Are you sex addict?
The warning signs, according to Dr Patrick Carnes, the leading figure in the field of sexual addiction and author of 10 books on the subject, include: feeling that your behaviour is out of control; knowing there may be consequences if you continue; wanting and trying to stop what you’re doing but feeling unable to; needing more and more sex to get the same high; spending an increasing amount of time planning, engaging in and recovering from sex; and neglecting other important areas of your life in favour of sex.
Paula Hall mostly agrees. A British sexual psychotherapist, she treats up to 70 people for sex addiction every year – almost exclusively heterosexual men; there is very little data on women with sex addiction. “The first thing to realise about sex addiction,” she says, “is that it’s not about having a high sex drive. It’s your relationship with sex that’s the issue: if you use it consistently as a way of altering your mood, if it becomes the primary coping mechanism for the difficulties you’re experiencing in your life. Lots and lots of people turn to sex for comfort. What matters is if it’s the only source of comfort you have.
The people Hall sees for sex addiction come from all walks of life, and their addictions take many forms, from excessive use of pornography to compulsive masturbation and use of fetishes, high-risk sex, paid sex, internet sex and multiple affairs. But opportunity plays a big part here, she says: “Many people I treat are men who travel a lot. They have the physical and the financial opportunity to pay prostitutes, for example.”
Increasingly, people are turning to Hall for what they see as an addiction to internet porn. It’s to do with the nature of the internet, the way it sucks you in, combined with the extremely high levels of stimulation it makes available.
Some professionals, though, are sceptical about the supposed extent of sex “addiction”. Professor Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University specialising in behavioural addiction, says he is sure “any behaviour can be potentially addictive” in the sense that “it becomes the most important thing in people’s lives; people compromise their relationships, their jobs, their families because of it; people use it for a high, and to obtain relief”.
The vast majority of people who check themselves into sex addiction clinics or otherwise seek treatment for what they see as an addiction to sex are, believes Griffiths, simply ”using the term ‘addiction’ to justify their behaviour. Psychologists call it functional attribution. It’s about seeking justification through this idea that we ‘really can’t help ourselves’.”
Source:Guardian
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