No, not at all. One of the frequent consequences of abuse in childhood is sexual obsessions / addictions in adulthood.

However, it is very risky to masturbate at work etc. At the very least, be very careful and, better, avoid doing it in risky situations. The last thing you want is to loose your job and risk being prosecuted / put on the sex offenders list.

i am the same way. I have children, so i never get a chance to masturbate. they simply dont allow me time to do it! however, i LOVE talking about sex, i fantasize all the time, i write erotic stories and put them on literotica, i love to READ the stories on literotica. Porn is a rarity (again, kids), but i love to watch it when i can. I talk in adult chat rooms, you name it. i have always been that way, even prior to abuse. im really not sure why. ive learned to tone it down a bit as i have gotten older, but its always on my mind.

Yes, I think this is fairly common. The two things I've seen in abused people is that they either swear off sex for life or they dive into it with both feet. I believe the latter is more common.

It is very common for the female survivors who embrace sex to feel incredibly guilty about it. I really dislike the term "nymphomania". It might apply to very few people but for the most part has been used by men to convince women that their sexuality was vestigial.

As for me, I went the embrace sex route. I have experimented a lot and even in my fifties it is on my mind every day. One of the things I am working on is separating sex from love. To me, loving me is having sex with me. Loving sex isn't a bad thing at all, it's a good thing, but I want to be able to separate love from that so that I can be loved too. If that makes any sense ....

I think it might depend on the type of abuse, the length of the abuse, and who the abuse came from. Due to my abuse I was obsessed with massages and handjobs, since that was my abuse from age 7-14 with a live in nanny. Therapy helped resolve the compulsion once I understood the feelings associated with it.

I too am more sexual than most males my age. I heard of a theory and have wondered if it is valid. It does make sense.

Speaking personally, I don't feel that I was tramatized in any way by my abuse. I was, to the best of my knowledge a willing and eager participant. I was four or five years old when it started. Before the abuse, I had felt alone, unwanted, and unlovable. My abuser let me know I was all the above. Later my ability to seek and find other 'abusers' confirmed my ability to be accepted as I was.

I also found out I could be made to feel very good by sexual stimulation and liked to be able to please others.

I have often wondered if no trauma and some pleasure, connected with the childhood sexual abuse had anything to do with the fact that I have been more sexual and seem to have wanted more sex with more different partners than others. Of course, except on a site like this, one cannot really say things as I have just said.

On the other hand, I am not sure that anyone who was not traumatized or who enjoyed it would need to be on a site where problems stemming from abuse have highest priority. I thought my problems we caused by my abuse, and some probably are...such as my inability to stay monogamous. However, most of my core issues I share with those who were in dysfunctional families but not necessairly abused...at least not that I know of.

I hope others comment..

Ophelia Slipstitch,

Do not buy into other people's labels, not even your therapists.

Is it normal you ask. It depends. Does it interfere with your life in any way? Do you put yourself in risky situations to gain your pleasure? Do you carry guilt as a result of your sexual activities? Is your obsession taking the place of a true intimate and healthy relationship with another person?

Some people express their grief through obsessive sex--are you one of them? Do you know yourself apart from your sexual obsession? Is your obsession about control--that is instead of someone abusing you, you now have control over your sexual self?

Some use sex as a form of self-injury, do you? Are you picking up where your perpetrator left off by abusing your body and mind? Is your obsession a way to regain sexual mastery over yourself as a result of the abuse? Do you feel any shame around your sexual behaviors? Is what you're doing healthy?

I too, became obsessed with sex. And according to one of my cousins could talk of nothing else. I had no memories of my childhood abuse so concluded that I was just a highly sexual person and loved that fact, even explaining my promiscuity away with that belief...I just wanted more than most women.

It took me a long time to realize that my brain had been programmed by the abuse and that my sexual obsessions continued to be an expression of that abuse.

I didn't know what healthy sex was. Do you? If you don't and are curious check out Wendy Maltz's website: www.healthysex.com to find out.

Like I said, Ophelia, I too adored sex but I was very lonely after all was said and done.

xx
SuzA

So I am in the process of working up a theory of my own here. I am an abuse survivor and I have studied human and animal behavior for decades. I'm very much into how brains work and something called Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology.

Here's what I'm starting to think:

Biologically, humans evolved to be highly sexual creatures who used sex less for reproduction and more for social interaction. Partners were shared, orgies we're common, and the gender of one's partner was flexible. The closest thing to this now is the Bonobo chimpanzee.

When we invented agriculture, we made a sociological shift to monogamy and began very tightly controlling sex, mostly for women but also for men. We invented religion to help with this control and added words and concepts like slut, gigolo, fag, dyke, nymphomaniac, sex addict, and so forth to keep everyone in line.

So modern humans are a mix of things. Sociologically, we want to marry as virgins, have babies, and a white picket fence. Underneath, our biology wants to have wild sex with multiple partners. Most of the time, we can control/repress the biology through guilt, social responsibility, or whatever.

Sexuality forms up, however, when you are young and gets somewhat fixed in your head by the time you hit puberty.

What happens when you are abused as a kid is that the more sexual biological side of you is awakened before the higher brain centers have fully turned on to inhibit them. When you hit puberty, this gets fixed in your head.

An abuse survivor now has a big problem. They are much more tightly connected to their sexual side but now they have all these messages telling them that this is wrong. In essence, the order is reversed. One is supposed to get the "sex is dirty" sociological message before actually having sex and before having the sexual centers, which are very primitive, turned on. If you think about it, society makes this very important; kids aren't exposed to sexuality until they are much older -- we hide it from them to the maximum extent possible for as long as possible.

This creates a schism in the mind of an abuse survivor where you like and want something but now have a newer, later, voice telling you this is wrong. You were doing sex, and liking it, before you were taught that it was "bad". This makes one inevitably blame themself for being evil. Self esteem goes out the window because you like(d) something you weren't supposed to like. This messes you up sexually and sociologically. You, in essence, don't fit in with what most people (who weren't abused) think you are supposed to fit into.

In saying this I want to be careful not to give the impression that abuse is some kind of favor that returns you to your natural self. That's not what I am trying to say. Rather, the way we live now, in 2011, is a combination of our biological selves living in a sociological world with rules and standards of behavior. If you took someone from 100,000 years ago and plunked them in New York City it wouldn't take long for them to get into trouble.

Rather, what I'm getting at is that this part of us that gets unlocked when we are abused is so fundamental that it is almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. That's why it is so hard for us. We aren't weak people and we aren't screwed up. We must deal with something that other people do not generally deal with at the level we must deal with it. What seems normal to us is different than what a lot of other folks would consider to be "normal" or, at least, would admit to thinking was normal.

Note also that I think this model fits the case of coercive sexual abuse. Violent abuse has other things obviously going on and I imagine this is much more complicated. I think people who were violently abused tend to shy away from sex. But the people who were coercively abused are attracted to it but then feel guilty.

it is just as common to go to far the other way and like it in unhealthy ways.

I was very violently sexually abused...and am a sexual addict as an adult. I have a lot of guilt and self-loathing etc. I seek out dangerous sexual encounters and BDSM activities and partners. I seek pain, I guess as a way to punish myself etc. I hate it. I wish I knew what a healthy loving relationship is supposed to feel like. I wish I could just make all the impulses I have just disappear and accept being loved in a healthy way.

@bomije

I'm sorry this happened to you.

Thank you for sharing your story. Most of the survivors I know were coerced by family members or caregivers so that's mostly what I know about (my abuse was coercive).

It makes some sense that the same things in one's head get awakened even if the encounter is violent. How one handles that is a question. Maybe it makes the self-esteem issues worse in a way because one thinks that's all that they are good for.

One other common trait I'm finding in abuse survivors is the relationship between sex and love. Either the two things are very tightly stuck together (sex is love) or they are completely separate (sex has nothing to do with love). The bottom line in either case is that it is difficult to experience sex in a loving way.