This then exacerbates and increases feelings of despair and a yearning to escape and repeat the cycle.

The result of this addictive cycle often includes isolation, anxiety, alienation from loved ones, a breaking of your value system, and secrecy, all of which can have a very damaging psychological impact. In sex addiction, shame and despair act as a precursor to the beginning of future cycles, where the need to keep emotional pain at bay leads to mental preoccupation as an escape. Three commonly experienced symptoms of childhood sexual abuse are also cornerstones of sexual addiction: compulsivity (the inability to control your behavior), shame, and despair. The Link Between Child Sexual Abuse and Sex Addiction Called ritualistic sexual abuse, this form of abuse is often justified by the cult’s ideology and may involve nonconsensual sexual intercourse, genital mutilation, or child marriage. Mainly occurring within cults, perpetrators will engage in the sexual abuse of others (sometimes using manipulation, mind control, or drugs) in hopes of achieving a spiritual experience. This type of sexual abuse can range from inappropriate touching, fondling, tickling, and kissing to refusing to use condoms, rape, coerced oral sex, or unwanted rough or violent sexual acts. Physical sexual abuse happens when the abuser nonconsensually engages in physical sexual acts with someone else, often forcibly. Examples of visual sexual abuse include making someone watch pornography, sending or airdropping unwanted graphic images or videos, flashing or exhibitionism, and even engaging in sexual acts in front of others. VisualĮxposing someone to sexual imagery without his or her consent is considered visual sexual abuse, which may typically occur online or at home. But covert sexual abuse can also involve secretly stalking or photographing victims as well. This often takes place in the home, where another family member abuses a child through grooming or covert tactics like emotional manipulation, exposure, and body-shaming. When covert sexual abuse occurs, the abuser derives sexual pleasure from his or her victims unbeknownst to them. Often occurring in social settings, verbal sexual abuse examples include sexual jokes, suggestive comments, name-calling, unwanted advances, solicitation, and sexting.

This type of sexual abuse consists of oral or written words expressed towards a victim that are sexual in nature. Though it doesn’t involve physical acts, verbal sexual abuse is still real abuse. There are actually other forms of sexual abuse, many of which don’t require physical contact at all, let alone being in the same room. While it’s fair to assume that sexual abuse requires engaging in physical sex acts, that is only one type of sexual abuse. This fusion of shame, secrecy, and pleasure has the potential to predispose you to sexual aversion, sexual anorexia, dysfunction, or compulsion, thereby deterring you from developing healthy sexual scripts in adulthood.

They may also experience an overall distrust of their bodily reactions (such as arousal) or physical dissociation (Hunter, 1990, & Long, Burnett, Thomas, 2006). Children who have experienced these positive and pleasurable feelings often report feelings of shame and responsibility tied to their abuse and sexuality.

When attempting to reconcile your abuse, a particularly confusing component for survivors of CSA is the experience of pleasurable physiological responses to your abuse, in conjunction with your emotional and psychological distress. It is not difficult to imagine why those whose sexuality has been impacted are more vulnerable to struggles with intimate relationships and sexuality. It can also draw early connections in the neural networks of the child’s brain that associate sex with power, fear, shame, confusion, secrecy and/or pain. When a child suffers sexual abuse, sexual arousal becomes activated prematurely and can largely impact the survivor’s sense of autonomy over their body and sexual sense of self (Roller, Martsolf, Draucker, Ross, 2009). The sexual functioning and sexual identity in adolescence and adulthood is a particularly vulnerable factor in childhood sexual abuse survivors. “When a child suffers sexual abuse, sexual arousal becomes activated prematurely and can largely impact the survivor’s sense of autonomy over their body and sexual sense of self.” - The Sexuality of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors

Signs of childhood sexual trauma