Recommended Reading from the Center for Healthy Sex and Alex Katehakis, MFT, CST, CSAT

Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery From Sex Addiction

By Alexandra Katehakis, MFT

"To discover and know one's authentic sexuality is to be fully alive and a means to truly know oneself. I wrote Erotic Intelligence to guide and re-focus the quest for the wholeness, self-knowledge and healing that I believe sex addicts are seeking and lost sight of along the way." - Alexandra Katehakis

"I consider this book a great gift to all recovering addicts and their partners who will benefit from its instruction and an impressive, effective resource for those who help them." - Patrick Carnes, author of Out of the Shadows.

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Recovery Zone Volume 1

By Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.

Stopping addictive behavior is the only way to start recovery. However, stopping the behavior is not enough to stay in recovery. True recovery is achieved by learning to cope with difficult situations and emotions. Dr. Patrick Carnes helps readers know how to deal with difficult affective states and guides them to a place of resilience so they can decide what is important in their lives. Readers will learn how to live optimally in the Recovery Zone. The work sets the stage for recovery Tasks Eight through Thirteen, providing readers with a practical approach to recognize the underlying emotional causes that perpetuate the addiction cycle.

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Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction

By Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.

This is the landmark book introducing and legitimizing sexual behaviors and sexual fantasies as an addictive disease. Dr. Carnes proposes three levels of sexual addiction, describes the addiction cycle and its progression, and presents the faulty core beliefs of the addict and the coaddict and their healthy counterparts.

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Facing the Shadow: Starting Sexual and Relationship Recovery

By Patrick Carnes, Ph.D

Starting Sexual and Relationship Recovery is the first to take techniques used by thousands of recovering sex addicts and show readers, step by step, how to break free of problematic sexual behaviors and live a healthier, more fulfilling life. A task-centered, competency-based, effective approach to recovery from compulsive sexual behaviors is presented. Dr. Carnes, through years of research, has found that if recovering sex addicts did certain tasks, they got better. If they did not, their life would remain problem-filled. Performing these tasks essentially creates skills that enable recovering sex addicts to manage their illness and to live rich, full, and relapse-free lives - and systematically following this process generates a positive outcome in all but about three percent of cases. A step-by-step, task-oriented model of how to manage sex addiction recovery for both individuals and professionals.

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The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography

By Wendy Maltz & Larry Maltz

Offers counsel on how to overcome porn addiction and pornography-related problems, in a guide that explains the allure of pornography, documents its history, and profiles its industry while making recommendations on rebuilding self-esteem and healing relationships harmed by porn use.

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In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior

By Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., David L. Delmonico, Ph.D., Elizabeth Griffin, M.A., Joseph Moriarity

As Internet usage has exploded in recent years, so has the prevalence of compulsive online sexual behavior-a problem first addressed five years ago by Patrick Carnes and coauthors of the breakthrough book, In The Shadows of the Net. Updated with the latest information, trends, and developments, the second edition equips readers with specific strategies for recognizing and changing compulsive sexual behaviors. Personal stories reveal how desperate life can become for online sex addicts-divorce, career loss, and financial ruin are common outcomes. More importantly the authors set forth a path for breaking free from compulsive online sexual behavior and cybersex and sustaining lifelong recovery.

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Cruise Control: Understanding Sex Addiction in Gay Men

By Robert Weiss, LCSW, CAS

Robert Weiss, Executive Director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Santa Monica, California, avoids political and moral arguments and instead focuses on the clinical approach, asking the question, "Is your sexual behavior causing problems in other areas of your life?" Cruise Control leads men to a better understanding of the difference between sexual compulsion and non-addictive sexual behavior within the gay experience, and it explains what resources are available for recovery. A timely and important contribution to the body of recovery literature, Cruise Control provides understanding, empathy and encouragement to gay men seeking healthy sexual expression.

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Hope and Recovery: A Twelve-Step Guide for Healing From Compulsive Sexual Behavior

By Hazelden

This was one of the first books to comprehensively describe the application of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to sexual addiction and compulsivity. It also includes a wide range of personal stories in which recovering sexual addicts share their experience, strength, and hope.

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The 12 Steps: A Way Out: A Spiritual Process for Healing

RPI, 1995

A step by step writing/journaling book for those wanting help working though the 12-steps. Simplistic for some, helpful to others, this is an effective way to get through the written part of the step process.

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A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps: The Classic Guide for All People in the Process of Recovery

By Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.

This is the first workbook on the Twelve Steps specifically designed with sex addicts and co-addicts in mind. It offers comprehensive and practical exercises for each of the twelve steps for anyone working a sexual recovery program.

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Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the Twelve Steps

By Charlotte Davis Kasl, Ph.D.

From the author of Women, Sex, and Addiction, a timely and controversial second look at 12-step programs, helping all readers to draw on the 12 steps' underlying wisdom, adapting them to their own experiences, beliefs, and sources of strength.

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Answers in the Heart: Daily Meditations

By Hazelden Information Education

The best daily meditation book for sex addicts available. One of the first books sex addicts should purchase.

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From Generation to Generation: Understanding Sexual Attraction to Children

By Anne Stirling Hastings, Ph.D.

A helpful explanation of one of humankind's most difficult problems by one of the best authorities.

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