Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation

"Traditional approaches to addiction treatment often focus on symptom reduction via left-brain, cognitive interventions as opposed to long- term change via right brain, somatic awareness. This course will focus on the power of affect regulation theory (ART) and, therefore, the healing power of dyadic, embodied, relational psychotherapy."

Affective neuroscience--the study of how emotions actually grow the brain and nervous system--shows that most of our psychological, intellectual, and even physical growth depends on regulatory/attachment patterns we (or more correctly, our brains and bodies) learn during infancy. It also demonstrates how early relational or developmental trauma hurts not just our feelings but our cognitive and behavioral capacities as well, making us susceptible later to psychopathology.

With hobbled capacities for self-regulation, self-reflection, self- differentiation, somatic awareness, and insight into self or others, sex addicts can’t tolerate long-term intimacy. Truly being known by another (lover or therapist) threatens to bring back the shame and self-loathing experienced in repeated losses of emotional attunement with their caregiver.

These findings allow us to understand and treat sex addicts as regulation-impaired due to a fundamental attachment disorder. Traditional approaches to addiction treatment often focus on symptom reduction via left-brain, cognitive interventions as opposed to long- term change via right brain, somatic awareness.

This course will focus on the power of affect regulation theory (ART) and, therefore, the healing power of dyadic, embodied, relational psychotherapy. ART provides clinicians a way of tracking somatic markers in their patients while also working with their clinical intuition and somatic countertransference. Emphasis will be on actual clinical work based on interpersonal neurobiology, the dyadic interaction between therapist and patient and the co-regulatory processes occurring that begin to increase the capacity for human relatedness and dissipate vulnerability for facing pain. Video taped sessions will illuminate examples of different attachment styles.