Sexual addiction, also known as “compulsive sexual activity,” is similar to gambling and alcohol addiction: you spend all your time doing it, even if it ruins your social relationships and has other negative consequences.
Sex can be healthy for a relationship. However, some people can become addicted to pornography, extramarital affairs, and some other activities.
If you think it’s just a primal desire, think twice. Like other addictive behaviors, sex becomes a tool to numb painful feelings, to pass time, or to escape loneliness.
Who is a sex addict?
It is estimated that about 3-6% of adults across the United States suffer from sex addiction. Experts believe that the Internet provides unlimited opportunities to view pornographic content and have sex online, leading to a significant rise in cases of sex addiction.
“We’re seeing rates of sex addiction reach epidemic proportions, especially with cybersex.” , the psychologist said. Recently, therapists have found that more women are suffering from addictions related to Internet pornography, so it has become a “gender-neutral” dependency. Previously, she said, women with sex addiction were more likely to have extramarital affairs or go into the flesh business.
Experts acknowledge that it’s not necessarily the case that people who have extramarital affairs or look at pornography are sex addicts. These could have been just pastimes. It is only when they negatively affect a person’s social relationships, take up free time, and cannot be stopped that a dependency develops.
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What makes it addictive?
About 80 percent of sex addiction cases have a history of being sexually abused or emotionally traumatized, and experts say a high number of people who develop sex addiction have been abused, assaulted or raped. “If you’ve been abused, you tend to distrust people and as a manifestation of that, you’re more likely to turn to something like sexual addiction.” And,
Experts say that feeling neglected as a child, whether because parents are divorced or because they both work and therefore can’t spend much time with their children, can also lead to sexual addiction.
Studies on the neurological aspects of sex addiction are inconclusive. Naturally occurring chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine and histamine, do contribute to sexual functioning, but it is not clear how they relate to sex addiction. These two chemicals are lower in the brains of children who have been sexually abused, which may explain why some abused children raise dopamine and histamine levels either through their own bodies or, for that matter, through food.
Many adolescents start their sexual development with pornographic images and then find that sexual relationships with people are less satisfying, that pornography gives them a “very strong chemical shock,” and that other ways of thinking about sex are just some sort of “ring the bell, feed the dog” conditioning mechanism. The other way of thinking about sex is a sort of “ring the bell, feed the dog” conditioned reflex mechanism. Addicts thus become associated with sex and objects, and have difficulty deriving the same level of satisfaction from stable relationships with others.
For many people, especially women, sexual addiction often goes hand in hand with other problems such as eating disorders, drug or alcohol dependence, experts say.
Unlike treating drug or alcohol addiction, the goal of sex addiction treatment is usually not abstinence, but learning how to engage in sexual activity in relationships with others, experts say. Similarly, a person recovering from a bulimic disorder doesn’t stop eating altogether, but learns how to manage eating.