What is Sexual Addiction?

Sexual addiction is the name given to a pattern of sexual behaviour that has the following characteristics:

• It becomes a preoccupation and is experienced as out of control.
• Individuals find that they cannot stop the behaviour or, more usually, they cannot consistently stay stopped.
• The behaviour brings with it real or potential harmful consequences.
• These could be health risks, professional misconduct, impaired parenting, financial loss, damage to marriage and other primary relationships and the neglect of important personal and vocational goals.
• It tends to be used, often unknowingly, to anaesthetise shame, low self worth, core loneliness, anger, stress and anxiety.

Sexual Addiction is a grass roots term that has emerged from the experience of ordinary people to describe what it feels like to be in the hold of these behaviours. It is not about any particular sexual behaviour but rather about how the behaviour functions, and is subjectively experienced in the life of the individual.

How does Sex Addiction get started?

Sexual addiction is not about too much sex or the 'wrong' kind of sex. Sexual addiction is a process that happens for people in that they learn, very often in childhood but sometimes in adolescence or later, to use sexual fantasy and behaviour to manage the problems and troubles of life.

For some people, the behaviour can bring with it painfully experienced harmful consequences; personal, social, occupational and domestic. In much the same way as an alcoholic will use alcohol to manage life- the sex addict does the same; he or she has learned to use sex like a drug.

Although it is not anyone's fault, sexual addiction is set up in the family of origin, normally as a response to the more difficult aspects of growing up. In some cases this might be a response to sexual, physical, emotional or even spiritual abuse, but equally it might be a response to circumstances beyond the family's control.