Steve Phillips Joins Fanhouse, Blames Sex Addiction on Childhood Trauma

Steve Phillips is a sex addict. He admitted this, through a statement sent to the press, after his entire world exploded at the hands of a co-worker at ESPN. Phillips disappeared in the aftermath of the news of his infidelity with Brook Hundley came to light, following a made-for-TV movie-like altercation between Hundley and Marni Phillips on the family’s front lawn. Marni Phillips eventually booted Steve to the curb, prompting the announcement he was a sex addict, and we all just assumed he’d resurface in a year or so, doing baseball-related work for some ball club or media outlet. Whether you agree with his analysis and insight or not, you must admit that Phillips is a handsome guy who is very polished on TV. Someone, assuredly, would hire him.↵↵And someone did. Fanhouse. Remember when that place was a good blog? Ah, the Aughts. Now Fanhouse is a dumping site for the biggest names AOL can hire to write and talk about sports, and they’ve thrown all their bloggers – the people I seem to remember being the backbone of the site just three years ago – onto something they call The Back Porch. Wouldn’t want those people on the front porch…what would the neighbors think? No, the front porch is where the sex addicts hang out. Who else will listen to Jay Mariotti continually attempt to get Ozzie Guillen fired at this point?↵

↵↵And speaking of sex addicts, Phillips tells Fanhouse TV’s Dan Graziano that’s he’s one of them, and it stems from childhood trauma that created a “hole inside” where “I didn’t care for myself, I didn’t like myself, I hated myself.” ↵

↵↵Phillips wouldn’t get into the specific trauma to which he attributes the manifestation of this sex addiction, but he does offer that he’s been living with this undiagnosed condition for a long time. He also likens sex addiction to alcoholism or drug addiction. They touch briefly on the Tiger Woods situation in this conversation, but Phillips adds nothing of substance to that topic, more just offering condolences to Elin Woods and their children and giving Tiger a virtual pat on the back for getting help. Here’s the Fanhouse TV video, with some of the pertinent quotes excerpted below:↵

↵

↵↵On dealing with the addiction:↵

↵↵⇥Right now, really living a life of recovery, I think living a life working a 12-step program, a lot like an alcoholic or drug addict would do. So I attend a lot of meetings, every day trying to do something for my recovery to get healthy individually and participate in the recovery and health of my family who was devastated by everything I did. ↵⇥↵⇥It’s a trauma-based illness. It’s a shame-based illness, where there’s that hole inside where you just don’t like yourself and I had that. Despite being successful in certain areas, none of that really filled that hole for me and it caused me to make decisions and try to medicate myself and make some of the pain go away by acting out with other people. Whatever the explanation is, it doesn’t make the pain or the consequences any less for the people that I love the most, which are my wife and my kids.↵⇥

↵↵

On using “sex addiction” as an excuse for his behavior:↵↵⇥A lot of people look at sex addiction as an excuse. The reality is, it’s a diagnosis. Just like alcoholism isn’t an excuse for somebody to drink, it’s an explanation for what they’re doing and a pathway to go get help. It’s the same thing for sex addiction. That diagnosis isn’t an excuse – I did some really bad things. I committed adultery. I lied. I cheated. I did some really painful things to my family. Calling myself a sex addict on top of that isn’t a better thing. All it is is really a way to identify what I did and where I can go to get help and therapy and treatment so that it never happens again and I don’t cause this kind of pain to my family again.↵↵On finding friends at sex-addiction meetings:↵↵⇥I think that what I realized is that I have a lot more friends now than I had eight months ago. By attending meetings on a regular basis, you get to meet people who have similar issues and similar problems. They know all my bad stuff. And by doing that, you form a more intimate relationship instead of creating an image, and I think that was a big part of my problem – image making. I was one person on television, I was one person who was general manager of the Mets, I was one person at home with my family. I was another person by acting out, and none of it was real. I’m really now getting back to the core bases of who I am and understanding that I have to validate myself and not look for validation from other people.↵↵On understanding addiction, rationalizing childhood trauma and hating himself inside:↵↵⇥Most people, including myself, kinda minimize their own trauma that they’ve experienced. Different people can look at and experience different things in their life and it affects them differently – it’s your own reality of what it was like. So I didn’t know. I kinda know what I experienced, but now understanding more where addiction comes from, and knowing that place in me that I didn’t care for myself, I didn’t like myself, I hated myself, I now understand where that came from. You can’t change any of that, but I have to look for other ways to validate myself and start to build up my own self-esteem and not look for that from other people.↵↵I’m not going to begin to try and parse this information to come to a decision as to whether or not Phillips is actually telling the truth about all this. He sure sounds believable, so he has that going for his public rehabilitation. We know this: sex addiction is a real problem for people and it does rip apart marriages all the time. It’s hard to know when celebrities get caught in situations like this if it’s PR spin for a man who was power-hungry and thought he could get away with anything he wanted – can’t get mad at a guy with a disease, right? – or if there is actually this hole inside him that needs fixing. Is Steve Phillips a sex addict? Is Tiger Woods? Is Jesse James? Maybe sex addiction is just starting to get properly diagnosed as a disorder. Or maybe it’s the new trendy thing to saddle oneself with – despite Phillips indicating that the admission doesn’t make his situation “better” – as a means of justifying the lifestyle of being famous. ↵↵We know this as well: Woods is coming back next week to play golf, and Phillips is now writing and doing video segments for Fanhouse. Addictions aside, it’s time for both to get back to work. And if Fanhouse doesn’t have a point-counterpoint between Phillips and Mariotti on the coaching merits of Ozzie Guillen this week, they’re just wasting bandwidth.↵

↵