2023-09-03 10:02:00
This summer Sunday in Paris, the mercury has stopped its mad race, and it’s mild. It is not a time that crushes movements or stirs up passions. It’s a time to talk regarding yourself, with the honesty you owe to yourself when you want to move forward. Nicolas is made of this wood.
The cause or the symptom, where to start? In his thirties, his eyes reddened by a long weekend of work, Nicolas is ready to testify to the sexual behavior disorder from which he suffers. This addiction has many names, “loss of sexual control”, “impulsive compulsive sexual disorder”, “hypersexuality”, “sex-addict”, “nymphomania” for women (read below).
In 2018, following reading the testimonies of men in the press regarding their addictive and unhappy relationship with sex, Nicolas pushed the door of a therapist. “What was written corresponded to many things that I was experiencing. I don’t remember if I sat in front of him saying I’m addicted. I was not aware that it was a disease, I had a particular relationship to sexuality but it seemed to be a behavior that video games or a lot of sport might have replaced, ”he begins.
“More and more extreme practices”
The cause or the symptom, where to continue? The symptom. After the first emotions alone, Nicolas quickly became a pornography viewer. At a more intense pace than many young people his age. “As a teenager, I got up at night to watch it. It became compulsive. During my studies, I didn’t watch it every day but I mightn’t masturbate without a porn movie. And as I got used to it, my excitement only came in front of more and more extreme practices”. From the screen to life, Nicolas, who nevertheless has no shortage of girlfriends, considered by his group of friends as “a bit of a hippie pleasure seeker”, begins to resort to prostitution. “That of the boulevards, first,” he said guiltily. “Even though I knew then that the Colombian prostitute who was in front of me was the victim of a network, and not happy to be there… I went there anyway”. A sign, he said.
From the outside, Nicolas seems to be having a good time: his difficult scientific studies are intellectually stimulating and crowned with success; he is surrounded by loving friends with whom he goes out a lot, with joy. However, a form of anger gnaws at him. “Once at a party, I grabbed a woman by the throat and squeezed hard enough for someone to punch me. I also fought for no reason. I went far in my excesses and I drove in more than second states, to the point of not knowing how I got back. I might have killed someone,” he admits, twisting a cardboard straw.
One day while travelling, following consuming LSD, Nicolas has “the vision of a shell opening up”. “Until then, I thought I had accumulated things from my childhood that I had to deal with. There I understood that I continued to accumulate”. That the gifted, euphoric, reveler young man, always attentive to others, skated on a bed of darkness and suffering.
Childhood trauma made of grief and pain
Cause 1. “My father committed suicide when I was 12 years old. Until I was 9 years old, he was very absent because of his work. He lost his job and started a pretty funny period, well… that’s how I lived it then, because my father was at home all the time”. But quickly the dad steps aside. Screwed in front of online games which he no longer knows how to do without, he disdains family meals, not even dressing anymore. The couple of his parents cannot resist it. “One day they sat us all down in the living room to tell us we still love each other but we’re breaking up. After which he was still living at home, I did not quite understand”.
Nicolas remembers badly his childhood. “I have difficulty distinguishing between my memories and those of others, especially those of my mother.” Reason 2? “I have four brothers and sister, I am in the middle of the siblings. As in any family, a role has been assigned to us all according to the character of each one. As I was empathetic, I became my mother’s crutch, her painkiller. The death of my father froze me in this fusional role. I haven’t learned to disentangle my emotions from those of others. And I had to mourn five people, especially my mother, ”he analyzes. Awkwardly, the mother tells her sons regarding all the difficulties of her relationship before the suicide, her husband’s addiction to gambling – all addictions can have a genetic component – the white powder sometimes found in his pockets, his violence to his regard, his adulteries. The courageous mother had also been a courageous woman, enduring everything, for the family. So Nicolas locks himself into his role: a good student, never a word too much, no rebuff. He is always a shoulder, the better he absorbs the pains of others.
It took him some time to understand the springs entangling these two causes. “When I started consulting, I thought I was talking regarding my father. In fact, I’ve been talking regarding my mother for five years, ”he smiles. This mother who, following the death of her husband, “instead of pushing us little by little towards normal life, made us build a family tale centered on this death” which amputated them all. And which continues, despite the years, to summon the father figure, yet so ambiguous. “At 19, I had worked to make a long trip to the end of the world. I was going to do something just for me. On the day of departure, sobbing, she gave me the hat my father was wearing the day he hanged himself,” he says, still annoyed. When Nicolas graduates, or announces to him that he is going to be a father, he triggers the same tearful uprising. “If your father was there”… the sentence does not even need to be said as it has infused. “Every happy moment she bursts into tears. Not joy, but pain”.
“What heals me is to regain lightness and happiness”
In the armchair where he sits twice a week, Nicolas understands that he has suffered terribly, for years, from being dragged down by a void. And that this inner tension only appeases in the crudest sex. Because the remedy has turned once morest him, calling for increasingly harsh practices. “I looked for solutions. Spending hours on the internet solved nothing. It has become unbearable. I tried to propose things to my wife, Charlotte, she refused. I mightn’t imagine rushing her or deceiving her,” he said, as if with a fist in his throat. With a lot of shame, “I turned to prostitutes once more, this time women my age who practice BDSM, and who I know understand the excitement I get from the humiliation of the other” .
A crisis occurs “when I can’t find my place”, a complex undertaking. “For me first, because I feel like I have to relearn everything. For the others, it is also incredibly difficult,” he laments. The therapy, his insights, his will, push him to change, “and people around me find it difficult to accept it. When I tell my brothers and sister that my mother screwed up with me, that she made me weigh a weight that I should never have carried, they are afraid that I will leave the clan”. Nicolas wants to get rid of this “morbid relationship to life”? His relatives tell him that he must protect his mother. At home, Charlotte struggles with the distance he is trying to establish, his refusal to be the bandage for her that he was for her mother.
“What heals me is to regain lightness and happiness,” he said, a flash of light in his voice. Which immediately turns off. “The problem is that… As I don’t always know how to position myself in beautiful things, there are happy moments on paper that put me at risk”. In these uncertain moments, the tension rises, rises once more, and suddenly accelerates the spiral that he has been trying for five years to stop.
The guilt reappeared. “Sometimes I feel like my time is running out, before Charlotte realizes my illness, and it destroys everything that is beautiful in my life,” he breathes, tears to the eyes. Only three friends are aware of his hypersexual disorder, including one “to whom I told everything, who never spoke to me regarding it once more, and who gives me space”, and another “who questions me regularly. , supports me”. From now on, Nicolas would like to have the strength to confide in one of his brothers, with whom he shares a happy and fulfilling relationship “but he is also very close to Charlotte, I don’t want him to have to lie to her. And I’m so afraid of disappointing him.
The therapy is progressing and Nicolas experiences increasingly long periods of abstinence. “No, I’m not proud of it,” he cuts off. But I am optimistic: at least the disease does not define everything in my life”. It is slipped to him that he can perhaps start there with his brother. And get some rest.
Sex-addict, an addiction that can be cured by therapy
Sex addiction was first described in the 1970s by Dr. Patrick Carnes, who developed several quizzes to “self-evaluate”. Although no epidemiological survey has been carried out on sex addiction, it affects 3 to 6% of the population of age to have sexual activity. 80% of men, who began to suffer from it at the end of adolescence and who often see their disorder increase with age. It is complex to treat because no substitute molecule exists, unlike drugs or alcohol.
The increase in the frequency of sexual intercourse is not necessarily a sign of addiction. This materializes when compulsive masturbation, anonymous or paid sex, consultation of pornographic Internet sites, voyeurism, sadomasochism, or other behaviors come to fill a depression or emotional difficulties. And that the behaviors are experienced as shameful, in greater and greater isolation, with the need to “increase the dose”.
“Childhood trauma, abuse, low self-esteem, lack of confidence, stress management difficulties or depression are all breeding grounds that can lead to sexual addiction,” says Marthylle Lagadec, psychologist specializing in the treatment of addiction. “Cognitive and behavioral techniques make it possible to readjust and treat the dysfunctional reward system” in a patient suffering from hypersexuality, she says. The tools and exercises proposed during this therapy, a long work, allow to control the triggering situations and the passage to the act.
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