Using Sex to Cope with Nervous System Shut Down

Using Sex to Cope with Nervous System Shut Down

The nervous system is connected to sexual addiction, often in unseen ways. For example, feeling safe can diminish triggers while fight-or-flight can enhance them. In this article I will show how Dorsal Vagal, the most primitive state of the nervous system, influences a sex and pornography addiction.

What is dorsal vagal?

Imagine an antelope being chased by a lion: dilated pupils, gripping fear, explosive energy. Then—bam—gets caught! As the animal realizes it’s game over, its body shifts from fight-or-flight to a state of freeze and shut down as it prepares to die.

Elizabeth Stanley writes about dorsal vagal in Widen the Window, “If the survival brain perceives that fight-or-flight won’t work [to handle a threat], it and the nervous system fall back to the third line of defense: freeze.”

If your nervous system detects serious danger, so much so that it believes the threat to be overwhelming, your body, like the antelope’s, will plummet into a state of freeze and shutdown. This is dorsal vagal.

How does ‘shut down’ happen?

Moving out of the animal world, when I am working with clients, it isn’t (usually) life-threatening predators that trigger dorsal activation. Often, it is someone’s primary relationships, particularly with their spouse.

Relationship overwhelm

Let’s say you and your wife are talking and she begins to open up and express that she doesn’t feel pursued (some of you already feel anxious). And let’s pretend you’ve had this conversation many times before and that it’s never gone well. In fact, let’s pretend this conversation has always ended in a fight.

You begin justifying yourself. “I’ve been stressed and busy lately,” you say. She gets defensive. You get tense. Things escalate and you begin feeling overwhelmed and like you have no control over the situation. Before you know it, you are freezing and shutting down.

Let’s look at another way dorsal vagal gets activated.

Culminative stress

Stress can build like compound interest in your brain and body. To the point where you may break under the weight.

Let’s say you are dealing with a sexual addiction, a broken marriage, being behind on bills, having little to no free time, young children, difficult personalities at work, and poor sleep. This lifestyle can go on only so long before your body checks out and nervous system shuts down.

What does dorsal vagal feel like?

Dorsal vagal is Low Battery Mode. Whereas fight-or-flight is an increase of energy in the body, dorsal vagal is the opposite problem: not enough juice for the system.

In the brain and body

Some of the most important parts of the brain—the thinking parts—get hampered in dorsal vagal. Back to Elizabeth Stanely, “conscious awareness and other thinking brain functions get degraded and may go offline completely.”

She continues,

We lose the capacity to make eye contact and move our head… We lose control of our facial muscles, creating a facial expression that looks deadened… we may also feel like everything’s happening in slow motion… we may lose track of time… We may also experience ourselves subjectively as being outside our body, as if watching ourselves from the ceiling or from across the room.

In the mind

Clients have told me that when dorsal vagal gets switched on, though their brains weren’t working properly, their minds were in full swing, that is their thinking. They may have wondered to themselves Why am I shutting down? Why can’t I get my words out? What’s wrong with me? If only they understood their nervous system.

Sex addicts use sex as an antidepressant

Dorsal vagal is a state of dysregulation. It’s a sign that something is wrong.

Thus, men with a sexual addiction use sex, pornography and masturbation to pull themselves out of that pit, that state of dysregulation, that feeling of hopelessness, exhaustion and shut down. This pattern gets wired in the brain.

The hunt for porn or a woman to seduce offers a neuro-chemical intensity that catapults them out of whatever dorsal valley they are in. A sex addiction, therefore, serves as an antidepressant. But one that has serious side effects.

Conclusion

The nervous system plays an integral role in a man’s struggles with sexual addiction, specifically the bodily state of dorsal vagal. His sexual acting out becomes a way for him to cope and lift himself up, to feel normal again.

Armed with this knowledge, new behaviors and patterns can be cultivated. A healthy sexuality can be forged.