What Causes Sex Addiction?

You may be reading this feeling like you’ve hit rock bottom. Your sex life is out of control, and you don’t know how it got so bad. You may even have a sex addiction. But what causes sex addiction? How can you go from choosing to have sex to feeling like you can’t stop? 

While we unravel how you may have arrived at this crossroads, it’s important to know that you’re not a horrible person. Sex addiction can happen to anyone. It’s actually likely rooted in something traumatic that happened to you; it wasn’t your choice to become a sex addict. As you understand the causes of sex addiction behind the scenes, you can begin to take steps to heal your mind, body, and spirit. 

Understanding Sex Addiction

When we say sex addiction, what does that actually mean? Sex addiction, also known as hypersexual disorder, is a form of compulsive sexual behavior (which is why you may feel like you can’t quit, even if you tried). When you’re struggling with sex addiction, you have an intense, uncontrollable fixation on sexual behaviors, urges, or fantasies. Your actions, thoughts, and feelings toward sex will likely cause great distress, shame, and frustration. And because sex has become compulsive, your addiction gets in the way of your daily functioning, your relationships, and your work. It can even negatively impact your physical and mental health.

Just because you have sex often doesn’t mean you’re addicted to sex. However, there are some specific symptoms of sex addiction to look out for if you’re concerned, including:

• Having sex with strangers or sex workers
• Escalating, compulsive porn consumption
• Chronic masturbation
• Using sex to feel better or cope with distressing emotions
• Inability to stop your sexual activities despite their negative consequences
• Feeling shame or depressed about your sexual behavior
• Neglecting responsibilities or social activities in favor of sex
• Low self-esteem
• Struggles to maintain intimate, personal relationships
• Risky sexual behaviors like exhibitionism and voyeurism

What Causes Sex Addiction, Exactly?

With that said, what causes sex addiction? In many ways, the short answer is unresolved past trauma. In fact, hypersexuality and trauma can be very much interconnected. But why? It all starts with the nature of trauma itself. When you have unresolved trauma, it means you went through a traumatic event in your past and were never able to fully process its impact on you. Consequently, your body and mind remain in fight-or-flight mode behind the scenes, leaving your stress levels elevated. Because of this trauma, you sought ways to find relief—and this is how sex entered the picture.

In looking at what causes sex addiction, it’s important to understand trauma and its effects on you. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event such as a serious accident, crime, abuse, or a natural disaster. No matter what happened, the event itself caused you to feel emotionally or physically unsafe. Inside your body, this trauma can potentially damage your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is responsible for regulating your body’s involuntary functions, such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. 

There are actually different types of trauma that can become the causes of sex addiction. Trauma can arise from one singular, life-changing event, or it could be the result of smaller experiences and situations that occur repeatedly over a period of time. In fact, trauma from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in your formative years can actually be tied to sex addiction causes as an adult. Trauma experienced as a child can unfortunately hinder your development and instinctual responses, causing you to form unhealthy attachment styles like anxious-avoidant attachment. 

Traumatic Experiences Often Tied to the Causes of Sex Addiction Include: 

• Unmet childhood needs from your caregiver
• Believing you were not good enough for your parents or friends
• Experiencing abandonment or rejection
• The death of a loved one
• Divorce
• Bullying
• Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
• Not being permitted to pursue your desires or interests
• Being threatened with exclusion or alienation

Sex Addiction Causes: Dopamine & Maladaptive Coping

From your body’s damaged ANS to a heightened stress response and unhealthy attachments, trauma leaves enduring collateral damage. Consequently, you may struggle to regulate your negative emotions, as well as trauma’s lingering effects. This may drive you to seek out experiences that make you feel good as a way to self-medicate and cope. 

Because sex naturally releases large amounts of dopamine (your brain’s pleasure chemical) in your body, it becomes an easy target for coping with your struggles. So you begin to use sexual behaviors to cope over and over again; yet your body’s response to dopamine isn’t as strong, so you need to pursue sex more often and in greater intensity to achieve the same feel-good experience. Soon sex becomes a maladaptive coping mechanism for anything troubling you (including your trauma), and you’re engaging in sexual behavior so much that you become chemically dependent on the dopamine it supplies. And that’s how you end up with a sexual addiction. 

Overcome Your Trauma and Hypersexuality at Integrative Life Center

When thinking about what causes sex addiction, you won’t be able to overcome it through behavior modification and self-discipline alone. You need to partner with professional help to address the underlying trauma behind it. At Integrative Life Center in Nashville, TN, our holistic sex addiction treatment program can help you heal the root trauma driving your struggles, as well as wholly recover from your addiction for good. Take our free sex addiction test as a first step or contact our team now to learn more. 

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