A growing area of my practice over the past 10 years has been working with those dealing with compulsive and/or deviant sexual behaviors. I offer both individual and group therapy sessions.
Sex addiction is a psychological disorder in which an individual is unable to control his or her sexual behavior. It involves an unhealthy preoccupation with sex and impulsive behaviors resulting from the thoughts. Ultimately, the sex addict must engage in riskier and riskier behaviors in order to achieve the euphoria they seek.
Sex addiction adversely affects both the individual and their loved ones and manifests in many different behaviors, including:
Compulsive sexual behavior, known as hypersexuality or sex addiction, occurs for a variety of reasons such as a traumatic or early childhood experience, escapism, childhood sexual abuse, a familial history of addiction, poor adult role modeling and even experiences that lack emotional intimacy in nonsexual ways. There is often an underlying psychiatric cause for the behaviors, including bipolar and schizoaffective disorder.
In the early stages of sexual addiction, the person believes that the addiction provides exorbitant pleasure and in this stage, sexual intercourse or masturbation is very frequent.
In the middle stage of sex addiction, the person begins questioning whether their addiction is providing pleasure. This marks the beginning of guilt, regret and repression of sex addiction.
In the end stage, the person comes to the realization that the sexual addiction is more painful than pleasurable but he or she cannot stop the behaviors on their own.
In addition to being a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT), I am one of a select number of therapists to be trained under Dr. Patrick Carnes, the leading expert in the field.
Dr. Carnes, an internationally acclaimed speaker and author on sex addiction, compulsion and treatment, developed the Certified Sex Addiction Therapist program. He also designed the United States’ first in-patient sexual dependency unit at Minnesota’s Golden Valley Health Center, which has since been replicated at treatment facilities across the country.
My practice offers individual and group sex addiction therapy sessions and I lead a men’s sex addiction group Tuesday evenings at my West Palm Beach office.