For example, someone with a traumatic background may develop extreme anxiety as an adult. When this anxiety is triggered, the affected person may resort to sexual behavior to decrease the discomfort they are experiencing. When anxiety and trauma are severe enough, the sexual behavior can become all-consuming. Your reactivity decreases and your distress acceptance takes the charge out of the fear equation. The secondary gain is that you begin to apply this constructively compassionate mindset to others as well. The Early Recovery Couples Empathy Model incorporates these skills to help you to become less reactive to your environment and the reality of the betrayal. So the better our relationships are in terms of providing us with a sense of, I can depend on you the more we are able to move fully into the rest of our lives, face insecurity and take risks. In this way our adult relationships mirror our relationship with our parents as children; both, when functioning well, provide us with a secure base from which we can enter our worlds with confidence. A survey of 28,000 men in Italy, conducted by the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine, said that several began an addiction to pornography early in their teen years, by age 14. When they reached the middle of their 20s, the men showed signs of a condition called sexual anorexia, where they had actually experienced a damaged or non-existent desire for sex. He was doing the work to overcome the addiction, and Covenant Eyes was the tool helping to make it easier for him. Recently I asked my husband how he was doing with his addiction. I didn t really need to ask, because his actions and accountability tell me everything I need to know, but it was reassuring nonetheless when he told me, Covenant Eyes has removed the temptation for me. There are several stereotypes that often come to mind when people hear the term sex addict. Sometimes the term is used synonymously with sex offender, and although the two terms can certainly coexist, they can also be mutually exclusive. Many people think a sex addict is that creepy-looking person they tend to avoid, the person who is unsuccessful in pursuit of relationships, the social outcast, the person without means and resources, or the person with the corny pickup lines in bars.