If you’re suffering from sexual addiction and you’ve entered recovery, it’s important to devise a treatment plan in order to increase your chances of success.
This will mean attending therapy sessions, connecting with others, adopting new behaviors, changing old behaviors and of course, treating and resolving the underlying issues.
While sex addiction recovery is not simple, there are a number of relatively easy steps you can put in place to help aid your efforts.
Identify the degree of your sex addiction
Identifying the degree of your sex addiction can help you to determine which type of therapy might be the most beneficial to you.
- Level one – behaviors include compulsive masturbation, obsessive use of pornography and regularly seeking out sexual encounters with different people.
- Level two – behaviors may have escalated to illegal activities including flashing, voyeurism and indecent phone calls.
- Level three – this involves serious criminal behaviors which are dangerous and abusive including molestation, sexual abuse and rape.
It’s important to get help for sex addiction as soon as you can. While it may seem that level one behaviors aren’t that bad, if left untreated, they can quickly escalate to level three actions.
Understand that sex addiction isn’t really about sex
Many of us assume that sex addiction stems from the desire to engage in sexual activities. It is in fact very rarely about the act itself and has more to do with escapism, power, trying to regulate feelings or an addiction to the chemical rush.
More often than not, sex addiction develops when a person uses it as a coping mechanism they have developed in response to trauma, insecure attachments or extreme stress. The trauma is usually incurred during childhood when victims were too scared to speak out which is why these feelings manifest into destructive behaviors.
Know the recovery process
It’s important to realize that sexual addiction treatment can be incredibly complicated. Normally, when we try to overcome an addiction, we give up the thing that’s causing our destructive behavior.
Because sex is a normal and healthy part of a relationship however, long term abstinence is not the goal. Sex addiction therapy will instead help you to discover the underlying cause of the addiction, what your triggers are and how to avoid relapsing.
Recognize the various forms of sex addiction therapy
Sex addiction can be treated and managed with the right help.
- Individual counselling – allows you to deal with the issues at hand in a personal and in-depth manner.
- Couples therapy – seeing a therapist together can help to open the channels of communication, deal with the betrayal that has been caused and help to navigate the early day chaos which usually exists posts discovery.
- Group therapy – as well as being surrounded by people who understand you, speaking to others who are further into their sexual addiction recovery can provide you with valuable tips and advice for coping. As sex addiction at its core is an intimacy disorder, spending time with other people in therapy helps in that regard.
Those with solid recovery will tell you that it was a combination of all three forms of counselling that helped them get to where they are today.
Put coping mechanisms in place
As with any addiction, there are going to be occasions you feel tempted. The best way to avoid this is to put mechanisms in place to help you deal with these feelings.
- Form healthy habits – do anything you can to keep away from unstructured time – join the gym, see friends, get a hobby, throw yourself into work, go travelling or do some volunteer work.
- Avoid triggers – avoid places, people and activities that may cause you to feel tempted to fall back into old habits. No matter how far you’ve come in your recovery, if you’re having a weak moment you might find it too difficult to resist.
- Manage stress – stress and anxiety are common triggers for relapse – the more stress you’re under, the more likely you are to seek an escape from it.
- Establish a good support network – the more support you have, the less likely you are to relapse
- Seek help – you may be willing to work at overcoming your addiction but if your efforts aren’t properly guided, it will more than likely lead to a relapse.
If you think that you or someone you know could benefit from sex addiction counselling, please feel free to contact Toronto Trauma and Addiction Counselling and we will be more than happy to help.
