How to Stop Using Sex as a Coping Mechanism

Your Guide to Overcoming Compulsive Sexual Behavior

Sexual relationships are a natural, often beautiful part of the human experience. But for people who carry emotional pain, including past trauma, sexual encounters can become an addiction or unhealthy way of coping with negative emotions. If that describes you or a loved one, you might wonder how to stop using sex as a coping mechanism.

As a Joint Commission-accredited mental health treatment center, the Icarus New Mexico team understands that nobody deliberately sets out to distort their own sexuality. Maladaptive coping mechanisms like a sex addiction come from deep internal pain.

Our job is to help uncover the underlying issues that lead to problematic sexual behavior and replace them with new thoughts and coping mechanisms.

We encourage you to keep reading to learn the causes of risky sexual behaviors and learn how our Albuquerque treatment facility can help those struggling develop healthy coping mechanisms.

Seeking Help for a Healthier Relationship with Sex

Healing sex addiction doesn’t mean rejecting a healthy sex life altogether. Instead, we help uncover the life events that caused the client to start using sex as a coping mechanism. In recovery from a sex addiction, people begin fully understanding the reasons why they used sex to cope with life in the past; they also develop the tools for developing emotional intimacy in the future.

Here’s how our team helps people understand how to stop using sex as a coping mechanism, all while embracing healthy sexuality, and not becoming asexual in the process.

Identifying One’s Root Cause of Atypical Sexual Urges

It’s important to know why the client started using sex as a way to cope with their emotions. Icarus New Mexico takes a holistic, evidence-based approach to helping people find the mechanisms that triggered sex addiction:

Clinical Interviews and Assessments

Our clinical staff will have structured discussions to explore the clients’ background. These conversations may encompass their:

• Relationship history
• Trauma exposure in the past
• Emotional regulation tools
• Other mental health concerns

The clinician will look for DSM-5 criteria for underlying disorders, such as PTSD, depression, or anxiety, during this process.

Trauma Assessments

Because sex addiction frequently ties back to childhood trauma, a recovery specialist may provide an assessment that looks for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). This score helps our team find unhealed wounds that explain the person’s relationship with sex.

Challenge Negative Beliefs That Reinforce the Sex Addiction Cycle

Once the causes of hypersexuality become clear, our team starts providing individualized therapy to treat the root causes. They’ll use a variety of evidence-based strategies that switch negative thoughts and behaviors into positive habits and stress-management mechanisms. Some therapies include:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Narrative therapy

Once clients start to engage in narrative therapy, alongside other approaches, they start understanding how the negative consequences of hypersexuality can hold them back from developing true emotional connections with others.

Developing Alternative Coping Strategies for Daily Life

Ending a sex addiction means the client must develop healthy coping mechanisms to deal with stress or their most difficult feelings and emotions. Some ways to cope that are effective for many who have received professional sex addiction treatment include these:

• Finding a healthy new hobby to relax and release built-up stress
• Attending support groups like SMART Recovery or Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), a 12-Step program similar to AA; support groups are usually free to attend and very effective
• Seeking trusted, safe friends or family to call and engage with if the feelings of sex addiction start to arise
• Mastering grounding techniques to reset the brain when experiencing harmful or low feelings; these can include deep breathing, yoga, or visualization tools.
• Keeping a journal or log when they feel like using sex to cope; the act of writing can help resist the urge

No two people will have the same coping mechanisms. Therapists and counselors help each client develop a plan to avoid using sex as a way to manage their feelings.

The Vicious Cycle of Sex as a Coping Mechanism

When someone uses sex as a coping mechanism to self-soothe emotional distress, it follows a predictable cycle:

Emotional pain leads to sexual acts –> the sexual experience provides temporary relief –> feelings of guilt or shame follow –> the hollow emptiness restarts the loop of compulsive sexual behavior.

Problematic Sexual Behaviors as Self-Soothing

Frequent sexual behavior in itself is not necessarily unhealthy. But when unprotected sex, watching porn daily, or living a double life become tools to numb feelings or to boost self-esteem, it’s a signal of a emotional disturbances.

Many who resort to compulsive sexual behavior suffer from trauma, abandonment, or extremely low self-worth. The person may feel distressed to the point of using intimacy to relieve the stress of their emotions of to deal with past trauma and pain.

Negative Emotional Consequences and Poor Mental Health

Many people can identify with the sense of immediate regret after a hookup. But using sexual activities as a coping mechanism can lead to more than that sense of immediate regret. Clients with hypersexuality almost always struggle with depression, anxiety, shame, low self-esteem, or emotional numbness.

Some people seek help because they feel disconnected from themselves and others or find themselves repeating the same relationship problems. The negative consequences lead to certain behaviors that further deepen their dependency on sex to manage unwanted feelings and negative thoughts.

If the person doesn’t learn how to cope with the underlying trauma or feelings, they will find it almost impossible to regain control over their life and engage in healthy sexuality. They find themself in increasingly stressful situations, worsening their mental health.

How Risky Sexual Encounters Lead to Dangerous Situations

When a person manages emotional pain by avoiding dealing with their particular feelings, they start to engage in increasingly unsafe behaviors. The sex addiction makes the person more likely to experience further trauma from:

• Sexually transmitted diseases, due to multiple partners
• Sexual encounters that turn violent
• Unintended pregnancy
• Having sexual activities in unsafe locations
• Difficulties with worsening anxiety or depression

Hypersexuality doesn’t fit the root cause. Without professional treatment, the unresolved trauma and emotional pain will continue to erode the person’s self-esteem.

Traumatic Events and Other Factors in Unhealthy Relationships

As mentioned earlier, trauma is a common theme in clients who come to Icarus with sex addictions. Their past trauma commonly includes the following:

• Childhood abuse by a parent or other family member
• Sexual or physical assaults
• Neglect or betrayal by parents or family support systems
• Emotional abandonment

In many cases, their daily functioning has been poor for some time – even since trauma in childhood. However, they didn’t connect their trauma with using sex as a coping mechanism.

Many with hypersexuality also struggle with behaviors related to depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders. Everything interconnects, but the person never developed the self-awareness to see it, because of their traumatic childhood.

Lucinda Used Sex as A Coping Mechanism Before Icarus New Mexico Helped Her

‘Lucinda’ was 30 when she came to Icarus New Mexico for help with a sex addiction. She’d been using sex as a coping mechanism since she turned 14. She thought she had control over her hypersexuality. But things took a bad turn when she was sexually assaulted while she was having a tryst with multiple partners, who all took turns abusing her. Lucinda ended up needing to seek medical care for her injuries; a kind physician helped her find Icarus New Mexico.

When Lucinda arrived, she was in poor physical and mental health. We took a holistic approach, helping her recover from both they physical injuries and the emotions that resulted from the assault. Our clinician learned during an assessment that her current situation wasn’t her first sexual violence.

Overcoming Childhood Trauma With Support

She’d been abused by her babysitter during childhood, which made her lose trust in others. In adolescence, she started having sex with other teens, constantly reenacting the trauma. Lucinda didn’t understand that her desire to engage in sex was her brain trying to sort out the trauma; she just knew that it have her a way to control others.

At Icarus, Lucinda received one-on-one therapy and flourished in her peer support groups. As she engaged in therapies, the traumatic memories grew less important to her. She also learned better coping mechanisms than having sex to deal with her daily stress. While the trauma from her childhood will always exist, Lucinda now has the appropriate coping tools to deal with it.

Today, Lucinda is juggling her full-time employment with a community college certificate – she’s hoping one day to become a victim advocate and help others who must overcome the trauma of sexual violence.

End Unsafe Sexual Activities with Help from Icarus New Mexico

If you or someone you love uses sex as an unhealthy coping mechanism, please know that help is near. Icarus New Mexico provides treatment for sex addiction without judgment or shame.

Our entire team understands that using intimacy as a way to cope with life is not a moral choice – it’s a sign of trauma in past relationships or carried from childhood.

Call us confidentially today to get the compassionate care that you deserve.