Possessing a high sex drive is not the same as being addicted to sex.

Rather, being addicted to sex is like any addiction, with The Guardian comparing it to a chronically obese person who can’t stop eating:

They don’t experience hunger and in a similar way the sex addict doesn’t feel sexual desire. What they are in search of is the dopamine hit from a risky or inappropriate sexualised encounter, the self-soothing buzz that will momentarily block out the underlying feelings of self-loathing and anguish.

But those feelings soon return and the sufferer seeks respite in the next sexual encounter.

An example of a person with this kind of addiction is Erica Garza:

She was just 12 when her interest in pornography began, an obsession that soon turned into an addiction. In her book “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction”, she chronicles her journey with the sexual compulsion:

“I started watching mild porn,” she tells me, “but to get that feeling of shame I had to watch harder and harder porn. I had to go to extremes. I had to find something that I thought was shameful and disgusting and that leaked out into the rest of my life.”

Soon enough, Garza was hosting house parties in order to have sex. She used her comfort with porn as a way to get them in. Soon, she moved onto bars, picking up men and having unprotected sex with them.

Not going to lie, sounds like a few of my own self-destructive friends in Cape Town.

But soon Garza realised that filling up her life with such reckless behaviour wasn’t a good thing, and set herself on a road to recovery, reports Daily Mail:

Garza did have serious relationship but her engagement to one man broke down because she became obsessed with the idea he was having an affair.

Another three-year relationship with a man she loved broke down because she cheated on him with a Colombian man she met on holiday and then, instead of trying to repair the damage, she slept with a French waiter instead.

In her book, she described the shame she felt over her addiction as:

“Sickening: letting daylight dissipate and with it all my plans and obligations for the day because I’d rather stay in bed with high definition clips of naughty secretaries, busty nurses, incestuous cheerleaders, drunk frat party girls and sad Thai hookers.”

Eventually, Garza decided to leave her home of Los Angeles and headed for Bali, Indonesia, thinking it would be the place where she could kick her porn habit:

There, she met her husband [below], who is 39 and works as an app designer, the Post reports.

She writes that he started asking her about why she was addicted to porn, which helped her analyze the root causes of her addiction.

She also went to therapy and practiced yoga in an effort to help curb her addiction, she writes.

Now, she says the couple only uses porn “healthily”. I wonder if there’s such things as a “healthy” relationship with other addictive things, like meth.

Anyway, you can buy the eBook here.

[source:theguardian&dailymail]