Sex Addiction Recovery: Creating Healthy Intimacy

Sex addicts, according to Robert Weiss, senior vice president of clinical development for Elements Behavioral Health and founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute (SRI), are people who experience an “intimacy disorder.” While sex may be an extension of an intimate connection for most people, for sex addicts, it becomes a replacement for intimate connection. Many experienced attachment injury in childhood, where an insecure or negative relationship was created with a caregiver, when a healthy, secure attachment was needed for full, unimpeded development. This attachment injury may have developed as a result of abuse or neglect, or it may have occurred for more indirect, but nevertheless painful, reasons. For example, a child growing up in a home without the attention or validation of his parents, even though they take care of his physical needs, may be said to experience intimacy injury.

Why Do Sex Addicts Act Out?

Attachment injury and the subsequent intimacy disorders that can develop lead to “acting out” behaviors for sex addicts. Acting out is a term used in psychology to refer to someone who uses extreme behaviors in order to express feelings he or she may be incapable of discussing or even examining. When we think of sexually addicted acting out, compulsive pornography use, serial affairs, exhibitionism, exploitive sexual behaviors, etc., might come to mind. Any of these behaviors may be used by the sex addict to experience intensity and its feel-good brain chemical, dopamine, as an analgesic for painful life circumstances. The problem, of course, is that addicted behavior leads to negative life consequences such as shame, remorse, broken relationships, legal problems, lost jobs, etc. And addicts are unable to stop using, despite the negative consequences.

Perhaps ironically, sex addicts are people who, despite compulsive sexual behavior, may turn away from sex when in the confines of a committed relationship (this kind of sex requires intimacy). And they are likely to flee or otherwise avoid encounters in which they are required to be vulnerable and connected. They may do so by becoming consumed with other types of addiction or even work. Any excuse can be found to avoid sustained emotional relating.

Steps for Creating Healthy Intimacy

So how do recovering sex addicts learn to master this tendency?

• Validate rather than judge. For any relationship to achieve healthy intimacy, it must be a safe place for both partners. Using criticism and condescension are ways addicts can avoid closeness, invalidating their partners in order to drive them away. Instead, it’s important to create a positive, safe environment where both parties can feel cared for, warts and all.
• Avoid the desire to control. When the need to control a partner (or the outcome of a situation) arises, it is often because an individual feels a lack of internal control, which he or she then attempts to correct for in the external world. But partners cannot be controlled, and attempting to do so annihilates intimacy. Genuine connection must arise spontaneously from the gifts both partners bring, not those forced upon or shut down by another.
• Open up and let your guard down. Allow yourself to be vulnerable with your partner. This requires some risk, and risk means it’s possible for you to get hurt. But without being brave enough to unveil who you really are, you cannot be loved for who you really are. Anything else is superficial.

Recovering sex addicts are unlikely to heal from an intimacy disorder without real work and emotional effort. Acknowledging the problem is important, but it isn’t enough. Stepping out of your comfort zone and remaining willing to get close, even when it feels uncomfortable or scary, is the only way to heal. Relationships often begin with intensity and a sense of intoxication in being together, but real intimacy can stand the test of time. That is what recovered addicts learn to do: to stand strong and open.