Sex addiction can take over our entire lives in devastating ways, one of the most painful being our relationships. When we are addicted to love and sex, it can affect our personal relationships in various ways. Having a healthy relationship can feel next to impossible when we are coming from a place of dependence, neediness and attachment. When our relationships are filled with addiction of any kind, they don’t have the solid foundation they need to survive. Relationships with sex addiction as a factor can be destructive and explosive, in drastically unhealthy ways.
Very often we are attracting relationships into our lives based on the energy of our addiction. We enter relationships simply to satisfy physical urges. We don’t choose our partners based on compatibility, mutual interests or love. Sometimes we’re not even physically attracted to our partners. We are so driven by the compulsive need to get our sexual fix, to feel our high again, that sometimes we don’t care who it is we’re sleeping with. We might be so desperate for connection, intimacy and company that we choose partners we might never have chosen if we were in a healthier place. Many of us are painfully afraid of being alone or lonely, and this fear drives us to make unhealthy choices that we later regret.
Sometimes we attract other addicts who are themselves struggling with sex addiction or another kind of addiction. When we’re in relationships with other addicts, we can feed off of each other’s destructive habits and exacerbate them. We can pull each other into relentless cycles of breaking up, making up, ending and restarting the relationship countless times. The toxicity of these kinds of patterns can worsen our addictive urges and make us more likely to use addictive substances or engage in other addictive behaviors to cope. We can also feel heightened compulsiveness with our sexual urges as well, making us even more likely to stay in the toxic situation or find other unhealthy outlets for our energy. Any time we’re in destructive patterns such as these, we can experience worsened depression and anxiety.
With addiction in general, but sex addiction in particular, we can find ourselves engaging in dangerous behaviors, having casual sex with multiple partners we don’t know well, staying in abusive relationships, risking our health and wellness to get our fix. Sex addiction can put us at higher risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections and/or having unwanted pregnancies. We may put ourselves in grave danger staying with partners who are abusive, because we feel we love them, when sometimes we’ve simply become addicted to them and to what they represent for us – someone who can fill our needs, make us feel less lonely or give us the attention we crave. Coming to an understanding about sex addiction involves looking at the ways in which it functions in our relationships.
The treatment programs at Enlightened Recovery work with co-occurring conditions, including sex addiction. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.