Lust, Anger, Love: Understanding Sexual Addiction and the Road to Healthy Intimacy - Softcover

Sexual addiction is a problem that affects millions of people. Maureen Canning, LMFT, who has extensive experience treating sex addicts, explains its roots and how those afflicted can recover.

This book also explains the poisonous childhood seeds that lead to public scandals like the revelations involving former congressman Mark Foley.

Canning shows how compulsions are the product of early childhood abuse and how patterns, from the most violent to the most commonplace, develop. She explains that the overriding emotion sexually addicted people feel towards the partners with whom they seek intimacy is anger turned into sexuality, or "sexualized anger." This yields a false sense of security and power, an "aggressive tendency," which destroys any chance of a healthy relationship. Lust, Anger, Love offers a comprehensive and enlightening look at the origins of these little discussed behaviors and maps out a plan for recovery.

Sexual addiction has hit the evening news and seeped into our national consciousness. The Roman Catholic Church has been embroiled in scandal over priests? relationships with young males; in Congress, Representative Mark Foley, one of the foremost opponents of child pornography, was ousted as a sex offender.
Despite these headline-grabbing cases, the addiction itself remains obscure and misunderstood. Some 13.5 million people in the United States are grappling with sexual addiction, and the disease, financial ruin, and loss of self-respect that accompanies it. In this book, Maureen Canning, a senior fellow at the Meadows and distinguished therapist, uses her years of counseling experience to bring the reader to a deeper understanding of what sexual addiction is, and how it can be overcome.
Canning has people with personal experience of the addiction tell their own stories: how their shame and sexualized anger, as well as their common history of childhood abuse, causes them to take out their aggressive feelings on the partners they seek in intimacy.
With a head-on approach to the problem and its consequences, Lust, Anger, Love takes an enlightened look at sexual addiction, and offers a comprehensive road map for recovery.
Maureen Canning, Clinical Consultant for Sexual Disorder Services at The Meadows, has extensive experience working with sexual disorders. As an early clinical associate of Dr. Patrick Carnes, she facilitated inpatient sexual disorders treatment at The Meadows for a number of years before opening a private practice in Phoenix.