​Sexual addiction occurs when the sexual experience has become the driving force of a person’s whole life to the detriment of their health, partner, children, friends, or their job. Sex addicts are people who have lost the ability to really choose the when, where, why and with whom they wish to be sexual.

With sexual and pornography addiction, the addict will turn to the illusionary world of sex and fantasy. Escape from the real world brings temporary relief but escaping too often solidifies a habit and so escape eventually becomes habitual and ultimately addictive. This is similar to how an addiction to alcohol or drugs masks the underlying pain of feeling hurt, betrayed, anxious or lonely. It can be the addict’s attempt to avoid the pain often caused by genuine intimacy. The sex addict is creating a false replacement relationship with someone or something that can be controlled, such as a picture, a video, or a prostitute.

 

The causative issue of pornography and sex addiction is fundamentally not about sex. It is a usually an unconscious dopamine-triggering mechanism to neurologically medicate feelings of deep emptiness, shame, relational pain, and other uncomfortable and often unconscious feeling states.

These addictions have clear neurobiological correlates. And while they often have roots in psychological and emotional trauma, over time they may become neurologically imprinted to different degrees based on a number of factors, including duration, frequency, and intensity.

Addiction is often a family disease. Sex addicts often come from families where addiction, abandonment, neglect, and abuse are normal. The parents, grandparents, siblings, or extended family may struggle with eating disorders, nicotine addiction, drug abuse, alcoholism, gambling, mental health challenges, or compulsive sex. Odds are that with sex addiction there exists a combination of addictive or maladaptive behaviors, not only in the suffering individual but in their current families and families of origin.

Sexual or pornography addiction can strike anyone, from all social classes, at any income level. Do you identify with any of these behaviors?

• Having an affair, either with one-night stands or ongoing sexual liaisons outside of marriage or other committed relationship. Masturbation can become compulsive if it interferes with your normal life and relationships with others.

• Engaging in sex with prostitutes, escorts, massage therapists or others, online or in-person, sometimes exhausting the time and money for housing, food, provisions for children, and other necessities of daily life.

• Compulsive use of the internet and social media for viewing pornography and/or engaging in “cybersex.”

• Excessive “sexualizing” by flirting frequently and compulsively or having an obsessional and excessive focus on, or interest in, sexual arousal.

• Having a feeling of leading a sexual double life separate from family, spouse, or partner, where lies and deception take over.

Those who engage in these behaviors may feel tremendous guilt, shame, distress, despair, and may even have suicidal thoughts just after acting out their addictive behavior.  In other cases,  there may be no guilt or remorse at all, just the fear of "getting caught" and its consequences.  In many, but not all respects, sex addiction is like an addiction to food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, compulsive shopping or spending or even excessive workaholism. Sex and pornography addiction can result in the threat of divorce, loss of employment and financial disaster.

 

Therapy, utilizing a variety of modalities, addresses the root cause of sex addiction from the present, here-and-now perspective, which can be the unresolved emotional logjams that keep you from truly connecting with other people.  This is the healing that needs to occur order for you to be free from sexual or pornography addiction.

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(Please refer to my Article on Sex Addiction in the Articles section of this site for more information.)