Smash hit

“I was addicted to the thrill,” she recalls. “Going to Harvey Nichols to buy La Perla lingerie, meeting a new man, drinking champagne with him, going to bed with him for the first time. With other men, I could express my sexuality in a different way. I hardly ever had sex with my husband — it became a chore.”

Having two daughters, now aged five and seven, did little to curb her behaviour. “I cringe when I think of the risks I took. One day, I told the nanny I was going to visit an old schoolfriend and wouldn’t be back until late that evening, then I got on the Eurostar and went to Paris with a guy I’d met at a friend’s dinner party. But there was a problem on the line that evening, and the trains back were cancelled. That was pretty scary, being stranded in another country when nobody knew I was there, and knowing my kids were expecting me to read them a story. I phoned and said I was staying with the friend because I had drunk too much to drive home.” Ultimately, it was her drinking that led Justine into recovery. “Ironically, my husband was fixated on the fact that I might be an alcoholic. He didn’t suspect anything else. It was only after I stopped drinking that I realised I had a problem with sex.”

“Drink is usually involved, underlying that need for intimacy,” says Style’s agony aunt, Sally Brampton. “For women, sex addiction is a form of self-abuse, to hand their body over to the nearest taker. In all the letters I get from women, the core issue is an inability to connect and a lack of self-worth. Funnily enough, the impulse behind women’s sex addiction is essentially a good one — an attempt to be intimate — but, because the person doesn’t understand what intimacy or boundaries mean, they get locked into this behaviour. Ultimately, sex addiction is a distortion of the self.”

Valerie hears a painful echo of her own experience in this definition. “I always thought I needed male attention in order to feel good about myself,” she says. “Therapy helped me to see that, ironically, this need for male validation was causing me to treat myself, and my body, as something with no value.”

The British Association for Sexual and Relationship Therapy provides a list of therapists; basrt.org.uk . Sex Addicts Anonymous; saa-recovery.org . Life Works; lifeworkscommunity.com

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