Sex Addiction

Sex addiction therapy 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 continue to cause harm long after the person has decided to stop. It is not defined by how much someone wants sex. It is defined by the gap between what they have resolved to do and what they find themselves doing, and by how much that gap costs them.

That gap is why willpower alone so rarely resolves it. Most people arriving for sex addiction help have already tried stopping, many times, often successfully for weeks or months. The relapse is not a failure of character. It is information about what the behaviour was doing for them.

What it actually looks like

The presentations vary more than the label suggests:

• Compulsive pornography use that has grown in volume, escalated in content, or started to intrude on work, sleep and sexual functioning with a partner. This is the most common reason people come, and the one they are least likely to name on the phone.
• Repeated sexual contact outside a committed relationship despite a genuine, sincere wish not to, followed by concealment that becomes its own full-time occupation.
• Compulsive use of sexual services, often escalating in cost and risk, and often conducted in a dissociated state the person struggles afterwards to recognise as themselves.
• Behaviour that is ego-dystonic: not aligned with the person’s values, sexuality or sense of self, and generating shame severe enough to be the presenting problem in its own right.

In each case the compulsive quality is the clinical feature, not the content. High sexual desire is not a disorder. Being unable to stop is a different matter.

If you are not sure whether this describes you, the practice has a short, private sex and porn addiction test that walks through the pattern rather than the diagnosis. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere.

What maintains the pattern

Compulsive sexual behaviour maintains itself through the same mechanism as other behavioural addictions. The behaviour provides reliable, rapid relief from an aversive internal state: anxiety, loneliness, shame, boredom, or the chronic low-level tension of a high-pressure working life. The relief is real, and it arrives faster and more dependably than anything else available.

Then the shame arrives. And the shame regenerates precisely the states that triggered the behaviour in the first place. That is the loop, and it is self-powering: the consequence of the act becomes the fuel for the next one. This is why secrecy is not incidental to the condition but structural to it, and why the pattern so often accelerates during periods of isolation.

Underneath, there is usually something older. Unprocessed trauma, an attachment history in which closeness was unsafe, a long-standing difficulty tolerating certain feelings without an exit. Sex addiction therapy that addresses only the behaviour, without the function it serves, tends to produce abstinence that holds until the next genuinely difficult week.

How the work is done

The practice offers individual sex addiction therapy and porn addiction therapy, drawing on integrative and Jungian psychotherapy and on 25 years in addiction treatment, including specialist training at Hazelden and Hope-One. Where trauma sits underneath the compulsivity, as it frequently does, EMDR may be incorporated.

In practical terms the work usually moves through three things, not in a tidy sequence:

1. Interrupting the behaviour enough to create space to think, which often means looking honestly at the mechanics of access, ritual and trigger rather than relying on resolve.
2. Understanding what the behaviour is managing — which feelings it reaches for, which it keeps at a distance, and what it would mean to tolerate those without it.
3. Rebuilding capacity for actual intimacy, which is frequently what has been most eroded, and which is the part that determines whether the change lasts.

Partners are affected, often severely, and the disclosure or discovery of the behaviour is its own crisis. The practice works with the individual, and can discuss couples therapy where that is the appropriate route.

Discretion

Many clients, particularly those in professional and public-facing roles, specifically choose the Harley Street office for its discretion: a medical address where an appointment explains itself. Appointments are scheduled so clients do not cross paths, and all sessions are held in strict confidence. No GP referral is needed to begin, and no record goes to anyone. For those who would rather not attend an address at all, the work is conducted online, which for this presentation is a substantial number of clients.

Arranging an initial consultation

Work is available at the Harley Street office in London and online, with Dr Philippe Jacquet, UKCP-registered psychotherapist and addiction specialist. To arrange a confidential initial consultation, please use the contact form or call the practice directly.

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 Professional Doctorate in Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

Also available: addiction therapist in London · what is sex addiction?

If you recognise the pattern but not the label, How to Stop Watching Porn describes the mechanism rather than the diagnosis, and explains why willpower keeps failing.

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