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Are you a Sex/Love Addict???
Sex and Love Addiction
Love addicts go through life with desperate hopes and constant fears. Fearing rejection, pain, unfamiliar experiences, and having little faith in their ability or right to inspire love, they wait and wish for love, perhaps their least familiar real experience.
Addictive sexuality is like most other compulsive behaviors: a 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 lack the ability to control or postpone sexual feelings and actions, with the need for arousal often replacing the need for intimacy. Eventually, thrill seeking becomes more important than family, career, even personal health and safety.
The sex addict follows a routine or ritual leading to acting out on desires, and is then fraught by feelings of denial then shame, despair, and confusion.
Addiction is characterized by the repeated, compulsive seeking or use of a substance or activity despite negative social, psychological and/or physical consequences. It is often (but not always) accompanied by physical dependence, withdrawal syndrome and tolerance.
Withdrawal consists of a predictable group of signs resulting from abrupt removal of, or a rapid decrease in the 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 response. That is to say, 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, which can trigger episodes 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 inability to control behavior or feel remorse
Other behavioral problems, particularly chemical dependency and eating disorders
Causes
In the situation of love addicts, often their own growth and development were thwarted earlier in life. Similarly, many sex addicts report some type of abuse or neglect as children and see themselves as damaged. Their parents are often sex addicts themselves.
Stress also encourages compulsive sexual behavior by feeding the addict's need for withdrawal and fantasy.
Levels of phenylethylamine (PEA)—a chemical in the brain involved in the euphoria that comes with falling in love—rise with feelings of infatuation, boosting euphoria and excitement.
Love and sex addicts, may simply be dependent upon the physical and psychological arousal triggered by PEA and stress-related neurotransmitters.
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Love and accept who your are, not who will or should be.
"Never let anyone keep you contained, and never let anyone keep your voice silent."
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