Tiger Woods’ high-profile infidelity, and subsequent admission into a clinic for sex addicts, has highlighted a growing area of therapy.

Jim Entwistle asks whether sex addiction is an affliction, or just an excuse for philandering husbands.

ABLURRY image has surfaced, showing golfer Tiger Woods leaving a Mississippi sex addiction clinic, weeks after admitting cheating on his wife with a miscellany of pole dancers, escorts and bar hostesses.

It looks like one of those grainy images of a big cat captured prowling moorland; the elusive subject obscured, but, in this case, unmistakable.

Like a wild cat, Tiger is caught, awkward, looking for shelter from the camera’s glare.

As if the humiliation couldn’t get any worse for the world’s richest sportsman, details have emerged of the regime he is being subjected to while living at the Pine Grove clinic. A ban on masturbation, army-style assault courses and confessionals in front of his wife, Erin.

Woods’ fall from grace has shone a torch into the world of sex addiction. Although sex therapy is big business in America, it is a field only now beginning to gain prominence in the UK, thanks in part to high-profile cases such as Woods and our own Russell Brand.

The clinics are not yet commonplace in Britain, but therapists are reporting rapidly increasing numbers of clients with sexual addictions.

Sue Ronaldson, a psychosexual therapist who works with sex addicts in the Yorkshire Dales, says the condition is more common than many would think.

“It’s not just problems in relationships,” she says. “I encounter internet porn addicts, people whose addiction escalates in intensity and the amount of time they dedicate to it.

“Sometimes, a problem gets so bad that the person starts accessing internet porn at work, knowing they will get caught. They take increasing risks.”

A retired psychosexual therapist from Darlington, who wanted to remain anonymous, says she encountered many cases of sex addiction during her time in practice.

She says Woods’ actions were the consequence of an irregular childhood. When he was two, he played a televised game of golf with American comedian Bob Hope and he was a regular in competitions by the age of eight.

“Someone like Tiger Woods, who probably hasn’t had a regular childhood or adolescence, would not develop along the usual lines,” she says. “He’s similar to Michael Jackson in that respect.

“Because of his public image as a purer-thanpure character, sex has become furtive and exciting to him, where to most men it would be something a lot more normal.

“He had such a restricted upbringing, and hasn’t been able to go out on the boys’ nights out and the other things that lads do as they are growing up.”

She suggests that the golfer wears an elastic band around his wrist to tweak whenever he feels an urge. It’s an effective method of programming the body, she says.

“Instead of training yourself to turn on to a situation, as is normally the case, it’s about training yourself to turn off.

“I know someone who was treating a guy who would carry a shell in his pocket, and when he felt an urge he would fondle the shell to get the urge under control.”

So what’s to stop Woods falling off the wagon? Nothing, says Mo Kirumbokus, a London- based therapist, who explains that it is crucial that the addict helps themselves by not “helping themselves”.

“We place a ban on masturbation and trust them not to do that,” he says.

“There are no hidden cameras or people following the patient around. If someone has come to us for help, and they want to make a change, they are not going to waste their time and money by not following our advice.”

But the concept of sex addiction as an affliction is rejected by the Reverend Peter Mullen, The Northern Echo columnist and Anglican chaplain to the London Stock Exchange.

“In the olden days, we wouldn’t call it sex addiction, we would call it womanising,” he says.

“Tiger Woods has everything. He’s the best golfer in the world, he will have a lot of women throwing themselves at him. He would have to be a saint to resist them all.

“I think he will have gone into rehab as it is the only hope he has of saving face. It’s a way of saying to the public, and his sponsors, ‘I can behave responsibly, and I will be reformed’.

“I don’t think this psychological therapy touches the real issue. It is a load of guff.

“He is young, he has loads of money and immense talent. He’s good looking, all the women are after him and it is very hard for him to resist.

I would find it difficult if I were 30 years younger.”