Withdrawal symptoms for female sex addiction can be quite severe and include physical symptoms. The women dealing with withdrawal symptoms for female sex addiction have to deal with a variety of physical symptoms including insomnia and sleeplessness, flu-like symptoms possibly including vomiting, and symptoms of deep grief and sadness. Also included on the list of symptoms are extreme irritability and restlessness, craving, shame, or guilt. Another set of withdrawal symptoms listed all of the above in addition to:

• loss of interest in life
• chills
• heart palpitations
• tremors and shaking
• constipation
• feeling raw
• hyperactivity
• anger
• inability to think straight
• confusion
• feeling numb
• fatigue
• bad dreams
• emotional instability
• aches and pains
• inability to concentrate
• hypersensitivity
• despair
• boredom
• loss of energy
• physical and emotional discomfort
• insecurity

These symptoms can come and go, or change from one extreme to the other.  A female sex addict in withdrawal can feel like they’re going insane. There can also be a sense of loss because the addiction has been the addicts’s “best friend”.  The worst of the symptoms usually start to taper off in the second week or so of abstinence, but until they do, they symptoms need a detoxification process much like that gone through by those using drugs and alcohol.

Working with a skilled therapist in addition to going to 12 step meetings are helpful, if not crucial, for women dealing with this painful process.  Love addicts can choose to go through this process when they reach the depths of despair and hopelessness engendered by the disease of female sex addiction. Other times they go through it involuntarily, when their partner, often a love-avoidant one, abandons them because of their behavior.

One of the problems that love addicts (or those with female sex addiction) face is that no one person can give them the ongoing unconditional love and acceptance the female sex addict seeks.  This can cause the female sex addict to cycle through a series of highs and lows which usually end in severe disappointment.

Female Sex addicts are seldom comfortable in their relationships and pursue a series of very intense  relationships. These relationships become more important to them than their job, children, and even self-care.  The relationships themselves seldom provide intimacy as such; rather, they provide the basis of a fantasy that doesn’t come close to reflecting the reality of their partner.

By the time they come for treatment, many sex addicts are in such deep depression that they need antidepressant medication in order to give them some sense of stability while they work through the issues that they come in with. By this time, the physical consequences of sex addiction are often also manifesting themselves and the female sex addict may be having to deal with physical illness caused by stds and the consequences of inadequate nutrition and the abuse of drugs. Some also need the consequences of physical abuse healed.

The symptoms of withdrawal from female sex addiction are many.  They include psychological, social, and physical problems caused by the years of neglect of self, jobs, and relationships.  The women who are caught up in the life of a female sex addiction need to repair the mess they have made of their lives and learn, some for the first time in their lives, to construct healthy intimate relationships with other people that are based in reality, not in their fevered imagination. This takes a lot of hard work and a relationship with a good therapist will make it much easier.

Something else that female sex addicts need to do is to break the “code of silence” that has consumed much of their lives.  This silence is not born out of respect for one’s partner, as is the case with Islamic families, but out of fear.  This fear can become overwhelming and paralyzing in some respects.  It is not a specific fear, but a generalized fear. In some cases this is the way these women grew up in a household where no one ever talked about anything because one or both parents were caught up in their own addictions and so were unavailable to the young girl.

Some researchers believe that the sex drive is even stronger than the drive to eat when hungry.  It is known that rats will brave an electric shock in order to get to a rod that stimulates the pleasure centers in their brain.  Even starving rats, on the other hand, will not brave an electric shock in order to get to food. This argument, applied to humans, would seem to indicate that the consequences of developing an addiction and then stopping without replacing that addiction with something that stimulates those same pleasure centers will be highly traumatizing to the person who does it.