Putting in the Work in Sex Addiction Recovery The process of recovery for sex addicts involves identifying those behaviors such as obsessive masturbation, pornography use, anonymous sex, exhibitionism, etc. 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. , a significant amount of people with sex addiction experienced emotional abuse (97%), sexual abuse (81%) or physical abuse (72%) in childhood. Furthermore, people who came from rigid, uninvolved and emotionally absent families were also more likely to experience sex addiction (77%). In other words, sex addicts often come from childhood environments in which they never learned how to create and maintain emotional bonds. Childhood trauma is not uniquely associated with sexual addiction by any means it is associated with a wide range of addictions and other psychological disorders. Sometimes, sex addiction develops during or after substance abuse. Abuse of stimulants and the intense sexual desire that can accompany these drugs can jumpstart a pattern of compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual addiction can also become a substitute addiction for people who are in the process of quitting an addictive substance. As a sex addict learns that others have gone down the same road and have begun to heal, despair ebbs away and hope returns. 5. Healing shame There is healthy shame and unhealthy shame. Healthy shame occurs when I have done something wrong, like lying, and I feel shame about it. My feeling of shame tells me I have sinned and that I need to deal with it through confession and repentance. God intended sex as two people giving themselves to each other. Porn is just about taking for yourself. So when someone watches pornography, they are consuming a degradation of God s image and degrading God s image in themselves. In contrast, Colossians 3:10 says that Christians have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Hypnotherapy Using deep relaxation techniques, hypnotherapy can help you readjust your priorities and alter your behavioral perception through suggestive techniques. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Trained practitioners perform a formal therapeutic technique that transplants negative thoughts with more positive ones.