitized and disconnected from people,” he said. “And I was frustrated because I couldn’t get a real date with a woman to save my neck. I didn’t even know how to do it anymore.”

A couple of days before his behavior crossed the line to criminal, Hardy began drinking malt whiskey and thinking that he’d gone so far already that his actions no longer mattered.

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Clients stay at Paradise Creek Recovery Center in Malta four to six weeks during treatment. ‘We prescribe a 90- to 120-day abstinence policy from all forms of sex,’ Dr. Matthew Hedelius says.

Addiction

CONSEQUENCES REPORTED BY SEX ADDICTS

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He told himself: “I’m going to hell anyway — what difference does it make?” And he started a conversation with a 14-yearold girl that escalated to sex talk within minutes.

Within 24 hours he’d made plans to meet her at a recreation center so they could go somewhere to have sex.

Today, as Hardy reflects on the drive he took to meet her, the junctures where he could have chosen a different path weigh heavily on him. The calls he didn’t answer as he drove could have diverted his course, or he could have turned a different way at the intersection before he arrived.

But he stubbornly kept on, arriving early to sit in the sunshine as he waited for the girl.

Hardy consoled himself with the thought that if she wanted to back out it would be easy for her to do so in a public place.

“Then here comes this gal out the door and she’s a policewoman,” he said.

He knew it was her because she had sent him a picture. He was caught in a police sting.

Through his arrest and much of his incarceration, Hardy maintained his innocence because he felt there was no real victim.

Years of therapy, he said, helped him understand the impact of his actions.

After his conviction, Hardy did a stint of work release and probation. He violated his probation twice, which meant spending 2 1/2 years in prison on top of his time in county jail.

The first time he violated probation, he went to an Elton John concert without permission from his probation officer. During the concert the doctor who led his group therapy sat in a seat behind him. During his next therapy session, Hardy was questioned but continued to deny any wrongdoing.

He learned the lying habit from porn — to keep from dealing with its consequences. He didn’t want anyone to know his dirty little secret.

“So you ask how impactful porn can be,” Hardy said. “It is so impactful that you are willing to still lie even though the people that caught you are looking you in the eye and know you did it.”

Breaking through denial‌

The first phase of treatment, Hedelius said, is helping people break through the denial.

Most people like sex, he said, but people with sexual addictions don’t know how to say no to it. They can be successful in other areas of life but justify the compulsive behaviors by telling themselves they are doing it for fun.

“But getting arrested or losing a job isn’t fun. Spending thousands of dollars on treatment and attorney’s fees isn’t fun,” Hedelius said.

“Most sexual addicts say the addiction has cost them a minimum of $200,000.”

Sometimes it also comes with physical side effects. Compulsive

77%

Failing to control acting out

84%

Feeling like two people

84%

Guilt and shame

75%

Isolation and loneliness

85%

Risking loss of partner or spouse

66%

Jeopardizing well-being Dr. Matthew Hedelius gives a tour Aug. 22 at Paradise Creek Recovery Center, where a client’s normal day of treatment lasts from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Hedelius says sex addiction can deal with a variety of issues including porn addiction, excessive masturbation, constant cheating and a desire to make people fall in love only to leave once sex is achieved. use of porn can result in pornography-induced erectile dysfunction, he said.

“Men become unable to achieve erection and orgasm sufficient enough to have a normal sexual experience with a partner. Unfortunately, what they oftentimes do is encourage a partner and the partner often agrees to do, is to have the laptop there on the bed so they can have enough stimulation to follow through with a sexual activity,” Hedelius said.

“But every time that happens it reinforces and strengthens the neurology of that behavior and it gets them farther and farther apart. It becomes impossible for them to have a healthy sexual relationship with that person.”

Other addicts fall into deep depression because their brains are used to having a high level of stimulation and without it life becomes meaningless.

If you are satisfied only when having sex, Hedelius said, the family trip to Disneyland or the Alps is boring and doesn’t mean anything.

Learning to control behavior‌

Clients at the Paradise Creek Recovery Center in Malta sign abstinence contracts and use the four- to six-week stay to detox from all sex. They undergo intensive group and individual counseling and relearn how to enjoy things like mountains and hiking. They are also exposed to challenges that are difficult and make them vulnerable.

“At the end they still like sex, but they realize there is so much more to themselves,” Hedelius said.

After the treatment they have at least another year of ongoing therapy with a counselor near

their home. If they maintain sobriety from the compulsive behavior for five years, Hedelius said, their chances of preventing a relapse is good.

The Malta recovery center has been open only shortly over two years. But Carnes has done longterm study of close to 1,000 inpatient addicts with a 10-year followup.

That study showed that if sexual addicts followed the treatment course, 95 percent remained sober throughout their lives; 2-3 percent relapsed.

Factors that play into success include ability to afford treatment, family support and maintaining employment.

Options include an inpatient treatment center, private or group therapy with a certified sexual addiction counselor or a 12-step sexual addiction program.

Hedelius said people come to the Malta center from across the country to unravel the damage of sexual addiction. Cost for the Malta program runs from $20,000 to $30,000.

It takes sacrifice for people to pay that much, take time off work and be away from their families, which testifies how important it is for them to reclaim their lives, Hedelius said. But shame keeps more people from seeking treatment than finances do.

“We have to keep fighting to get through the shame,” he said.

It’s a problem that’s just not talked about. But someone with sexual addiction can be confident that somebody else at their church, in their pew or the next, has the same problem, he said.

The goal in treatment is to achieve complete sobriety, but Hedelius tells people that is a lofty goal to work toward. In reality, re-

lapses occur.

“We teach them how to handle it and to realize not everything is lost. There is no starting over — just taking up where they left off,” he said.

Hedelius said no long-term studies have determined whether the changes in brain activity can be reversed.

“But what we do know about addiction is when you get someone sober, one relapse 20 or 30 years down the road lights up the brain again and takes them back to the same place,” he said. “We’ve seen that for all types of addiction.

The best thing we can prescribe is just don’t go there anymore.”

That means learning to handle stress and enjoying pleasures like a sunset or listening to a rainstorm.

They have forgotten how to soothe themselves, Hedelius said. “So sex becomes the way to soothe.”

Finding connections‌

After years of recovery, Hardy believes there is no cure — only control of the behavior.

Although his internet use is monitored as a condition of his prison release, he is still bombarded with sexy images from billboards, magazine covers and television. He rarely goes to an R-rated movie.

Learning to communicate better with people also helps, he said.

Although a partner’s use of pornography may feel personal, he said, it’s crucial for the addict’s partner to open up the dialog about the issue so the addict can seek help.

When he catches himself objectifying a woman, he said, he’s learned to recognize the process and shift his thoughts to the im-

42%

Illegal sexual activities Source: Patrick Carnes, a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health for his work in sexual addiction research and rehabilitation. He founded the GentlePath at The Meadows inpatient center for sexual addiction in Arizona and pioneered the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals, which trains certified sex specialists.

pact that behavior has on others.

Those impacts can be far-reaching, even extending to his family.

Sharon Hardy-Mills, Hardy’s sister, said her brother’s addiction not only brought him mental anguish and incarceration but also “ruined family and community trust.”

Reaction to someone charged with a sex crime can resemble a “witch hunt,” she said. Her brother lived with her for a while after he got out of prison, and soon nasty comments started showing up about him on social media.

“I thought we were going to have a lynch mob,” Hardy-Mills said.

She welcomed any of the commenters to come to her home and sit down with her to have a conversation; the comments abruptly stopped.

Hardy tries to find peace in simple things like a Saturday-morning motorcycle ride.

But evidence of what he’s lost through sexual addiction, and what he struggles every day to regain, confronts him in the form of happy couples enjoying their time together.

“I’m truly envious of those couples and how cool it is for them,” he said. “It really is all about finding that connection.”

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