How Sex Abuse Made Me A Sex Addict

What are you thinking about?

I became a sex addict at the age of 6 years old. When most people think about sexual abuse, they see it like a movie. Someone is forced upon in a horrible, painful experience both emotionally and physically, and sometimes it is, but a lot of the times it's not that way, especially when you're a child. All sexual abuse is bad, but sometimes you don’t know that when you're the victim and you're conditioned to see it as something that's not bad. I was sexually abused as a 6-year-old until I was 9 years old. I was abused by someone I knew and trusted. I was taught that what we were doing was a game and not something bad.

What I did experience is real endorphins from sexual acts that I couldn’t experience pleasure from yet, but my body didn’t hate it; that’s why it kept happening. By the time I was 9, it stopped, and in the coming years, my body started to develop the hormones to experience pleasure and desire it. But I also had the cognitive ability to realize what I had experienced was wrong and bad. I now had the conflicting feelings of shame for what I went through, understanding it better, and lingering memories of enjoying the physical experiences before fully understanding them.

Not knowing how to emotionally navigate this as a 9-year-old child, I began to open every sexual door I could that made me feel less shame than what I had been through and having enjoyable feelings within that awful experience. It made me feel like a monster, and it still does because it very much created a sexual monster that took me 30 years to learn how to navigate by feeling all the fucked up things I have been through and the sexual doors I opened running from those experiences.

I chose not to talk about who my abuser was, not to protect them, but because I wasn't the only victim in this story. Some details will not be shared to protect the others involved and how they navigate this experience in their life. I do ask that if you know me and this is the first time you're hearing this about my story, to not ask questions I don't want to provide answers to. I have a therapist, psychologist, and neuropsychologist to work through those memories with. I have PTSD and have spent many years working through all of this and feeling it to get to a good place. I don't want to relive it because of your curiosity.

Something I find interesting about sharing my story with some people is that some religious people tend to ask me if I have forgiven that person yet. In navigating all this, I have realized so many of us learn emotions completely wrong, and it can really get messed up within religious cultures.

What is forgiveness? Most people say something like letting it go and moving on, but according to neuroscience, that's not how the psychological connection between our brain and emotions works. What most of us do is learn to not feel the raw deep emotions, like anger, sadness, rage, and shame. We do whatever gets away from these instead of learning to go through them. So that's how “forgiveness” becomes this get-out-of-jail-free card that allows some people to not hold on to the guilt that will help them change behavior. Or holding on to healthy anger and sadness to create boundaries from those who won’t change behavior and take accountability. Instead, we are encouraged to let it go so those around us who don’t have awareness and accountability don’t have to change. You slowly condition yourself to not even feel your own life or experiences for those toxic people around you to stay in your life how they want.

The sad truth is that most of us out there have more than one person in our life who behaves this way. Some of us have parents and loved ones who claim to love you, but this is the foundation of your relationship. A conditional gratitude disguised as love forcing you to fall into the same pattern of unhealthy behaviors over and over again. Something your nervous system remembers from the beginning because it never forgets.

The nervous system is a fascinating and completely misunderstood topic. The nervous system is deeply connected to our physiological experiences because it controls how we process the world around us. Essentially, your nervous system is what you are; it's the foundation of the person you are and will become in life. The connection between our nervous system and our experiences is emotions. Life is a nervous system game, what you can navigate through your nervous system when it comes to emotions and experiences. Trauma is when they get stuck, and toxic humans are people who think they are above raw feelings, believing emotional control means the absence of them, but that's actually not even remotely true according to neuroscience. You have to feel life to be in control of it, and that's what I have learned working through this experience within my own nervous system.

In the process of running from these memories, I became one of the most hypersexual kids you would ever meet. In the environment I grew up in, being gay was not okay, so being bi and also loving women made it easy to just focus on that. I was probably 12 when I started hooking up with girls and was having sex by 14 and threesomes by 16. I made friends along the way that had similar hypersexual behavior and had no shame about it. My sex life as just as a teenager was on a different level, some shit out of a weird porno. Everything was always consensual, but I know in my life I opened sexual doors for some girls that they can't close or maybe didn't want open that early in life. If you find yourself reading this, I am truly sorry for not treating you like the queens you are and opening doors to sexual pleasures that you may not know how to navigate in a normal relationship.

Sexual emotions are emotions, and like we have learned from neuroscience, feelings don't go away by ignoring them or shaming them in an unhealthy way. It's strange to me that it's normal to think that loving another human being stops your sexual desires or thoughts towards other people. That’s not how emotions work at all, and science proves that now. These younger generations being more free to explore that in a healthy way are on the right track. I am not saying open your relationship and fuck everyone you guys want unless that works for your relationship. What I am saying is open up the emotional foundation of your sexual thoughts alone and in relationships. Freedom of sexual expression is what me and my wife call it. We are free to talk and express what we desire and what comes through our minds. To create fantasies and explore how we feel comfortable together, whatever that means for us, and we allow it to evolve as time goes on at the pace of the slower-moving partner.

Pleasure is a very large spectrum, and there is so much to explore that our unhealthy conditioning of the wrong way to navigate human behavior does not allow us to find ourselves comfortable enough to explore these depths, especially within a relationship. For me, I had no choice but to learn how to navigate all the complex sexual emotions I have inside and find a way to work through what I had been through as well as get a handle on the complex sexual desires that come with opening kinky sexual doors at a young age. I love my wife more than anything and could never picture life without her, and I know she feels the same. I would truly not be able to love these parts of myself without the love she showed me as we have worked through them over the years.

I know I am not alone when it comes to hypersexual behavior and sex addiction. Abuse doesn't have to happen for that to be a thing; that’s just my story. I do know that sexual emotions are like any other, and they have to be pushed through the nervous system. I can't live any other way and find peace and happiness being my weird bi kinky self with no shame, married to an amazing woman who accepts and loves me as I am. So I would encourage you to do the same within your own life. Let your freak flag fly and work on sexual compatibility within your own relationship to strengthen and heal parts of you, you didn't know needed it.