When sex addict is acting-out - he is experiencing three basic types of neurochemical responses: arousal, satiation, or an increase in fantasy or preoccupation with the object/behavior.
Mood-altering behaviors can create the same central nervous system responses as mood-altering substances, and often the behaviors and substances are used in combination.
Arousal can be achieved with e.g.: stimulants (e.g. cocaine, amphetamines), gambling, or participating in high-risk behaviors - all would result in an increase in brain norepinephrine and/or dopamine.
Sedation can be achieved with e.g.: alcohol, benzodiazepines, excessive food consumption, television viewing.
The behaviors themselves can induce neurochemical changes similar to those induced by exogenous drugs.
The arousal neuropathway is about pleasure and intensity. One of the most common methods of stimulating arousal pathways are high-risk sex, or compulsive masturbation to the point of injury.
The numbing neuropathway produces a calming, relaxing, soothing, or sedative process. Compulsive masturbation creates an analgesic experience in the brain.
The fantasy neuropathway focuses on escape through obsession, preoccupation, and ritualization.
At the core of such obsessions is a desire to escape from the world flooded with pain, shame, and trauma (PTSD and Family of Origin Issues).
Combining the arousal, numbing, and fantasy pathways together creates a powerful neurochemical package for the sex addict who masturbates to the point of injury.
Sex addict is able to achieve high states of arousal through the masturbation. When the physical act becomes painful through repetition, cutting, or the combination of inserting physical objects to cause pain, sex addict achieves a high state of arousal followed immediately by numbing and fantasy.
Frequent masturbation and ejaculation stimulate acetylcholine/parasympathetic nervous functions excessively, resulting in the over production of sex hormones and neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, dopamine and serotonin. Abundant and unusually amount of these hormones and neurotransmitters can cause the brain and adrenal glands to perform excessive dopamine-norepinephrine-epinephrine conversion and turn the brain and body functions to be extremely sympathetic. In other words, there is a big change of body chemistry when a client compulsively masturbates.
For the client engaging in compulsive masturbation, they often experience problems with concentration and memory. This is a dangerous side effect of compulsive masturbation and signals that the brain is being over drained of acetylcholine.
This behavior can also drain the motor nerves, neuro-muscular endings, and tissues of acetylcholine and replace it with too much stress adrenalin which is where memory loss, lack of concentration, and eye floaters come from. To fight these symptoms, the chemical levels in their body needs to be balanced.
Behaviors associated with sex addiction do trigger neurochemical reactions similar to those produced by many psychoactive drugs. In other words sex addicts become addicted to the neurochemical changes that take place in the body during sexual behavior.
A key component of the reward circuitry is the mesolimbic dopamine system: a set of nerve cells that originate in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), near the base of the brain, and send projections to target regions in the front of the brain--most notably to a structure deep beneath the frontal cortex called the nucleus accumbens. Those VTA neurons communicate by dispatching the chemical messenger (neurotransmitter) dopamine from the terminals, or tips, of their long projections to receptors on nucleus accumbens neurons. The dopamine pathway from the VTA to the nucleus accumbens is critical for addiction: animals with lesions in these brain regions no longer show interest in substances of abuse.
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