Sex Addiction Therapy in Houston: Assessment First, Then a Plan
Compulsive sexual behavior is rarely about sex. It is usually about regulation, a reliable way to shut off stress, shame, loneliness, or a history the nervous system never got to process. Connect Clinical Services offers outpatient therapy led by CSAT-certified clinicians who start with structured assessment instead of assumptions.
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The Honest Version
“Sex Addiction” Is a Contested Term. Here Is How We Use It.
The DSM-5 does not list sex addiction. The ICD-11 includes Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder as an impulse-control disorder. Researchers and clinicians have argued about the right model for thirty years, and that argument is not settled. Any practice that tells you otherwise is selling certainty it does not have.
Here is what the disagreement does not touch. People lose marriages, jobs, money, and years to behavior they have decided a hundred times to stop. The hours disappear. The secrecy grows its own architecture. The behavior keeps working, right up until it does not. Those are clinical facts regardless of what the field ends up calling them.
We use the phrase sex addiction because it is the language people search with and because the CSAT training model is built on it. In the room, what we work with is more specific: what the behavior does for you, when it escalates, what it costs, and what happened earlier that made it necessary.
That framing matters practically. If the behavior is a regulation strategy, then removing it without replacing what it did is not a plan, it is a countdown. The people who reach us have usually stopped before, more than once. What they have never had is something to stop with.
Scope of Care
CCS provides outpatient therapy. We are not a residential program, an inpatient facility, or a detox. We do not provide court-ordered sex offender treatment, forensic evaluations, or risk assessments, and if your situation involves illegal behavior you need a provider trained specifically for that, which we will help you find. If you are in crisis or immediate danger, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room.
What We Work With
Patterns People Bring Us
The object varies. The function is usually the same: something reliable to do with a feeling there was no other plan for.
Compulsive Pornography Use
Hours that were not the plan, escalating content, and the gap between what you watch and what you actually value. More on our porn addiction page.
Escalating Online Behavior
Cam sites, paid chat, subscription platforms, sexting with strangers. Spending that has its own hidden account and a schedule that works around other people being asleep.
Anonymous or Casual Encounters
Apps, hookups, and encounters that follow a pattern you can predict in advance and stop anyway, often clustered around stress, travel, or conflict at home.
Affairs and Double Lives
A second phone, a second story, a second version of yourself that has been running long enough to feel load-bearing.
Paid Encounters
Escorts, massage, and the financial and legal exposure that comes with them, plus the logistics that end up organizing whole days.
Compulsive Masturbation
Frequency that has stopped being about pleasure and started being about getting through the day, sometimes with physical consequences people are embarrassed to mention.
Intensity-Seeking in Relationships
Serial intensity, overlapping partners, or the pull toward the beginning of things and the collapse that arrives when the beginning ends.
Behavior Tangled With Substances
Use that reliably shows up together, where treating either one alone leaves the other in place. See substance use therapy.
What Makes This Different
Four Structured Assessments Before We Build a Plan
Therapy for this usually starts with a conversation and a guess. Austin Leighton uses the IITAP inventory battery, which turns the first few sessions into a measurement rather than an impression. The plan that follows is built on what the instruments show.
Sexual Dependency Inventory (SDI-4.0)
Measures the breadth and impact of the pattern across life domains: relationships, emotional well-being, work, and financial health. It answers how far the behavior has reached, which is usually further than the presenting complaint suggests.
Tells us: severity, spread, and which domains to stabilize first.
Post-Traumatic Stress Index (PTSI-R)
Surfaces co-occurring post-traumatic stress symptoms and the earlier history that often sits underneath the pattern. When this comes back loud, trauma processing is not an optional later phase, it is the work.
Tells us: whether trauma treatment leads or follows.
Sexual Digital Media Inventory (SDMI)
Maps the specific platforms, media types, and usage patterns tied to the behavior, which turns a vague intention to stop into a concrete list of high-risk situations, times, and triggers.
Tells us: where relapse actually happens, in detail.
Money and Work Adaptive Styles (MAWASI)
Examines work style, financial stress, and adaptive patterns that intersect with compulsive behavior or run alongside it as a second risk factor. Overwork and financial chaos are frequently part of the same structure.
Tells us: what else is carrying the load.
The Work Underneath
Four Trauma Modalities, Matched to What the Assessment Shows
Once the pattern is mapped, the question becomes what the behavior was solving. These are the approaches we use to work on that, all of them in-house at one practice.
EMDR Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing works on the specific memories and beliefs that sit underneath the pattern: the humiliation, the early exposure, the abandonment, the thing you have never said out loud. Reprocessing those targets changes how loudly they call.
Best for: identifiable memories, shame-bound beliefs, betrayal injuries.
Brainspotting
A focused, slower approach that works through where the activation lives in the body and the visual field. Useful when the story is hard to put into words, or when talking about it has stopped moving anything.
Best for: preverbal material, stuck points, clients tired of narrating.
Somatic Experiencing
Urges are physical before they are decisions. Somatic work builds the capacity to feel an urge rise, stay in the body while it does, and let it pass without acting, which is a skill rather than a matter of willpower.
Best for: body-level urges, chronic dysregulation, numbing.
Neurofeedback
Training that targets the regulation problem directly rather than the behavior. When sleep, focus, and baseline arousal improve, the nervous system has less it is trying to fix.
Best for: sleep disruption, agitation, difficulty staying regulated.
The Arc
How the Work Unfolds
Timelines vary by person. This is the general shape.
Free 15-Minute Consultation
A call with our care team to hear what is bringing you in and whether outpatient, assessment-led work fits your situation.
Intake and Assessment Battery
History, current behavior, medical and recovery supports, and the inventories. Your clinician reviews the results with you before anything is decided.
Your Own Definition of Sobriety
You and your clinician name the specific behaviors that are off the table, built from your values and the consequences you are trying to stop. Not a template.
Stabilization and Boundaries
Concrete work on the high-risk situations the SDMI identified, plus regulation skills, so there is something to reach for when the urge arrives.
Trauma Processing
EMDR, Brainspotting, or somatic work on the specific material the PTSI-R surfaced, at a pace your nervous system can hold.
Relationship Repair and Disclosure
If a partner is involved, planned disclosure work rather than staggered discovery, coordinated with their own clinician.
Relapse Prevention
A written plan tied to your actual triggers, reviewed and revised as the situations change.
Who Does This Work
The Clinicians Behind This Page
Austin Leighton, LPC, LCDC, CSAT is a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor, and a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist with over 10 years specializing in addictions and problematic addictive behaviors. He runs the IITAP assessment battery described above and works from a trauma-informed frame that looks past the behavior to the emotional, relational, and developmental factors driving it.
Marina White, LMFT-S, LCDC, CSAT, CMAT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Supervisor and a Certified Multiple Addiction Therapist with over ten years practicing in Houston, including developing and managing the Recovery Intensive Outpatient Program at The Menninger Clinic. She brings a family systems lens, which matters when the behavior has reached a marriage.
Guy Bender, LPC, Clinical Director, oversees treatment planning across the practice and holds the trauma side of the work: which modality, in what order, at what pace.
Ready to Find Out What Is Actually Going On?
Request a free 15-minute consultation with our care team to learn whether this kind of therapy fits where you are right now.
(713) 564-5146 • 8100 Washington Ave, Suite 170, Houston TX 77007
For Partners
If You Are the One Who Found Out
Discovery is its own injury, and it is not the same problem as the behavior that caused it. Intrusive images, hypervigilance, checking, sleep that will not come, and the sense that your own judgment cannot be trusted are trauma responses, and we treat them as trauma rather than as evidence that you were somehow part of the pattern.
Partners work with their own clinician here, never the same one as the person whose behavior is in question. Read about betrayal trauma therapy.
What It Costs
Private Pay, and Why That Matters Here
Connect Clinical Services is private pay. We do not bill insurance and we are not paneled with any plan, which means no diagnosis is submitted to an insurer, no utilization reviewer decides how long you get, and your record stays between you and your clinician. For this particular work, people tend to care about that more than usual.
Sessions run $125 to $225 depending on the clinician, and every rate is published on our costs page rather than quoted on a call. The initial 15-minute consultation is free.
Why CCS
Why Houston Clients Choose Us for This Work
Two CSAT-Certified Clinicians
Austin Leighton, LPC, LCDC, CSAT and Marina White, LMFT-S, LCDC, CSAT, CMAT both hold Certified Sex Addiction Therapist credentials through IITAP. See their full backgrounds on our team page.
Assessment Before Plan
Structured inventories come first, so the treatment plan answers what is actually happening rather than what the intake conversation happened to surface.
Trauma Training, Not Just Addiction Training
EMDR, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and Neurofeedback are in-house at one practice, so the trauma underneath the pattern does not get referred out to a stranger.
No Imposed Morality
Your values set the goal. We are not a faith-based program and we are not a program that treats sexuality itself as the problem.
Partner Work Taken Seriously
Partners are treated as people with a trauma injury, not as co-addicts, and they get their own clinician. See betrayal trauma therapy.
Private Pay, Washington Avenue and Telehealth
In person on the Washington Avenue corridor or by telehealth anywhere in Texas, with no insurance record of care.
Common Questions
Frequently Asked Questions About Sex Addiction Therapy in Houston
Is sex addiction a real diagnosis?
What is a CSAT?
Do I have to stop all sexual behavior?
How long does the assessment take?
Will you tell my partner?
Can you see me and my partner both?
Do you treat women?
Do you provide court-ordered treatment or evaluations?
Do you take insurance?
What happens on the free consultation?
Ready to Stop Guessing at This?
Contact Connect Clinical Services to request a free consultation. Whether the pattern has been running for six months or twenty years, whether a partner knows or does not, the first step is the same: find out what is actually happening before deciding what to do about it.
Our office is on the Washington Avenue corridor, minutes from Rice Military, Memorial, River Oaks, Montrose, and the Heights, and we see clients anywhere in Texas by telehealth.
Request Your Free Consultation
Our care team aims to call you back the same business day.
Prefer to call? (713) 564-5146
Related Services
Porn Addiction TherapyBetrayal Trauma TherapyAddiction TherapySubstance Use TherapyTrauma TherapyEMDRCouples TherapyOur Costs
The behavior was an answer. For a long time it was the one that reliably worked, which is exactly why deciding to stop has not been enough. Therapy is how you work on the question underneath, so the answer no longer has to do all that work.
Last reviewed September 2026 by Guy Bender, LPC, Clinical Director.
