THE recent television drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards has brought his story back into public view, amid reports of his planned return to the public eye, not to his former role as a mainstream news broadcaster, but to share his own version of events following his conviction in 2024 for accessing indecent images of children.
The public reaction to his case continues to be shock, outrage, disbelief and a sense that something totally unfathomable has taken place. Not just how someone so visible, so trusted, so apparently contained, could move into behaviour starkly at odds with everything he represented, but also why.
The instinct is to reach for simple explanations: weakness, opportunity, poor judgment, a failing marriage, mental health diagnosis. But these don’t explain how a hidden life, mired in the abusive exploitation of children, can develop and persist. Time and again, behaviour like this is described, condemned and yet left fundamentally unexplained, because we’re looking in the wrong place.
The reasons can’t be found in the moment the behaviour is discovered; they’re found much earlier, in something far more fundamental: the needto be comforted. By comfort, I mean the experience of physical and emotional relief, the body settling through attuned human response. Human beings are not born able to regulate their own distress. That capacity is built through early relationships when a caregiver notices discomfort, responds to it, and brings the child back into balance. I’m talking not about something sentimental; this is physiological. It shapes how the brain manages stress, how reward is experienced and what other people come to represent.
When this system works, distress can be resolved through connection. Comfort can be trusted. But when it doesn’t, the brain doesn’t stop needing comfort, it reroutes the search for it and the need becomes pathological.
The brain then adapts by attaching relief to whatever reduces distress in the moment: not what’s appropriate and not what’s relationally meaningful, simply what works right now for me. Over time, this creates a fusion where comfort becomes linked with ‘something else’. In some cases, that ‘something else’ may be physical intensity or the need to control, or both. This is not an excuse, but a mechanism through which deeply harmful behaviour can take hold.
Problematically, the pathway for sexual arousal is deeply intertwined with the same physiological and neurological pathways which process normal rewards, such as comfort, closeness and affection. So, in more disturbing and destructive cases, comfort becomes entangled with sexual arousal. This isn’t a conscious pairing; it’s not a decision taken after thought and consideration of options. It’s a neurobiological one, compulsively enacted, but ‘relief’ is felt no matter how corrupt. From the outside, the behaviour that follows appears baffling. Why return to something so obviously risky? Why repeat something that threatens everything a person has built? But from within the system, the logic is brutally simple.
It works!
It provides relief where nothing else does, so over time that pathway deepens. The brain returns, time and again, to the only place it knows how to resolve a particular internal state, and when this happens something else begins to emerge, as night follows day. Not just a pattern of behaviour but thought distortion too, because for this system to continue functioning, certain realities and uncomfortable feelings of doubt or shame must be managed. Any contradiction, no matter how mild, no matter if external or internal, becomes threatening. The mind begins to reshape perception in ways that allow the behaviour to continue without collapse. Superficially it looks like denial, but it’s more complex; it’s a restructuring of how information is processed to override what is externally accurate.
Disruption to early comfort exists on a spectrum. It can begin with something as common as maternal depression, or paternal coldness, where genuine attunement is intermittently unavailable, and extend through inconsistency, emotional absence and, at its most extreme, severe neglect and horrendous abuse. All interfere with the development of stable attachment and the child’s capacity to regulate distress through relationship.
Where comfort is unreliable, fundamental emotions such as anger emerge as part of adaptation. But at the most extreme end, where comfort is absent or paired with fear or cruelty, something more powerful can develop: a form of enduring, background rage. Not conscious anger, but a raw, survival-based state arising from the repeated failure of relief at the point it is biologically expected.
If this unresolved intensity becomes fused with the only available experience of relief, including sexual arousal where boundaries have already been violated, the consequences are catastrophic. Behaviour is no longer organised around connection but driven by an unconscious attempt to discharge what was never soothed. The need remains, held outside awareness, at an unconscious level, while sexual behaviour becomes the vehicle through which it is repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, expressed.
This is very dangerous territory for any such individual and the victims who draw their attention.
What is often missing from discussions of compulsive sexual behaviour is not simply understanding of the individual but understanding of those closest to them. For partners and family it’s a complete betrayal, something uniquely disorienting. The discovery that the person who appeared present, connected and committed was, in crucial ways, psychologically and often intimately absent.
People ask, often in disbelief, how someone who appears to love their family can behave in a way that so completely undermines it. The answer lies in the split between appearance and function. Where early comfort has failed, the individual may still form relationships, but the primary goal is not relational connection. Learnt ‘relief’ and anything that reliably achieves it is prioritised. In this context, sexual reward takes on a particular power because orgasm is one of the most potent reinforcers available to the human brain.
From the outside, the behaviour appears, and is, selfish and narcissistic, sometimes psychopathic, because for it to continue something else must happen: the acknowledgement of the crushing impact on others has to be kept out of awareness because allowing it in would interrupt the only reliable pathway to relief. The mind begins to exclude, minimise or distort anything that threatens the behaviour and empathy becomes selectively disengaged. Partners, however, experience everything that has been excluded. A devastating rupture in trust, and a sense of being unseen.
This is why the impact is so profound. It is not simply that a boundary has been crossed, it’s that the relationship itself is shown to be fake. At its most extreme, this feels like discovering that one has been in relationship with someone who was, psychologically, somewhere else entirely, a stranger, an alien.
None of this removes responsibility and importantly none of it excuses the immense harm done to victims whether in reality or on film. But it does change the frame because if we continue to see cases like this as isolatedfailures of individual characters, we will continue to miss the ‘why’ and ‘how’. These behaviours are not disconnected from development; they’re shaped by it. That means some cases might not be inevitable because they are not predetermined but formed over time by the way the brain has learned to regulate itself, to seek relief and to make sense of experience.
The renewed focus on Huw Edwards, through both dramatisation and his promised response, risks repeating a familiar pattern: scrutiny of behaviour without understanding of its origins.
As a specialist psychologist I have assessed cases of sexual brutality, by both men and women, that were unimaginably appalling. When such cases are examined through attachment science, they revealed a consistently clear and deeply disturbing developmental pathway. Not random. Not inexplicable. But also not easily undone, or even redeemable. This is why understanding must come early because once these patterns are established, the cost is rarely contained to the individual who carries them.
Cases such as Huw Edwards force us to confront something deeply uncomfortable. Not simply that such behaviour exists, but that it can emerge in individuals who appear, from the outside, entirely intact. What shocks us is not just the behaviour itself, but the distance between what we see publicly and what has been developing, unseen, over time.
