The only way for me to really explain sex addiction is to talk about my own history with addiction.
I got sober in 1985 when I was 15 years old. My drug of choice was marijuana, and I had experimented with alcohol and psychedelics enough to scare myself into stopping. I hit rock bottom quickly and asked my father to put me in a drug rehab. There, I read the 12-step recovery book of Alcoholics Anonymous three times from cover to cover. I was terrified and did not want to return to my addictive patterns because I was deeply unhappy. In actuality, I was more terrified of starting to smoke cigarettes because that’s what all the sober kids were doing back then.
Fast-forward 10 years, I’m now 25 years old and living in New York City. I was still attending 12-step meetings and had a recovery program, but there wasn’t any real sense of urgency because I didn’t have cravings for drugs or tobacco. I could decide when to engage in my recovery. Quite honestly, when I look back, it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing the work needed to relax my mind and become more stable; it was that I didn’t know what type of work I had to do. There weren’t many people doing that work around me, and I didn’t have a clear view of the problem the way I do today at age 55.
Looking back, I realize that my addictive behavior patterns were just that—patterns I copied from the world around me to find relaxation and peace, something I could never quite achieve. It was always a sense of longing, a sense that something was missing. Despite knowing I came from an alcoholic, dysfunctional home, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was wrong. The problem was chronic anxiety, inherited from my parents and their parents, and prevalent in society around me. Chronic anxiety is when we are constantly triggered by various things in the world and never find a way back to relaxation.
In scientific terms, the brain has two modes of functionality: the parasympathetic state, which is the relaxed state, often referred to as "feed or breed," and the sympathetic state, which is the "fight or flight" response. A child feels soothed and comfortable when its needs are met—when it is cool, touched, loved, makes eye contact, smells its mother, feeds, has dry diapers, and gets a good night’s sleep. However, my life had many disruptions to this peace due to various stress stimuli. My family dynamic, although average in stress load, was enough to do its damage.
By the time I was 25, despite maturing in many ways and accomplishing interesting things, I was still a big baby with low self-esteem and unaddressed psychological damage. I was anxious without knowing it and had no sustainable way to relieve it. I didn’t understand how to breathe to relax myself and didn’t have a relaxation program. I spent money and consumed everything to distract myself from my anxieties. I discovered skydiving, which was a dangerous thrill that completely distracted me from any psychological issues, so I did it repeatedly for ten years. My relationships were dysfunctional, resembling skydiving—thrilling and dangerous. When there were good moments, I felt ‘high’. This pattern unfolded in my emotional world because I had poor role models.
I’m not blaming others for my problems or putting all of this on addiction alone. The path to improving our relationships and happiness begins with self-awareness. We must understand what happened to us. When we can see and understand our experiences, our relationship to them can change. Instead of being confused, we can learn to understand and name things correctly.
Sex addiction is a poor term to describe how we cope with and manage romantic relationships. It isn’t just about craving sex; it’s about the failure to relate on a deep, intimate level with another person. Addiction in sex and love addiction or obsession is a failure to achieve meaningful intimacy that can bring relaxation and comfort. My relationships were turmoil, reflecting my internal chaos. They were thrilling and dangerous, with moments of high that mirrored my experience with skydiving.
For a person with a normal brain pattern and self-esteem, sex involves mutual pleasure and connection. In contrast, for the anxious brain, sex becomes an intense immersion in sensory pleasure that distracts from anxiety. Sex addicts may not seek to build a safer place where attraction grows through caring for each other first; they seek immediate gratification to feel different from anxious or uncomfortable.
Sex addiction can progress to extramarital affairs and other inappropriate behaviors. Dangerous behaviors like unsafe sex are common in sex addiction, driven by a trance-like state and the thrill of danger. I learned about this through my years in sex addiction recovery, where I listened to countless stories to understand the progression of addictive behaviors.
Masturbation can also become an addiction. The focus should be on recognizing how we feel before and after masturbating and understanding what we are trying to achieve. People can become addicted to pornography, seeking increasingly intense depictions of sexuality to become aroused, similar to how people become desensitized to violence in movies.
Sex addiction often overlaps with love addiction, where an intense focus on love and romance becomes a source of pain. Behaviors like stalking, possessiveness, jealousy, and conflict-based relationships fall into this category. The stigma around sex addiction can prevent people from addressing these behavior patterns.
The first step in change is learning to breathe deeply throughout the day to help cope with stress. Breathing exercises, used in various contexts like childbirth, help relax the central nervous system and control the heart rate. Practicing deep breathing when anxious can gradually shift our baseline state from anxiety to relaxation.
Writing about our feelings and experiences is another crucial step. It creates a dialogue with ourselves and helps us process our thoughts and actions. Writing about our family history, personal history, and current addictions can provide insights and promote self-awareness.
Finding a therapist on a sliding scale based on income can be beneficial. Most partners in a relationship affected by sex addiction also have their own issues to address. Breathing exercises and therapy can help navigate the detoxification period from negative behavior patterns.
Ultimately, overcoming addiction involves a willingness to change, self-awareness, and consistent practice of relaxation techniques. The journey to self-improvement is ongoing, but with the right tools and mindset, it is achievable.
My sex addiction led me to be attracted to a certain type of woman. Let’s just say I liked to play with ‘loaded guns,’ and it wasn't too long before I would shoot myself in the foot with them. Each of my four primary relationships over a 20-year period would plunge us both into our own deep-rooted anxieties, pain, and suffering. The addiction pattern was specific. Before each relationship, there was an intense loneliness and self-obsession with that discomfort. I had a total lack of awareness as to what to do and how to work on that. I was not in therapy, was not avidly reading books on the subject matter, and did not have a breathing practice to relax. Next, I would meet a person, and the feelings of intense attraction would be euphoric. My chemistry would change.
Fantasy was a major part of the addiction cycle I would fall into. The fantasy was my thought process that somehow, if I had that special someone, my life would be perfect. That the union between me and the other person would make me feel alright. In reality, I was looking to the relationship and the other person for relief from my lifelong feeling of ‘dis-ease,’ a feeling that no external substance or person can fix.
I did not have a breathing regimen to create lasting chemical changes in my physiology, I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t in therapy, and I had no means by which to redirect my mind away from negative thinking. My only way to redirect my mind was through uncontrollable obsessions of one type or another.
The obsession may have been on my physical image and my perceived flaws, money, work, creativity, exercise, spending, bragging, fantasy, danger, adrenaline, coffee, refined sugar, busy, busy, busy.
Inside the relationships, there was turmoil and anxiety coming from both channels—myself and the other person. We were both in the same place with our anxieties, and that is how we attracted each other, through our neurosis, anxiety, fantasies, combined with some positive things as well. Love is a positive goal. I sense that ultimately the addiction to sex for me was a deeper desire to find love and gentle happiness in the embrace of my lover. This likely amplified due to my lack of a loving embrace from my mother during the formative years of my life. When I look back at my efforts to find love, they failed because they were unconscious. We were in a dream-like state trying to make the surface world function, while internally, I was always imploding from the undefined feelings of anxiety.
A normal, healthy defense mechanism is designed to alert thinking creatures to danger of any kind, both physical and mental. We encounter more mental dangers throughout our lives than physical ones because we are intelligent, self-aware creatures with free will. We think about things, and events that occur affect our emotions. The anxieties we experience are real when we are young. Something happens in our youth to create anxiety, both real and overproduced by perceptions of danger, both real and imagined.
I was a scared child. I was anxious my entire childhood, and I had no clue what was driving my discomfort. It goes without saying that the anxious feeling would follow me into my ideas about a mate, my wild courtships, the dangerous emotional experiences, the lack of safety, the conflict, the hurt, etc.
Sex addiction for me was nothing more than the pursuit of safety, misguided and transferred into sexuality and intimate emotional experiences. If I could not achieve love and intimacy, I could achieve intense sexual experiences. Sex was a way to relate and find love.
I realize that we all transfer anxious energy into our daily activities, starting with our negativity, our ideas about money, how and why we exercise or not at all. We bring our anxiety into our diet, our politics, our breathing patterns, how we treat others, how we experience others, and of course, how we approach romance and sex.
Online dating was not the giant thing it’s become today, but if we study the dynamics of social media dating and hookups, it generates tremendous anxiety and addictive behaviors. We move from our earnest human desires to find a special person to simply hooking up for one time with a stranger.
What is in that transaction? Touch, eye contact, validation? When we connect on a physical level alone, how is that enough? In the modern anxious world, I became transactional. I was conditioned like this because I live in a consumer-based society where we buy everything. When we’re hungry, we go to the supermarket and buy food. Everything is for sale. And my relationships were also based on simple currency. Physical attraction was the currency, adrenaline is a currency, and sexuality is a currency. It is a currency to pay for sating the deep-rooted desire to make an emotional connection with someone. Emotional connections require investment, self-development, and work to find someone appropriate. And it’s really difficult to find that, so we just make it really simple. We go after the physical experience, taking out all the difficult stuff that is required to form a more meaningful relationship. And to me, that is what sex addiction is about.
Now I think about masturbation differently than I do about sex with a partner, obviously because one involves being alone and the other involves being with someone. Even though masturbation involves sexuality, there’s a different component in it, which just involves intense moments of physicality. I do think that there is a healthy version of masturbation for a free-will-thinking creature like humans. Sexuality is complicated, and masturbation is a way of exploring sexual components. With masturbation, we can learn what we like. I even believe that healthy fantasy is a way of projecting into the world what it is that we like.
And I am not judging your fantasies. I’m just telling you my own. If I fantasize about sex with anonymous partners in inappropriate places doing wild things rather than fantasizing about finding a special someone to connect with and develop a deep feeling of trust and understanding—someone who understands me, someone who I understand, someone who I share things with other than physicality—then the fantasies that are around genital sex are really just empty. They’re like a shot of crack. When I masturbate out of frustration, it’s really masturbation to relieve anxiety temporarily. It’s really just a momentary distraction.
When I was in my early years of recovery around these concepts, I had about 15 years of sobriety. For a decade, I listened to people talk about their exploits and sex addiction, and I was blown away by how far progressed people's addictions could get. I met people who were compulsively paying prostitutes for sex and people who were always out and about, cruising for someone to have a fleeting encounter with. I discovered that that type of behavior was not part of my self-help and certainly was not leading me somewhere positive. In fact, that type of behavior just leads to more and more behavior like that and more and more anxiety.
My sex addiction transferred more into relationship problems and drama. It wasn’t so much that I was addicted to sex itself; I was addicted to solving the problems. You might say that I was self-obsessed. I was in a neurotic state where I was self-critical, had negative self-talk, and my thought patterns revolved around the things that I wasn’t getting in my relationship and the pain that that caused me. I didn’t realize how much of that I was causing first and foremost with my mindset, not correcting my own anxieties, and then with the mates that I would select. I had a choice with who I would sleep with, obviously, and so all along, I was choosing people who could not live anxiety-free.
I think it’s rather ineffective to think of sex addiction as some isolated, strange behavior. If you look closely at any person behaving in an addictive pattern, you'll see that they don’t find the relief they really need on a deeper level, which requires total relaxation of mind and a deep exploration of our thinking, followed by positive behavior patterns. If we don’t find the truth about our addictions being related to early childhood trauma and anxiety, it doesn’t make a difference if it’s sex in August, food in September, followed by travel, spending, exercise, working hard, or just doing something to distract. We will use anything that makes us feel good in an addictive way. The addictive component is that we will use that thing in a way that leads to negative outcomes. The addictive component is that we are fast asleep in a subconscious dream, living out subconscious patterns, and we are not in the present moment. In this frame of mind, we aren’t really free-will thinkers at all; we are being controlled by the subconscious mind.
In the modern world, there are just an infinite number of things we can become addicted to. It’s so common in our society that it’s just normalized. We’re addicted to our phones, substances from sugar to coffee to unhealthy foods, and even worry. We can become addicted to almost anything we do and almost anything we think. The big breakthrough is first the recognition of the anxiety state. The first thing we need to do is understand the nature of anxiety itself. We have to come to understand that anxiety is a natural mechanism that alerts us to danger and prepares us to take action.
So there’s a certain degree of anxiety that is the primer for deeper and deeper feelings of anxiety if we cannot find solutions. Finding solutions to things that make us anxious when we’re two years old is impossible. We are 100% reliant on our caretakers to provide us with relief. If we are habitually neglected, if there is anxiety in our childhood environment, if our caretakers are distracted by their anxieties and are not present, if we don’t have a healthy amount of contact that includes learning, touch, affection, correction, and just simple attention—the undivided attention that we need in order to learn how to pay undivided attention to things—we will step from our childhood with the remnants of that childhood anxiety, which could amplify as we get older. We become more aware of our surroundings and place our anxieties on bigger and bigger things.
Anxiety is not selective. It doesn’t just skip the rich people, it doesn’t skip people who are beautiful, it doesn’t skip people who are great athletes, it doesn’t skip the creative, and it doesn’t target the poor or the less fortunate. Everyone feels it. Everyone is struggling. It is part of the nature of our existence. So, we have to look for the end of chronic suffering. We have to find a way to mitigate anxiety without attaching ourselves to self-destructive behavior patterns.
We can spend a lot of time thinking about sex addiction, but what is the solution to that? What are our romantic relationships supposed to look like? How do we think about masturbation and sex in a healthy way? The bigger question is how do we relax the mind first without using anything other than the breath, the one thing that has absolutely no negative consequence? How do we get ourselves into the habitual pattern of taking slow, deep, mindful breaths?
I realize now that my conflicts within relationships were already conflicts within my character and the essence of my frame of reference.
How could I be happy in a relationship if I was not relaxed or happy in my own head to some degree? I do believe that we are meant to find that special someone by design. Evolution wants us to mate, so it designed us to feel some pressure to go outside and socialize.
When we do fall in love, there is a sense of fulfillment and a needed set of attachments that can soothe our primal drives. However, if we were anxious before we met our partner, it would only be a matter of time before the discomfort reappears.
Back to sex addiction. The mindset behind sex addiction is that sex is just a feeling we experience in the genitals—it’s a touch on a private part, it’s a kiss. It is passion, it is animalistic, it is primal, meaning it’s part of what we are here to do. We are driven by instinct and programmed by society to have a sex life of some kind. The addictive part for me was when I took for granted the other important things I needed to have present in mind with sex. I want love and affection, and I want my partner's validation that I am a great lover for her. These things are secondary to the idea of sharing and forming a union in love.
Recognizing the patterns of addiction is crucial for recovery. Addiction, whether to sex or other behaviors, stems from chronic anxiety and a lack of effective relaxation techniques. For me, understanding the nature of anxiety and developing self-awareness were key steps in breaking free from addictive patterns. Daily proper deep breathing practices designed to help me relax and observe my mind are the fundamental first step to improve any negative feelings, including anxiety and fear. Consistent practice of these techniques, along with writing and therapy, can gradually shift our baseline state from anxiety to relaxation, leading to healthier relationships and overall well-being.