Are hypersexuality and trauma somehow linked? For many who are fighting some form of hypersexuality (also known as sex addiction or compulsive sexual behavior), unresolved trauma is often at the core of their struggles. And it’s easy to see why when you realize how much trauma leaves lasting scars that can change your brain and impact your natural stress responses.
Understanding Trauma and Its Impact
If something activates your body’s fight-or-flight response and makes you think you’re in danger, then this experience would be considered trauma. Trauma can be one singular damaging experience or a series of negative circumstances over time. Most people experience trauma in three categories:
- Physical Trauma: this can be any event or events that lead to injury or physical pain, such as illness, natural disasters, abuse, or auto accidents.
- Sexual Trauma: this usually looks like unwanted or forced sexual behavior and may include sexual assault, incest, or rape.
- Emotional Trauma: this often represents a type of abuse designed to manipulate or control, such as bullying, neglect by a spouse or parent, or the rejection of someone’s identity.
When you experience trauma and shift into fight-or-flight mode in your brain, your mind and body are immediately focused on your escape from danger and your survival. This involuntary state puts any non-essential systems offline and stays active until an external stimulus makes you feel safe again.
Once you are safe, your brain remembers your trauma by setting up a type of alarm system for similar kinds of situations in the future. Any related potential threat becomes a trigger that can lead to anxiety and fear, putting you back into fight-or-flight mode.
Yet trauma also impacts your brain in other ways. Your prefrontal cortex can easily get suppressed during trauma, which means you’re less able to control your emotions, impulses, and reactions. Trauma can also reduce activity in your hippocampus, which helps you form or maintain memories, making it difficult to know the difference between the present and past and making any traumatic flashbacks triggering.
Understanding Hypersexuality
To understand the connection between sex addiction and trauma, we need to explore hypersexuality. If you’re experiencing obsessive and compulsive sexual thoughts, behaviors, and urges, then you’re struggling with hypersexuality disorder, or sex addiction. According to World Psychiatry, these hypersexual behaviors are so repetitive they can cause significant distress and impair your functioning. Consequently, hypersexuality can cause damage to your physical and mental health, your work, and your relationships. Hypersexuality typically occurs in three ways:
- Sex Addiction: this means you’re compulsively addicted to sex, which can manifest as having sex with strangers, experiencing uncontrollable sexual thoughts, or engaging in illegal sexual activities.
- Porn Addiction: you have an insatiable need to view porn (usually followed by masturbation), and may not be able to experience sexual release without it.
- Masturbation Addiction: you masturbate compulsively, often in response to various stressors or unwanted feelings.
When you’re dealing with hypersexuality as a coping mechanism, what began as healthy sexual behavior has transformed into an uncontrollable, maladaptive addiction used to self-medicate negative feelings. As a result, your obsessive sexual thoughts may cause you to avoid activities or hobbies in favor of feeding your sex addiction. You may hide your sexual behaviors from your family or friends out of shame and struggle with mental health conditions like depression or anxiety in the process.
Can Hypersexuality Be Caused by Trauma?
In exploring the connection between hypersexuality and trauma, we find ourselves back to the body’s fight-or-flight response. When trauma happens and your body shifts into survival mode, the external stimulus that communicates your safety causes your brain to release a chemical called dopamine, often known as the pleasure chemical. When you experience a dopamine release, your fight-or-flight response dissipates, bringing you back to normal.
This is ultimately why some people can experience hypersexuality due to trauma. When you experience negative feelings or stressors associated with memories or triggers your brain associates with past trauma, you will seek out ways to cope to return your mind to safety. Because sex, masturbation, or porn consumption can cause a major dopamine release, these behaviors can become your go-to resource for coping with daily struggles and adverse situations.
Over time, your regular self-medication through sex can lead to hypersexuality after trauma generates years of repetitive triggering and associated negative thoughts. As hypersexuality and trauma further intertwine in your mind, a neural network forms in your brain connecting any forms of stress, your past trauma, and sex together. This network only gets stronger as you pursue your compulsive sexual behaviors over and over again. Dr. Gabor Mate, author of “Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters of Addiction,” sums up the hypersexuality and trauma connection well:
“Addiction is not a choice that anybody makes; it’s not a moral failure. It’s actually a response to human suffering.”
Overcome Your Hypersexuality After Trauma at Integrative Life Center
If you’re struggling with sex addiction, you may encounter a number of treatment options. However, many programs only address your symptoms, leaving the root cause of your addiction—your unresolved trauma—untouched.
At Integrative Life Center, we realize that you can’t fully recover unless your mind, body, and spirit are healed. That’s why we take a comprehensive approach to sex addiction treatment, targeting both your behavior as well as the underlying trauma connected to it. If you’re ready to achieve real, lasting healing for your hypersexuality and trauma, we’re ready to help. To learn more about our intimacy disorder treatment programs, contact us today.
