The Vicious Cycle of Adult ADD, Shame and Sex Addiction
The Vicious Cycle of Adult ADD, Shame and Compulsive Sexuality
Brian is an investment banker in his early forties who, in graduate business school, first began to visit prostitutes, spend money on phone sex, compulsively masturbate and, finally spend as much as 5-10 hours a day looking at internet porn. When sexually acting out, he would feel that someone had turned on his brain for the first time. On the net, he would suddenly feel alive. He had energy and felt the euphoria that sexual immersion seductively provides. His mind slowed down; he didn’t need to keep moving.
Since his teens, he had masturbated nearly every night before going to sleep and sometimes once or twice during the day as well. He was shy in school and dated infrequently, partly from his feelings of inadequacy from the persistent inability to concentrate, multiple failures, disapproval from parents, teachers and peers and the consequent demoralization that contributed to low self-esteem. Undergraduate school had been difficult for him. Complex mathematical formulations from his economics courses were tape-recorded while he fantasized about looking under the girl’s shirt who sat next to him. He was chronically late at classes, his dorm was messy and his clothes were disheveled. He seemed to live in another world.
Once on the job, he loved the thrill, excitement and risk of being a trader, but when he had to sit in boardrooms to listen to his bosses talk about strategy, his “eyes glazed over” with boredom and he entered into an “erotic haze”. He would fantasize about the escort he had been with the night before and anticipated getting home after a long day to get on the chat rooms and look at pornography on the