Sex Addiction

Sex addiction: therapy and treatment in London

Sex addiction (or compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, as it is now more precisely classified) describes a pattern in which sexual thoughts, urges, or behaviours are persistent and intrusive, feel outside voluntary control, and cause significant distress or harm despite continued engagement. Like other addiction presentations, it is characterised not by the presence of strong desire but by the compulsive quality of the pattern and its resistance to change through intention alone.

The presentations are various. Some involve use of pornography at a level that has become compulsive and interferes with relationships or daily functioning. Others involve repeated sexual contact outside a committed relationship despite a genuine wish not to. Others involve sexual behaviour that feels ego-dystonic, not aligned with the person’s values or self-concept, and generates significant shame. In each case, the compulsive quality is the clinical feature that distinguishes this from simply high sexual desire.

What maintains the pattern

Sex addiction maintains itself through the same mechanism as other behavioural addictions: the sexual behaviour provides reliable, rapid relief from aversive internal states, anxiety, loneliness, shame, the chronic low-level tension of high-pressure professional life. The relief is real and temporary, and the shame following the behaviour often intensifies the very states that initiated it, creating the cycle.

Treatment that addresses only the behaviour without the underlying function rarely holds. The therapeutic work is with what the sexual behaviour is managing and what would need to be different for those states to be tolerable through other means.

Working with a sex addiction therapist in London

The practice offers individual therapy for sex addiction and compulsive sexual behaviour, drawing on 25 years of addiction treatment experience including specialist training at Hazelden and Hope-One. As a sex and pornography addiction therapist in London, Dr Jacquet works confidentially and without judgement, at the Harley Street office and online. Many clients, particularly from professional backgrounds, specifically choose the Harley Street office for its discretion.

To arrange a confidential initial consultation, please use our contact form or call the practice directly.

When medical treatment comes first

This is psychotherapy, not medical treatment. Withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be dangerous and occasionally life threatening, and needs to be managed by a GP, an addiction psychiatrist or a medically supervised detox rather than attempted alone. Where that is what is needed, it is said at the assessment and the referral is made.

The same applies where a psychiatric assessment should come first or run alongside the work, and where the right answer is residential treatment rather than weekly sessions. Therapy does the work that follows stabilisation, and it does that work better once stabilisation is in place.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.