Counseling For Sex Addiction Resolves Childhood Loss

Sex Addiction and Childhood Loss

Counseling for sex addiction is best when it includes helping resolve confusing memories and troubling experiences from childhood. Sexual addiction’s roots are often cumulative childhood loss and abandonment experiences, and this is particularly so if the experiences were chronic. If any personal work to relieve the distress and disruption by these experiences has been inadequate, there is a “carried-forward loss” into adulthood that lays groundwork for addiction. Addiction is primarily a [flawed] solution to the adult distresses fastened to childhood abandonment pain.

Addiction is a process offering solace against anxiety, fear, or lack of security. Addiction’s problem is its solace is efficiently certain yet vanishes instantaneously, which makes choosing behaviors that diminish solace from instantaneously vanishing so captivating and compulsive. Addicts disregard the consequences of their choices in the delusional pursuit of the solace’s promise to be rewarding. This spiral of living is isolated and destructive.

The choices of sexual addicts either indulgently access sexuality or deprivationally reject sexuality compulsively and recklessly.

To apply to one’s personal life the understanding that sexual addiction is a disease, which is a chronic state of behavioral choices that ignore personal limitations and are disruptive to vital relationship benefits, is a critical part of the answer. The other part of the answer is helping resolve the troubling childhood experiences that interfere with contemporary living. Counseling for sex addiction must include both parts to help create sustainable and meaningful sexual addiction recovery.