Hey onesmartcookie39. For one thing good for you for being able to write about this. I've had the exact same problem with my mom when it came to any kind of physical contact for years… and the only explanation is the emotional incest thing. I know how hard it must have been to write about it because I've spent the past 3 years (or maybe more actually) wanting to talk about it in therapy, occasionally being able to work on it to some extent and then not being able to so much as allow myself to think about it for months on end… so no it's not easy but you don't have to be afraid of it defining who you are.
Having a sex addiction is not the same as having BPD. You have to match 5 out of 9 criteria in order to qualify for BPD and a sex addiction isn't even one of the criteria (although it could potentially fall under "impulsivity in at least two areas…". Now granted, that being said, I myself have BPD so I'm not sure to what extent my own experience is relevant to yours because I'm not sure how much of it was BPD related and how much of it was BPD-mother-related.
Back when I was sexually active (I stopped IRL 3 years ago and all together a year and a half ago) there was a long stretch of time where I
thought that I loved sex and I
thought I was open to it because I most certainly
appeared to be drawn to it and open about it. Then, about 3 years ago, I made the ever so stupid mistake of having sex with my boss because he threatened to fire me if I didn't. It didn't last long and I stopped and quit after realizing what I'd done to myself… but even so the damage had been done and the one good thing that came out of it was: it made me realize something about what I'd been doing to myself all along… After some self confrontation it turned out that
all along I had
never liked sex. In the same way that I'd forced myself to do it in order to not get fired, I had previously also been forcing myself to do it in order to serve all kinds of psychological needs that had nothing to do with actually wanting actual sex.
There were all kinds of "little" signs that I'd simply ignored… like the nightmares I'd get in the early days right after sex… or like never getting actual physical pleasure out of it, feeling uncomfortable and irritated any time any partner tried to get me to physically enjoy it and not allowing it for the most part. Once when I was in a book store looking into the section that dealt with that kind of issue I was shocked at my own reaction of extreme shame when a couple walked by and saw me there… I literally had no awareness of feeling any kind of shame about it up to that point in time. Like I said, I'd always considered myself an open, "liberated" woman and then one day one partner got me close to feeling something and somehow the words "you dirty w---" came flashing through my mind out of the blue…. So you could say that all along there had been "little" signs and yet somehow I never saw them… After the incident with the ex-boss, I was finally able to look back and be aware that one of the things that had always been there was tension… and fear… and a certain sense of "
I have no right". I may have been the one initiating the sex but there was always some part of me, somewhere in the back of my mind, that didn't want it and each and every time I'd tell that part to shut up and deal with it. Nowadays I've come to think of it as a form of self-sexual-abuse.
It's just an example but when I was 12 and started needing a bra for the first time; that was also the first time I ever started feeling a need for sexual boundaries. All of a sudden I didn't want my mom to see me naked anymore. When I told her that, it got her so, so pissed off… I got angry lectures about how I was ruining the "bond" between us by not letting her see me naked and about how she was my mother and had changed so many of my diapers and how could I ever think about her in any kind of sexual context what so ever and if anything I was a pervert for doing so… Or in other words "shame on me for wanting to set sexual boundaries" and, of course, "lack of sexual boundaries is a good thing" and "a way of lovingly bonding with others" and "I have no right to say 'no', not to men who are interested and not even to myself when the sex can serve any kind of miniscule purpose that I consciously want".
Basically what I'm trying to say in all this is that not only is it not wrong for you to start thinking in terms of how to protect your inner self from whatever damage the sex addiction might be causing you – you have an obligation towards yourself to do so. She was never protected from your mother and if anything she was taught that she has no right to protect herself from her… but now it's something you can do for yourself. I strongly suggest you look up information about sexual addiction and also about the effects of covert incest and about mother-daughter sexual abuse and most of all that you talk about it to a therapist who understands about sex addiction and about the effects of bad sexual boundaries with a parent (aka covert incest/sexual abuse). At some point in time it might be something you'll need to also share with your partner… but it might be best to do some processing with a therapist first…
Here's a link btw to a discussion in this here site about the general subject of emotional incest:
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=127914.0 among other things it leads up to a discussion about the sexual aspect of the covert incest… As for everything else (sex addiction, help for sex addiction, sexual abuse, covert incest, mother daughter sexual abuse, overcoming the effects of sexual abuse etc' it's just a matter of typing in the keywords in Google… I'm not sure which site would be better than which… Either way, you are extremely brave for taking this first step and please don't let the fear, shame, guilt or disgust (they're all understandable and you are not alone) get in your way of continuing what you've started now.
