You may be feeling “taken over” by sexual acting out. Perhaps you feel that sex is your master rather than your slave. Rather than enjoying a robust sex life –one that contributes to your overall sense of well-being, divorced from secrecy and shame and in-line with your core values, you feel imprisoned by behaviors that ultimately damage your self-worth and self-respect. Isn’t that why you came to treatment in the first place?
If you continue to engage in a behavior or take a substance that damages your sense of integrity and creates other significant negative consequences, yet you have lost the power of CHOICE with regards to that behavior, I think it’s safe to say we’re talking about sex addiction. Like all addictions, sex addiction begins as a simply pursuit of pleasure has become a critical coping mechanism to escape inner pain and to just feel OK. Meanwhile, your relationship may be destroyed and other areas of your life – career, friends, recreation, religious commitments, financial status – may be negatively impacted.
So…if your out-of-control sexual behaviors are causing problems in your life and you have lost the power to exercise CHOICE with regard to those behaviors, you may be ready for Sex addiction treatment.
One way of differentiating yourself from a non-sex addict is to look beneath the “hood” of the behavior. While other folks use sex as a way to gratify their libido and to connect with another person they care about, you are driven by powerful unconscious motives to meet the needs of “unfinished business” from the past. These imperious unconscious needs propel you in the direction of repetitive, compulsive acting out. The nature of compulsion, however, is that it never really “works” to do what you’re compelled to do. That’s why you have to keep doing it over and over. If it “worked” to heal your wounds, you could stop doing it (it wouldn’t be compulsive).
Work with a sex addiction therapist will enable you to identify and understand what the needs are that are driving you so that you can learn to get your needs met in an appropriate (grown-up) way that contributes to your well-being, not to your demise.
But Is It Really An Addiction?
Well, this is an area of heated debate.
The American Society for Addiction Medicine (ASAM) defines addiction as follows:
“Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.”
Folks who object to the term “sex addiction” have a number of compelling arguments. For one, is this really a “chronic medical disease” or is it simply a behavioral disorder? Labeling a sex addict as one who has a “chronic medical disease” may serve to further pathologize a person who already suffers from shame about his actions.
They further claim that the sex addiction therapist delivers a “one-size-fits-all” form of treatment. They feel that the term has become trendy, fadish, overused and misused. Further, some definitions of addiction include the phenomenon of tolerance and withdrawal. Tolerance happens when a person no longer responds to a drug in the way they did at first. So it takes a higher dose of the drug to achieve the same effect as when the person first used it. This is why people with substance use disorders use more and more of a drug to get the “high” they seek.
The jury is out about whether or not sex addicts experience tolerance. Some say that, with internet porn for instance, the person gradually needs more intensity and greater deviance to get his “fix”. Others say there’s no evidence or research that states that that’s true. Does someone who enjoys vanilla, heterosexual, “normative’ porn eventually escalate to downloading kiddie porn or to extreme masochistic bondage & discipline? You tell me.
- Another reason the “anti-sex addiction” pundits say that compulsive sexual behaviors shouldn’t be classified as an addiction is that there’s no evidence of withdrawal. Withdrawal is a complex set of physical/mental symptoms that occur when a person stops or reduces the intake of his drug of choice. Symptoms of withdrawal include:
- Changes in mood
- Fatigue
- Irritability
- Muscle pain
- Nausea
- Restlessness
- Runny nose
- Shakiness
- Sleeping difficulties Carmelle Millar
- Edit
- Sweating
- Tremors
- Vomiting
In my experience, no sex addict that I’ve ever treated experienced the magnitude of these symptoms. When your primary coping mechanism is taken away, you may experience irritability, moodiness or trouble sleeping, but nobody ever died from the cessation of porn viewing, whereas withdrawal from alcohol and certain drugs may be life-threatening.
Regardless of what we label the behavior, as an addiction, a compulsion, – an impulse control disorder or whatever, the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people suffer sometimes devastating consequences from their out-of-control sexual behaviors (sex addiction) and stand to benefit from a comprehensive program for Sex addiction treatment.