A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (2 page)

While some people become aware of the problem in one horrible instant of discovery, often the understanding can creep up in a series of small awakenings. The betrayed partner may have voiced suspicions that were repeatedly denied but which, over time, added up to a certainty.

No matter how you learn about your partner’s sexual addiction, it is a stunning and painful revelation. You may feel shocked or numb, hurt, ashamed, afraid, and angry. Your partner may also feel shocked or numb, hurt, ashamed, afraid, and sometimes angry. In fact, the real brick wall you have run into may well be a wall of shame about the behavior of your partner, your behavior, your inability to stop the behavior, or a lack of awareness that it was happening. Shame is a significant aspect of sexual addiction that will be explored in greater detail in
Chapter 6
.

What Sexual Addiction Is

Sex addiction is a compulsive urge to engage in sexual activity, thoughts, or fantasies in a way that is detrimental to the individual, his family, his friends, and/or his work. It blocks the development of true intimacy in a relationship. Sex addiction is also labeled sexual dependency or sexual compulsivity. For the ease of communication here, we will interchangeably use the terms sex addiction, sexual compulsivity, or sexual dependency to refer to this issue.

Our natural urge for sex, the way sex is used for marketing purposes, and the explosion of porn on the Internet have created a “perfect storm” of conditions leading to sex addiction.

To understand how sexual addiction can arise, it helps to understand what impulses and motivations drive the behavior.

The Sexual Impulse

As a human, you have an animal body guided by instinct. You also have a reasoning part of your brain that allows you to work with your instinctive responses. In its basic and natural form—if there has not been physical or emotional damage along the way—human sexual contact feels good, touching feels good, having an orgasm feels good. This is normal and wonderful. The natural desire for sex and sexual pleasure is not an enemy. The natural sexual impulse can guide you to finding closeness, connectedness, and intimacy with your partner.

When your natural biochemical responses produce hormonal impulses, you experience sexual desire. When sexual urges get misdirected or they become addictive or compulsive, instead of leading to pleasure and connection, the sex drive can lead to suffering.

Basically, we all want to love and be loved. At the core of our humanity, we yearn to be treated with kindness and compassion and to return kindness and compassion. And we quite naturally require human connection at a biological level. We have evolved as members of a tribe, as part of a society. We need each other.

Biology And Sex

Our needs for sex, touch, attachment, bonding, and commitment are chemically influenced in different ways at different stages of our lives. The hormone testosterone, sometimes called “the warrior hormone,” is found in both men and women. Men, however, tend to have twenty to forty times more testosterone than women. Testosterone creates an urge for sexual contact, but may also foster the desire to dominate and to be alone. Thus, it’s no surprise that men are more inclined to one-night stands—or that they like to roll over and go to sleep afterward.

In men, testosterone levels peak in the morning and are lower at night. They cycle up and down every fifteen to twenty minutes. It is widely known that at puberty young men are hit with a flood of testosterone. Testosterone also spikes for young women at puberty, but women produce more of the hormone estrogen. Estrogen causes a woman to want to be held, and causes her to feel receptive to sexual advances.

Touch and the chemicals released with touch also play a vital role in our survival, happiness, and our experience of connectedness. Studies have shown that babies do not thrive and can die when there is a lack of touch. As we grow older, without touch we become more subject to senility and can die sooner. Touching and being touched by someone alters our chemical composition, strengthening the biochemical bond with that individual. Even a thought of the person can cause a hormonal surge. A chemical reaction occurs that actually causes a craving for more touch from that individual. In this way, touching and being touched are literally addictive.

The physical structures in your brain also influence how you respond to the world. The prefrontal cortex, which sits right behind your forehead, is associated with personality, intelligence, ethics, and morality, and with regulating control over emotional and sexual urges.

In other words, you can override the primitive call-of-the-wild automatic responses we all have that compel us to get away from pain and danger and to move toward pleasure. Studies have shown that we can engage the thinking function of the prefrontal cortex by something as simple as using our thinking function to label an angry face as “angry.”

By putting just a little bit of awareness around your automatic survival response, you can begin to have a choice about the response. This is one of the vital components of overcoming sexual addiction. By understanding your biological influences, you can start to work with your urges and impulses as they arise. You can begin to see how your biology naturally creates a desire for sexual connectedness or a desire to masturbate or a desire to dominate or a desire to be receptive to sex or a desire to touch and be touched. You can begin to find ways to work with these energies so they do not overwhelm your relationship. You can find ways to work with your biochemistry so your desires for attachment, connection, bonding, and commitment can be met.

Pornography

Because of the way our hormonal impulses can drive our behaviors, sex has also become entangled with power and domination, which is at odds with our need for closeness, touch, and connection. The portrayal of sex as a matter of power and domination is a common theme in much of porn. This can create a distortion and confusion about sexual impulses and what is actually desirable for women. Those who have viewed a lot of pornography can start to imagine that women in real life are like the women portrayed in pornography. This is one way that sexual compulsion can damage relationships.

Viewing porn can be instantly gratifying. It’s readily available and doesn’t require connection or cooperation. Testosterone drives the urge for sexual expression, and men seem to be more oriented to being aroused and attracted visually. In particular, when sexually explicit materials are introduced (or discovered) during puberty, a cycle of connecting with the sexual excitement and release that comes with the viewing of pornography can be set in motion in a way that impacts the view of and approach to sexuality for many years to come. The natural maturing of the capacities for sexual connection through truly intimate contact can become diverted.

In 1953, the face of pornography changed with the first issue of
Playboy
magazine.
Playboy
and its related magazines brought pornography into more public—and widespread—view at magazine stands everywhere. These objectified and sexualized images of women were packaged as a lifestyle choice available to any successful and intellectual gentleman.
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazine vied to produce the most sexually explicit material. In 1974, with the publishing of
Hustler
magazine, the limits of what was acceptable for mainstream distribution were pushed even further, laying the groundwork for the multibillion dollar porn industry of today.

With the explosion of Internet porn—and computers to view it on—porn is now accessible in ways it never was before. Any kind of pornographic material that can be imagined (or desired) is available instantly in the privacy of one’s home or office. Greater accessibility has also led to more explicit and increasingly violent material aimed at younger audiences. Currently, the average age at which a child first views porn online is eleven—and what a child sees is a far cry from that first edition of
Playboy
.

It is no secret that pornography tends to depict sexuality from a view that objectifies. Many of our clients have found it difficult to understand that the view of sex portrayed by porn is a fantasy. It is a type of fairy tale created for men by the porn industry because sex sells. That doesn’t mean porn is necessarily bad. Sometimes couples can use it as part of a healthy sex life. For example, sexually explicit materials that depict partners sexually connecting and caring for each other can model the connection that is possible through human sexuality. However, an individual who compulsively uses pornography generally needs to abstain from viewing pornography completely.

The Label “Sex Addict”

Many people resist the “sex addict” label. They don’t want to associate addiction with their behaviors or with their relationship. Sometimes it’s easier for people to think they simply have a bad habit. We encourage them, and encourage you, not to get stuck on words, but to focus on healing. Whether we use the label bad habit, addiction, compulsion, or dependency, or any other words, if your behavior is creating suffering, then you have a problem. For the individual who is caught by sexual compulsion, sex has become something other than an intimate expression of loving connectedness. The pleasure that is inherently present in orgasm or connection with another has been altered and is being used as a balm, an escape, a distraction, rather than being enjoyed for what it does offer.

Unfortunately, shying away from the phrase “sex addiction” can keep you from the very information that can be helpful. If you know what sex addiction means, then if you are suffering from it (or your partner is), you can recognize that you’re not alone and you can find help and relief for the pain that compulsive behavior causes.

Just because someone likes to masturbate or to have sex doesn’t mean that he or she is a sex addict or has a problem. A friend of ours asked if we thought he had a problem because he loves to look at his fiancée when she is naked, and he really enjoys having sex with her—frequently. We assured him that he is a healthy male.

What Are the Signs of Sexual Addiction?

To determine if you (or your partner) may have a problem with sexual addiction, ask these questions:

1. Are you (or is your partner) preoccupied with sexual thoughts, impulses, or desires?

2. Are your (or is your partner’s) sexual behavior(s) getting in the way of having the intimate connection you want to have?

3. Are your (or is your partner’s) sexual behavior(s) getting in the way of work or causing financial problems?

If you answered yes to even one of these questions, it is likely that sexual compulsivity is an issue for you. At the very least, you can assume that sexual compulsion is creating problems for you in your life and with your relationship.

You have an issue with sex addiction, dependency, or compulsion if your sexual behaviors interfere with your day-to-day living by causing stress on your family members, friends, other loved ones, and/or work. If your sexual expression has become self-defeating, then you have a problem. If your sexual behaviors are getting in the way of intimacy, then you have a problem. Your natural animal instinct to soothe yourself with this particular type of behavior is overriding your capacity to regulate your impulses in a way that allows for human connection and intimacy.

The problem with soothing yourself with sexual behavior is that the soothing is momentary. You may feel ashamed, too, because you are probably aware that your behavior is out of your control. An internal war is going on. Life is not working. As George likes to describe the cycle of sexual compulsivity, “You can’t get enough of what won’t satisfy you.”

Porn and Masturbation—“All Men Do It”

If someone says you have sexually addictive behavior, your automatic response may be, “All men do it,” “Are you kidding me? This is just how guys are wired,” or “This doesn’t have anything to do with my relationship. It’s no big deal.”

But if you could let go of the defensiveness for a moment, you would probably say something like, “Please don’t make me stop. I really need this. This is the one thing I can count on to never let me down.”

It’s easy to understand that when one of the partners in a committed relationship has an affair the behavior is harmful to the relationship and is unacceptable. But when you’re simply masturbating, you may wonder, “What’s the harm in that? If the sexual impulse is so natural, then why would following it create a problem?”

Let’s dig into this. Start with a natural, run-of-the-mill instinctive sexual urge—just an urge on its own, not connected to feeling close and loving toward someone—just that nice warm sexual urge that kind of glows in your genital area. At its most simple, that urge is the desire to feel the release and pleasure in an orgasm. So the individual masturbates and has an orgasm. It just feels good, and there isn’t a problem.

Most of us masturbate; that’s not the problem. The problem occurs when masturbation interferes with our relationships. Most of us have sexual thoughts and feelings about people we see and meet that we find sexually attractive. Again, that’s not a problem. It only becomes a problem when you’re driven to engage in sexual behaviors that interfere with the rest of your life.