Ryan I.
It’s interesting that sex addiction really has nothing to do with sex at all. Sex between two partners is all about communication, connecting and sharing. There is a bond established between the two partners that is intimate, trusting and loving. 
Sex addiction is about isolation. It is not about communicating or sharing your experience with another person. In the addictive mindset, even if acting out involves another person, that act and intention are still isolation, being disconnected from each other’s feelings and hiding in the shadows to cover up shameful actions.
Out of all the potential addictions a person chooses, and usually it’s more than one, sex addiction is much more complicated because it is closely linked with actions of another person that supports the addict in a positive or negative way.
Alcohol, for example, is not a native desire and we don’t instinctively depend on anyone else to provide us the drink. Sex is a basic human desire (not a need, however, we can actually survive without sex) that can only be shared with someone else.
Although the conditions and context surrounding the addiction are different with sex than other addictions, the root causes tend to have the same meaning to us and have nothing to do with the acts themselves and everything to do with medicating to avoid painful feelings and trying to control our environment. So why is that?
We are not born addicts. There may be a genetic predisposition that some of us are more susceptible to addictive tendencies, but that is a topic for a different discussion. We are born into this world with a clean slate and as experiences happen, both good and bad, we learn how to react to them. If something makes us feel good, we want more of it. If something makes us feel bad, we want to avoid it. Patterns develop that help us cope with different events that are happening and these patterns develop at a very early age. These patterns and mental models serve as the structure for how we operate as adults and influence every aspect of our lives at both conscious and subconscious levels. So what happens when we don’t have a perfect childhood? We have imperfect lives. This is beautiful because no one has had a perfect childhood and therefore has the potential to grow closer to what they really want to be. Being aware of our background and why we tend to recreate negative experiences over and over again in our lives is critical in true recovery.
It is no accident that an extremely high percentage of all addicts came from an addictive household. The addiction in the family does not have to involve sex in order to spawn a sex addiction. This just happens to be the addiction that we gravitated to because of circumstances that were presented to us as children. I would also classify abuse in most cases as an addictive tendency as it tends to be a repetitive activity that abusers feel they have no control over. Sexual abuse in a household almost always creates sexual addiction in the victim as this is what they know and what they are taught. Mental and physical abuse can also lead to a sex addiction since the victim is searching for thoughts and actions that help them cope with negative abusive experiences. Through these experiences we search for mechanisms that help us survive, cope and live our lives. The addictive behaviors, in isolation, tie us down and keep us rooted in practices that are self-defeating. But on the contrary, many of these mechanisms actually enhance our lives by giving us an internal drive to succeed. As addicts, we know this cycle well – we commit a shameful act, worry about judgment and consequence, search for something to make the pain and suffering stop, and commit a shameful act. The burden is heavy and the guilt is extreme and it serves nothing but an insatiable appetite for the addiction itself. So how do we change?
I think we can all agree that as addicts we are not where we want to be. We may feel that something went wrong along the way to the present; but, I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. The addiction we carry, if looked at with a different light, is actually a gift that can be used to serve a much higher purpose for our lives. All of our lives we feel we have been victimized in some way, which as children we certainly were on many levels even if not readily apparent. A victim states that it’s not their fault or it is their fault, seeking for ways to assign blame to someone or something rather than accepting ownership of a situation no matter how painful it might be. Being a victim has definite payoffs; otherwise we wouldn’t play that role. But playing the role of victim, and the actions that go along with it, don’t work very well as an adult because we are tied down to thoughts and actions that lead to destructive cycles. The cycles are very difficult to change, along with anything else in your life, if you are a victim.
As adults, every decision we have ever made, regardless of its influence, has led us to this very moment and how we are feeling, thinking and acting right now. If we can get through the fog of addiction that clouds our judgment, we can see other possibilities. We can see that we didn’t get to necessarily choose how we lived our lives as children or what experiences we had, but we do have a choice to make once we are self-aware adults. We can decide how we want to live our lives, how we react to events and how we handle our feelings. Of course we cannot go through our lives alone in these decisions and as any recovered addict knows, we need our higher power and a support system; however we define that, to help us along the way. But even doing that, by definition, is a choice that we make. You may not fully understand why you have made the choices in your life, but regardless of the understanding, everything has been a decision you have made based on implicit or explicit reasoning. Once we have a better understanding of where we have been and why, our recovery becomes a clear pathway because our decisions are in alignment with how we want to view our world. Releasing the bonds of addiction through surrendering to your higher power and leveraging your support system with SAA, is a choice you can make every moment of every day. The choice is yours.
Tags: Gifts of Recovery