Now Providing Sex Addiction, Love Addiction, & Betrayal Trauma Therapy

By Magnolia Heaton, LCSW-S, CSAT Candidate, CIMHP, CMNCS, CCTP-II, EV2

Hi there!

Welcome back to our blog! :) This blog post is intended to give a brief mention to the fact that we are now providing sex addiction therapy, love addiction therapy, and betrayal trauma therapy. While these are very complex topics, my intent is also to briefly overview some key words/concepts and definitions. Now, what are these?

Addiction of any kind is a behavior or substance that we use compulsively, to cope with intense feelings. Addiction means we experience: increased frequency and amount of use, increased tolerance, trouble stopping engaging in the addictive behavior.

While many sexual behaviors are appropriate, what is considered appropriate varies from culture to culture. Sex addiction encompasses a wide array of compulsive sexual behaviors, from problematic pornography use, to more overt sexual acting out behaviors. It is very closely related to love addiction and betrayal trauma (both of which we can also treat!) With sexual addiction, we often also see other addictions (to chemicals/drugs or to processes, like eating, gambling, exercising, video gaming, compulsive spending, and emotions such as rage). These would be what we call cross-addictions, where there are other addictions present in addition to the primary addiction.

Love addiction is when one is addicted to relationships. This is typically seen in situations where people are rarely single (typically due to fears of being alone) and is typically associated with romantic relationships. Limerence (idealizing partners and other people, hyperfixating our attention on them, to the point where one can have trouble focusing on other tasks) is also usually seen with love addiction. Anxious attachment style is most common in love addiction but it's not necessary.

Betrayal trauma is the trauma that can result from being betrayed. Betrayal can occur in any type of relationship (family, friends, partners, workplaces, institutions). For the purposes of this blog post/article, we are discussing partner betrayal trauma; infidelity. Infidelity is defined here as the breaking of any agreements of boundaries set by yourself and your partner. This can be a single incident, multiple incidents, sexual infidelity, emotional infidelity, financial infidelity, inappropriate social media use, etc. Lying about these incidents can also cause or exacerbate symptoms of betrayal trauma. Unaddressed betrayal trauma and recent discovery of an infidelity can cause full-blown PTSD (post-traumatic stress) symptoms if unaddressed. We do now provide services to serve clients experiencing these challenges. Look at our provider pages and look out for the credentials: ASAT, ASAT Candidate, CSAT Candidate, CSAT to see who's currently providing these services. We do work with special intersections of clients experiencing these, like: autism, LGBTQ+. Questions? Leave a comment! Thanks for reading! :)