The first time many of us met Vannah Hughes, she was a standout women’s basketball player at North Crowley and Waxahachie high schools, where her father served as the coach.
After earning the highest honors in the state for her performance, Hughes went on to the University of Texas, where she played on scholarship for four years.
She used that foundation as a platform to launch an interesting career, one that has since evolved into entrepreneurship.
Hughes, now 38, is the founder and CEO of Trinity Integrative Holistic Medicine & Counseling Services, a practice focused on helping individuals and couples navigate issues of sex, intimacy, and complex relational dynamics — often at the intersection of emotional health, communication, and personal history.
Her practice employs a holistic model, integrating talk therapy with body-based treatments like yoga, breathwork, and dance to change brain wiring by forming new neural connections.
“I definitely believe that this was a calling,” Hughes says. “Even in my own family, I was always around certain sex and love issues without knowing it. So, I was like, ‘Wait minute — you wanted me to do this.’ Now it’s more or less like I’m going back and trying to help families that maybe my family didn’t get.
“Even my own divorce, I see where if someone gets the help, if someone truly wants to get the help, there are ways to build reconciliations or help people stop with the addictive patterns and you can kind of fall back in love. My goal is to decrease the anxiety, the compulsions, and also save the relationships, if it’s possible.”
Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder is a condition recognized by the World Health Organization, defined by a persistent inability to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or behaviors that become a central focus of life and continue despite negative consequences.
The diagnosis emphasizes loss of control, distress, and functional impairment, rather than the frequency of sexual activity or moral judgments about sex.
In a foundational paper explaining its inclusion in ICD-11, psychiatrist Shane W. Kraus and colleagues note that available population studies suggest CSBD affects a minority of adults, with prevalence estimates generally ranging from about 3% to 6%, though rates vary widely depending on definitions, measurement tools, and cultural context.
The authors stress that while CSBD is clinically significant for those affected, it should not be conflated with high sexual desire or normative variations in sexual behavior.
Hughes’ path into sex addiction therapy began unexpectedly while she was working in mental health and addiction treatment in Tennessee.
Much of her caseload involved clients with significant trauma, and leadership at the organization noticed a recurring pattern: many patients struggling with substance use were also dealing with compulsive sexual behaviors, including problematic pornography use, infidelity, and job loss tied to sexual misconduct.
The clinic approached Hughes about stepping into a newly created role to lead a specialized program focused on sexual addiction — a field she admits she knew little about at the time. Despite her initial hesitation, she accepted and was sent for advanced training and certification through the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals, where she studied directly under pioneers in the field, including Patrick Carnes and Stephanie Carnes.
The experience reshaped her clinical focus. Hughes began working with high-functioning professionals — doctors, surgeons, executives, and tech workers — whose outward success masked lives in crisis, often driven by untreated compulsive sexual behavior.
She also saw how sexual addiction frequently underpinned other addictions, with clients using substances to numb shame or distress rooted in unresolved sexual compulsivity.
“I won’t say all, but usually there is a high percentage of trauma, and it’s not always sexual trauma,” Hughes says. “Really, those most affected with such addiction are individuals who have had emotional trauma.”
Though she had no idea where this would all lead, Hughes had an epiphany at an early age. She says she knew by the sixth grade that she wanted to do mental health as a profession.
“It’s a crazy story, really,” says Hughes, who was born at the former Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to her Air Force mother. It was after watching the movie “The Sixth Sense,” written by M. Night Shyamaian and starring Bruce Willis as a child psychologist. Its iconic line, repeated ad infinitum from here to eternity, is I see dead people.
“I just remember I saw that movie, I looked at my mom, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a psychologist.’ She said, ‘OK.’ And we laughed, but that was it.”
She was called to help people.
Hughes earned a bachelor’s in sociology and psychology from University of North Texas, where she transferred after UT, and a master’s in forensic psychology from Argosy University.
Trinity Integrative Holistic Medicine & Counseling Services isn’t only CSBD therapy. The practice also offers marriage and family counseling.
Hughes’ practice is virtual only, but it’s growing.
“We are starting to have a huge waiting list,” she says.
That increased demand is reflected in additions to the staff, including three new clinicians and a supervisor. She attributes the growth to growing her relationship with insurance providers.
“We expanded from it just being sex addiction to also, now we’re doing marriage and family,” she says. “That way the practice is not just known as the sex addiction, but we are heavily focused on that.”