BPD & Sex addiction

Sex, three letters that have made up a living misery yet total ecstasy for most of my life. Back in the early 00's as a teen, I spent my evenings in my room binge watching Eurotrash whilst my parents slept in the next room. I think they did not realise the world in which they were opening up to a 12-year-old girl by allowing them to have sky in their bedroom or the internet for that matter. I was still their bundle of innocence.

Since that moment in my life, it has plagued my thoughts. From the moment I wake to the moment I rest my head, those three letters follow me around. I yearn for it, to be touched, to be teased, to feel a release. When I was finally diagnosed with, emotionally unstable personality disorder or BPD back in 2019, the puzzle all began to come together. Throughout my teenage and early twenties, it was as though I needed sex to survive, at times I would go in search for it 3 or 4 times a day with random strangers in which I had never met. Looking back on it now I had put myself in some dangerous situations, yet my urges told me to go for it and that I would be ok. My impulses grew and grew until sex was the only thing that I was living for. I dropped out of college four times and could barely hold down a job because everywhere I went, there was always a man involved, everything just became too complicated to stay.

Throughout my life, I have been, stalked, blackmailed, humiliated, degraded and shamed all in the name of sex, yet I still go back for me, over and over when I needed my next fix. Like a drug, it has consumed me, made me feel powerless but at the same time making me feel on top of the world, a moment of pleasure for a lifetime of pain.

To this day, sex is something in which I am still struggling to manage. BPD and other mental health conditions such as Bipolar can be linked with sex addiction or hypersexuality, I am currently not any medication or receiving any therapy for my BPD. I have found that medicine has never been the right path for me. I felt my symptoms worsened with medication rather than help. I have found talking therapy to be a great help with my BPD. I was never offered this service through my mental health team or GP. Instead I found self help my only form of support.

As I get older, I have grown realising that my sex addiction is here to stay therefore instead of fearing it, I am learning to embrace it. It is my uniqueness, my quirk and persona. Others may not understand it, will look down upon it and be quick to judge me about it, but for me, sex addiction is something beautiful, no matter how frustrating to my day to day life it can be. Life in my head is one big orgy, naked bodies, skin on skin all at once and I think I want to keep it that way. Throughout my life, I have always been made to feel I should be ashamed of my sex addiction and my mental illness, but I see now that it is other peoples discomfort in the subject that makes them want me to shut it out, so I can hide it from them and not make them face it. If I keep quiet they do not have to feel it for themselves. Let us embrace our oddness and our quirks, our mental illness and addiction, let us educate the world and in turn gain some understanding because let's face it, no matter how much medication we take or therapy we have our addictions or illness will never leave us, it will always be there deep inside of us, we just have to learn to manage it whilst being present with it all at the time, when in reality we can be at one with it.