Many people ask, “What is a sex addict, and is sex addiction a real thing?”
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD), also known as hypersexuality, is a common term for sex addiction. Although some professionals don’t agree on the term ‘sex addiction,’ many men struggle with compulsive sexual behavior, as it negatively affects their lives.
Though there isn’t a formal diagnosis of sex addiction, compulsive sexual behavior can cause much emotional pain and other problems for any person suffering from it. It’s estimated that about 3% to 6% of the general population shows symptoms of compulsive sexual behavior.
Since it has been medically reviewed, it’s clear that hypersexual disorder problem can be fixed. However, it might be necessary to get help from a health professional, but this article will give you the tools and resources to get you started.
By getting the right tools and information, people can permanently overcome their addiction or habit and live a life with strong marriages and families, feeling peace, confidence, and satisfaction.
Definition of Sexual Addiction
Though “sex addiction” is a common term, it’s very controversial, and people often don’t understand it very well.
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder refers to a long-term pattern of sexual behaviors done repeatedly.
It might cause you much pain and trouble in your relationships and make everyday tasks, like working with professional relationships or studying, more difficult.
Another probable reason for the same sexual activities and urges could be that the person is sexually out of control (OCSB). This idea has been reviewed by medical professionals and refers to a behavioral pattern rather than a clinical disorder.
In CSBD and OCSB, your sexual thoughts, sexual urges, and behaviors may become the focus of your life and may have negative impacts on other areas of your life, relationships, finances, work, and levels of happiness. Sometimes people seek to be reviewed by medically certified experts or therapists to get help with their problem.
What Causes Compulsive Sexual Behavior?
It’s important to understand that a sex addiction isn’t caused by a high desire for sex. Rather, sex is used as a coping mechanism for unresolved negative emotions.
When someone feels depressed, low self-worth, inadequate, lonely, anxious, or stressed, they get an endorphin and dopamine rush from sex, which helps them to feel better in the moment.
The more they turn to sex or other compulsive sexual behavior to feel better and escape their negative emotions, the more it develops into a habit because of the pleasure they receive. It gets difficult to break their habit unless they have new ways of coping AND actually deal with the underlying feelings that they want to escape.
There are resources to help you more clearly identify the specific underlying cause of your addiction or habit so you can resolve it and put it behind you.
What Is Sex Addiction?
“Sex addiction” is when someone strongly needs to have sexual intercourse or find multiple sex partners to get a “fix” like alcohol or drug or alcohol dependence.
It can harm a person’s health, relationships, quality of life, and safety. People with sex addiction can no longer be officially diagnosed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), but the consequences men experience due to their compulsions are very real.
The “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems” (ICD-10) and the DSM-5 can still be used to diagnose it as “Other specified sexual dysfunction” (as “Other sexual dysfunction not due to a substance or known physiological condition”).
Symptoms of Sex Addiction?
Since sex addiction is not a mental illness and isn’t in the DSM-5, there’s a lot of debate about what qualifies as an addiction.
However, here are some common symptoms that many men experience who are struggling, and if a person shows some or all of the following signs, they may have a sex addiction as reviewed by medically qualified individuals:
- Chronic, obsessive-compulsive sexual behaviors or fantasies
- Managing Compulsive sexual behaviors with multiple partners, including strangers
- Lying that they can control sexual behavior
- Focused on having sex interferes with daily life, relationships, and work performance.
- The inability to stop or control Sexually addictive disorders
- putting oneself or others in danger because of sexual behavior
- Feeling guilt after sex or with their porn addiction
- Experiencing other negative personal or professional consequences
It’s important to remember that having sex or the level of sexual interest from one party is not a sign of sexual addiction.
What Are The Treatments to Help A Sex Addict?
There are a number of different treatment options for people who want additional help to gain control over their behaviors:
Therapy
The best approach for treating sexual addiction is to resolve the root problem of the behavior. This can be done by a trained professional who specializes in sex addiction to identify and process the negative feelings that drive the behavior.
A sex addict often struggles with feelings of low self-worth, depression, inadequacies, or other negative emotions that fuel their sexual behavior, so addressing and resolving these issues is critical to finding freedom and control over their sexual behavior.
Eliminating Your Triggers and Urges For Porn
The best type of individual counseling focuses on helping men effectively deal with their triggers, because without knowing how to identify and eliminate them, you’ll always be vulnerable to another relapse.
For example, let’s say you see an attractive woman at the gym and it triggers you to think sexual thoughts about her. Later on at night it can turn into scrolling on your phone looking at pictures, which eventually leads you to porn. Before you know it, it’s already too late because the temptation is so strong and you mess up again and feel guilty about it.
The key to finding freedom after you’ve identified the trigger is to reprocess it internally in a way that eliminates the power it has over you. You might have any number of different triggers, but the process is the same.
Developing the ability to remove the intensity or emotional pull of your triggers is the only way to become free, because you can’t just avoid stress at work, quit going to the gym or grocery store, stop watching TV or seeing attractive women when you’re out. So if those external triggers don’t stir up the urge or desire to watch porn or compulsively pursue sex, you won’t ever begin the search in the first place.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Sam Tielemans, has developed a unique approach to help men reprocess their triggers to eliminate their urges and cravings for pornography, which is often the reason why men end up relapsing, despite their best efforts to stay strong.
If you want help identifying and reprocessing triggers so you find freedom from your compulsive urges, this podcast episode outlines the steps to this approach so you can try it for yourself.
Inpatient Treatment Programs
You can get help with sex addiction from many inpatient treatment facilities. People who have a sex addiction or other behavioral addictions are taken away from their everyday lives for at least 30 days.
Doing this can help them get back in control of impulses and heal. In addition, these kinds of programs usually have many in-depth individual and group therapy sessions to lead toward sexual sobriety. The downside of inpatient help is the tremendous cost and lack of aftercare support.
12-Step Programs
Programs such as Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) follow the same recovery model as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Though success rates for attending groups is only about 5-10% for those who participate because it’s more focused on support instead of resolving the root problem of the addiction.
Members aren’t required to give up sex entirely, but they are encouraged to refrain from compulsive and destructive sexual behavior. These groups offer a sense of support more than actual deeper-level treatment.
If 12-step isn’t your thing, this resource will help you understand how to overcome your addiction without 12-step, accountability, or filters on your phone.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
This kind of therapy can help people figure out what causes them to have sexual behaviors and then show them how to change their behavior.
The best way to do this is to speak to and be reviewed by medically licensed mental health therapists on a one-to-one basis.
Medication
Using drugs to treat some people might be a promising idea. For example, some antidepressants may help people not want to do things they don’t want to do (which is separate from the potential side effects of some antidepressants that can cause decreased libido or impair other aspects of the sexual experience).
It’s not clear, though, if a doctor would give this person medicine for this problem.
Sexual addictions can come in many forms, including addiction to:
- Sexual acts with multiple sexual partners
- Prostitution
- Watching pornography and having sexual fantasies
- Compulsive Masturbation or Obsessive Sexual Thoughts
- Exhibition or voyeurism
Sex addicts may persistently alter their activities to perform sexual acts, unable to control their behavior despite adverse consequences.
Such compulsive sexual behavior can lead to serious personal consequences. Like drug or alcohol addiction, sex addicts can harm physical health, mental health, personal relationships, and quality of life.
Many sex offenders have been reviewed by medically qualified experts from academic research institutions in the medical community, and half of them have impulse control disorders or sexual addiction.
A Sex Addict and Family Members
An addict may be drawn to having sex with new people, even if this means cheating on their partner or having an affair with someone else. They may look for one-night stands all the time or even cheat with different people multiple times.
Treatment may differ depending on the root cause and how it shows up in someone’s personal life. If the sex addiction is also caused by an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder, medications may also be used as part of the treatment plan.
Sex addiction can be thought of as the desire to have sex despite negative consequences. It is inappropriate behavior because it makes you feel bad instead of happy. Even though sex addiction isn’t always seen as a real medical condition, it can have actual effects on relationships and well-being.
The idea of sex addiction has been thought of in many ways. Sexual addiction has many of the same characteristics as a real addiction.
There is a big difference in someone who has a healthy sex drive vs someone who is struggling with addiction. A sex addict will spend a lot of time looking for or having sex while keeping it a secret from other people.
People who have a sex addiction cannot stop their behavior unless some event stops them.
What Are the Negative Effects of Sex Addiction?
Relationships at home and work may get worse. Some people have trouble controlling their sexual impulses, leading to infections like HIV. This can even happen if someone can’t control their urges.
When someone has problems with stress, anxiety, depression, and social isolation, they may use sex to get away from them.
The Effects of Sex Addiction Are Real, But Some Professionals Don’t Agree on the Diagnosis
Everyone in the medical field isn’t sure that medically reviewed by written statements shows sex addiction is an actual disease.
The American Psychiatric Association book on mental disorders isn’t medically reviewed to the extent it is called a real thing that happens in real life (APA).
How Can Family Members Identify Sex Addiction?
As a result, the diagnostic criteria for a sex addict can be very vague and subjective, so it’s hard to know if you have one or if a family member has one.
However, there are some things that people with sex addiction have in common and how family members can help if their partner has such sexual behavior.
- Sex takes over the person’s life to the exclusion of other things.
- Sexual activities may be inappropriate or dangerous, and they may include sex with prostitutes, sex in public, or going to sex clubs all the time.
- Feelings of regret, anxiety, depression, or shame are often mixed with the constant desire for sex.
- When the person is alone, they do other types of sex, like phone sex, pornography, or computer sex, to get pleasure.
- The person is sexually compulsive and has sex with many different people. (Chances of sexually transmitted diseases are high).
- When a person is alone, they perform excessive masturbation.
- Sexual addiction is usually marked by a vicious circle of over-sexuality and low self-esteem.
- Even though sex can provide short-term relief, the damage to the person’s psychological well-being will get worse and worse.
To be a sex addict, a person doesn’t need to do things that are very extreme or “weird.” It’s more about being unable to stop themselves even though they know what they’re doing is bad for them.
It’s possible to have a sexual addiction for a long time and not know why. Sex addiction can be thought of in some ways as impulse control, OCD, or relationship disorder. They also say that, in some people, sexual addictions start to deal with early traumas, including sexual trauma.
Having a lot of sexual desire does not signify some types of mental illness (like bipolar disorder). Neurological disorders, such as epilepsy, head injuries, or dementia, have caused behaviors to be more sexually interested, but this does not constitute sex addiction. Some drugs that affect dopamine may also, but rarely, not do the same.
Sexual addiction needs to be treated by a therapist who is well-versed in the field, like a psychologist, psychiatrist, or sex therapist. It can be challenging when such an individual has personal relationships or a family.
Treatment can differ depending on the root cause, but it will usually be done outside of the hospital with counseling and behavioral therapies.
Medicines may be used as part of the treatment plan if the sex addiction is linked to an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder. However, if you have a sex addiction that isn’t one of these clinically defined disorders, there aren’t any guidelines on using medicines to treat it.
A family doctor or a local psychiatric group can be the first to be medically reviewed to start. Both groups can send you to the right doctor to provide medical advice and prescribe drugs or point you to the right place to get the best help.
Above all else, know that addictions can be overcome as you get the right tools and direction, and there are lots or resources that provide information and strategies to help.
