Sex Rehab Doesn't Heal All Wounds

David Duchovny and Tea Leoni are splitting up, three years after he got treatment for sex addiction. You mean sex rehab isn’t a magic cure-all?

Obviously outside observers don’t really know what goes on in a marriage, least of all a celebrity one. Still, it’s a little surprising to see one break up after weathering the storms of publicly acknowledged infidelity and treatment. ABC asked Rob Weiss, founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute, to speculate on what went wrong. He says couples break up after sex addiction treatment for one of two reasons: “Either the person who has the addiction hasn’t stopped or hasn’t fully embraced recovery, or the spouse hasn’t been able to get past their own anger and hurt even though the person in treatment is working very hard.” He adds,

The greatest stressor that comes up with these couples is not when they first find out. It’s if the spouse doesn’t join him or her in treatment and they get into these stuck places where the spouse’s role is to blame and shame.

Weiss also notes that Duchovny basically playing himself in a show with “fornication” in the title probably didn’t help matters. But what stands out about this divorce news is the fact that sex rehab — often a last-ditch effort to save a reputation — may not salvage a marriage. Celebs and the media sometimes portray getting treatment as a way of erasing misdeeds and making everything okay, but rebuilding trust in a relationship may not be so easy. And if someone’s truly struggling with addiction, backsliding is often a reality. Add to this the fact that the treatment of sex addiction is relatively new and not yet standardized, and you have a lot of reasons why a relationship might collapse even if one partner gets help. Of course, it’s not clear whether Duchovny has relapsed, and treatment can succeed where a marriage dos not. All we know right now is that for Duchovny and Leoni, sex rehab wasn’t a relationship panacea.