Sex is the very source of life and a cornerstone of a healthy relationship which makes an addiction to it hard to categorise.

How do you define when the boundaries between normal sexual relations have been crossed into an unnatural obsession?

For Bermuda?s mental health professionals the clear danger signs are when sexual addiction causes problems with a person?s partner.

Dr. Wells Hively, of Ashton Associates, says: ?We eat because it feels really good, we have sex because it feels really good.

?All these things in moderation are just part of the wonderful feeling of being alive and all of them can become an addiction if we do them too much.

?If you say you are screwing your wife ten times a day it?s not an addiction. It?s great for your wife and it?s great for you. There?s no such thing as too much of that.?

It?s only damaging when it?s causes trouble in the relationship, for instance if every time you are out of town and you find yourself looking for a one-night stand.

?The key is does it detrimentally affect your life? Is deceit and secrecy being used to cover up repetitive behaviour from loved ones??

Psychologist Vaughan Mosher Managing Director of Benedict Associates, agrees that healthy sex can be a big part of a relationship but problems occur when the sexuality detracts from the relationship.

He gives an example of someone with a problem.

?I had a client over ten years ago who for months at a time was not having sex with his wife.?

Instead he took solo pleasures in the shower.

?It?s almost humorous when you think about how it became a crisis but we had a severe water shortage.

The guy was taking a of showers and using a of water creating a water crisis.

His wife then had her suspicions confirmed about what the showers were really all about and the addiction was finally addressed.

?His sexual addiction was really very detrimental to his marriage, not to mention his water supply.?

The concept of sexual addiction is controversial in medical circles. The American Society of Addiction Medicine has refused to accept the concept.

But for Mr. Mosher the problem is serious and he is pushing colleagues to pay it attention by distributing US sex therapist Dr. Patrick Carnes? book on the subject called ?Don?t Call It Love?.

?Sexual addiction is often overlooked because there?s a lot of humour around it ? male prowess is prided or it?s seen as a conquest. But it?s a very serious addictive problem, just like alcohol and drugs in terms of the potential ruination of a person?s overall lifestyle. The obsession interferes with work.?

Sex addiction can cover a whole gamut of problems.

?There are so many different varieties of this such as having as many multiple partners as one can. It?s kind of an accrual, treating the woman as an object.?

?How different that is to a male who seeks and finds women as if they are wounded animals and nourishes them back to health.? Sounds healthy?

?However it often is another side relationship from the main relationship, getting involved with a series of other people and making promises but never coming through.?

Another dangerous scenario was shown in the film ?Disclosure? where Michael Douglas plays an employee harassed by boss Demi Moore.

?Where it carries another problem is in the workplace between a boss and subordinate. For her it was all about control, she could have anything she wanted. It was sexual harassment only the gender was the other way.

?It?s a lot of trouble when a boss has multiple encounters with co-workers and it makes for a very different kind of workplace where people all kind of know about it ? number one, two and three and that was just last month.?

?It can be someone whose ritual is to fly away from Bermuda and have a sexual bingeing ? five or six days abroad.

?Then the travel gets more frequent ? there?s a financial price to pay for that for living one?s secret away from where one is.

The furtive traveller could be a series of prostitutes or same-sex encounters for someone who is ostensibly heterosexual.

The thrill of engaging in dangerous behaviour also adds to the excitement with the addiction becoming psychologically dependent.

Dr. Hively says: ?There are guys who prey on young girls, who move from one to another, who are excited by it.

He said such individuals were the equivalent of rock stars or football players who became addicted on the thrill of the sexual chase because there were so many girls available.

Some examples of sexual addiction might not even involve physical contact, such as obsessive internet users trawling porn websites, says Mr. Mosher.

?Some men stay up most of the night after the family have gone to sleep and go off to work with two hours sleep after being on porn sites all night.?

Aside from the financial toll of paying for credit card websites the bigger financial impact is the not being able to produce at work said Mr. Mosher.

?Sexual addiction can be best thought of as a behaviour that is in some cases almost ritualistic. It?s repetitive and seeks to make the individual complete.

?They feel life is not good or exciting unless there?s the next encounter. That encounter occurs but when its over the emptiness continues. That?s what makes it an addiction ? looking externally to be complete internally.?

He said the cycle of emptiness, temporary diversion followed by devastation and then renewed searching was typical of other addictions such as gambling, compulsive disorders or fetishes.

?It?s the insufficiency of self that?s OK for a moment in time.?

What makes one unhappy person choose sex over drugs or gambling is a question Mr. Mosher can?t answer. ?It?s just the behaviour of choice, just like for drug addicts there are drugs of choice.?

Like other addictions the problem transcends race, class and nationality. Men make up the bulk of Mr. Mosher?s clients but he estimates around 20 percent are female.

And as Dr. Hively notes, not even preachers are immune from raging passion.

?It?s continually amazing to use how often you find women in congregations being seduced by preachers.?