Does Sexual Promiscuity Make a Woman a Sex Addict?

While the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has yet to make sexual addiction a standalone diagnosis in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), compulsive sexual behavior continues to be treated by noted mental health organizations, therapists and healthcare providers in every state. While the APA continues to work out the science—and the politics—inherent in legitimizing the diagnosis, naysayers continue to level serious claims as to why they should not. One of the arguments made against putting sexual addiction into the DSM is that doing so is a way for conservative elements to attempt to police people’s sexual behavior. “Too much” sex, they say, is a value judgment, and value judgments around sex are moral attitudes, not scientific facts.

The other side of the debate, those in favor of making sexual addiction a valid diagnosis, argue that it’s important to do so because compulsive sexual behavior has the potential to harm people, to ruin their lives—it has been doing so and will continue to do so whether the APA gets on board to recognize the true nature of the problem. A diagnosis of sexual addiction means that not only will insurance companies be forced to honor people’s needs for care, but that more research and more therapeutic intervention will be made available. Research in the area is sorely lacking , particularly in regard to women. When we think of compulsive sexual behavior to the point of dysfunction in life, we have primarily and historically only thought of men. But this, again, is a social attitude, not a scientific fact. The reality is simply that more and more women are experiencing hypersexuality to the point of dysfunction. 

Can a Child Porn Addict Ever Be Cured?

Few things appall the collective conscience like the charge of child pornography. Yet despite the social shame and stigma attached to child pornography and the people who view and produce it, it is no fringe issue. As of 2005, the child pornography world was a $3-billion industry. With each year comes greater Internet access and reach and these numbers only grow—often exponentially.

One of the challenges of treating child pornography addicts is that the addiction is tied to tight legal regulations and consequences. As a result, addicts, when they are discovered, are usually in the process of being charged with a felony. The treatment that is necessary for the rehabilitation and recovery of an addict may be inconsistent at best. Rather than dealing with the illness, the addict is locked up and the problem tends to go unsolved. When these sex offenders are allowed to reemerge in society, the behavior is often repeated; the disease has not been healed, merely deferred.

Christian and a Sex Addict? How Is This Possible?

Christian sex addict. It seems like an oxymoron. Whether it’s true or not, many of us still hold to the stereotype of Christians as nuns and monks; chaste, pure and more concerned with the spiritual than the carnal.

This stereotype, though perhaps nice in theory, is not only a fallacy, it is harmful. Failing to see Christians as individuals who could be vulnerable to the same sorts of temptations and frailties that face the general population, we fail to hold others accountable and we miss the opportunity to speak Biblical truth into a soul-destroying condition.

Recent years have unmasked the reality that sex addiction is not a condition reserved for the unsaved. It is everywhere. But despite the alarmingly high occurrence of sex addiction in the church, the issue is still seen as an anomaly, the subject is taboo, and those suffering with various shades of sex and porn addiction remain in the shadows.

Building Boundaries in Relationship With a Sex Addict

We’ve all known those people — at work, at a party, in our family — who stand a little too close for comfort when talking to us. They invade that unspoken 24-inch barrier that differentiates my space from your space. Other people stand farther away and maybe a bit to the side. Perhaps they have their arms crossed and their mouths covered a little when speaking. They feel so far away we never feel close enough to them to hear just what they’re saying. Whether you’re an in-your-face person or a cold-fish person or someone in between, barring a complication in the way you process social awareness, you notice personal boundaries.

Balancing Sex Positivity and Sexual Addiction

It isn’t surprising that in the sometimes troubling quest to understand sexual addiction, there exists a radical polemic, much as there exists in any other controversial area of our culture—two sides, split and warring, convinced the other is wrong, wrong, wrong. For those who believe absolutely in sexual addiction and worry about its consequences—the devastation to lives, the damage done to individuals—and the methods currently used and being newly created in order to treat it, a lack of restraint around sexual ideas or behaviors can seem not only daunting and irresponsible, but sometimes just plain immoral.

For those who hang out in the sex positive camp (a belief system which effectively states that anything consenting adults choose to do sexually is not only OK, but good), believers in sexual addiction can appear anywhere along a spectrum between simply deluded to downright suppressive. Liberal-leaning sex positive activists have been known to suggest that sex addiction as a potential diagnosis was invented purely by the psycho-medical establishment in order to shame peoples’ sexual desires and to control their personal choices. In other words, concepts such as “sex addiction” are viewed by some in this group as representative of a “sex-negative culture,” repressive and suppressive and just plain old unhealthy.

Pornography and Stress: An Endless Cycle – Part 2

Continued from Pornography and Stress: An Endless Cycle – Part 1.

While not always, this inability to cope and to practice healthy behaviors for dealing with stress often springs from childhood trauma, abuse, abandonment or a failure to effectively bond in early childhood relationships, primarily with parents. The individual becomes highly sensitive to stress and feels a profound need to maintain control of himself or his circumstances. In order to escape the crushing weight of trying to micromanage life, the individual often begins to explore substances or behaviors that promise to calm the brain and the body and provide a release from the constant, overwhelming tension.

Pornography and Stress: An Endless Cycle – Part 1

Stress and pornography consumption are inextricably linked. This is no surprise to the addict, who sees his need and desire for pornographic content intensify during periods of stress or emotional disturbance, and it is no surprise to scientists who study porn and sex addiction. The results of a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon confirmed their hunches—porn helps to lower stress levels.

However, that statement, without qualification, is incomplete and oversimplified. Invariably it leads to irresponsible psychological advice and misguided attempts to help men manage the stress in their lives, evidenced by a recent article in Men’s Health Magazine entitled “How Hot Women Help You De-Stress.”

Pornography and Loneliness – Part 2

Continued from Pornography and Loneliness –  Part 1.

Once porn has become your life, your comfort, you community, there is nowhere to turn; nothing satisfies — not even the porn. Complete loneliness has set in and the addict reaches a point of desperation. There are three options: keep increasing the quantity of porn you consume hoping that one day you’ll get that same dopamine rush that hooked you in the first place, find a new and harder drug, or get help reclaiming your life. Thinking “it’s no big deal” or that you can get your consumption under control on your own are only indicators of denial.

Pornography and Loneliness – Part 1

Feeling a little lonely? It isn’t completely off base to think that viewing a little porn might provide some relief for both the emotional need and the accompanying sexual frustration or desire. Yet consuming porn as a remedy for loneliness, or for a lack of adequate and fulfilling relationships, can mean danger. But what is so dangerous about using electronic sex to meet the need?

Advice for Dealing With a Spouse’s Sex Addiction – Part 2

Continued from Advice for Dealing with a Spouse’s Sex Addiction – Part 1.

This Is Bondage

If there is one phrase the spouse of a sex addict must continually run through his or her mind it is: “This is not about me.” Addiction is not personal, it is not malicious and it is not a product of your failings. It is bondage. Sex addicts are enslaved to something beyond their control. They genuinely cannot stop. And many do not act out their sex addictions with pleasure or enjoyment; they come to hate everything related to their disease. But the compulsion denies them the power to say no.

As painful as the effects of the disease may be to your personally, and as angry as you may feel, your spouse desperately needs your compassion and love—though he may not seem at all lovable or deserving of compassion. Try to remember that he is deeply and painfully ill and that he would stop if he could.