An addiction to sex can have a devastating impact on your mental health, physical health, your relationships, career and finances. Whether you are struggling with the addiction or you’re worried about a loved one, it’s important to seek or encourage help as soon as you can. If you don’t, sexual addiction can result in thoughts and behaviors that will lead to increasingly serious consequences.
Depression – sexual addiction can and very often does lead to depression. When you think about the feelings an addiction can cause, this isn’t surprising. A number of overwhelming feelings are very common such as intense anxiety, loneliness and remorse.
What’s more, for however long your addiction has been present, you will have been facing a difficult moral conflict as well as contradictions between your ethical values and the behaviors that you haven’t been able to control. A sex addiction therapist can not only help you to recover but also aid you in restoring your confidence.
Low self-esteem – it’s not uncommon for those struggling with sex addiction to suffer from severely low self-esteem before they enter sex addiction therapy. This could be the result of losing your job, friends or family, you feeling like you don’t deserve for anyone to be nice to you or your partner leaving you. Because you haven’t been able to control your addiction or stop your destructive behaviors, you are also very likely to be experiencing feelings of shame, self-hatred, hopelessness and despair.
Risk of suffering from other addictions – a staggering 83% of sex addicts have concurrent addictions such as alcoholism, drug addiction, an eating disorder or are compulsive gamblers.
One of the reasons for this is because as your feelings of loneliness, helplessness and depression increase, you’re more likely to turn to alcohol, drugs or anything else that provides you with a temporary release and eases the pain of your emotional struggles. Your eating may also suffer as a result of your addiction because you may feel like it’s the only thing in your life that you have any control over.
Relationship breakdowns – if you’re struggling with sex addiction and you have a partner, it’s more likely than not that you have deeply hurt the person you love. Betrayals can be hard to overcome – especially when they’ve happened repeatedly and naturally, this can lead to relationship breakdowns.
Perhaps despite your partners’ pleas, you wouldn’t get sexual addiction treatment so they left before you were ready to go into recovery. Relationships with friends, family and colleagues may have suffered too.
Health consequences – if you’re engaging in risky behaviors, you’re very obviously putting yourself at risk. There are many health consequences of sex addiction including HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases as well as the impact it will have on your mental health.
Financial difficulties – sex addiction can also lead to financial difficulties. Perhaps you lost your job or even if you’ve managed to stay in employment, you could be leading a lifestyle that quite simply, you can’t maintain. Prostitutes, escorts, strip clubs, paying for pornography and the cost of traveling for the purpose of sexual hook-ups can be taxing on an addicted person’s financial resources.
Legal consequences – 58% of sex addicts report having engaged in some form of illegal activity. Your behavior may have escalated into sexual offenses such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, inappropriate touching, downloading child pornography or sexual harassment. The consequences of this can range from receiving a caution or getting sued to being stuck with a police record or being sent to jail.
If you think that you or someone you know could benefit from sexual addiction treatment, please feel free to contact Toronto Trauma and Addiction Counselling for more information about the signs, symptoms and different treatments that are available. Our Sexual Addiction Screening Test can also help you to determine whether or not you may need sex addiction therapy.
Sources for statistics – https://www.sexualrecovery.com/articles/consequences/
