Sexual addiction is very common. In this article, you can go through a checklist to determine if you are sexually addicted or using sex addictively.
Are you sexually addicted or using sex addictively? Identifying with just one of these symptoms listed below may indicate a sexual addiction or a tendency to use sex addictively.
Obviously, there are many different levels of sexual addiction. Sexual addiction, like all other addictions, comes from the empty wounded part of ourselves.
The ego part of ourselves – our wounded self – learns throughout childhood and adolescence various ways to attempt to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. Many adolescent boys, as they start to masturbate, learn to use some form of sexuality to pacify their fears of rejection. Girls may learn to use their sexuality as a way to get love, as well as to avoid rejection. When a substance or behavior works to fill emptiness, take away loneliness, get attention or avoid pain, it often becomes an addition.
If you identified with any of the above, you might want to consider that you are using sex to avoid personal responsibility for your own feelings. While it may make you feel good for the moment, in the long run it lowers your sense of self-worth. Anything you do to pacify yourself rather than take responsibility for thinking and behaving in ways that enhance your positive sense of self, is self-abusive and self-abandoning. It would be akin to telling a child to watch pornography or masturbate when the child is feeling badly, rather than attend to the child’s real needs. When you use an addiction to pacify your painful feelings rather than attend to them, you are abandoning yourself - your inner child.
Next time you want to act out sexually, perhaps you would be willing to stop for a moment and tune into your feelings. Are you feeling sad, alone, empty, depressed rejected, abandoned, anxious, scared, or angry? Instead of pacifying yourself with sex, you might want to notice what you are telling yourself and how you are treating yourself that is causing you to feel badly and to want to act out. You might want to learn how to bring in a compassionate spiritual Source of love and comfort to fill the emptiness and aloneness. You might want to learn the Inner Bonding process that we teach to begin to heal your addictions.
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