Dr. Paula Hall
Dr Paula Hall is a leading UK psychotherapist and author specialising in sex and porn addiction. She has developed widely used treatment programmes, trains professionals through AT...
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Who are you?
Hello. My name is Dr. Paula Hall and I'm a psychotherapist and a sex therapist. I come from Dorsett. I've got two children. I love cats and I love food.
What is your background?
So my background is I actually started in the IT industry many, many years ago when I left school. And then in my late twenties I retrained as a psychosexual therapist. So I've been a therapist for over 30 years now. Initially I worked in drugs and alcohol and then I trained to work with couples and work with sexual problems particularly, and I guess it was during that work that this thing called sex addiction started appearing. And that was, oh gosh, probably 20 years ago now. And I started seeing that in my private practise. But there were so few resources available and I was seeing a lot of people struggling with this and no help out there. So that's when I decided to specialise in working with sex addiction and it was sex addiction then, because this is even before everybody had a smartphone. And from there, because of the internet business has absolutely boomed. So I'm now founder of the Laurel Centre, and that's a private therapy organisation with over 25 therapists all around the uk and also the not-for-profit organisation, pivotal Recovery.
What is sex addiction, and how do you define it?
Sex addiction is a broad, overarching term that explains any unwanted, problematic sexual behaviour that is causing significant problems in somebody's life. But in spite of those problems, they feel unable to reliably cut down or stop.