Harm Reduction in Sex & Love Addiction
An excerpt from one of my research papers “Sex and Love Addiction: The Roots of Trauma in Addiction” which is located under the Explore tab.
Harm reduction is an approach that decreases risks for people who are not at the point in their journey to be incomplete abstinence. Recovery is a process and many times it is a process that deals with severe trauma, emotional pain, and unconscious patterns. The process is like peeling back layers of a spiritual, mental, & emotional onion. It is a process that has stages, downward trajectories, turning points and sometimes during this journey the pain is too much for people to stop the behavior at that time. This is where harm reduction approaches can assist in decreasing the risk of even darker trajectories and increase the chances of life, recovery, and service.
Harm reduction in sex and love addiction aims at reducing the risks to the individual by increasing condom use, contraceptives, and educating on sexually transmitted diseases. For love addiction, harm reduction may look like having laws to protect against domestic violence (which is not a right granted in every country), battered women’s shelters, legal assistance for victims of abuse, protective orders, and no contact orders. Harm reduction techniques for love addiction may also look like education on what mental, verbal & emotional abuse looks like and recognizing red flags or abuse tactics. Understanding the cycles of abuse, creating safety plans, and understanding what healthy relationships are, would all be considered harm reduction strategies.
Harm reduction assists in decreasing neurological damage by decreasing the risk of trauma produced by the addiction. Mental and emotional abuse, contraction of disease, unexpected pregnancies, abortion, and unplanned parenthood are all factors that can increase mental, emotional and social stress for individuals and the people affected by the addiction. Reducing the potential for more traumatic events is a primary tool of harm reduction. “One of the most prominent adverse neuropsychiatric consequences of traumatic exposure is post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a persistent and severely distressing neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by several symptoms” (Burton, Feeny, Connell & Zoellner, 2018; Sherin & Nemeroff, 2011, as cited in Sharma et al., 2020). PTSD changes the brain chemistry and can further perpetuate addiction in the individual and those surrounding them. Harm reduction reduces the potential for children to be born to parents with untreated PTSD, who are emotionally and financially incapable of raising them. It reduces the impact on society, on the family members or foster families who must care for the children, actual or potential. It can reduce the risk of children being raised in abusive homes and continuing the devastating effects of unprocessed trauma.