TINSA: A Neurological Approach to the Treatment of Sex Addiction

By: Michael Barta PhD LPC CSAT-S

Narrated by: Craig Hannaway

Sexual addiction treatment has long focused on managing the symptoms of addiction with abstinence - a difficult challenge in a world where limitless pornographic gratification is never more than a mouse click away. A new recovery method is needed: one capable of identifying and treating the core cause of addictive behavior.

TINSA is such a program. Created by a preeminent Colorado master clinician, TINSA, or Trauma Induced Sexual Addiction, explores the effects of adverse developmental experiences on a young brain and nervous system and illustrates how the damage caused by those experiences encourages addictive behavior.

Realizing how many sex addicts suffer from abandonment, neglect, and other childhood trauma led TINSA® creator Michael Barta, PhD, LPC, CSAT, to examine how emotional wounding leads to the need to self-regulate the release of the pleasure hormone dopamine through sexual stimuli. As increasing levels of dopamine are required over time to reach the same “high,” by adulthood, self-regulation can produce compulsive, damaging sexual behavior.

Through TINSA, Barta offers the means to treat sex addiction at the source, reducing compulsive sexual behavior over time and providing effective, long-term recovery. TINSA has helped thousands already. It can help you too.

©2017 Michael Barta (P)2020 Michael Barta

A "MUST READ" for anyone in Sex Addiction Recovery

Thought the subject matter would be to clinical for me to grasp but I was wrong...surprised how much sense it made and expanded my knowledge on the "why" of how my addiction came to be.

Great book. Gave me a real breakthrough into understanding myself!

This book was a critical turning point in being able to identify what made me the way I was and to start solving my problems at their true roots!

Incredibly helpful for addicts and partners

As a trained APSATS LPC, I found this book to be a profoundly helpful resource for both addicts and partners alike. Highly recommend for both sides of betrayal trauma and counselors working with them.

excellent

essential work about an underdiscussed but pervasive problem. highly recommended for all sufferers of sexual addiction as well as those they've made to suffer.

one of the best books on SA that I've read

Finally someone is writing about the truths of sexual addiction. As a spouse of a SA, this book has given me some of the answers I've been looking for for the past 20 years.

Great content but repetitive

This is really valuable knowledge, and totally worth the time. But I found it to be often frustratingly repetitive, like a string of blog posts, so it often seems generally very poorly structured. That said it's all incredibly useful and worth the repetition.

Something I find worth questioning is that while I agree the addicted person should take full responsibility for healing, the author also affirms with unblinking force that there's no such thing as a slip, providing no grey area or forgiveness for a misstep while healing. Objectification during sex with your spouse, and fantasizing while masturbating are both dopamenergic, and though they may be useful in creating some steps towards healing, they clukd be considered kind of as tiny slip. The author imposes zero tolerance, stating that there is no slip... if you "slip", you have completely failed, and you have to start all over again, as though you've made no progress in reprogramming your brain up until then. He imposes this force with conviction that the addict must take his healing seriously and that they could use continual slips as excuses to never heal. I find the idea as one truly has "fallen off the bandwagon" as wholly neglectful of how the brain really grows and evolves, and not everyone will continually slip as an excuse. Telling someone he's lost years of progress after a harmless slip like a sip of beer after a couple years of bring sober is not only not true, but it could be devastating. And to pair with this excessive force, the author also holds the addicted totally responsible for the emotions of the spouse, which are in some way certainly true, but the spouse brings her own baggage to the table just like the rest of us, and I think holding her harmless for choosing an addict isn't carefully acknowledging her own baggage.

This book is also feels like a long advertisement for the TINSA program the author also created. I found the narration perfect. At the end of the day, beside all of the details, I find this incredibly valuable knowledge and perspective. If you are still reading this review, you shouldn't hesitate. It's totally valuable and worth the time and money.