Sex Addiction

The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity has defined sexual addiction as "…engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self and others." Therefore, people addicted to sex continue to engage in specific sexual behaviors despite facing potential health risks, financial problems, shattered relationships, and even arrest.

Behavioral addictions can be challenging to manage. When sex becomes a problem, it can push people to do things they would not normally do if they were not suffering from an addiction. This workbook is full of assessments, activities, and journaling exercises that can help your clients or students overcome sexual addiction and teach them essential skills aimed at assisting them in repairing problems in their lives caused by a preoccupation with sex.

The Sex Addiction Workbook aims to provide helping professionals with cognitive and behavioral assessments, tools, and exercises to treat the root psychological causes of sex addiction. It is designed to help people identify and change negative, unhealthy thoughts and behaviors that may have led to sex addiction. The activities contained in this workbook can help participants identify the triggers that can lead to a preoccupation with sex and teach them ways to manage and overcome those triggers.

The Sex Addiction Workbook will help participants to:

• Recognize that they are experiencing an addiction problem.
• Reflect and become aware of the behaviors that were part of and arose from the addiction.
• Build self-esteem in positive capabilities outside of sexual behavior.
• Understand the triggers for preoccupation with sex.
• Develop greater self-acceptance and the ability to change ineffective behaviors.
• Understand recurring patterns that indicate a sex disorder.
• Learn ways to live a new life without a preoccupation with sex.

The Sex Addiction Workbook is a practical tool for teachers, counselors, and helping professionals in their work with people suffering from behavioral addictions. Depending on the person's role using this workbook and the specific group's or individual's needs, the modules can be used individually or as part of an integrated curriculum. Use one activity in a group or several assessments in a workshop.

The Five Modules

This workbook contains five separate modules of activity-based handouts to help participants learn more about themselves and their addiction to sex and sex-related behaviors. These modules serve as avenues for self-reflection and group experiences revolving around topics of importance in the lives of the participants in the group.

The activities in this workbook are user-friendly and varied to provide a comprehensive way of analyzing, strengthening, and developing characteristics, skills, and attitudes for overcoming an addiction to sex.

The activities in this workbook are entirely reproducible and can be photocopied and/or revised for direct participant use.

Module 1: Sex Addiction Behaviors

This module helps participants explore their unhealthy and unsafe sexual behaviors, sexual fantasies that trigger thoughts of sex, alternatives to unhealthy sexual behavior, sexual triggers, addiction beliefs, and ways of dealing with emotional pain other than engaging in sex.

Module 2: Social Aspects of a Sex Addiction

This module helps participants explore how their social activities affect their sexual urges, guilt, and shame as an after-effect of unhealthy sexual activities and peer and social rejection. Participants will identify ways to nurture healthy relationships, methods to deal with feelings of loneliness, and steps to building the amount of physical intimacy in their lives.

Module 3: Escaping Emotional Pain

This module helps participants examine how they may be using unhealthy sexual behaviors to escape from emotional pain in their lives, explore their emotions, understand ways of expressing emotions, deal with shame, and break secrecy about their sexual addiction.

Module 4: Loss of Control

This module helps participants observe the times they are no longer able to control their sexual compulsions, how impulses arise, how they can deal effectively with sexual impulses, be alert to early warning signs of a sexual impulse, and use mindfulness to control sexual impulses.

Module 5: A Hopeful Future

This module helps participants discover ways to promote a healthy and productive future, learn accountability, be more grateful, discover a life purpose, promote positive thinking, overcome feelings of denial, start to determine the type of future they want, explore proud moments, and develop a healthy sex plan.

PDF Worksheets - With the purchase of this workbook, you also get access to a PDF download of the included worksheets.

Sex Addiction Card Deck

Using the Discussion Starter Card Deck will break the ice, encourage openness, and help introduce a specific subject. Activity handouts included in these workbooks are reflective, easy-to-use exercises, presented in a variety of formats to accommodate multiple intelligences and different learning styles. Each question corresponds to a page in the workbook.