Sexual Trauma and Addiction Therapy
Healing the wounds that drive compulsive behaviours. Rebuilding safety, trust, and wholeness.
Sexual trauma often leaves a deep imprint, not just on the body, but on how a person relates to themselves, others, and the world. For many sexual abuse survivors, addiction becomes a survival strategy: a way to escape, to disconnect, or to manage pain that words alone can’t describe. Behaviours that may look like “acting out” are often attempts to self-soothe, feel something, or feel nothing at all.
At Addiction Therapist London, I work with individuals seeking to understand the link between their history of trauma and their struggles with addiction, including sexual addiction, substance use disorder, alcohol addiction, and compulsive sexual behaviour. Therapy offers a confidential, compassionate space to make sense of complex patterns and begin the work of healing not just controlling behaviour but transforming what drives it.
Understanding the Connection
The experience of sexual trauma can take many forms:
- Childhood sexual abuse
- Coercion, assault, or violation of boundaries
- Emotional abuse, physical abuse, or sexual violence
- Repeated exposure to inappropriate sexual content in early life
- Ongoing sexual dynamics in adult relationships that feel unsafe or disempowering
These events may be remembered vividly or buried beneath years of emotional numbing. But their effects often show up in the present, sometimes in ways that feel confusing or out of proportion.
Common coping behaviours include:
- Using substances to numb memory, shame, or anxiety
- Repeated sexual encounters that feel compulsive or disconnected
- Avoidance of all intimacy or sexual contact
- Disordered eating, self-harm, or dissociative behaviours
- Hyperarousal or shutdown in response to stress, closeness, or touch
These are not character flaws. They are intelligent adaptations developed in the absence of safety. And like many strategies developed under threat, they can become harmful when the threat has passed but the body and brain still respond as though it hasn’t.
How Trauma Can Affect Sexuality and Addiction
Experiences of sexual trauma, emotional trauma, or early developmental trauma can influence how a person relates to desire, consent, pleasure, intimacy, and control. Some people describe feeling hypersexual, others experience reduced or absent sexual desire, while many notice fluctuations over time. For some, these experiences reflect enduring aspects of identity; for others, they function as adaptive responses, ways the psyche and nervous system protect against vulnerability, exposure, or further harm.
Clients I work with sometimes describe:
- Feeling emotionally disconnected or “frozen” during intimacy
- Confusing touch with obligation, validation, or performance
- Experiencing guilt, anxiety, or fear following consensual intimacy
- Moving between avoidance and compulsive sexual behaviour
- Feeling ashamed, overwhelmed, or “too much” within relationships
Addiction whether involving substances, compulsive sexual behaviour, or other repetitive coping strategies can develop when these internal states become difficult to tolerate. In this context, addictive patterns often serve to regulate distress, numb emotional pain, or create a temporary sense of control. Therapy offers a space to understand these patterns with compassion, supporting longer-term integration, emotional regulation, and a more grounded relationship with self and others.
Signs That Trauma May Be Underlying Addiction
You may not use the word “trauma” to describe your history. That’s okay. But you may recognise some of the following:
- Difficulty maintaining trust or intimacy
- Numbness, shame, or disgust around your body
- Sexual behaviours that feel out of alignment with your values or desires
- Recurring dreams, flashbacks, or panic responses
- Feeling “split off” from parts of yourself including sexual, emotional, or relational
- Addictive behaviours that seem unrelated, but help you feel less
These patterns often stem from adverse childhood experiences, past trauma, or unprocessed events from adulthood. In many cases, they are linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and can overlap with substance use disorder or compulsive sexual behaviour. Regardless of origin, they can be transformed.
What Therapy Can Offer
My approach is trauma-informed, relational, and individually tailored. This means we move at your pace. You will never be pushed to disclose more than you feel ready to share. Therapy is not about re-exposing yourself to pain, it’s about creating safety where none existed before.
Depending on your needs, therapy may include:
- Psychodynamic exploration of unconscious emotional patterns
- Psychoeducation on the effects of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and relationships
- Gentle, trauma-informed grounding and body-awareness work to support reconnection at a pace that feels safe (not physical touch-based or somatic therapy)
- Art Psychotherapy for creative, non-verbal processing
- Support to understand and interrupt trauma-driven compulsive cycles, with grounding strategies tailored to your emotional needs.
- Emotion regulation and grounding techniques
- Work on identity, shame, and meaning in the aftermath of trauma
- Referral to specialist trauma services where appropriate
Where appropriate, and with your consent, I also collaborate with trauma-informed psychiatrists, GPs, sexual health specialists, and psychosexual therapists to ensure your care is safe, integrated, and clinically supported.
In my professional opinion, the behaviours we label as addiction, whether sexual behaviour, substance abuse, or compulsive behaviour, are often rooted in experiences the nervous system never fully recovered from. Clients frequently tell me they’ve worked on the ‘symptoms’ for years, only to discover that their deepest healing began when we gently addressed the parts of their story, they’d never felt safe enough to tell.
When the trauma is sexual, healing often includes rebuilding your relationship with touch, boundaries, pleasure, and safety. This is a sensitive process and one that can only unfold and understood in a space of trust.
Who This Is For
You may benefit from this work if:
- You have a history of trauma related to sex, boundaries, or violation
- You are struggling with addictive or compulsive sexual behaviour
- You’ve noticed patterns in intimacy that feel disconnected or confusing
- You experience shame, numbness, or distress around your body or sexuality
- You’ve been told you are “too sensitive,” “too sexual,” or “emotionally unavailable”
- You’ve worked on your addiction but feel there’s a deeper layer to explore
Some clients come to therapy unsure if what happened “counts” as trauma. Others know but have never spoken about it. Some have repressed memories that return unexpectedly; others carry the weight of unacknowledged pain every day.
You do not need a label to begin. If something changed how you relate to your body, to intimacy, or to yourself — that’s enough.
A Note on Gender, Identity, and Cultural Sensitivity
Sexual trauma affects people across all genders, orientations, and backgrounds. For many, the trauma is compounded by layers of silence especially where religious, cultural, or family systems have reinforced shame or denied the reality of abuse.
I work sensitively with clients navigating:
- LGBTQ+ identity and trauma
- Cultural expectations around sex, silence, or marriage
- Religious messaging around purity, sin, or guilt
- Intersectional trauma related to race, gender, or disability
- Neurodivergence and sensory trauma responses
No part of your experience is too complex or “too much” to be held in therapy.
Specialist Therapy in London’s Harley Street Medical Quarter, St Pauls in the City of London and Online
My private practice offers a discreet, professional setting for high-quality psychological care. I offer sessions in person or online, and I work with clients across the UK and internationally. With over a decade of experience as a psychotherapist specialising in trauma, sexual behaviour concerns, and addiction treatment, I understand the layered, often hidden nature of this work. My clients come from all walks of life, each carrying untold stories and reaching a point where they are ready, at last, to begin speaking them.
Healing Is Possible — Even If You Don’t Know Where to Start
You may still be trying to make sense of what happened. You may feel that the past is over, but the pain remains. Or you may have been managing well, until something recent stirred everything back up.
Wherever you are in your process, therapy offers a way forward. This isn’t about fixing you, it’s about helping you reclaim the parts of yourself that were never broken, only buried.
If you’re ready to explore how your history, whether childhood trauma, sexual assault, early trauma, emotional trauma, or childhood abuse may be shaping your present, I invite you to reach out for a complimentary confidential 15-minute consultation.
Book a complimentary consultation or a private therapy session.