Virtual Infidelity: Cybersex Addiction

Cybersex has become the new marketplace for meeting anonymous partners and engaging in a fantasy world in which survivors of childhood abuse escape the demands of daily life as well as the pain and shame of past trauma. Compulsive cybersex has been described as a survival mechanism involving dissociative reenactment and affect regulation. It is also considered a “courtship disorder” where in the “high” of being wanted by someone for sex regulates affect and bolsters a fragile self.

The fantasy world of cybersex is a dissociative experience where the rapid turnover of prospective partners creates the allure of invisibility and the aphrodisiac of variety. Intense orgasms from the minimal investment of a few keystrokes are powerfully reinforcing. As with any addictive substance, compulsive cybersex users find that more frequent contacts or more illicit activities to reach the original high of an idealized sexual encounter. In fact, compulsive cybersex participants spend hours trying to locate fantasy partners or recreate role play situations.

Many of these compulsive users are re-enacting aspects of past losses, conflicts, or traumas in order to foster illusions of power and love. In the course of this involvement, the addicts' families, home lives and relationships are left behind in a path of devastation.

Literature Review: Cybersex addiction

Cybersex as dissociative re-enactment

Compulsive cybersex has overt and covert purposes and functions. On the surface, cybersex is a sexual outlet that feels good and releases tension. There is also an illusory connection to another human being that allows a temporary escape from boredom, loneliness, anxiety and emptiness. Heavy users of the internet and compulsive cybersex participants are typically depressed.

On a deeper level, the functions of compulsive cybersex participation are dissociative re-enactments of past conflicts or traumas with underlying motives to resolve unfinished business. Dissociation means that two or more mental processes are not integrated. Dissociation is present when a person engages in secretive or illicit sex on the computer and then goes to bed with the spouse without any dissonance or discomfort. When people are overwhelmed by life experiences, dissociation facilitates alteration in consciousness in which aspects of the self are disconnected. These aspects include behavior, affect, sensation and knowledge.

The survival strategy of dissociation evolved in childhood to manage disparate experiences such as tolerating physical abuse at home, while maintaining capacities for socializing and learning in school. Dissociation, through encapsulation, helps an individual forget overwhelming childhood experiences, which are fragmented and stored in various parts of memory. These dissociated experiences, although seemingly forgotten, leak into consciousness as re-enactments. In compulsive cybersex, it appears that an ego-state has evolved to re-enact unfinished business, while the executive self-parents, goes to work (sometimes), or otherwise maintains a semblance of a normal lifestyle.

Cybersex also functions as a distraction from the burdensome consequences of self-hood, such as shame and perfectionism. Any tension-reducing event, such as bingeing, purging, self-cutting, or compulsively masturbating to cybersex, serves the function to narrow the perceptual field to concrete events and refocusing the attention away from the distressing cognition and affect. Masturbation during cybersex suppresses awareness and expression of emotion (Cooper, Delmonico, et al., 2000).

Computer/Internet Addiction Disorder

The assessment of sexual addiction shows that it is not necessarily the frequency or kind of behavior but the loss of control, or compulsivity, and the negative consequences, that indicate addiction. Cybersex compulsives spend an average of 10 to 25 hours per week pursuing sex online. Although sexual compulsion can include many sexually compulsive behaviors, cybersex compulsives used online sex as their main sexually compulsive behavior, or their “drug of choice”. The following tables illustrate the comparison of Computer/Internet Addiction Disorder and the definition of Sexual Addiction:

Computer/Internet Addiction Disorder

Persistent and recurrent misuse of the computer is indicated by at least five of the following:

1. Experiences pleasure, gratification, or relive while engaged in computer activities.
2. Preoccupation with computer activity, including thinking about the experience, making plans to return to the computer, surfing the web, having the newest and fastest hardware.
3. Needing to spend more and more time or money on computer activities to change mood.
4. Failure of repeated efforts to control these activities.
5. Restlessness, irritability, or other dysphoric moods such as increase in tension when not engaged in computer activities.
6. Need to return to these activities to escape problems or relieve dysphoric mood.
7. Neglect of social, familial, educational or work obligations.
8. Lying to family members, therapists, and others about the extent of time spent on the computer.
9. Actual or threatened loss of significant relationships, job, financial stability, or educational opportunity because of computer usage.
10. Show physical signs, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, backaches , dry eyes, migraines, headaches, neglect of personal hygiene or eating irregularities.
11. Changes in sleep patterns.

Computer misuse is not better accounted for by OCD or a manic episode.