After all, they are a relationship expert, literally sending you away from your relationship for not being good enough at forgiving and forgetting. This confirms your worst fears about your worth as a partner and kicks you when you re down. No one would blame you if you were distracted from recovery and trapped in the belief that something is wrong with you. If you manage a period of sexual abstinence correctly you will learn some important lessons about yourself that will help you for the rest of your life, especially if you combine it with other constructive actions. There are many people who can go 90 days without sex with relative ease. But if you are a person whose sexual behaviors have taken you where you don't want to go time and again then you may find a 90 day period of sexual abstinence to be a serious challenge. Therefore, they get stuck in a loop of negative behaviors. Patrick Carnes calls this The Offending Cycle . As a result, antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy are a common treatment option for sex addiction. Bipolar Disorders as Symptom and Cause Bipolar disorder can be both a cause and a symptom of compulsive sexual behavior, as, untreated bipolar disorder may lead to behaviors consistent with sex addiction. 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. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples says that betrayal traumas, overwhelm coping capacities and define the relationship, as a source of danger rather than a safe haven in times of stress. When that special someone that we have bonded with betrays us it messes us up because all of a sudden the person who is our secure base in the world has caused us untold pain and robbed us of our sense of safety. The study showed that many men began using pornography at an early stage of their teen years, with nearly six percent starting when they were 14 to 18 years old. During the mid-twenties to mid-thirties time period, more than 22 percent had begun using pornography and this number rose to more than 25 percent for men in the next age group, 35 to 44 years.