Sexual Addiction

Sexual addiction does not feel like a vice. It feels like survival. The urge for the next sexual experience — whether with a person, with pornography, with fantasies — is not primarily desire. It is a pull. A draw in a direction you do not consciously choose, but follow, because the alternative seems unbearable: arriving at yourself.

Medically, sexual addiction is discussed as an impulse control disorder, as a behavioural pattern with addiction-like features — tolerance development, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control. From a psychosomatic perspective, a deeper question arises: what is so difficult about being present in your own life that your system keeps sending you into the numbing of sexual arousal?

Sexual addiction is not a character weakness, but a flight — from an arriving that feels as if it could break you.