You searched for a sex addiction therapist. Here is what I do with that phrase.
I am a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist, and I am careful with the word addiction. Not because it offends me: because a label describes a person, and it is the pattern we can actually change.
Most people who land here typed those three words at two in the morning.
It is the phrase in circulation, so it is the phrase on this page. I would rather be findable and then honest than invisible and pure about language.
Here is the honest part. Some men arrive already using the word about themselves. I do not take it away from them. Some arrive terrified of it. I do not hand it to them. What I will not do is make an identity out of a behavior, because a man cannot be revised and a pattern can.
That is not a soft position. It is a clinical one, and it changes what happens in the room: less time spent establishing what you are, more spent on when this shows up, what it is doing for you, and what would have to be true for you not to need it.
Shame is not the thing that stops the behavior. It is usually the thing that runs it.
I am not criticizing this model from the outside.
I completed the Certified Sex Addiction Therapist training and I use a great deal of it every week: how the cycle escalates, how partners are affected, how a disclosure is structured so that it does not become a second injury.
What I set down is the identity language, not the clinical craft. Knowing the model well is exactly what lets me tell you which parts of it I think earn their place.
- Licensed
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California license #154119
- Certified
- Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT)
- Also trained in
- Gottman Method couples work, used in trust repair
- Practicing
- over five years, with men and couples
- Language
- Se habla español
California only. In person in Long Beach, or telehealth anywhere in the state.
Four things replace the label, and they are all more useful than it.
How the work actually runs.
Not a program with a certificate at the end. Four stretches, in roughly this order, with plenty of doubling back.
Assessment
A real look, without the verdict
Two or three sessions to understand history, escalation, what has been tried, what is at stake now, and whether anything else (trauma, mood, substances) needs its own attention. You get my honest read at the end of it, including if I think someone else is a better fit.
Including the ones about the word itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sex addiction therapy, written for where you are
The work is the same in every one of these rooms. How men arrive at it differs by city, so each page below is written for that.
- Sex addiction therapy in Long BeachThe in-person version, twelve minutes from most of the city.Read it
- Sex addiction therapy in Orange CountyFor men driving up the 405, or keeping the work out of their own zip code.Read it
- Sex addiction therapy in Los AngelesMostly video, occasionally the drive south, and what that trade-off costs.Read it
Use whatever words you have
A free 15-minute phone call. You do not need a diagnosis, a first step, or a tidy version of events to make it.