Research figures indicate 5% of the USA adult male population and 3% of the adult female population is being affected by sexual addiction, with a tendency to rise.
There is much discussion of what may cause sexual addiction with research still ongoing.
Likely areas of impairment include early psychological development with faulty experiences of early care giving.
Many sex addicts report emotional or physical childhood abuse and may see themselves as ‘damaged’, ‘tarnished’ or ‘diminished’.
Stress and lowered moods are also contributors to sexual addiction. Sex, pornography, or masturbation are commonly used by the sex addict as a form of self-medicating and escapism from stress, emptiness, restlessness, irritability, sadness, or other low moods.
The onset of sexual addiction occurs mostly during adolescence when sexual self-pleasuring may be used to escape the unpleasantness of tension, sadness, unhappiness, aloneness, family dysfunction, feelings of inadequacy, and a lack of attractiveness.
Another contributing area to the development of sex addiction is the absence of adequate sex education. Pre-adolescents and adolescents are often left with unsupervised ‘self education’ and feed their natural sexual curiosities with mostly inadequate materials, such as adult porn, both magazines or the internet.
Nothing prepares the young person for love, bond, and in particular for a permission to healthy sexual pleasure. Instead the young brain develops an attachment to false powerful sexual fantasies that may become the fuel for the development of a later sexual addiction.
It is important to understand that sex addiction is NOT a moral failure.
Sex addiction is a neurochemistry.
The brain addicts to elevated levels of brain chemicals, including dopamines, endorphins, PEA, and opiate peptides. The sex addict uses sex, masturbation, or frequently changing sexual partners as a drug to achieve a high.
