I looked up Sex and Love Addiction because I was talking to my friend a couple of days ago and he goes to the Sex and Love Addiction Anonymous meetings.

When I looked up that on YouTube, yours was like in the top four videos that popped up about that topic and you said something interesting in there about how you feel that, well first of all, I think we should probably tell people what is self-sex and love addiction.

These are two separate issues actually.

Sex addiction is the compulsive need, just a second, sex addiction is the compulsive need to have sex, let me put my back up, sorry, I told you I’m compulsive, there you go, yeah.

So sex addiction is a compulsive need to have sex without any emotional attachment or interaction with the sex partners when the sex partner is essentially objectified and used as a glorified animated dildo or animated sex dildo.

It is very similar to other types of addiction.

We distinguish two big groups of addiction, one is called substance addictions and the other group is called process addictions, addictions to process.

So the sex addict is addicted to the process of obtaining the sex, not to the sex itself, that’s something that few people know. He is addicted to the chase, he is addicted to the conquest, he is addicted to the aftermath, he is addicted to a variety of variables that accompany the sex and that’s why a typical sex addict has very brief encounters, quickies in a way, he doesn’t engage in real involved sex and so on.

Sex addiction has nothing to do with love addiction and conflating the two is very not useful.

Love addiction is also a process addiction but it is the attempt to regulate internal processes or to cater to psychological needs by believing oneself to be in love.

Now I’ll break this down, there are internal processes, for example, you have emotions, these emotions can be very strong, too strong for you, they can overwhelm you, a process called dysregulation, you have a sense of self-worth, your sense of self-worth comprises your sense of self-esteem and self-confidence, you need to regulate this, you need to stabilize it, some people cannot, their sense of self-esteem goes up and down like a yo-yo, they can’t control it.

You have cognitions, thoughts, some people cannot control their thoughts, they have intrusive thoughts, their thoughts intrude and they can’t stop thinking specific thoughts.

So as you see anything internal can go haywire, anything internal can go awry or get out of control and there are some people who fall in love in order to regulate their internal environment.

When they fall in love they have a sense of inner peace, oceanic belonging and fitting in, they reduce their anxiety, it’s a kind of anxiolytic like anti-anxiety medicine, they medicate, self-medicate with love, not with a partner, not with a partner, it’s very important, they don’t fall in love with other people, they fall in love with love, with love itself, they need to feel the process of falling in love because it regulates their internal environment and caters to some needs, for example, it raises their self-esteem, so many of them fall in love in order to regulate their self-esteem.

This also applies to sex addiction, many sex addicts engage in sex in order to regulate the sense of self-esteem.

So in both these cases it’s not about anyone out there, the partner is totally irrelevant.

In the first case of sex addiction it is the process of obtaining sex that helps the sex addict to reduce his anxiety, to regulate his self-esteem, to feel good about himself, to avoid depression, etc, and in the case of the love addict it is a process of being in love that does the same things, caters to needs, caters to and regulates internal processes.

The partner is fungible, interchangeable, anonymous in effect, even in love addiction, the partner is essentially a commodity, like grains of rice.

And this reminds us very much of narcissism because the narcissist does exactly the same, the narcissist uses the intimate partner to cater to his emotional needs, the narcissist uses the intimate partner, example, to obtain narcissistic supply, attention, and uses the attention to regulate his sense of self-worth.

But the narcissist doesn’t care who is the intimate partner, he just cares to have an intimate partner, it could be anyone and everyone.

The partner is totally interchangeable, that’s why when the narcissist discards the partner, walks out on the partner, breaks up with the partner, the next day he has another partner, if not the next hour, because the partner doesn’t matter, he’s not there, it’s a figment of fantasy in love addiction, in sex addiction, and in the addiction to narcissistic supply, addiction to attention, known as narcissism, they’re all addictive disorders in a way.

And so it’s very disorienting because when you’re on the receiving end of love addiction, you feel as if you have never been loved before.

Love addiction is hugely intense, and so it’s a laser focus, and you feel that your lover, your intimate partner, the one who loves you, loves you like you have never been loved before. And you will never be loved after.

It’s the most extremely intense form of love.

And so it’s very disorienting to realize at the end of the relationship that it could have been anyone.

You’re not special, you’ve not been chosen, you just happen to be there.

And this is what victims reject, victims of love addiction, because love addiction victimizes, victimizes people.

Same with sex addiction, same with narcissism, which is attention addiction, addictions victimize, alcoholics victimize people all the time. Their nearest and dearest, their family members, you name it, junkies victimize everyone. They steal money from their mothers, I mean, addictions victimize people. They’re not victimless crimes, because when you talk to addicts, they say, why do you care? It’s my body, I’m doing to my body whatever I want. You have no right to tell me what to do with my body.

True, but you have no right to victimize other people, as you habitually do as an addict.

So what is very difficult for victims in narcissistic abuse relationship, in love addiction, in sex addiction, it’s very difficult for them to accept that they are nobodies, nobodies, anyone could have been there in that bed, anyone could have been there in that so-called love relationship, and anyone could have been the last intimate partner.

They want to feel special, they want to feel chosen, they want to feel unique, they want to feel that there was sense and rhyme and reason in all that has happened.

But the reason, it’s totally meaningless, it’s accidental.

So of course the partner of the narcissist, the partner in the love addiction and the partner in the sex addiction, they make their own choices and they are responsible for their choices, and they should learn how to not make these choices in the future.

But as far as the narcissist or the sex addict or the love addict, the partner is Israel, and so we call this autoerotism, the love addict is invested in feeling love, the sex addict is invested in his own body actually, he uses someone else’s body to masturbate with.

The narcissist is invested in his fantasy of grandiose, of grandeur and so on.

And so the partner is just there to uphold the fantasy, participate in it, but these people are inside their heads, they never exit their heads, as far as they’re concerned there’s nobody out there, they’re just using people, they’re users, love addiction is extremely difficult to change or to cure, because it’s really a dopamine rush to be in love, it’s probably the most profound addiction, the most difficult to disentangle, you can go cold turkey or many drugs, you can suffer a lot but you’ll be over them, but love is everything, love has emotional dimension, cognitive dimension, social dimension, you know love is intimacy, love is all day in love, love is such a total solution, you know people say love cures all, which is another piece of nonsense, because they believe that love is a total solution, and so being in love all the time is dopamine rush, how would you give this up, why would you give this up, it’s very difficult to convince the love addict that he’s an addict or she’s an addict, she should give it up, she says I would never give up being in love, it’s the most amazing feeling in the world, when I’m in love the world is in color, when I’m not in love the world is black and white. I want to live, I feel alive when I’m in love, I feel dead when I’m not in love. Why would I choose to not be in love? I want to be in love.

So it’s very difficult to cure this, but the love addict doesn’t love, it’s not love, it’s exploitation and usage, it’s not love, love is about accepting that the other party is separate from you and that together you can enrich each other’s lives by allowing each other to develop independently and to grow independent, this is not love, this is annexation, this is invasion, this is the partner in the sex addiction or the love addiction is an object, absolute object, there’s no love there, it’s a drug, a drug to regulate your mood, your self-esteem, your whatever.

I feel like that’s a definite issue that I have that I didn’t really realize until recently, even when I was having sex with this one person, she said that I feel like you’re not here, I feel like I’m having sex with a robot and that at first hit my ego and I’m like, what do you mean, you think I’m not good enough.

But then recently I realized I have massive intimacy issues, like massive intimacy issues and I’m essentially kind of doing or I am doing what you spoke of. I don’t think consciously or I’m just going to use them but that is kind of what I’m doing but also I feel like I get into these relationships with people who are either codependent and they’re feeding my, they’re being like the sex doll in a sense or we’re both each other’s dildo, sex doll thingy at the same time because my last relationship she used to, I don’t know if this is just like a weird crazy thing or if this is correlated but she would have conversations with my penis and then I felt she was kind of using my body in a sense but then she would talk to my penis, have conversations, like whisper to it and I would say what are you saying and she’d go it’s just between me and him and I thought she was joking and she was dead serious and she would do it all the time.

So yeah this phenomenon is called reduction, it’s when we reduce the partner into a single organ, a single heart.

And of course you know fetishism, fetishism is when we interact sexually with a specific part of the body for example a foot, foot fetishism or a breast or ass or whatever.

So fetishism is a form of reduction

And so when you want to avoid intimacy with the totality of the partner you isolate a part of the partner, an organ you know and then you interact mostly with that organ, it’s in extreme forms it’s fetishism otherwise it’s reductionism and that’s common when both partners have trouble with intimacy.

Now intimacy, we are like to you know going back to the beginning of our conversation where we spoke about self-help and everything, we are like to about this too, we are like to, we are being told starting at a very early age, adolescence and the latest, we are being told that nothing is more wonderful than intimacy, then we should pursue intimacy.

That intimacy is the total solution and the total cure, the panacea if we will only be, if we will only find intimacy we will find happiness, we will find gratification and tranquility for life, we will have, we will become better people, we will grow and develop and accomplish goals, intimacy is the cure all.

This is of course a distorted view of intimacy, intimacy is hard work, intimacy is hard work and it’s an extremely frightening proposition, it’s very threatening.

To be intimate, to be truly intimate, you need to expose yourself totally, you need to be 100,000 million percent vulnerable, because if you’re only 99% vulnerable you’re not intimate, you need to be totally vulnerable and exposed to attack.

And here’s the breaking news in a majority of cases you will be attacked, people will take advantage and abuse your vulnerability in an overwhelming majority of cases.

So intimacy is a seriously terrifying proposition, instead of telling us as children or adolescents, listen, intimacy is risky, in intimacy you need to be 100% vulnerable, intimacy is very hard work, day in and day out, 24, 7, 60 minutes an hour, you need to invest yourself in intimacy, you need to commit to intimacy, otherwise it won’t work and so on, instead of telling us the bad news about intimacy, we are sold a Disneyland fantasy variant of intimacy which does not exist anywhere, like ever.

So people go and search for intimacy and they get disappointed and heartbroken time and again and then they have two options, they can say the hell with that, I’m not looking for intimacy anymore, it sucks, or they say much more commonly, something is wrong with me, presumably everyone else is having a grand time with intimacy and only I can’t do intimacy, so something is wrong with me, I need therapy and the truth is nothing is wrong with you, intimacy rarely works, it is a convoluted mechanism, you need a user’s manual of 1000 pages long in the best case, intimacy extremely rarely works and in a majority of cases you will experience loss and heartbreak and hurt and pain and you will be badly damaged and broken and you will have to work extremely hard and then you will be badly damaged and broken, so this is the truth about intimacy, so why do I advocate intimacy, why do I think you should pursue it despite everything, because it’s good for you to be vulnerable, this is the path to self-love and self-acceptance and self-awareness.

Intimacy is the ultimate form of therapy, ultimate and it’s relatively cheap compared to therapy, it is true intimacy that you are forced to face yourself, you’re pushed to the limits, you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re naked in every possible way, physically, emotionally, mentally, you’re naked, you’re vulnerable, you open yourself up to true information about who you are, which is very often not favorable.

It’s a great exercise at healing and becoming complete, not perfect, no one is but becoming complete, there’s no other pathway, not therapy, not sex, not infatuation and limerence, there is no other pathway, none except intimacy.

It is through the agency of the intimate partner, the partner who is in you in this mess, it is through the agency of this partner that you become you. It’s a process of becoming and it’s your only chance to become, if you never experience real intimacy, you are never you.

That’s not me, that’s eric rome, you’re never you. Do you want to be you?

Now some people say I don’t want to be me because I strongly suspect that I suck, so I don’t want to be me. I want to be someone else. I want to be Donald Trump, I want to be rich, I want to be billionaire, I want to be a playboy. I don’t want to be me and that’s legitimate, that’s another thing we should accept, that many many people don’t want to be themselves, they want to be someone else, they want to play a game, they want to live in fantasy, they want to pretend, fake it till you make it, lie, confabulate, what have you.

We have to accept this, we can’t fight all these battles all the time and win them all. We have to accept that there are such people and stay away if we can.