Sex Addiction and Arousal Templates

Sexual addiction is actually very trendy these days, thanks to the internet. Have you all heard of an "arousal template"? It's basically a fancy word for "what floats your boat." An example of an arousal template would be a adolescent male walking home from school, who happens to look into a neighbors window and catches a couple having sex. If this experience is a sexually powerful for him, that is, it creates a high, he may try to replicate it by looking into other windows or, later, drilling holes in locker room walls, etc.

Not infrequently an arousal template is related to sexual abuse. I remember working with a client who was raped in early adolescence by a man 20 years older than her. She grew up and married, not one, not two, but four different men (at different times) who were all about 20 years older than her.

So the sneaky part of this is that these porn folks on the web understand it. So when you look at porn - I mean, that is, well, I'm sure none of YOU have ever actually seen pornography on the internet, but, you know, let's say your clients may have... so, uh, when your clients look at porn, there are often advertisements for other porn sites that are at the "next level" so to speak. That is a "normal" porn site will show advertisements for voyeur or foot fetish sites in an effort to snag the viewers arousal template, because once they hit that, you're hooked. I once worked with a client whose struggle was looking at pornographic images of women being strangled while under water. There are web sites for that. At least two of them...