My Sexual Addictions and the whole story........

I have finally plucked up enough courage to broadcast myself. I really did not know which section of the Forum to put this in as it seems that my problems are all over the place. I am putting it in 'Sexual Addictions' and 'NPD'.

I left work in April 2010 after having a mental breakdown due to my worsening OCD and other mental problems. I have received psychiatric treatment for the past three years and I have been told that I have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (an Unprincipled Narcissist) which has made my OCD worse and caused me to be very depressed. I also feel that I have a form of sexual addiction.

I have had CBT therapy and Psychiatric therapy under a psychiatric unit. This has now finished as I only had a fixed number of sessions. I was told that the NHS could not offer any help for my sexual problems. This has made me very angry as I do not feel that it has helped. It has just been an NHS box-ticking exercise and I now feel totally abandoned. I have been told that the NHS is no longer able to help me but help may be available privately. I cannot afford to go privately as I have not worked since my breakdown. I see my GP on a monthly basis but feel that she is only performing another box-ticking exercise.

I have been on medication since April 2010; 250mg/day Chlomipramine with 7mg/day Risperidone, then Olanzapine and I am on now on Sertraline 100mg/day. I have had unpleasant side affects with some of these.

I have anger management issues as I find my day to day coping with my NPD and OCD a struggle which I cannot deal with. My OCD means that I cannot touch things without washing my hands afterward repeatedly. I have morbid and obscene thoughts all the time which means I cannot walk about, switch lights, doors, stairs, anything at all until I have the right thoughts, which are very hard to find. If I try to ignore them, my stress and anger level increases and I have a tightening sensation in my chest and I feel sick. At times like these I lose interest in what I am doing (if I even start it) and give up.

Whenever I meet people I just feel hostile and am ready for any attack they make. If somebody looks at me in the wrong way or says something, I cannot stop myself from snapping back at them and being rude and aggressive. I sometimes push things in shops or slam doors open or closed. I feel very aggressive and want to break things and I try to suppress this by talking to myself when I walk around. I swear at things loudly and people under my breath in a way that means I can just be heard, but people cannot be sure that I am talking to them. I feel very anxious when meeting people as if they know what my problems are so I attack them to warn them away. I know that if I hit somebody I will be in trouble so I have to walk away. It is better to avoid people in the first place. They are always against me and I cannot allow them to beat me. They will be nasty to me sooner or later so I have to protect myself. My thoughts wander all over the place and I sometimes have bad thoughts about what I would like to do to people who are my enemy.

Sometimes I am so depressed that I have to try very hard not to hurt myself. When I have the bad thoughts, I have to punish myself by hitting myself and cutting myself. I have also burnt myself with an iron. When I cut myself I like to see the blood because I know that the badness is running out of me for a while. I find it impossible to get motivated and get more and more depressed. This makes my OCD worse and my anger increases. My anger started as a coping strategy but is sometimes out of control. When I told my Psychiatrist that I hoped that somebody would break into my home so that I could use my shotgun, they carried out a Police check on me. I am scared that I will be put into a situation that makes me so angry that I will not be able to control myself.

My NPD and OCD includes sexual obsessions which upset me and yet I often find it very hard to behave in an appropriate manner. My sexual obsessions mean that I look at women in a sexually intimidating manner. I look at their breasts or between their legs not caring if they see me looking or are offended because I have no thought or regard for them. It gives me a feeling of power and control. I have to avoid women because my anger sometimes feels sexual. I have sexual urges which I find difficult to control. I would never physically hurt anybody but cannot stop myself from intimidating them. I have sexual thoughts about my loved ones so I have to punish myself.

I have several sexualised websites on which I post photos of me nude or having sex with women I have photographed. I cannot stop looking at pornography and feel the need to masturbate often. My psychiatrist says that these issues are deep within myself and feels that they may have contributed to my NPD and OCD. She thinks that I channel the disturbing sexual thoughts which go along with my OCD into ones that I can control ie. exhibitionism and pornography etc. It seems that when I am sexually charged I am more confident for a while but when they go I am left feeling more desperately depressed than ever. I have visited sex clubs and taken part in 'greedy girl' events. I love my wife and have never been inside another woman although I like to have them perform oral sex on me. I like to ejaculate over them and this does not feel as if I am being unfaithful to my wife because they are doing it to me, not me to them. I have recently masturbated a man at a sex club and that does not feel like being unfaithful as I know that it is not really me. I do not find the male body attractive at all but I like to look at penises, usually in relation to hetero pornography. When I masturbated that man, I put myself into the mind of a porn actress and enjoyed the control I had over him. I am hostile toward men and so I enjoy having the power. It is my way of exercising control. Some kind of controlled aggression. I sometimes park my car in a quiet place and masturbate whilst reading pornography. If a man makes an advance to me, I attack them verbally and can hardly control my hate. It seems that most of the time I think that I either want to hurt people or have sex with them.

I regret not making more of of my CBT session with my first counsellor. I found her attractiveness to be too much of a distraction and I would be sitting in front of her not really taking in what she was saying but imagining ejaculating over her legs and face.

I find myself thinking about how I would kill myself. I can be sitting watching TV and when I have to keep rewinding the programme because something is said or shown on the TV which my OCD will not let me get past, I get so depressed that I wonder if certain things around the house would take my weight if I tied a rope to them. The only thing that stops me from doing something like this is the thought of my family. I then feel so depressed and empty that it is usually then that I have to go and look at some pornography and masturbate.

I really cannot see anything in my life that is good for me except my wife, daughter and my parents. I love them so much and would never hurt them but they find it difficult to understand me, although they try. Without them I think I would do something to hurt myself badly or worse.

It seems that my NPD and OCD are controlling my whole life and I do not know what I can do about it.

There. I have said it.

I am not at all a professional, but that is obviously some heavy stuff. Congratulations on at least recognizing there is a problem. You seem to have a fairly strong grasp on your issues. Please don't do anythign drastic. One thing i've been trying to do is to find another focus for my attention. A lot of my "issues" have arisen simply due to being bored. It killed time and gave me a high all at the same time. Also, the first step is recognizing your own value. There are worse people than you out there and many of us battling this addiction. You aren't alone. If you can convince yourself that you are inherently good, that will be half the battle. A big reason i have this addiction is because ive had low self esteem and worth... The sex is a mechanism to make up for that. At least in my case.

Anyway, good luck. Hope things continue to improve on your end.

Hang in there buddy.
I too am fighting this illness.

I've been where you are, except with Bipolar Disorder and sex addiction. My recommendation is to patiently persist with medication adjustment and therapy, and forums like this. It took me 20 years to find the right balance of medications that stabilized my BD.

It's not like my life was hell for 20 years. The first meds I took at the start of the journey helped a lot! But I had to allow the various psychiatrists I saw over the years keep twiddling, to get to where I hardly notice my BD anymore.

Of course, medication changes were always uncomfortable. At least 3 months of feeling like a Martian wrapped in cotton batting (weird, but that's how I think of it), with icky side effects, before my body adjusts and I can begin to determine if the change was any good. But by staying the course, I got there.

Still, for the first half of that journey, I was quite a bit like you, with intrusive thoughts and strong drives. Very strong! I know OCD is strong, but full-blown mania is certainly no weaker. My life crumbled more than once under the force of this disease.

But now I'm much better, and I plan to be better still.

Some advice, don't think you are all that shocking, inside. It gives your hypersexuality too much power to imagine that it is shocking. It's not. There are 7 billion people in the world. 1 in 200 has severe OCD. Dividing 7 billion by 200 give you 35 million people with severe OCD. I don't know what the prevalence of hypersexuality is, but I do know one thing, the pornography and prostitution industries have never suffered from lack of demand!

Still, let's say 80 percent of people will severe OCD have no sexual component to their obsessions and compulsions (I doubt it's that rare, but the 80/20 rule is at least some basis for a guess). That still leaves 7 million "yous".

So there are millions of people who struggle with what you struggle with, and make out just fine in the end. Some of that "7 million" number don't make it out fine, but you are here, in this forum. You are already looking like someone choosing to do what it takes to make out well. Keep it up. Millions of other people before you have overcome this, and millions more will after you. And you're not alone. Tons of us are working on the same issues right now. I was like you, 20 years ago, and I'm much better now. It can happen. I think it happens more often then not, among those of us who put our minds to it.