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I think I get the difference for me, now. And all these statements are how I see this for myself. I don’t claim to know the psychological texts and references for or against this view.
In the beginning I did go to several sites and ebooks about how to handle things if your husband had an affair. How to cope, how to heal, what to do about the relationship, etc. I read them and they just feel flat. They were about relationships, between two people. What they offered, what they failed to provide. How they could be improved and strengthened.
Now I get it. What is most revolting to me, what the “heal and forgive and restore” don’t address, is the objectification of the sexual addict/compulsive. It is not selective. They objectify the porn stars, the whores, the madames and doms, the men (when they get to that) and their wives. Everyone is a tool. Period. To accomplish their required end result. And it is by definition a very short lived result and has to therefore be repeated.
In other addictions, it seems to me, other people are still other people. Some are manipulated, some are avoided, but they are still recognized as people. In comparison to other addictions – booze, pills, food, exercise – you do NOT USE OTHER PEOPLE as tools for the high, as in sexual “addiction”.
People are disposable for the SA. And we know we are and that is not a thing you can address in 12 step which is basically behavorial modification program. That everyone except YOU is a tool for your personal use is a God complex in a very warped way. They may not want to be God and they may suck at it, but that’s where they are in their own personal reality.
That’s why I could never approach this as a relational issue for couples counseling. How can you treat a relationship where one person is God and everyone else is tool? That’s not possible. In order to address his place in a relationship, the SA has to admit the personhood of others, and he can’t even conceptualize his own. And for him to be able to do that, he has to realize that he has placed everyone and everything at the feet of his compulsion. But he won’t recognize this because he will say it was the fault of something external. God who does not accept sovereignty, only power and entitlement.
I see how far beneath them the SAs have placed every woman on this site, and all the women they are using that is the reason every woman is here, and it is unfathomable to me that anyone could compare that to anything else.
A bottle of booze is a bottle of booze. You drink it, the result does not affect the bottle of booze. You use a whore, and there are ripples across the universe for all of us. And you have equated your wife to a whore, because she is no longer with you as your beloved and faithful wife. You have squandered what you vowed to her, your faithfulness, the ONLY thing you have to give your wife that no other man can. Her place in your life was stolen, you paid for the chance to give away the faithfulness which was your currency and bond, and so now you are BUYING her with money, a home, provision, but have refused her the agreed transaction of faithfulness – you don’t love her and her place in the marriage bed has now been rendered equal to a whore in your service. Whether she knows about this devaulation of the entire marriage does not negate it’s occurance and insidious deterioriation begins. When she learns, there is no cure for the damage that ensues, she will never fully recover from the blow. This ‘abuse/addiction’ crumbles everyone and everything in it’s path. It is NOT the same. Other addictions do NOT destory and devalue other human beings to this degree.
Just as an example, the difference could be determined in a way widely recognized fundamentally in the Ten Commandments. It doesn’t say “Thou shalt not drink alcohol”, or “Thou shalt not gamble”. Those things are addressed elsewhere. Because they are secondary in importance. This sexual abuse/addiction/compulsion is a foundationally destructive behavior that is not in any way equaled by the admittedly crushing damage from other addictions.
I don’t need to keep going, I am making myself sick here. But I get the difference, for me.
Great post Lynn.
It all boils down to this:
There are chemical addictions and there are behavioral addictions. (Yes, I know there are some chemicals involved in behavioral addictions, but that is too complex of an issue to discuss here, and is not really relevant).
Both build up a tolerance.
With chemical addictions the addict needs more.
With behavioral addictions the addict needs different.
Then you have all the rest of their distorted traits and symptoms and trying to understand them is just crazy making. ~ JoAnn
I have never believed sex is an addiction in the true sense of the word and I never will. I believe it is a symptom and a coping mechanism that is used to cover other , more serious, problems.
I know they all claim to feel shamed and guilty afterwards and they try to stop..blah blah blah …while that may be true, look at it from the perspective of me having an affair. I would know it was wrong. I would be giddy and remorseful at the same time. But, I could choose whether to keep doing it or not. They can make the same choice.
Great post Lynn, I agree 100%.
What I hear Lynn saying is that whether it is an addiction or compulsion or whatever, it is still different from others because of the way they use people as their drug. In some ways, that makes the SA more like a sociopath in my mind.
In other addictions, the addict might manipulate people to get what he wants- money to pay for the addiction, for example. But people (and the dehumanization of them) aren’t actually part of the addiction.
I would say that based on the recovering alcoholics I know, there is definitely a difference with how they relate to people. They don’t blame others for their addiction, they allow others to heal at their own pace, they have a respect for others that I don’t see in my experience with SA.
Lynn makes a good point that there is something fundamentally different between addictions to things like alcohol and gambling and addiction to something that is supposed to be about intimacy and our primary attachment in our adult lives, I think.
Something to think about.
They can’t actually form the attachement, so they have to do what in their minds is the next best thing, control it. Always have control of the supply of what they consider the proof of their worthiness, either they have sex, or they have the capacity to make people have sex with them, either through power, money, or force.
That’s what I’m seeing.
Yes, it is very different. That’s why it’s not an ‘addiction’ in itself, but a symptom of the underlying disorder. And, it’s that underlying disorder that makes them what they are.
Disordered and mentally ill.
I think we all get that.
Why don’t the so called ‘professional’ counselors and SA gurus get it?
We all know the answer to that too.
MONEY! ~ JoAnn
JoAnn,
Do you plan to change the name of our sister site, ‘Married to a Sex Addict’? Since it’s not an addiction.Lynn,
Interesting…I looked up attachment disorders which usually is used in reference to children (my brother- adopted- had this). It’s always dicey using the internet to “diagnose” anything, but I definitely see what I would consider consistencies between my SA’s behavior and signs of attachment disorder. You may be on to something, Lynn.“Indiscriminate and excessive attempts to receive comfort and affection from any available adult, even relative strangers
Extreme reluctance to initiate or accept comfort and affection, even from familiar adults, especially when distressed. “
“absence of a discriminated, preferred adult,
lack of comfort seeking for distress,
failure to respond to comfort when offered,
lack of social and emotional reciprocity, and
emotion regulation difficulties.”So aren’t personality disorders thought to be about wounds during childhood, usually from the primary care giver? I can’t remember and you all know way more than I do. Would that also cause attachment problems?
I did a lot of attachment disorder studies when I was in nursing and massage school. It fits the description completely. But that isn’t a cash cow, so, who’s gonna feed it?
Lynn i really love your post. very insightful and i agree.
i spent some time with my cousin this wknd. He’s a recovered alcholic, sober 9 years. his brother is also an addict. his brother has been in and out of rehab/and prison most of his life. he describes his brother as “having no evil in him”. a guy who struggles with chemical dependency for most of his adult life. yes, he has lied to get money to support his addiction, but this was a very human person. a troubled person.
there are times i see exsah as a troubled human. and others, as a cold calculating sociopath, capable of God knows what. scares the crap out of me.
plus, i think the putting the wife on such a lower scale than themselves, is typical abuser mentality. male privelage. and fundamental disrespect. it is a form of domestic violence. imo
If it walks like a sociopath, talks like a sociopath and acts like a socioapath…its probably a sociopath or one of it’s batshit crazy counterparts.
Great post LynnI think Dr. Minwalla does see it as an addiction – in the sense that they are addicted.
Many CSATs do also view sex addiction as an attachment disorder, or at least do consider attachment theory in treatment. There are a few papers on it in the Journal of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity – which Patrick Carnes is co-editor.
My SA definitely has a dismissive attachment style – describes him exactly. Of course, many CSAT’s will also view all us “co” partners as having attachment disorders too!
I’m just going to copy/paste a section here –
“Affective Neuroscience and the Treatment of Sexual Addiction” Alexandra Katehakis, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, Vol. 16, Iss. 1, 2009
Main and Solomon: the secure attachment style, the anxious-avoidant, the anxious-ambivalent, and the anxious-disorganized (Main & Solomon, 1990).
Certainly, the inborn capacity for attachment receives its fundamental shaping through each infant’s early experiences. Bowlby (1998) had called these patterns the “internal working model of attachment” to underscore the experiential conditionality of the attachment system. Siegel (1999) notes evidence of the plasticity and complexity of attachment pattern development and the growing brains that accommodate it: He finds that children may have distinct attachment strategies with different caregivers, and thus each distinct “interpersonal relationship directly shapes the neurobiological state of the infant’s brain within interactions with each caregiver” yielding, for example, an avoidant attachment to a parent but a more secure one with a grandparent (p. 77). Over time, both these patterns will shape the child’s brain. Siegel further points out that “the Strange Situation classifications at one year of age are associated with numerous findings as children grow into adolescence, such as emotional maturity, peer relationships, and academic performance” (p. 73), and suggests that they may be used to predict adult attachment styles. Tarullo and Gunnar (2006) demonstrate that disorganized toddlers retain heightened cortisol levels after the “Strange Situation” protocol while securely attached children do not.
Yet even though early attachment patterns have a monumental impact on an individual’s functioning, later experiences continue to influence his internal working model (or models) of attachment. Understanding these internal categories, and their continued malleability, directs sexual addiction therapists to the most effective interventions they can use to change these patients’ insecure attachment patterns through a highly attuned therapeutic relationship. To distinguish adult attachment styles from their childhood manifestations, we may use the Adult Attachment Inventory’s denotation of the infant’s secure pattern as the adult “secure/autonomous”; the infant’s avoidant style as the adult “dismissing”; the infant’s resistant pattern as the adult “preoccupied”; and the infant’s disorganized/disoriented style as the adult “unresolved/disorganized” (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996).
CLINICAL PRESENTATION OF ATTACHMENT STYLES IN SEXUAL ADDICTS AND THEIR PARTNERS
The current author’s clinical experience accords with impressions of numerous practitioners working with sexual addicts and their partners (Creeden, 2004; Seedall & Butler, 2008; Zapf, Greiner, & Carroll, 2008). The insights of affective neuroscience greatly elucidate the powerful physiological and psychodynamic mechanisms contributing to this population’s strikingly consistent presentations.
Dismissing Attachment Style
Patients with a dismissing attachment style often lack awareness of their emotional states. Usually from emotionally distant or rejecting families, such individuals most likely have developed prefrontal cortical pathways that over-regulate the limbic brain input, restricting both affect and activity. In addition, these patients are deficient in insight, which travels affect-mediated neuronal pathways of the right hemisphere to link previously unrelated ideas and to allow self-monitoring.
As a result, such patients generally provide only brief, perfunctory descriptions of their activities and feelings, seem emotionally cold, lack compassion for others and for themselves, and minimize the importance of attachment-related experiences such as their primary romantic relationship and their relationship with the therapist or group members. They often do not remember much of their childhoods or report them as “fine.” They can present with blunt or flattened affect, and can be rigid in their responses to others or their social environment. Dismissing personalities seek external sources of regulation—whether food, gambling, love or sex—because using these produces a dopaminergic arousal that temporarily obscures the chronic emotional numbness they learned early, and all too well, as a survival skill.
Along with discounting their own feelings, these classic sexual addicts studiously protect themselves from the demands of genuine human connection. They are accustomed to doing everything in isolation, prizing their hyper-individuality and rejecting any need for connection, love and intimacy.
They become overwhelmed when relationships—personal or therapeutic— require intimacy, and avoid closeness by acting out sexually, disappearing emotionally in therapy, and resisting 12-Step group meetings. Clinicians may find it difficult to empathize with these patients, whose primary styles of relating include passive-aggressive behaviors: As Cohen and Shaver (2004) note, “emotional negativity and withdrawal motivation have been connected in psychophysiological studies with the right frontal lobe of the brain” (p. 799). They find also that avoidant individuals show “a right hemisphere ad- vantage for processing negative emotion and attachment-related words” (p. 807). These habits of ignoring both the self and others allow them to evade the emotional threats of inner awareness and of social connections.
Preoccupied Attachment Style
Ambivalently attached individuals are similarly incoherent reporters about themselves, but demonstrate more explicitly the anxiety, anger and fear marking their personalities. In contrast to dismissing patients, individuals displaying a preoccupied manner of attachment have developed cortical pathways that generally under-regulate both affect and actions, and this under-regulation allows their verbal and behavioral responses to bypass the controlling neocortex and short-circuit any judgment about what they say and do. Typically, their caregivers were unpredictable, leaving them feeling constantly out of control, tense, and at the mercy of their own immediate impulses. Again unlike the laconic dismissing patient, the preoccupied individual may overwhelm the therapist with emotional material. The speaker remains caught up in past attachment experiences, and is irrelevantly verbose, especially when recounting childhood material. He maintains connection through negative affect, which may present as complaints, criticism, and rage. These individuals have very little capacity for self-soothing or becoming vulnerable with others, but tend to stay in relationships via their anger.
Unresolved/Disorganized Attachment Style
Individuals whose attachment style is unresolved/disorganized may appear both avoidant and ambivalent at once, and may present the bi-phasic fears of engulfment and abandonment characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder. Because these patients often have suffered childhood abuse wherein the attachment figure from whom they sought comfort was also a threat, as Main and Hesse (1990) believe, they have been trapped within a “paradoxical injunction;” try as he might, the child could never achieve an organized, regulated state by way of the caregiver. Patients with such a history may exhibit contradictory coping mechanisms including negative attention-getting, or shifting from prolonged silence into an endless, unreasoned monologue.
Left at its worst, this style of attachment presents as sociopathy. Only the resolution of this early childhood trauma can allow these individuals to gain a congruent sense of self and healthy affective regulation.The finding that “sexually addicted men are more likely to relate with insecure attachment styles. . . . [and that] treatment for male sexual addicts should address both addiction and relationship insecurity” (Zapf et al., 2008, p. 158) suggests the therapeutic centrality of developing a secure attachment between patient and therapist. Indeed, this “earned secure attachment” is one of the most powerful forces helping patients learn to regulate their nervous systems (Ginot, 2007). The factors that, over time, reveal neurally encoded attachment patterns, alter the brain, retrain the ANS, and help create a secure attachment emerge within the intersubjective field of the therapeutic dyad: limbic resonance, attunement, and play. In addition to a secure attachment with a clinician who has resolved his or her own conflicts, connection with other caring people in a 12-Step program, group therapy, or a healthy love relationship helps repair deficient attachment patterns.
Still chewing on this, Lynn.
My brother isn’t nearly as manipulative as my dad or STBX. It’s like he isn’t really aware that people can be manipulated. He just states what he wants and expects people will respond. He might get mad if they don’t and overreact. But no manipulation.
He’s also a loner. He doesn’t form attachments and doesn’t seem to mind? I don’t know about sexual behavior. He had a lot of odd stuff that went on when we were kids- I don’t know if that was because of his attachment issues, the rampant porn at dads, or both. He used to steal underwear from the women that my dad had around and kept them in a bag in his closet. He compulsively masturbated even in front of people in our house (much to my great embarrassment). But I never knew him to have a girl (or boy) friend. But as an adult,he does not keep in contact with anyone in the family, so I don’t know much about what he is like now.
I don’t know how much is typical of attachment disorder and how much is personality.
But he doesn’t seem to need any kind of attachment whereas my STBX and my dad maybe substituted sexual relationships for primary attachments?
The whole attachment disorder connection makes a lot of sense to me. My SAH was adopted (by a very loving family) and this has given him an attachment issue (which he’s kind of aware of). He struggled to initiate sex within our marriage in real life because of a fear of rejection (though his online fantasy persona seemed to do ok!). He is passive/aggressive (which we’ve discussed), lies compulsively and struggles with intimacy.
He’s a loner who does not seem to be able to make connections with people, even when they have shared interests. Over the years, I have tried to help him with this (as has his mum and sister). It was kind of exhausting as he would never really pick up the ball and run with it.
It’s as though being married and having a family unit to hide in meant he could shut out the outside world and indulge his need to secure his dopamine high through porn, escalating to interactive online sex chats (complete with videos and pics of his bits!!). And beyond? Who knows!
Is it an addiction? I’m no expert, but I don’t think it’s an addiction. I think it’s his (very twisted) way of being. Where does that leave me? Kicking myself for thinking I could change him through love and support. Realising that it will take years of therapy for him to become anything like a functioning human being.
Great info.! Thanks Lynn and Victoria.
I think that most SA’s have attachment issues (due to incomplete bonding, childhood trauma, etc) that leads to a PD (personality disorder) that leads to their SA activities of choice. Once they get into their SA activities – then an addiction can form. (with brain chemistry).
Alcoholism and drug addiction are similar….it’s a self-soothing mechanism that turns into an addiction (via brain chemistry)….with PDs being optional.
PD’s seem to be much more common in the SA world.
And there seems to be much more control issues and domestic abuse in the SA world (probably since it involves people vs. an inanimate object).So – as I see it, the PDs are what differentiate the alcohol/drug addicts from the SA’s.
Joann – interesting point about how substance addicts want MORE and SA’s want DIFFERENT. One thing I do know is that it’s very common for addicts to want more and different stimulation to their pleasure center – many do escalate to gambling, sex, drugs, etc. over time.
BTW – speaking of addicts, my brother keeps hanging on. His pancreas is still inflamed/infected – after 3 months in a regional PA hospital they transferred him to Jefferson in Phila. He keeps nearly dying – they transfer him to ICU and intubate him. That’s where he is now. I’m just praying that he goes to a better place (not a hospital) soon. His wife and grown children refuse to visit him. Only my 88 year old mother makes the 2 hour trip to see him. Very sad.
Deb
Deb,
How old is your brother and what was his addiction? If you don’t mind answering. Do you see him?
Love, NapI noticed that someone said that she believes Dr. Minwalla sees it as an addiction. From my own experience at ISH and talking with Dr. Minwalla, I know he is well aware of the attachment disorders of sex addicts.
Thanks for the info, Victoria.
I definitely see a lot of dismissive about his childhood and family of origin stuff. Of course, though, he can go on and on about how terrible I am.
Still I see differences between my bro’s attachment disorder and SA, so that’s not the whole story as far as my understanding.
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