There are fierce guardians at the gate of sexual addiction and intimacy disruption. There is always pain beneath the compulsion and the unconscious origins and coping that drive it.

Sexual compulsivity or addiction is always partly connected to the biological and chemical euphoria—the desire for instant gratification, control over pleasure, high dopamine, and high intensity. The biological sex drive, our climactic origins, becomes an elixir of intensity and ecstatic ecstasy. An instant mood changer. A surge fused with mental attraction, desire, and fantasy, with direct associations to essential attachment needs such as feeling potent, valued, worthy, and loved.

This becomes deeply important to parts of the psyche as a substitute or balm for attachment wounds, shame, and long-held inadequacies and insecurities. No wonder it is so fiercely protected. It clarifies why pornography is never just benign pixels on a screen. It carries relational, psychological, and intimacy impacts far beyond the image itself.

You can use sex, compartmentalize sex, or have transactional sex to cope, manage, or medicate emotional experience—especially what is uncomfortable or overwhelming. You can check out, go numb, escape.

The problem, as with all addictive attachment, is that you always come back down. The familiar feelings return. Reality reappears. What temporarily placates the attachment void quickly dissolves.

In Jungian language, numinous refers to an experience that feels larger than the ego, a release, a transcendence, something sacred or charged with great power.

Sex becomes hijacked as the numinous imposter—a counterfeit form of intimacy that imitates spiritual or relational wholeness but leaves you emptier, more fragmented, and more disconnected afterward.

The addiction cycle has long since lost its original efficacy. Keeping it secret and hidden from yourself, your partner, and those you love creates profound harm. The ongoing combination of acting out and dishonesty will eventually erode, and often destroy, what holds real relationship and intimacy, meaning, and value.

Denial is one of the most potent guardians. It insists sex is not the problem and easily rationalizes, justifies, minimizes, gaslights, or shifts blame elsewhere. The challenge with denial is that denial is not aware of being denial. It is often too threatening to self-examine or to acknowledge the harm that has been done — and continues to be done.

The protectors have many roles. They can be entitled, self-absorbed, slick, charming, manipulative, lacking empathy and self-awareness. Some become highly skilled at lying or keeping secrets to avoid exposure and consequences.

In general, these protectors are overly zealous. While intelligent, they are emotionally and relationally impulsive, impatient, and immature. They are out of control, want what they want, do not trust, and often act with a sense of impunity. Listen to your partner — they are the most direct mirror for seeing how these parts show up in the relationship. They undermine intimacy and are unaware. 

Start where you are. Gestalt therapy describes the paradoxical theory of change, which teaches that change begins when you fully identify with and accept your present experience, rather than attempting to force yourself into who you think you “should” be. We will clarify your individual and relational recovery goals. Recovery begins to give rise to a self capable of honesty, a self capable of intimacy, and a self capable of living from integrity rather than compulsion or fear.

You may arrive feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of urges, secrecy, or compulsivity. You may feel emotionally shut down. You may feel trapped between the fear of being discovered and the fear of being alone. You may be entering a serious crisis after your partner’s discovery or confrontation. Wherever you begin, I meet you where you are, without shame or judgment. There are clear underlying reasons for why you have arrived at this difficult place.

This work is not simply about reducing symptoms or willful sobriety. It is a deeper, attachment-based, relational, and often trauma-informed recovery process. You begin to understand the internal dynamics that shape your choices, reactions, and patterns of intimacy disruption. You develop new coping strategies for emotional discomfort and overwhelm. A number of balances and counterbalances begin to shift: from denial to self-awareness, dishonesty to honesty, addictive control to surrender, avoidance of accountability to responsibility, distraction to presence, isolation to community, and shame to self-acceptance.

We draw from Internal Family Systems parts work, Gestalt relational practice, mindfulness, Attachment Theory, Jungian depth inquiry, and trauma-informed relational perspectives. As your self-understanding expands, shame begins to loosen. Your internal system becomes less reactive, less defensive, more grounded. This shift opens the door to meaningful change—not quick fixes, but sustainable recovery rooted in emotional clarity, secure attachment, and a more honest relationship with yourself.

As recovery deepens, certain inner movements begin to take shape. These shifts are not forced; they arise from awareness, accountability, and the willingness to stay present with yourself. Recovery becomes a series of balances and counterbalances — forming new patterns of response and new ways of coping with life’s stressors.

Develop an understanding—and a lived experience—of real intimacy in your relationship, one that allows genuine connection and secure attachment. Sex becomes an expression of fuller contact and love, passionate and connective rather than compartmentalized or disembodied. Intimacy invites the vulnerable parts of the self to come forward, the parts that long to be known, valued, and understood, without being overtaken by the protectors that once kept you safe. It is the movement between individuation and mutuality, shaped by clarity and the ongoing negotiation of boundaries and needs, and grounded in the honesty, presence, and emotional awareness that make real connection possible.

My approach integrates Attachment Theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Internal Family Systems (IFS parts work), Gestalt relational practice, Jungian Theory, mindfulness-based teachings, somatic approaches including Brainspotting, and trauma-informed couples work. The purpose of this integration is to support movement from rupture and confusion toward honesty, emotional clarity, secure attachment, and the possibility of renewed intimacy.