All in the Mind Read Online Free Page A

marriages had ended because they had run off with younger women. But also he knew he depended on his wife. Who would book the holidays for a start? Who would run the house? And they still sometimes laughed together, not always at each other. So he was grateful that Celia was making such an effort to keep things from falling apart. He found it quite touching that once the initial shock at his infidelity had subsided, she changed her attitude, deciding to think of him as victim not sinner. He found it irritating, however, to be labelled a sex addict.
    The days after Celia’s discovery of his second affair had been torture . They skirted round each other in the house, avoiding any kind of conversation. Then, one night, after they had been lying stiffly side by side for hours, both wide awake, Celia had gone into the study and switched on the computer. By the time dawn broke, she was convinced that the Internet had explained her husband’s betrayal. And she said that the volume of material on sex addiction – more than six million items on Google – meant it was likely to be straightforward finding someone to help him. She refused to countenance even the faintest protest from Matthew. All the evidence pointed in the same direction. For example, though their sex life might not have transported them to heavenly pastures too frequently in recent years, her research showed they had sex more often than the most regularly quoted average for their age group, only marginally, it was true, but he could not claim theirs was a sexless marriage. Yet he had twice put in peril a relationship that they, their children, their friends and Matthew’s colleagues at the Bar all rationally analysed as a strong one. And the most common definition of a sex addict appeared to be someone who felt compelled to seek out new sexual experiences regardless of the risk to personal, family or professional life. ‘That would seem to be you in a nutshell,’ she’d said over breakfast the next morning, as she took him through printouts from the Web. ‘Look at the facts,’ she’d said. Though he didn’t particularly want to, he had to accept that when she first caught him red-handed, professing love down the phone to Madeleine, a divorced solicitor, his reaction had been to go off immediately in search of another even bigger fix with Angela. Celia had articles on how the addict spent a great deal of time and energy planning the next sexual encounter, often making the arrangements more and more complicated as a way of heightening the eventual thrill, which in turn would lead to the need for greater complexity in future to maintain the thrill level. When he thought about the layers of subterfuge in his relationship with Angela, and the lies he told Celia about conferences that never happened, in countries he had never been to, he could see she had a point.
    He’d sat and listened as she itemised all the chemical changes that take place in people’s minds and bodies during and after sex. ‘Your sexual wiring is different to most people’s, Matthew,’ she’d said. ‘For you, the chemical reactions are more intense so you need one sexual sensation to be followed by another once the effect of the first one has worn off.’ Apparently, he was among the 3 to 7 per cent of the population suffering some form of sex addiction.
    Amid the relief at her apparent forgiveness, Matthew felt humiliated that he was going to see a psychiatrist. He paced up and down the length of their kitchen as he waited for the taxi he’d booked to come at 10.45, in good time to get him from upmarket suburban Totteridge to central London. From the moment he’d woken up, he’d felt mildly nauseous. If people who knew him were asked to write down one word to sum him up, ‘robust’ would feature high up the list, as well as ‘strong-willed, independent, pragmatic, solid’. Mad, insane, loopy, deranged, depressed – the words normally associated with the need to see a