Multiple Causes of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity
The reasons someone becomes a sex addict are never simple. There can be many complicating factors impacting a person’s sexual behavior that clinicians, family members and addicts need to assess and understand. The words “sex addict” may seem cut and dry—they sound like a person who likes to have too much sex—but sex addicts are rarely people who enjoy sex. Instead, they frequently use sex to experience feelings of power or acceptance, or because they were taught very early that sex equals love.
Research has shown that sexually addictive patterns arrive in many forms, including these:
Sex Addicts Who Experienced Sexual Abuse
It is not uncommon for the victims of childhood sexual abuse to internalize their trauma in such a way that, down the road, it shows up in the form of addiction. For many survivors of sexual abuse, the addiction occurs in the shape of sexual compulsion. One study reports that about 82 percent of people who struggle with sex addiction experienced sexual abuse. In “Facing the Shadow: Starting Sexual and Relationship Recovery,” expert and author Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., describes how our “arousal template,” which comprises the totality of the “thoughts, images, behaviors, sounds, smells, sights, fantasies, and objects that arouse us sexually,” can unfortunately become linked to the earliest memories we have of sexuality, even when those memories are confused, conflicted, unresolved or frightening. Sexually compulsive behaviors may emerge later in life because a person’s sexual template is out of balance and carries unresolved issues.
Sex Addiction as a Symptom of Mental Illness
People with love addiction, or dependent personality disorder, can exhibit symptoms of sex addiction because they “use sex to get love.” Both love addiction and sex addiction are characterized as intimacy disorders; people with both issues struggle to form balanced, healthy intimacy. The love addict loses his or her identity in another person, depending on that person in order to feel safe and worthy. Sex may become an unconscious commodity in the exchange—a set of behaviors upon which the addict judges his or her self worth.
Those suffering from bipolar disorder may experience symptoms of hypersexuality as a result of the manic states inherent to the disorder. Hypersexuality during mania is a tendency to engage in high-risk, compulsive or impulsive sexual behaviors. Someone with bipolar disorder may have ongoing sexual addiction, or may have the symptoms of sex addiction only as a result of manic episodes, which may alter in frequency over time or as a result of treatment.
Individuals with borderline personality disorder do not experience the appreciable manias of bipolar, but they may engage in impulsive sexual behavior as a pattern of self-injury or because they confuse the intensity of sex with emotional validation—something they desperately seek.
Sex Addicts Who Experience Paraphilias
A paraphilia is a psychosexual desire or set of desires that may be unusual, dangerous or even harmful. People with severe exhibitionism, voyeurism and other fetishes need more than the standard treatment for sexual addiction because their behavior victimizes another person. Some may have antisocial personality disorder rather than sexual addiction.
Researchers believe that both genes and environment play a role in why some people become addicted and others do not. There is no across-the-board answer for everyone, and sexual addiction is even more complex than reviewed here. The good news is that in most cases, there is hope for recovery, and multiple therapeutic models and other support systems (such as 12-step and other support groups for sex addicts) are available.