How Hypersexuality Masks Dysregulation in Neurodivergent Bodies

What if your hypersexuality wasn’t about desire at all?

What if it was your nervous system—traumatized, neurodivergent, touch-starved—reaching for relief in the only way it knew how?

This is a story about dopamine loops, disconnection, survival, and what happens when we stop performing intimacy and finally come home to ourselves.

There was a time when I thought I was just a hypersexual person.
Insatiable. Sensual. Shameless.
Many of us build identities around that.
And in some ways, it serves us. It gives us power. Language. Access.
Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually, in the quiet—after the orgasm—or lackthereof, after the high—there’s the ache.
The emptiness. The question we don’t want to ask:
If this is what I wanted,
why do I feel so alone?

---

Three years ago, I committed to an indefinite period of celibacy. I didn’t set a timeline. I just knew something had to change.
To my surprise, what started as a quiet refusal became a full seven months of choosing myself.

Sex had become compulsive.
Pleasure was replaced by performance.
The high was followed by numbness.
And the longer I kept reaching, the more I realized I wasn’t chasing intimacy.
I was chasing relief.

The first 2 months of abstinence were unbearable.
Every part of my body screamed to be touched, held, needed.
But underneath that urgency was something even louder:
a nervous system on fire.

---

I started waking up.

What I’d been chasing wasn’t desire.
It was regulation.

And not the kind that lives in erotic connection—
but the kind that lives in neurobiology.
In trauma.
In hormones that most of us were never taught to name.

It wasn’t until after the 7 months of celibacy that I decided to break it— at a play party just days before Valentine’s Day.

Somewhere in that chaotic but intentional blur of dopamine and detachment, I had my first orgy—and it was glorious.

Not because I felt whole, but because for a moment, I forgot how empty I actually was. 

I felt it, in a way I haven’t experienced before.

---

About three years ago, before I knew anything about somatic therapy— or nervous system anything,
I was caught in a loop of self-loathing.
Every encounter that left me empty pushed me closer to the edge of despair.
Not because I wanted to die— and I did,
but because I didn’t want to live inside a body that only felt valuable when it was being touched.

I didn’t have the language for it yet,
but I was trapped in what psychologists now recognize as a dopamine loop—
a state of chronic seeking caused by reward circuitry dysregulation,
common in people with ADHD, autism, and trauma histories.

---

According to neuroscientist Dr. Robert Lustig,
“Dopamine is about the pursuit. It makes you want more.
Oxytocin, on the other hand, is about connection. It makes you feel safe.”

And when you're neurodivergent,
dopamine floods the system fast—but oxytocin may be harder to access.
We feel urgency but not always intimacy.
Excitement, but not safety.
And because the body can’t distinguish between regulation and relief,
we keep going back for more.

---

There were times I’d stumbled into bars two or three times a week, 
not looking for sex—
just hoping to go home with someone,
to be held, even if it wasn’t safe.

And most of the time, it wasn’t.
I said I only wanted to cuddle.
They assumed that meant more.
After the third or fourth time I found myself fighting off someone I barely knew,
I realized:
I couldn’t keep using my body as a bargaining chip for comfort.
I couldn’t keep handing my nervous system over to people
who didn’t know how to hold it.

That’s when I chose abstinence.
Not as a performance of purity,
but as a reclaiming of peace.

---

I thought I was chasing sex.
But I was chasing dopamine.

And what I actually needed—what we often need—was oxytocin:
the hormone of trust, safety, bonding, and emotional regulation.
The one that requires presence, not performance.
Stillness, not urgency.

But studies show that people with autism and ADHD often process oxytocin differently.
We may not produce it consistently.
We may need more touch, more repetition, more time to feel it.
So we default to what gives us a spike: dopamine.
Quick, intoxicating, and short-lived.

---

“When dysregulated, our nervous system will look for whatever pattern helped us survive in the past—even if that pattern is destructive now.”
— Dr. Arielle Schwartz

---

And for many of us,
that pattern is sex.

Not because we’re addicted to pleasure—
but because we never learned what safety feels like without it.

---

I remember watching Diary of a Nymphomaniac and seeing myself in her ache.
Her loneliness.
Her longing for something deeper than what she was reaching for.
It made sense.
It validated my chaos.
But now, looking back, I realize:
I wasn’t addicted to sex.
I was addicted to the momentary silence it gave my nervous system.

---

Now, my relationship to sex is completely different.
It’s slower.
More intentional.
90% less active, and yet I’ve never felt more whole.
I’m not trying to be seen.
I already see myself.

---

What our bodies needed was never more sex.

It needed:

Cold water.
Bare feet on the ground.
A weighted blanket.
A long exhale.
Sunlight on skin.
Touch that feels safe—not expected.
Movement without urgency.
Stillness without guilt.

---

These are not luxuries.
They are nervous system regulation.
They are somatic anchors.
They are how we come home to ourselves
without needing to escape into someone else.

---

You’re not broken.

If you’ve used sex to feel safe, to feel something, to feel anything—
you’re not alone.
You were surviving.
And now, maybe, you're ready to do more than survive.

You get to come back to your body.
Not as something to prove.
Not as something to perform.
But as something sacred.
Something that belongs to you.

---

🖤
VUDUDAHL
Somatic Sexologist | Trauma-Informed Kink Educator
Read more at vududahl.substack.com