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Sexual Addiction

it's 23 Sep, 2024 11:59 pm

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Sexual Addiction

Background

This information is about the specific health area mentioned above. It comprises a combination of textual and video information, on our site and on external sites. We will be adding new specific health areas and further information continually.

The idea is for you to understand more about the health area you are addressing before you get too far building your action plan.

General Information

Compulsive sexual behaviour

There are no Government statistics because sex addiction is not classified as a medical issue but professionals are seeking classification as increasing numbers of people seek out advice. It is estimated that up to 12% of the population could have a secret sexual addiction. Sex addiction is characterised by excessive urges to have sex or engage in other sex-related behaviours, even when such actions may jeopardise your physical health, emotional wellbeing or social standing.

Of course, sexual desires and urges are a normal and healthy part of life. But in the case of sex addiction, these urges become overwhelming and the resultant decisions and actions can be extremely destructive.

Background Information

There is information available which will help you formulate your action plan – both on our site and on external sites.

On our site

SexDrive

SexDrive looks at all aspects of sexuality, including relationships and gender as well as sexual congress and addiction.

Compulsive sexual behaviour

We have relevant information on SexDrive

Communication

Communication is the key to resolving sexual addiction.

Most marriage guidance blame relationship breakdown to communication. It cannot be just the way people talk to each other but what types of character we are. See the previous points on personality and character. On top of these issues are their other issues that we can add to the mix such as infidelity and lying. No matter how hard a person tries to forgive and forget the sometimes can forgive but rarely they forget. If you are communicating with a partner with history there can be many prejudices and emotions under the surface that distort what another person says.

We have relevant information on Communication

On external site(s)

TheMindfulHabit provide Porn and Sex Addiction Group Coaching. Their site has some useful information including the true life story of the founder and former addict Craig Perra. His intro is shown below.

“My insane sexual addiction almost killed me 10 years ago when I felt so ashamed I tried to kill myself. I saved my life, family, and found my purpose.

For the past eight years, I’ve been leading men to take back control over their powerful sexual energy and harness it to create great lives … and to save their families. Clients have called the tools learned in my group coaching program, “revolutionary,” “awesome,” and “life-changing.”

I’m not for everyone, but if you: 1. are willing to do some work; and 2. connect with my approach my team and I will move you quickly to healthy sexuality and a great life. We guarantee results with a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee. Lives and families are at stake and we think we should be compensated only if we deliver results.

Where you are at right now … I’ve been there. Since then, I have coached over 1,000 men in 25+ countries all over world. Millions saw my wife and I on Katie Couric and me as an expert on The Steve Harvey Show. Over 1 million people have watched my videos on YouTube and over 500,000 people have learned from my podcast Sex Afflictions & Porn Addictions. ”

Are you ready to take massive action?

Psychology Today have an interview with cognitive psychologist Thaddeus Birchard. A summary is shown below.

“Sex is a normal human need, but for some people, sexual behavior becomes compulsive, and the behavior remains out of control despite feelings of shame and harmful consequences. Experts know that sex addiction is not about sex. Instead, sexual behavior is used as an escape from unpleasant feelings—feelings that can be successfully addressed in psychotherapy.

You are the founder of the Marylebone Centre in London, which focuses on treating people with relationship problems, sexual compulsivity, and mood disorders. You were one of the first to address issues of sexuality in the U.K. Exactly how do you define sexual addiction?

The usual answer is that it is defined by four criteria: out of control, harmful consequences, not being able to stay stopped, and it has a function. As the first three potentially apply to sex in general, I focus on the last criteria: function. It is sex used to relieve painful and intolerable feeling states. These include depression, shame, anxiety, boredom, low self-worth and, sometimes, problems hidden in the structure of the primary relationship.”

Video

Sometimes the owner of a video will not allow the video to be played on external sites. If you see the video is unavailable on the left just click the ‘WATCH NOW’ link on the right and the video will play in a new window.

We Need To Talk About Sex Addiction

This is a TEDx Talk from Paula Hall, and the video summary is shown below.

“Sex addiction affects young and old, rich and poor, male and female. Paula Hall shares what we can do about it, even if we don’t suffer from it ourselves. Paula Hall (UKCP Reg, BACP Acc, COSRT Acc, ATSAC) has been working in the field of Sex Addiction for over 10 years and is author of Understanding & Treating Sex Addiction (Routledge 2013).

Sex Addiction – The Partners Perspective (Routledge 2015). She has also been published in a number of academic journals and within the professional press. Paula was a founder member of ATSAC and served as Chair for three years and is currently on the board of SASH. In addition to working with individuals and couples, she developed the Hall Recovery Course which is available around the UK and also under licence in Denmark and Holland and provides residential programmes for both people with addiction and partners. She has spoken at conferences in the UK, Europe and in the US on behalf of ESSM, UKCP, BACP, ATSAC, UKESAD and The International Sex Addiction Conference.”

Watch Now

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Questionnaire

In order for you to assess what you know about this health area, we suggest using a questionnaire. This might help you understand your situation in this area, or taking it might improve your understanding of the area.

You may be able to take this questionnaire online – either here on our site or on an external site – or download it and complete it on paper – it depends on copyright (and whether we’ve managed to build it on our site!).

The ways you can take a questionnaire:

More than one external site questionnaire, More than one questionnaire on our site

Take questionnaire on external site

You can take this questionnaire on at least one external site.

This short interactive test from The Laurel Centre has been designed as a non-clinical tool to help indicate possible behaviour traits which might be having a negative effect on your life. The test consists of 14 key questions which help to highlight specific indicators of compulsive sexual behaviour or sex or porn addiction. It takes about 5 minutes to complete with no email or logging in required and gives results split into 3 categories. They say:

“It is important to note that this test should not be used in place of professional advice, it is merely a tool to enable you to make the first step in deciding what type of help and support you need. For a full assessment with one of our Associates, please contact us.

Please note that this test is 100% confidential and no personal information will be recorded or stored.”

These questionnaires are online versions of the questionnaire on our site.

Healthy Place have a Sexual Addiction Screening Test for Women which is a 25 question True or False questionnaire – it takes about 5 minutes to complete and doesn’t need an email address or logging in.

There is also a similar test for men

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All areas of health are interlinked

Find your initial focus

You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.

You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.

For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances. Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.

We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.

Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route. You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job). Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?

If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.

Health Areas in Domains

Domains

We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see

Emotional: Anxiety, Compassion Fatigue, Depression, Gambling, Laughter, Narcissistic, Personality Disorder, Sleep, Stress

Environmental: Environmental Issues, Greenness

Financial: Debt, Family Finance, Financial Planning, Financial Wellness

Intellectual: IQ, Personality, Procrastination

Occupational: Jobs for Different Personality Types, Retirement Income, Work Life Balance

Physical: Alcohol, Disabilities, Dizziness, Drugs, Fitness, Food Preferences, General Health, Healthy Ageing, Illness, Nutrition, Sleep Apnea, Smoking

Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction

Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality

Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.

Understand Health

Physical, financial and mental health

One definition of health is:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’

We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.

It gets more complicated…

What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?

The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life. We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.

Health domains

We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.

See which domains you should address

Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.

The 8 are:

Emotional
Environmental
Financial
Intellectual
Occupational
Physical
Social
Spiritual

You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain. You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.

Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.

Locus of Control

We want to help people in all aspects of their health – physical, financial and mental. We also provide detailed explanations of how overall health (or well-being) is measured.
We believe these things are often linked, so we try and address health holistically. We are building templates, questionnaires and exercises to help you identify what’s important to you.
We think people should try and take responsibility for of their own health as much as they can. See below for what that means.

People look at things differently. Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’. People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control

So how do you see things?

Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.

My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.

People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older. However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do. This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.

Internal

More likely to take responsibility for actions
Tend to be less influenced by others

External

Blame outside forces for what happens
Don’t believe they can change their situation themselves

Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life

Do you need to change?

No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.

At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt. We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.

However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.

The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.

This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.

Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.

Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.

Consequently we need to make some changes. The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones. Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.

We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.

It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.

It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.

Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire

At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.

We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.

You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.

So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness). We do this by questionnaire. Which one is determined by the type of person you are:

You understand yourself well and want a quick overview of your health and wellness, and will drill down in any areas needing work
You want to do a more detailed assessment and then focus on areas you’re already aware of
You want to look at the whole situation in more detail across all the health domains.

By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.

You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas. We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.

In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.

We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.

Values, Attitudes and Beliefs

We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.

The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.

The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.”

Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.

Beliefs

These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).

Attitudes

This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).

Values

These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)

The theory

Links to Wikipedia

Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.

Beliefs

Expressions of confidence – can change over time

Attitudes

Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change

Values

Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change

Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation

A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine

Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.

Your Dashboard Tools

Sexual Addiction

it's 23 Sep, 2024 11:59 pm

Add Your Info Details Here

Sexual Addiction

Background

General Information

Background Information

On our site

On external site(s)

Video

We Need To Talk About Sex Addiction

Watch Now

Questionnaire

Take Questionnaire on our site

YDH Questionnaire Selection

Take questionnaire on external site

All areas of health are interlinked

Find your initial focus

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Health Areas in Domains

Domains

Health Areas

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Understand Health

Physical, financial and mental health

What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Health domains

Health Areas

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

See which domains you should address

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Locus of Control

So how do you see things?

Internal

External

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life

Do you need to change?

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

Values, Attitudes and Beliefs

Beliefs

Attitudes

Values

The theory

Beliefs

Attitudes

Values

To close this box and go back click the X at the top or just click outside the box

A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine