Take an hour, take the last three times, and write each one backwards from the act to six hours before it. What you're looking for is the earliest step that repeats, because that's the point where the sequence is still made of choices. Everything after it runs closer to automatic, which is why holding the line at the end keeps failing.
The four stages, and what they are actually worth
The standard vocabulary in this field describes a cycle in four parts: preoccupation, then ritual, then acting out, then the crash that follows. It's a description that has become near universal in treatment settings and in fellowship rooms, and it's genuinely useful as a map.
Be clear about its status, though. It's a descriptive model rather than a validated diagnostic sequence, and it isn't part of the ICD-11 criteria. What the diagnosis does describe is [a persistent pattern of failure to control repetitive sexual impulses, with numerous unsuccessful efforts to reduce it](https://www.findacode.com/icd-11/code-1630268048.html), continuing despite consequences. The cycle is a way of getting granular about where that failure of control actually happens.
Use it the way you'd use a map somebody else drew of a town you live in. Helpful for orientation, and your own version is the one that matters.
Stage one: preoccupation
The stage nobody logs, because it doesn't look like anything.
Attention starts to tilt. You notice people differently. You're rehearsing scenarios in gaps between tasks. You're not planning anything, and there's a low hum in the background of the day that wasn't there last week.
It usually starts somewhere unrelated to sex. A row you swallowed. A rejection. A stretch of work you're dreading. A run of bad sleep. Sometimes something good that you don't know how to sit with.
What makes preoccupation hard to catch is that it's deniable. Nothing has happened. You haven't done anything. And that's precisely why it's the best place to intervene, because intervening costs almost nothing at this point.
The tell to look for is not the content of the thoughts. It's the change in your attention, and usually a change in how you're talking to yourself.
Stage two: the ritual
The run-up. The sequence of small, individually harmless, entirely deniable actions that reliably ends somewhere.
Reinstalling something "just to see". Taking a route home you don't need to take. Leaving the house at half nine with no errand. Getting cash out. Charging the phone next to the bed rather than in the kitchen. Opening a conversation you know where it goes. A drink you weren't planning. Staying up an hour past when you were tired.
Each step feels optional. Each step, individually, is defensible. That's the design of the thing.
Sex Addicts Anonymous gives this the name middle circle: [behaviours that may lead to acting out, or that you're not sure about](https://saa-recovery.org/our-program/sobriety/). The exercise of writing that circle out and reading it to another person is the most useful hour available to you this week, precisely because it turns a deniable sequence into a named one.
By the end of the ritual, the decision is essentially made. The willpower you're planning to deploy at the door is being asked to do a job that was lost two hours earlier.
Stage three: acting out
Shorter than the run-up, and frequently reported as less satisfying than the preoccupation promised.
Two things are worth noticing here honestly. The first is that many people describe the hunt as carrying more of the charge than the act. If that's true for you, the target is the ritual, and it changes what you build.
The second is that the ICD-11 criteria include continuing the behaviour ["even when they derive little or no satisfaction from it"](https://www.findacode.com/icd-11/code-1630268048.html). If you've been doing something you no longer particularly enjoy, that isn't a strange contradiction. It's part of the described picture.
Stage four: the crash, which loads the next one
Shame, self-disgust, promises, sometimes a purge of accounts and a very large resolution.
This is the stage that makes it a cycle rather than a line, and it's the one worth understanding most. The feeling after is not mild regret. It's contempt directed at who you are, and it's unbearable, and the fastest available relief from it is the same behaviour that produced it. Research on men in residential treatment describes shame as ["a well-documented consequence"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29333201/) of compulsive sexual behaviour that increases the likelihood of relapse.
Which means the punishment you administer in stage four is not a consequence. It's the fuel for the next stage one, usually within days. [Shame, and the loop it keeps running](/guides/sex/shame-and-the-loop-it-keeps-running) takes that apart properly.
Writing your own, in an hour
Paper, not a phone. Somewhere you won't be interrupted.
- **Take the last three times** and give each one a page.
- **Work backwards.** The act. Then the hour before. Then the three hours before. Then the day. Write every step, however trivial, in order. Include the boring ones: what you ate, when you last slept properly, who you spoke to, what you were avoiding.
- **Go back further on the third page.** What was the week like. What happened that you didn't say anything about.
- **Lay the three pages side by side** and mark every step that appears on more than one.
- **Circle the earliest repeated step.** That's your line.
- **Write down the feeling at that point**, in one word. Not what you did, what you felt. That word is what the whole sequence is regulating, and it's the thing you eventually need another answer to.
- **Read the whole thing to one person.** Or, if there's no one yet, read it out loud to the room. The map stays theoretical until it's been said out loud.
Two rules while writing. No commentary and no verdicts. The moment the page becomes a place where you tell yourself what you are, you'll stop keeping it, and you'll have destroyed the only honest record you had.
Where to put the interruption
Once you have the line, three things follow.
**Friction goes at the line, not at the end.** If the earliest repeated step is unlocking a specific app, the block goes there. If it's getting cash out, that's a banking change. If it's a route home, it's a different route. [Cutting off access: apps, cash and contacts](/guides/sex/cutting-off-access-apps-cash-and-contacts) has the four routes in order, and the passcode belongs with somebody else.
**A person gets told about the line.** Specifically. "If I mention being at a loose end on a Thursday, that's the one." A line that only exists inside your own head is a line you'll renegotiate at the exact moment renegotiating it matters.
**The one-word feeling gets a different answer.** If it's loneliness, that answer has people in it. If it's dread, it's usually one specific unopened thing. If it's the flatness after a good day, you need a different way of marking one. This is the slow part and it's the part that actually changes the pattern rather than delaying it.
Then keep the map current. Rewrite it in a month. Sequences change shape once you block the obvious routes, and a map of a route you closed in August is not much use in October.
If the shame around any of this goes somewhere darker, Samaritans is on 116 123, free, any hour. In England, 111 and option 2 reaches urgent mental health support.
Common questions
**What are the stages of the sexual addiction cycle?** The standard description has four: preoccupation, ritual, acting out, and the shame crash that follows. It's a widely used clinical map rather than part of the formal diagnostic criteria, and its value is in helping you locate the earliest interruptible point in your own version.
**How do I catch it during preoccupation when nothing has happened yet?** By watching your attention rather than your behaviour. The reliable early tells are usually a shift in what you're noticing, a change in self-talk, and a specific restlessness. Naming the shift out loud to one person is the intervention, and at that stage it costs almost nothing.
**What if my cycle doesn't have a clear ritual?** Then it's shorter than you think and probably anchored to a place or a time rather than a sequence of actions. Log location and hour for two weeks and the anchor tends to appear. Some people's version is genuinely three steps long, which makes friction more important, not less.
**Isn't analysing it just another way of thinking about it?** It can become that, which is why the map is an hour's work and not a hobby. Write it, act on it, put it away. If you find yourself endlessly revisiting the detail, that's worth mentioning to whoever is supporting you.
**Do I need a therapist to do this?** No, and it's better with one. The mapping is straightforward to do alone. What's harder alone is the seventh step, saying it out loud to another person, and the last one, finding a different answer to the feeling at the line.
Sources
- [SAA on sobriety](https://saa-recovery.org/our-program/sobriety/). Inner, middle and outer circles, with the middle circle defined as behaviours that may lead to acting out.
- [ICD-11 compulsive sexual behaviour disorder entry](https://www.findacode.com/icd-11/code-1630268048.html). Repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce the behaviour, and continuing when deriving little or no satisfaction from it.
- [Brem et al., Mindfulness, 2017](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29333201/). Shame as a documented consequence of compulsive sexual behaviour that raises the likelihood of relapse.
