Definition

Love addicts are characteristically familiar with desperate hopes and seemingly unending fears. Fearing rejection, pain, unfamiliar experiences, and having little faith in their ability or right to inspire love, they wait, wish, and hope for love, perhaps their least familiar experience.

Addictive sexuality is like most other compulsive behaviors: a potentially destructive twist on a normal life-enhancing activity. Defining sex addiction depends less on the behavior itself than on the person's motivation.

Sex addicts display a lack of the ability to control or postpone sexual feelings and actions. The need for arousal often replaces the need for intimacy. Eventually, thrill seeking becomes more important than family, career, even personal health and safety.

As sexual preoccupation increases in terms of energy and time, the sex addict follows a routine or ritual leading to acting out on desires which is then followed by feelings of denial then shame, despair and confusion.

It may be helpful to examine the definition of addiction more closely. Addiction is characterized by the repeated, compulsive seeking or use of a substance or activity despite adverse social, psychologic and/or physical consequences. Addiction is often (but not always) accompanied by physical dependence, a withdrawal syndrome and tolerance. Physical dependence is defined as a physiologic state of adaptation to a substance, the absence of which produces symptoms and signs of withdrawal.

Withdrawal syndrome consists of a predictable group of signs and symptoms resulting from abrupt removal of, or a rapid decrease in the regular dosage of, a psychoactive substance or activity; the syndrome is often characterized by overactivity of the physiologic functions that were suppressed by the drug and/or depression of the functions that were stimulated by the object of addiction.

Tolerance is a state in which a drug or activity produces a diminishing biologic or behavioral response; in other words, higher doses or in the case of sex addicts, riskier behavior is needed to produce the same effect that the user experienced initially.

Symptoms

For love addicts, love:

• Is all consuming and obsessive
• Is inhibited
• Avoids risk or change
• Lacks true intimacy
• Is manipulative, strikes deals
• Is dependent and parasitic
• Demands the loved one's devotion

Sexual addictions usually are revealed in stages:

• Preoccupation: continual fantasies about sexual prospects or situations. This can trigger an episode of sexual "acting-out"
• Ritualization: a preferred sexual activity or situation is often stereotyped and repetitive
• Compulsion: continual engagement in sexual activity despite negative consequences and desire to stop
• Despair: guilt or shame over their inability to control behavior or feel remorse
• Other behavioral problems, particularly chemical dependency and eating disorders