If It’s Not “Sex Addiction,” What Is It? And How Do You Treat It?

Do you work with patients involved with infidelity, chronic porn-watching, sex workers, or cybersex?

The sex addiction movement addresses fundamental human (and therefore clinical) issues: lust, desire, guilt, fantasy, decision-making, and the relationship of love and sex. The answers generated by this model, however, have important limitations—and for many people, sex addiction treatment is disastrous, contradicting the best practices of psychotherapy and couples counseling.

We will examine how patients’ seemingly out-of-control sexual behavior may really involve:

• medicating their depression, anxiety or anhedonia
• acting out (unconscious) hostility
• fear of getting too close to a primary partner
• attempting to remain in a low-sex or no-sex relationship
• unresolved conflict with religious values
• an arousal disorder, recurring sexual dysfunction, or disturbing sexual preference

When we realize that almost every patient who regrets their sexual decision-making is not out of control—is not “addicted”—we’re free to use our best psychotherapeutic tools. So how can we best diagnose and successfully treat these patients?

We’ll also look at the new narrative of porn addiction—is there really such a thing? What are better ways to evaluate—and treat—patients who use porn self-destructively? And what do we do with couples when one partner is obsessed with the other’s porn watching?

I’m a big believer in therapy—and I bet you are, too. In this program, you’ll learn how to use our best therapy tools to effectively treat problematic sexual decision-making—without shaming patients who make poor sexual choices.