Jordan Gray says that sex addiction is more about shame, isolation, and unworthiness than it is about sex. This is his story.

“My name is Jordan, and I’m a sex addict.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt like a total impostor.

The men and women seated around me, legs crossed and arms folded, draped over orange plastic chairs, would see right through me any second now. Even though I was staring down at the floor, I could feel their eyes burning in to me.
These people had real addictions… my problems felt so entry-level by comparison. They had serious problems, not me.
I mean, sure, I’d slept with countless women who I felt no emotional connection to.
Sure, I’ve felt a deeply permeating sense of shame at the core of my being after compulsively acting out sexually.
And, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve probably cumulatively spent weeks of my life watching porn, scanning sex ads, and frequenting massage parlours and sex workers in multiple countries.
Bleep. Who am I kidding?The more I listened to the stories of the people around me, the more I realized that I was in the right place.

Don’t Trust Your Thoughts
As human beings we have a brilliant capacity for bullshitting ourselves.
It can take years of spinning our wheels in the mud before we realize that we aren’t making any progress in a certain area of our lives.
Some people think that sex addiction isn’t a ‘real’ addiction. Some people say dismissive things like, “Well, if that’s what sex addiction is, then every guy I know is a sex addict.” As with many process addictions, sexual addiction is a commonly misunderstood one.
So what is sex addiction, and why is it so frequently misunderstood?

What Is Sexual Addiction?
I’d say the biggest thing that most people don’t understand about sexual addiction is thatsex addiction isn’t about sex. The way that I see it, sexual addiction is more about shame, isolation, and unworthiness than it is about chasing after sexual experiences.
Or, as one SAA (Sex Addicts Anonymous) member once so eloquently put it in a meeting that I attended, “When I act out with sex workers, I’m not thinking to myself ‘Oh boy, this is going to be super fun!’. But rather, I’m thinking ‘I have such a tornado of pain inside of myself that I either have to kill myself or compulsively act out to numb the pain.’”
Compulsive sexual behaviour is what sex addicts use to numb out their emotions, just like alcoholics often use staying drunk to avoid feeling their underlying difficult emotions.
Sexual addiction, just like any drug addiction, can have a sliding scale of symptoms – ranging in severity. For some people, sex addiction looks like chronic masturbation to porn, where they don’t feel like they can function in society without climaxing at least seven times a day. For others, sex addiction could look like occasional flare ups of wanting to ‘use’ or ‘act out’ with sex workers only when they’re going through emotionally trying times (breakups, divorces, losing their jobs, death of a friend or family member, etc.). cont...
https://osagiesblogs..com.ng/2016/11/how-i-overcame-sexual-addiction.html