What is Chemsex Addiction?

Chemsex addiction occurs when a person switches from enjoying casual or even intense substance use in combination with sex to experiencing the effects of addiction. The rewards begin to be outweighed by the consequences. Harm reduction methods can still help and keep a person alive, but they become less effective and maybe just not enough. A person may feel completely dependent on chems to have sex at all. Sex outside of the drug experience may seem lackluster or even unpleasant. The classic signs of addiction like developing tolerance and inability to stop or moderate start to show up strongly. A person may feel like their sexual behavior is out of control. A lot of Chemsex addicts are mistakenly “diagnosed” as “Sex Addicts.”

And that is the primary difficulty for Chemsex addicts, a perfectly normal and nearly automatic human function becomes entangled with something that almost always requires complete abstinence to fully recover. Folks are often trying to moderate one thing and stop the other, while not getting any help with detangling the two. In fact, it is often recommended to put sex on the back burner, or just “wait a year,” but with no guidance about when to approach the back burner, or what to do while you’re waiting.

I’ve seen so many people relapse over sex. They can stay sober while they’re abstinent from everything, but as soon as sex comes back into the picture, all the old habits and mental/emotional/physical entanglements are still there. Sex will only stay on the back burner for so long before it becomes a problem. I like to say that the back burner is where things catch on fire.

This is why we have to bring everything up front and address it right away.