Treating a teenager with sex addiction

For more information on teens visit KidsInTheHouse.com

Treating a teenager with sex addiction

I think it’s an important question to decide whether a teenager can be a sex addict and is the treatment any different. We have to be more careful when you start using labels like addiction, or sexual addiction, with teenagers. We sometimes just don’t know whether they’re exploring and whether it will stop until they reach further ages.

Having said that, we do begin to see some teenagers who have the hallmarks of being addicted. I think it’s important, certainly as a treatment community that I belong to, and also just as a culture that we not impose the “sex addict” label on teenager when we are not certain whether or not are they going to have a full blown addiction. We do see some teenagers who are more at higher risk. They tend to come from troubled backgrounds, families with low empathy,a high degree of dysfunction, you know, difficulty with bounding and attachment, not a lot of love going on. Those kids are at higher risk for addiction. So if that teenager is using pot, cocaine, drinking alcohol and compulsively sexual, that probably is a pretty good recipe for that kid to be on the road to addiction.

Certainly at those times we will want to use addiction approaches but we have to be very careful with teenagers. You can’t send a teenager to a 12-step meeting with adults, for example. So the programs have to be specialized to the teenager and the developmental exploration that goes on with kids has to be considered as part of the normative curve before you start labeling everything problematic.

In my practice we have a special program for teens, for example, and so we’re very careful about using labels. We also are very considerate about the possibility that some of their behavior is exploratory. So, what we do is, we look at the high risk behaviors. We help them put boundaries around them, like we would with adult sex addict. But we’re more careful about how we label that and how we introduce that and the support group or the therapy group is run by counselor as opposed to them going to a meeting with other adults.