People With Sex Addiction Often Suffered Early Trauma The cycles of behavior exhibited by people with sex addiction are often connected to traumatic childhood experiences, particularly attachment-related trauma that continues to impair their ability to form healthy interpersonal relationships. Attachment-related trauma can include physical, sexual or emotional abuse by a parent or caregiver. that take you out of yourself and away from those around you, acknowledging the behaviors as a problem and finding sobriety by eliminating those behaviors before they show up. But it s much more than that. Recovery is also very much about recognizing that much of who we ve presented ourselves to be to others, and many of the ways we ve chosen to do it, have been based on dishonesty. That intimacy then ripples out into every other aspect of the partner s life. This allows the betrayal trauma response to calm as you gain the ability to be present with the natural normal distress resulting from the discovery that the addict has betrayed them. Your reactivity decreases and your distress acceptance takes the charge out of the fear equation. This profound and sudden change in our sense of security and connection sends our bodies into panic and lights up the fear center in our brain like a giant Christmas tree. When our fear center goes into overdrive our ability to think and reason diminishes quickly and our ability to function takes a nose dive. Others spend years, even decades, caught in the addiction cycle, engaging in risky and dangerous sexual behaviors before they acknowledge that they need help. Still others never reach, or refuse to reach, the realization they are addicted to sex. If the addicted person fakes hitting bottom, he is back to playing his con games. Not only does abuse of pornography lead to a loss of interest in sex, it can make men unable to perform sexually and create a mindset where even the idea of sex exists in a different realm than reality. During the process, the viewer becomes addicted to pornography online, then needs more and more of the material to get the same effect; but their response to the images is reduced, until they cannot become aroused any longer.