Female Sexual Addiction: From Depersonalization to Conscious Healing

It is from somewhere near the ceiling that I witness myself and the scene I have somehow chosen. I am naked on a stranger’s bed – a four poster of heavy carved mahogany. I am tied with intricate knots binding my wrists to my ankles behind me. There is the deafening sound of metal music, which vibrates the bed beneath me. There is scented candlelight diffusing the room, creating a density of sickening sweetness. A man is standing near the bed speaking menacingly to me about his selection of tools, a cane. He is preparing to cane the bottom of my tender, bare feet. When he begins, I seem to fall into the center of the nearest candle.

The man, whom I must call “Sir,” flays my body with the cane and other instruments, but I am not in my body. Maybe I have never been in my body and all of these progressively dramatic experiences are unconsciously intended to call me back to it – I have a lifelong history of only wanting to part from it. This man seems frustrated. When he finally stops beating me in order to do other things, I feel disgusted, but I say nothing. My disgust is like all of the other sensations and emotions I keep so far away from my center that I’ve little idea where the center is.

Expressions of Sexual Addiction

I sought this man out; I thought I wanted to have this kind of experience. I believed I wanted to test myself – to experience something new. The truth is that I have a long history of sexual compulsivity – I graduate from one set of sexually compulsive behaviors to the next, more extreme set of sexual behaviors in order to experience these things: 1) dopamine and norepinephrine, those chemicals to which we’re all addicted if we have any type of addiction; 2) the adrenaline rush that comes from pushing beyond my previous boundaries ; 3) the sense of depersonalization in the face of extreme physical circumstances.

Depersonalization and Disassociation

Depersonalization is a state in which one loses touch with her sense of identity, individuality, or humanness. For sex addicts, particularly female sex addicts, depersonalization is a common feature. Desire to follow a depersonalized script during sex and the frequency of women to dissociate during intense sexual interactions, even ones she requested or consented to, may be prevalent for women who have histories of early sexual abuse. Not all female sex addicts have sexual abuse histories, but many do.

I am one of them. Having been sexualized very early and for many years throughout my childhood may have been my unconscious motivation for repeating certain traumas and behaviors. I needed to resolve those issues, but was not doing so consciously. Often, when we are unable or unwilling to consciously examine our unresolved conflicts, we begin to unconsciously express them through our behavior. I did this by continuing to put myself in more extreme sexual circumstances in which it felt as though I had little power or choice and my sexual partners had all the power and choice. My partners would then use scripted violence and pain in the sexual act. This was how I reenacted my childhood traumas. It’s hard to imagine why I’d ever want to do this, but unconsciously I was reenacting experiences because I very much needed to face my traumas in order to finally heal. I needed to integrate what had happened, to connect with my body and my center. I needed to stop dissociating – the defense mechanism I’d first learned as a result of those traumas in childhood – so that I could be fully and consciously present in my life today.

Every addiction has an underlying cause. The compulsive behaviors we find ourselves acting out can be seen as messages from a deeper part of ourselves – willing us to examine the why behind the what. Learning why we are acting out addictively is the key to healing something far deeper than the addiction alone, and will always grace us with a closer relationship to ourselves, and a deeper capacity to connect with others.