Brianne Davis is a working actress of 20 years, a director, and a number one bestselling author. She has been on Six, Lucifer, True Blood, Casual, and films like Jarhead and Prom Night 2. She is also 11 years into recovery as a sex and love addict, and she came on The Other Side of Addiction with Al Richards to talk about it without flinching.
Why she broke her anonymity
Brianne stayed anonymous for a decade. She broke it last year because she kept watching 19 and 20 year olds walk into meetings, wrecked by social media and porn, afraid of intimacy, chasing the next shinier thing. Nobody was talking about her addiction in public, so she decided to.
"If you are an alcoholic you use a bottle. If you are a heroin addict you use heroin. We use people."
What sex and love addiction actually is
Brianne split it cleanly. The love side is chasing unavailable people, staying in bad relationships, flirting with intent, swiping endlessly for a soul mate. The sex side is the part men talk about - porn, masturbation, multiple partners, hookups, cheating. There is also a back end almost nobody names: sexual anorexia, where everything shuts down inside a relationship.
Underneath all of it is the same thing. Fear of abandonment. Fear of not being worthy. Fear of intimacy. An inability to connect sex and love in the same room.
It is not just men
The public story of sex addiction is always a famous man getting caught. Brianne pushed back on that hard. A seven year old statistic said 38 percent of sex and love addicts in the US are women. From the inside, sponsoring people all over the world, she says it is closer to 50/50. Every walk of life. Celebrities, social workers, elementary school teachers, housewives. She spoke in the LA County women's jail for two and a half years and says every woman in those cells was there because of a relationship.
The hardest program to walk into
Brianne shared something a man said in her first months of recovery that stopped her cold: I can quit heroin but I can't quit her. She sponsors a woman with 35 years in AA who fought coming into SLAA because everyone calls it the shack in the back, the last house on the block. The withdrawal is brutal. The disease touches every relationship in your life - friendships, family, boundaries, accountability.
Why Al wanted this conversation on the show
Al opened up about hiding his wife's addiction from his own family for years until an aunt asked how she was doing and he broke down. He told Brianne he had almost never heard a woman talk about sex addiction in any of the men's groups he sits in. That is exactly the silence she came on the show to break.
If something in this hit you
Al Richards coaches men and supports the families around them through the moments they cannot talk about anywhere else. If this interview with Brianne Davis named something you have been carrying, the next step is a free first call. No script. No pitch. Just a conversation.