Sex - addiction

Published on Addictions, Reproductive system.

All forms of addiction represent an escape. It is an escape that started as a quest. What actually happens is that the person literally projects the objective of his search on something he found along the way and decided his quest was over. He is pleased with what he has found. He remains trapped in fear and convenience. Anything can cause addiction: alcohol, drugs, sex, tobacco, gambling, food (bulimia, anorexia), but also, and even to a larger extent, money, power, rules, fame, influence, knowledge, entertainment, isolation, asceticism, cult, tradition, ancestral beliefs, religion…

The addicted person is the one who stops halfway through his quest. For this reason, he feels empty. And because he feels empty, he needs to fill the void with external substances that confer him the illusion of being balanced.

Basically, we could say that in all humanity, we all depend on something. The difference between the sick addicted and the healthy dependent lays in the quality of self-observation, that is, in the awareness of one self, of one’s feelings and path. Dependence is a type of attachment. The non-addict, non-sick consumer is the one who is aware of his attachments.

The practice of sex results from natural impulses, hormonal impulses of the human body. It starts during adolescence, with the adolescent’s hormonal standstill. Sexual energy is the one that gives life. It is sexual energy that confers vitality to human beings. It is sexual energy that ensures the preservation of animals. Sexual energy stimulates our pleasure nervous centres. Learning how to give in to sexual energy is learning how to give in to emotions, is living the emotion (ex-movere – moving out)), in other words, it is allowing the body to come untied.

Most physical problems in our body are due to control and attachment-related tensions, because we refuse to let go. Experiencing emotions is utterly natural and necessary. The extremely regulated society in which we live punishes sexual impulse and teenagers are taught to think that sexual behaviour is not a socially accepted behaviour. However, the fact that sexual behaviour is not considered to be an acceptable behaviour does not obviously stop the hormonal process. On the contrary, it hurries it up.

Any individual who looks for another person through a sexual act is looking for his opposite side inside himself. To punish sexuality is to punish integrity, authenticity, and the honesty of the human being. The person who controls his sexual impulses will surely have problems in several parts of his body. Women who behave just like mothers, and not as women with full rights to having sexual pleasure, tend to severely castigate their female organs.

The person who does not engage in sex due to control and a prohibition is losing vitality, balance and harmony, the same way the person who defines himself through sex and believes that everything in his life must include continuous sexual activity is also losing vitality, balance and harmony.

Both excessive control (which restrains the practice of sex) and behaviour of sexual addiction share the same tension as a background. They are both dependent. The very controlled person depends on religious, family, cultural and ethnic beliefs and, as such, is not authentic. He is addicted. This person is addicted to regulations and merely repeats other people’s ideas. The sexual addicted person depends on sexual pleasure and cannot live without it. He is also addicted, but to sex.

© Copyright by Luís Martins Simões, developed by RUPEAL