In Part One we learned about a teenager named Charlie whose relationship with porn became his secret life. Now let’s take a look at a few action steps that Charlie might consider to develop a more satisfying and pleasurable sex life.
Continue reading...Sexual Addiction
Sexual Health in the Age of Sex Addiction (Part 1)
Charlie was the oldest of three children raised in a middle-class suburb of Boston by well-meaning, hard-working parents. Because his family lived paycheck to paycheck, Charlie was often left on his own after school before his parents arrived home by 6. He was . . .
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- June 5, 2020
- Porn Sex Education Sexual Addiction
Moving from Sexual Sobriety to Emotional Sobriety
Once you stop your out of control sexual behavior, you’ve come to the starting gate of discovering emotional sobriety. But what does this really mean? It’s when you feel most like yourself. When you begin to feel more comfortable in your skin, more relaxed and more at peace. It’s a reclaiming of your resilient, resourceful, regulated state of well-being.
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- November 23, 2019
- Recovery Sexual Addiction Sobriety
Restoring the Wisdom of the Nervous System: Reducing the Vulnerability to Relapse from Sexual Addiction
Out of control sexual behavior creates an imbalanced nervous system. The anticipation and hunt for sex leaves you dysregulated, as you remain lost in the attempt to numb your pain and escape your feelings. Dysregulation describes the disruption of the nervous system: up-regulation refers to internal states such as panic or rage, and down-regulation refers to disconnection or shutting down.
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- September 17, 2019
- Sexual Addiction
Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder
A few months ago, the World Health Organization recognized and included “compulsive sexual behavior disorder” in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). This is the first time that anything close to “sex addiction” has been validated as a diagnostic code. For many years there has been an effort by sex addiction therapists to include “sexual addiction” as a classification/diagnosis, but to no avail. Sexual addiction was coined by Patrick Carnes in the 1980s, but it’s always been a controversial term accepted by some clinicians and rejected by others.
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- October 24, 2018
- Sexual Addiction
The positive psychology of sex addiction
Traditionally, twelve-step programs describe addiction with borrowed language from the medical model such as disease, illness, and even the word addiction itself. Yet, there’s less shameful and stigmatizing ways to talk about it.
In 1998, Dr. Marty Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania coined the term Positive Psychology, and a like-minded, international community of researchers came out of the woodwork. Not only did they open the door to expanded research in this brand-new field, but they also paved the way toward its application toward addictive and compulsive behaviors.
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- July 24, 2018
- Psychology Sexual Addiction