Compulsive Romantic & Sexual Behavior
For adults whose romantic or sexual behavior has started to feel out of control—or whose pursuit of connection, validation, or sexual experience is causing harm. The goal here is freedom, not restriction.
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Caught in a cycle you can't seem to break?
This includes compulsive pornography use, repetitive infidelity, serial romantic obsession, sex or love addiction, or a pattern of using romance and sex to manage or escape difficult emotions. Whatever the specifics, there's usually an unmet need underneath—and that's what we'll work with.
Do You Recognize Yourself?
- Preoccupation with a romantic interest or sexual fantasy that intrudes on daily life
- Engaging in behavior you've tried to stop—and can't
- Shame, secrecy, and double lives
- Promising yourself you'll change and then not changing
- Temporary relief followed by guilt, self-disgust, or despair
- Relationships that keep ending the same way
- Intimacy that only feels possible under specific, often escalating conditions
The Cycle Beneath the Behavior
Often the behavior is a way to self-medicate anxiety, loneliness, shame, or emptiness. Tolerance escalates—requiring more novelty, risk, or intensity for the same relief—and the cycle repeats: preoccupation, acting out, shame, resolve, preoccupation again. Love addiction can confuse obsessive attachment for love; ordinary intimacy feels harder than the chase, the fantasy, or the crisis. Early relational trauma or attachment disruption is frequently an underlying driver.
How I Can Help
We start with psychoeducation on the cycle of compulsive behavior and the role of shame in maintaining it, then take a trauma-informed look at what the behavior is regulating and what unmet need it represents. We'll build distress tolerance and emotional regulation skills that don't require acting out, and develop a genuine capacity for intimacy that doesn't depend on intensity or fantasy. Attachment-focused work helps shift the relational patterns that feed the cycle, with integration of 12-step or other peer support when appropriate—all within a sex-positive, non-shaming framework.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. I work from a sex-positive, non-shaming framework throughout. Shame is part of what keeps the cycle going, not what breaks it. The goal isn’t restriction for its own sake — it’s freedom, and a genuine capacity for intimacy that doesn’t depend on intensity or fantasy.
A useful question is whether it’s causing harm to you or your relationships, and whether you’ve tried to stop and couldn’t. Preoccupation that intrudes on daily life, escalating intensity, and a cycle of acting out followed by shame are common signs worth exploring together.
Not at all. For some people, 12-step or other peer support communities are a valuable complement to therapy, and I’m happy to integrate that when it fits. But it’s not a requirement — we’ll build an approach around what actually helps you.
Freedom is possible
You don't have to keep white-knuckling this alone. Schedule a free, confidential consultation to talk about what's happening and how therapy can help.
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