The Dissociative Nature of Sexual Addiction the Role of Traumatic Emotions

The term addiction applies to a morbid form characterized by substance abuse, an object or a behaviour; it defines a dysfunctional mental state characterized by a feeling of irrepressible desire and uncontrollable need to be repeated in a compulsive manner; it is an invasive condition marked by the phenomena of craving in a frame of uncontrollable habit that causes clinically significant distress. The authors propose a new interpretation of sexual addiction as a dissociative mechanism to regulate not-modulated emotions that were not mentalized (traumatic emotions) in early relationships with primary caregivers. To start from this theoretical model, this article suggests a treatment of sex addiction focused on the identifying and regulation of traumatic emotions implicated in sexual compulsion.