What the sex therapist told me en route to the burlesque show
OR what the Lifeline sex callers taught me about relationships
We’ll get to the sex therapist shortly. Our first port of call is sex callers at Lifeline.
When I started volunteering at Lifeline crisis counselling in 2005, the training for ‘wannabe’ Lifeline telephone counselors was spread over a three-month period.
And I soon realized that all us trainees had a ‘worst fear’ about being on the phones. For many, their worst fear was a suicide-in-progress call. But my worst fear was different.
My worst fear was sex callers.
Sex callers rarely present as sex callers. They rarely say, “Keep talking while I masturbate to the sound of your voice”. A small minority of sex callers may be as obvious as that, but I wasn’t worried about that type.
I was worried about the more subtle type of sex caller. The ones that present as non-sex callers.
Typically they spin a plausible, often tragic story, that slowly hooks the counselor into the call. As the call progresses, sexual content slowly creeps into the story. By then the counselor is likely to be emotionally involved and consequently slower to recognize the ‘red flags’ of a sex caller.
Essentially, this type of sex caller tries to groom the telephone counselor for sexual abuse.
My fear was the yuck factor. The fear of feeling tricked, fooled, and used, by a sex caller.
And it’s a serious problem. Many phone counselors quit Lifeline due to sex callers.
Eventually our training was complete. We got on the phones. We faced our worst fears.
A fellow trainee did get a suicide call as her first call. She also got lots of support and she coped fine.
As for me – I quickly lost my dread of sex callers.
I realized that sex calling was ‘just’ an addiction. And that sex callers were as worthy of compassion as any other type of addict.
However, I couldn’t help them. The same way a drug-of-choice can’t help a drug addict.
The best I could do was try to avoid allowing them to use me, redirect them to people who could help, and have compassion for them.
And it seemed to work. The sex callers seemed to find my compassion and firm boundaries distinctly un-erotic.
Boundaries can make or break a sex call. One day I had an unsatisfactory call with a difficult-to-engage male caller. The dissatisfaction was evidently mutual. As soon as our call was over, he called Lifeline straight back. This time he got a different counselor - young, female and inexperienced. She didn’t have the skills to manage the call and he did a full-on sex call. She was extremely distressed after the call, and that was the last shift I saw her.
People often ask; “Why do sex callers bother calling Lifeline, why don’t they just call an 0900 sex line?”.
Maybe they do. I don’t think there’s much, if any, data on that.
However, sex callers may call free helplines, such as Lifeline, instead of 0900 commercial sex lines for several reasons.
Please forgive the truism, but at least one reason is probably that sex-calls are not about sex. It’s probably about power.
A sex caller is more likely to be someone who feels out of control, desperately trying to claw back some control over something or somebody. They are unlikely to get that same sense of power by calling a dedicated 0900 sex line.
The fact that helplines are free may also be a draw card for sex callers. But not for the obvious reason. Aside from not having to pay to make sexually explicit phone calls, the free nature of helplines has other advantages.
Making sex calls to a free helpline means no 0900 sex-phoneline bills are going to show up on their credit card bill or phone account for a partner to see.
Because, according to the Lifeline sex caller profiling, most sex callers are young to middle-aged men ... in a relationship.
To be more specific they are in relationships with intimacy problems.
Which reminds me of what the sex therapist said to me on our way to the burlesque show.
She said that of all the couples she counselled, all their sexual problems came down to one thing.
I’m gratified I was able to guess it before she said it.
Problems with intimacy.
So, I’m guessing different people manifest their fear of rejection – and resulting problems with emotional and sexual intimacy – in different ways.
Some of us make sex calls to free helplines. Some of us have sex with strangers. Some of us are serial monogamists. Some of us are serial cheaters. Some of us are faux-polyamorous. Some of us go celibate rather than risk rejection and/or struggle with human intimacy. Some of us lose our libido within a committed relationship. Some of us are in relationships with people we don’t know and who don’t know us.
I’ve been some of these things.
Safest not to judge. I think.
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