A “healthy” expression of love involves safety, trust, holding the other as dear and precious as well as maintaining a balanced sense of give and take in relation to a valued other.  Love involves the experience of truly knowing and holding the other spiritually, emotionally and physically.  Love deepens over time as a couple grows to understand one another from the “inside out”.  The reciprocity of love involves holding a sense of loving oneself as well as the other.  Love is expressed healthily through the process of holding, accepting and valuing  oneself.

Those suffering in sexual addiction and compulsivity  have a deep deficit of self-regard and self-love.  Sex Addicts often experience extreme self-hatred, root level shame  and difficulty experiencing and expressing love toward themselves as well as others.  Sex Addicts report an absence  of caring connection in their lives and fear, anxiety and feelings of avoidance with regard to the important people in their lives.  They are often repulsed by their own thoughts, urges and actions.  They are terrified that their shameful behavior will be discovered and they will be exposed for the “sick” person they regard themselves to be.

It is often when a sex addict feels the deepest shame and self-hatred that the thoughts become obsessions and the urge to act on the obsessions become compulsive.  Sex addicts are deeply lost in their sexually acting out behavior at these times.  The shame digs a deeper hole of hopelessness, embarrassment and self-loathing.  These feelings drive the sex addict to act out to relieve the pain and “check out”.

Sex addicts overwhelmingly report feeling emotionallydisconnected from their acting out partners and their behavior.  They report the excitement is in the thinking about the behavior because of the “high” they experience at the thought of acting out.  Sex addicts report feeling most isolated and alone  and disconnected from humanity when they act out.

Acting out puts the sex addict at risk of contracting life-threatening diseases; subjects them to the embarrassment of discovery of their “sick” behaviors; they loose time, money, status, jobs, custody of their children, and self-respect as a result of their acting out.

Sex addicts do not feel an increase in self-confidence, a positive reflection of self  from their acting out behavior.  They do not feel loved or loving.  Sexual acting out is informed by anger, self-loathing, emptiness, an unsteady sense of self, a growing inability to bond  with loving others in a meaningful way, shame, guilt and a whole array of painful feelings.  This is behavior is not an expression of love. 

Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., the preeminent expert in sexual addiction, the “Father” of sexual addiction identification and treatment, says it best in the title of his second book on sexual addiction. 

 The book is entitled Don’t Call It Love.

With peace

Michele Saffier

This entry was posted on July 28, 2010 at 7:25 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in Michele Saffier's Blog by michelesaffier