“I can’t stop going to prostitutes for sex. I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop. I hate doing this to my girlfriend, but it’s all I think about. After the sex I feel disgusted with myself, but I keep doing it. I’ve tried hard to give it up but I can’t. I want to be a partner, so I hope you can help me give this habit up.”
This was a cry from the heart of 33-year-old Dario who came for therapy to help with his Compulsive Sexual Behavior (CSB), also known as hypersexuality. He was awash in shame and told me about his problem with his head down, speaking quietly as if the low volume would reduce the severity of his self-hate.
Dario was a physically fit, good looking man with a thick mop of dark hair, dark eyes that looked blank and a voice that was devoid of emotion – just flat. He had to step outside of himself in order to report on the part of him that wanted sex all the time, with women who were just vessels for his narcissistic pleasure.
He was brought up in a strictly religious home, that outwardly appeared very abstemious, believing it a sin to want sex, talk about sex, or watch shows that alluded to sexual acts.
Compulsive Sexual Behavior is not About Sex – it’s more about feeling in control
Dario’s mother was a cold fish who only ever took notice of him when he was obedient and made her feel good. That was part of the religious duty in his home. As an adult, he switched roles. He became the cold fish, forcing women to be obedient in servicing his sexual fantasies without resisting, making him feel good and in control.
He didn’t enjoy the personal interaction with the prostitutes. His need for control was never satiated. That’s what made him continue a behavior pattern that made him disgusted with himself; affected his relationship with his girlfriend and colleagues because he had to pretend to be someone he wasn’t.
A recent research article in Archives of Sexual Behavior, May 2025, reported that adults, especially men, who displayed signs of CSB were 60% more likely to have suffered childhood trauma – including emotional, physical, and other forms of abuse (not necessarily sexual abuse as one would imagine) than those not displaying hypersexuality (CSB) These adult men were also more likely to have parents with narcissistic personality traits, whom they had to please and who had the power to influence their child’s sense of identity and self-worth.
Compulsive Sexual Behavior is not About Sex – it’s about narcissism operating in a sexual domain
Dario took on the same narcissistic personality traits in order to feel masterful rather than vulnerable.
These traits include
• Entitlement in sexual contexts
• An enhanced sense of one’s own desirability,
• Low empathy
• Exploitative approach towards partners
He felt an inflated sense of his own desirability, because his mother had made him feel desired, if only to be the one to please her and earn his exalted place in her mind through his skill in doing so.
Dario’s ability and wish to exploit women sexually was also something he took from the model his mother presented. She used him as if he were a possession and therefore justified in him in doing so. Paying women to engage in sexual acts was his way of possessing women for a period of time, with an entitlement to exploit them as his personal property.
He had no problem exploiting his sexual partners, forcing them into sexual acts because he paid them. Nor did he have much if any empathy for them as they were just disposable objects, not humans with feelings. Just as his mother treated him as if his role in life was to please and pleasure her with no reciprocation, he never experienced empathy let alone attuned to as a vulnerable child.
Man wearing angel wings
Compulsive Sexual Behavior is not about Sex – it’s about an attempt to pretend to be ‘pure’ when you are human and subject to the same needs as others
Dario’s childhood’s emotional atmosphere was one of pretense. His parents were outwardly religious in terms of strict observance – using it to control and feel righteous – to mask their need for narcissistic fulfilment that made them feel powerful. He was made to feel ‘bad and sinful’ for being a normal kid in an abnormal household. He came to believe that sexual needs were evil and that he had to overcome them by being overtly wedded to religious rites and practices. He learned to hate himself for having sexual needs that he couldn’t get rid of, and the only way he could manage his ‘lack of control’ was to use prostitutes. He projected into them his apparent badness (prostitutes are considered bad in most societies), hoping that it would rid him of his normal sexual feelings.
Even though Dario was attractive and had girlfriends, he never slept with them – keeping up his religious traditions of no sex before marriage. To his parents and his current girlfriend, he was the epitome of a good upstanding man. His girlfriend often tried to engage him n pre-sex necking, but his libido wasn’t aroused. She worried about her attractiveness. He feared that if he attempted to have sexual encounters with his girlfriend he would be impotent.
Compulsive Sexual Behavior is not about Sex – it is about doing bad things to defy the norms of family and society.
Being indoctrinated with strict religious behavioral norms that made sexual thoughts and feelings evil, Dario’s brain was rewired to experience thoughts and acts of normal sexual attraction and desire as aversive. His libido was only aroused when he got in touch with his sense of badness and trying to get rid of it – by doing bad things (have sexual interactions) with bad people (prostitutes).
Having a narcissistic mother who felt entitled to use him for her own needs, meant that he was fearful of other women doing the same. Women in the real world were likely to be similar to his mother, so he was put off by them. He could only go with prostitutes where he was the boss taking on the role of his mother, using and abusing prostitutes like his mother used him. Prostitutes kept quiet, just as he did when he was used and abused by his mother. He could exercise his narcissism (modelled by his mother) and not care about his abused victim – easing any pang of conscience by paying them off. (just like mom paid him with praising him for doing her bidding).
Compulsive Sexual Behavior is not about Sex – it’s about recoiling from the normal and choosing the abnormal, not enjoying it, and drowning in self-disgust
What should Dario’s therapist NOT DO?
• Don’t fall for making it all about sex as it will only serve to reinforce Dario’s sense of badness and self-disgust.
• Don’t condone it either. Stay neutral.
• Don’t show alarm and fear as if he is intolerable.
• Don’t make him feel like a human freak and shame him, reinforcing his disapproval of himself.
• Don’t try and stop him from his CSB. He must do it until he can transfer his libido to ordinary available women. If you attempt to stop him, or censure him, or hold him to account, you will be taking on the role of the mom who made him feel bad.
• Don’t sent him to any sex addict group or rehab. It isn’t about sex!
What should I as Dario’s therapist DO INSTEAD?
• Treat Dario as a victim of abuse in the context of his family background.
• Engage him in what he is running away from (normal sexual relationships) and what he is running toward (assuming the powers his mother had over him).
• Discuss his childhood experiences as asbusive because he doesn’t recognize it as such.
• Talk about the fears he has of being with a woman in the real world, and the ease with which he engages with prostitutes in the ‘underworld.’
• Help him feel safe enough to talk about his mother in ways that don’t make him feel as he is betraying her.
• Talk about his need to rebel which he wasn’t allowed to do during his teenage years like his peers, and how that might be playing out in the form of CSB.
• Form a therapeutic relationship with him where he can work out his hatred for himself, his anger at his parents and his fear of not being normal.
• Listen attentively for any sign of normal sexual feelings for non-prostitutes and foster it, noting particularly when he can’t keep it going and attend to his fears.
© Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D. 2025
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