Techniques to control and manage Sex Addiction or Masturbation Addiction

Behavior Mastery Training 

Psychiatrist at VHC Dr Parth Yoganandi explains that Behavior Mastery Training (BMT) is a set of techniques designed to help individuals successfully stop their symptomatic sexual behavior. It is built around three primary techniques and serves as a natural bridge from managing behavior toward deeper, emotion-focused therapy (psychodynamic psychotherapy).

1. Risk Management:

Handling Urges: This technique focuses on reducing the likelihood of symptomatic behavior by teaching the person to manage factors that precede urges.

Mapping Behavior: The first essential step is to review specific past instances to outline the sequence of steps, the precursors (early signals), and triggers that start the behavior.

Self-Monitoring: Success requires daily self-monitoring (journaling) of practices, attitudes, and thoughts that affect the likelihood of engaging in the behavior.

Urge-Handling: These skills allow the person to manage strong urges without returning to the symptomatic behavior. This involves reducing risk factors and engaging in a substitute activity (e.g., physically leaving a situation). These skills are always most effective when they are planned in advance and rehearsed.

2. Symptom Containment:

Stopping Harm: Symptom containment skills are actions designed to limit the progression of symptomatic behavior and restart the healing process.

Defining an Episode: An episode of symptomatic sexual behavior starts and is considered ended when the person refrains from the behavior before it produces significant harmful consequences.

Goal: The aim is to quickly bring back the ability to refrain before the behavior creates major harm. These skills are developed to prevent recurrence and promote recovery.

Who It Applies To: This treatment approach assumes that recurrences can be tolerated to some degree. It is reserved for sex-addicted individuals whose behaviors are harmful but not so seriously harmful to others (like masturbating to pornography or visiting strip clubs).

Serious Harm Exclusion: If a person acts on urges for seriously harmful sexual behavior (like rape, sexual contact with children), this treatment is not recommended without behavior modification or specialized medicine, especially if the patient is not sufficiently motivated to cooperate. A lack of motivation too small to justify the high risks.

3. Cognitive Skills:

Changing Your Thoughts: Cognitive skills involve reframing how a person thinks about recurrence and learning how to modify their own thoughts to handle urges. These are most

Reframing Recurrence: A recurrence is not seen as a sign of failure but as a signal that a change in the management program is needed. It becomes an opportunity to learn and improve the treatment.

Four Components of Cognitive Skills:

– Accepting that urges are normal but choosing to modify own thoughts.

– Challenging urges and realizing the negative consequences of acting on the behavior.

– Focusing on the immediate pleasurable feelings from the urge while simultaneously imagining the harmful consequences.

– Visualizing the consequences of engaging in the behavior.

Understanding Recurrence:

The text acknowledges that even with strong motivation, symptomatic behavior can recur.

The Cause: This recurrence is often driven by the same motivations and self-regulatory impairments that fueled the original addiction.

Shifting Motivation: Factors like emotional stress, narcissistic injury (feeling deeply hurt), weakening of internal behavioral controls, and gaps in the external support system can cause the motivation to shift toward resuming the behavior.

When It Happens: Recurrence is most likely when this motivational shift happens to coincide with an opportunity to engage.

Intervention: For symptom containment, the sooner an intervention occurs after a recurrence, the greater the chance of preventing a full reversion.

The ultimate goal of BMT is to shift the focus from controlling the behavior to understanding the disruptive feelings (affects) that cause the urges.