Category: Addiction
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Treatment for Pornography ‘Addiction’ to Recover Mental Health
Treatment for pornography ‘addiction’ is increasingly in demand. Compulsive use of harmful pornography can be destructive to your mental health, your relationships, and your sexual functioning. The Internet and smartphones have exposed an entire generation to violent, abusive pornography from an early age. Realising you have a problem with using pornography might lead you to…
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How to Treat ‘Sex Addiction’: The Role of the Therapist
Is sex addiction really a legitimate mental health problem or just an excuse for sleeping around? That was the question Tom Tilley used to open the Hack Live Sex Addicts programme shown on Australia’s public tv broadcaster the ABC this week. I’m sure a lot of viewers were hoping to get a handle on their…
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Treatment for Pornography: From Disease Model to a Response by Men
Treatment for Pornography Addiction often focusses on the act of watching pornography and assistance to try to reduce the ‘behaviour’. But if such an approach doesn’t work, what are the alternatives and why don’t we hear more about them? I’ve been working with concerns about addiction to pornography for a number of years now. When…
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Healthy Sexuality and Sexual Addiction: Two Ideas Worth Exploring
I was recently contacted by a student who was writing a paper about ‘sexual addiction’ for a college course on sexuality. As a counsellor and therapist in private practice, I’m not usually in a position to offer so much assistance to students (I receive many requests and my time with people is my livelihood) but…
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Can I see a Medicare Provider for Porn Addiction? Do You Accept Health Insurance?
As a counsellor and therapist specialising in pornography use problems, these are questions I am asked often. Both men and women contact me seeking help, either for themselves or their partners, around use of pornography and dating websites. Sometimes they are concerned or convinced there is a mental health or medical condition involved and want…
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Is this Sex Addiction? Questioning ‘Sex Addiction’ in Therapy and Counselling Conversations
This paper examines the concept of ‘sex addiction’, and its increasing popularity since the emergence of AIDS in gay communities in the 1980s. Adopting narrative therapy’s ethical orientations of decentred yet influential positioning, and being in a ‘lifelong apprenticeship’, the author worked with a number of men to renegotiate their relationship with ‘sex addiction’ in…