Are You Powerless Over Your Sexual Behavior? Sex Addiction Therapy Can Help!!

The first step of the 12 Steps encourages you to admit you are powerless over your own sexual behavior. It’s like there are two sides of your personality: the REAL side of you and the DARK side of you. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide is a good metaphor.

Mr. Hyde can do all sorts of outrageous things almost without Dr. Jekyll knowing about it.

A sex addiction therapist can help you see how much your mind informs your “stinking thinking” messages about sex. Distorted cognitions (thoughts and images) are what underlie your sexual behavior, enabling you to distort reality when it comes to sex and keep the Mr. Hyde part of you alive.

My clients have given me ample examples of times when they’ve been powerless over sex so as to lose touch with what they were really doing, resulting in a feeling of unmanageability. See if you can see yourself in any and all of these examples. These include examples of “vanilla” sex addiction as well as compulsions over other sexual behaviors such as fetishism, sexual masochism, sadomasochism, exhibitionism, and fetishistic crossdressing.

The loss of a job due to inappropriate sexual contact with a customer.
Loss of the business you spent 20 years to build up.
The exhaustion from staying up all night looking at pornography has resulted in pornography addiction and has resulted in job jeopardy.
Being “86ed” from a bar due to having sex with strangers in the bathroom.
Exposing yourself to a woman in a park despite the fact that you’re already on probation for exhibitionism.
Getting put on notice for looking at pornography during work time.
Bringing hookers to your apartment building to have sex with them in the basement while your spouse and child were sleeping in their beds upstairs.
Having colleagues lie for you at work to account for your long absences during the afternoon.
Losing marriages due to multiple affairs with unavailable women.
Crossing professional boundaries by having sex with clients.
Having a 14-year-old daughter exhibit the same promiscuity you’ve indulged in for years.
Having sex with both your therapist and two college professors at the same time.
Dropping out of school due to inability to concentrate from being distracted by intrusive, obsessive sexual fantasies.
Spending money on dominatrixes when you need the money for your daughter’s college tuition.
Staying out all night cruising and sleeping all day despite the fact that the children needed you to take care of them.
Losing whole days in bed with various sexual partners.
Going to work with black and blue marks from your masochistic sexual acting out.
Having a neighbor call the police on you for peeping in the bedroom window.
Being constantly late for work from staying up all night cruising or looking at porn.
Spending another $2,000 on a wardrobe to cross-dress, only to purge it and to spend another $2,000 on a new wardrobe, etc.

Unfortunately, many addicts do not realize that their lives are becoming unmanageable and that hey are powerless over their sexual behaviors until the evidence becomes overwhelming and they hang out the white flag and surrender into the freedom of sexual recovery.