Sexual health -Jim not (can not) understand his real name, why would anyone want to be monogamous. As a 47-year-old who worked as part-time bartender divorce, he had sex with many women and men, as he wanted.
He was in love with a young mother of two children, separated from her husband. She loved the party, and he was always jealous of anyone who came near her. He kept tabs on where she was and who she was. But no matter how much they consume his thoughts, he felt empty inside. That is,
when he realized something was wrong in his life.
At the urging of a therapist, who was treated for depression, Jim went to a meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. "I thought I would see men walking in with dirty old raincoat," he says. What he thought was a notion of a community of people with similar problems – a heterogeneous group of priests, carpenters, 70-year-old men together, 50-year-old women, Housewives, career professionals, gay men, heterosexuals, blacks and whites. "
Modeled after the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, the organization currently houses approximately 1,200 meetings around the world. Now in its 25th year, the Group is one of the few help from charitable organizations, members of sex and love addiction dedicated to them for free.
"I am a man," said Jim, after years of membership in the program. "I used to always keep secrets to hide. Now I can open and vulnerable."
"Lust an old problem", says one source to another recovery group, Sexaholics Anonymous is anonymous. It notes that some children from broken families, in environments that are functional or harassment issues may, in adults who do not distinguish between what is acceptable and what difference life to grow.
The problem may be exacerbated by the many sexual images in the media today.
The theories about why people destroy themselves with sex and love are very different. "People do a lot of time to escape," says Jim.
Jim lived his addiction to sex with multiple partners, and finally obsessively about a woman who was emotionally unavailable to him. Other derail their lives due to frequent masturbation (sometimes four or five times a day), not suitable fantasies, or extramarital affairs, always log on to pornographic websites on the Internet, or sexually hurt themselves with different objects.
Peter R. Martin, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Vanderbilt Addiction Center in Nashville, Tennessee, says the root causes of problems related to gender, are not known, since it still matters how the people dependent on drugs.
He says that scientists are beginning to believe it has something to do with how our brains process stations, and sometimes problems with the "reward centers" of the brains of a person.
It is unclear how sexual addiction fit into the realm of mental illness, says Martin. For this reason, he prefers the disease "problem called hyper sexuality" and not "sex addiction".
Interestingly, he adds that many problems in which the brains obsessed with an activity – whether the result is about sex, drugs or alcohol – usually together.
Scientists now study medications that could potentially treat the dependency of love and sex. In the meantime, doctors such as Martin use of psychotherapy and techniques for the treatment of dependence on other people who help disrupt the life sexual thoughts and actions used to support. This may Prescription for problems to go along with it, such as depression or anxiety.
Use twelve-step programs, meetings and exchange of stories that offer comfort to the restless. The idea is that there are other people trying to deal with similar problems.
Jim says that his salvation came in the company of people whose lives have also fallen out of hand. On its website, the group Anonymous Sexual Compulsives lists some characteristics of the majority of its members have in common:
• You use compulsive sex as a drug of emotions such as fear, loneliness, escape, anger, and self-hatred, but also joy.
• They are immobilized by romantic obsessions. Becoming addicted to the search for love and sex makes them neglect their lives.
• You try to bring intensity and excitement in their lives through sex, but the constant feeling empty.
• Even if they receive the love of another human being, because it never seems enough, and they can not stop lusting after another.
• You are trying their dependence on the claims, hiding more and more isolated with himself, God and the people they long to very close.
For those still not sure if they have a problem with sex and love addiction, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous has developed 40 questions for self diagnosis, including:
• Have you ever tried to control how much sex or how often you would see someone?
• Set "high" of sex and / or romance? Did you crash?
• Do you do sex and / or a relationship, your life bearable?
• Have you stopped the number of sexual partners did you count?
• Do you have a serious relationship threatened or destroyed because of an affair?
• Are you unable to concentrate on other areas of your life because of the thoughts or feelings you have with another person or sex to focus on?