Sexual Addiction Cycle

1. The first stage is a Trigger; it could be any kind of emotional discomfort (i.e.. pain, fear, shame, anger, loneliness, early trauma, etc.), it could be unresolved conflict (inner or outer), it could be stress, or it could be the need to connect with another. If the person doesn’t take care of the pain agent in a healthy way, he may then move into:
2. The second stage of this cycle – Disassociation / Altered state. In this stage, you begin to disassociate or move away from yourself and your feelings; a separation begins to take place between your mind and your emotional self.

If a person does nothing to help himself reconnect with himself at this stage, he may move into:

3. The third stage – Bubble / Fantasy State. In this stage you become very disconnected from yourself and your emotions, so that sexual acting out makes sense (usually there is a lot of thinking about how good it will be and an absence of any awareness of any negative consequences). When you’re in the bubble, reality is blocked out.  From this altered state stage, a person generally moves to:
4. The forth stage Pursuing Behavior. In this stage, one begins to take action towards the acting out; perhaps by making a phone call to a sex line, or by getting in a car and taking off to find a prostitute, or looking at porn.
5. The fifth stage Acting Out Behavior – whatever it is for each particular person. Then the final stage of the cycle is:
6. The sixth stage, Guilt, Shame, Remorse for the behavior. Sometimes these feelings can trigger stage 1 again, or sometimes there is a time period where there is no acting out until another pain agent triggers the cycle.

This cycle shows how in stage 1 the pain agents are what trigger the addictive cycle and how its best to work quickly at stage 1. One needs to learn how to deal with these pain agents in healthy ways, because if you do not you may begin to move deeper into the cycle. It is also possible to work in the 2nd stage by learning to recognize when you are disassociating from your self, and then learning how to reconnect with your self and your feelings.

If you can do this, you can stop the cycle from continuing. However, if a person has done nothing or hasn’t been successful to deal with one or more of the pain agents, or has not been able to reconnect with their feelings from the 2nd stage, he will most likely move into the 3rd stage – into the bubble / fantasy state.

In the 3rd stage it’s often too late to get out of the cycle; once you get into the this stage, you are likely to act out. This is why it’s so important to work in the 1st or 2nd stage. This is why it is so important to work with any difficult feelings coming up, or in dealing with stress in healthy ways, or in recognizing that one has a need to connect with another and taking action to get this need met. In addition, one can learn when he is cutting off from himself and learn healthy ways to deal with it.

A lot of people end up getting down on themselves for not being to get out of the bubble / fantasy state stage. This is the stage usually where your thinking about doing something sexually really gets going. The truth is that for many people, once you’ve gotten to this stage it’s very hard to derail the cycle – it will usually happen, particularly for early recovery people. It helps to know this (especially if you are early in recovery) so that you can be easier on yourself when you do act out and so you can learn to work on the stage 1 thing(s) that most commonly trigger the whole acting out cycle.

The main benefit of this cycle is that it clarifies how the pain agents begin the cycle, and that the most effective way to work on a sex addiction is at stage 1. When working at stage 1, you need to first learn what issues you have that are triggering the cycle, which will be one or more of the 4 pain agents. Then you need to begin to understand what these issues are about, and then to begin both resolving them and learning how to deal with them when they come up.

text by Mark Robinett, MFT