Addicted to Love: Sex, Love & Compulsion
Their stories are the stories of addicts. See if any look familiar.
Ben is a successful attorney. Married with three children, his life looks exemplary and he seems destined for great public achievement. But Ben also leads a secret life, revolving around visits to prostitutes and adult book stores. Lately, he’s taken to cruising the World Wide Web, downloading porn and searching for partners in electronic chat rooms and online hook-up sites.
Susan is a mid-level administrator and a single mother. Every few weeks or months she goes on a sexual binge, dressing provocatively and acting out exhibitionistic fantasies in local bars. She has sex with at least one man each night, and sometimes more.
Charles spends hours each day driving between retail outlets as head of regional sales for a publisher. Between clients, he often stops at shopping malls and supermarkets, fantasizing about sex with women he sees and masturbating. Increasingly, he spends his days cruising, rather than working.
Paul is gay and afraid of AIDS. Still, he spends most evenings and weekends in bars. He can’t remember how many men he’s had sex with in the past year, but guesses somewhere around 100.
And those are just some of the faces — because according to experts, six to 10 percent of the American public experiences real problems with sexual compulsivity or inappropriate sexual expression.
Pleasure and Pain
The personalities and patterns change, but one thing stays the same. For addicts, sex isn’t an expression of love or a pleasurable pastime, but an obsessive force that causes trance-like states of arousal and overpowering urges to act out sexual fantasies.
That’s the way it is for millions of people — but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Loosening the grip of sex addiction is possible, and starts with recognizing it as a problem and identifying the factors that keep it in place.
And if its your problem, it starts where you are now.
What is sexual addiction?
Addictive sexuality is like most other compulsive behaviors, including eating disorders and drug and alcohol abuse: a potentially-destructive twist on a normal life-enhancing activity.
More at; Do It Now Foundation
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