# Sex and Porn Addiction Treatment | Sierra Recovery, Spain

> Residential treatment for compulsive sexual behaviour and pornography use at a licensed centre in Spain. GBP 9,900 for 28 days, published in full.

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Behavioural addictions

# Sex and pornography addiction treatment

Residential treatment for compulsive sexual behaviour, including compulsive pornography use, at a licensed centre in the Málaga countryside. Small groups, an English-speaking clinical team, and a price published in full.

Clinically reviewed by[Nerea Encinas Sánchez](/clinical-team/)Director of the centre, MSc General Health PsychologyRegistered psychologist, COPAO AO13857

Checked for accuracy on 29 July 2026. Next review due July 2027. This page is general information about our programme and is not a substitute for advice about your own situation.

Compulsive sexual behaviour, including compulsive pornography use, is treated at Sierra Recovery as a 28-day residential programme, published at £9,900. It is recognised in ICD-11 as Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder: a persistent failure to control intense sexual impulses that continues despite consequences and despite little or no pleasure. Pornography is the most common vehicle for it rather than a separate condition, which is why it is treated on this page and not on another. The defining clinical feature is that the behaviour is being used to regulate a state, not pursued for enjoyment, and the largest obstacle to treatment is almost always shame rather than motivation.

Programme

28 days residential

Published price

£9,900

Group work

3 sessions a day

Room

Private, as standard

Language

English throughout

Registration

N.I.C.A. 67331

## What it looks like clinically

The threshold is not frequency. It is control, and consequence.

- The behaviour regulates a mood rather than expressing desire. It reliably follows stress,
loneliness, boredom, conflict or humiliation, and it works, briefly.

- Escalation. More time, more extreme material, or more risk is needed for the same effect,
which is the same tolerance curve seen with a substance.

- Repeated failed attempts to stop. Deleting accounts, installing blockers, promising a
partner. The promise is sincere every time.

- Concealment. A second phone, a second browser, an entire parallel accounting of your own
time. The management of the secret often costs more than the behaviour.

- Continuation despite consequence. A relationship, a job, money, sometimes legal risk.

- Diminishing pleasure. By the time most people ask for help, the behaviour has stopped
being enjoyable and has become something they do anyway.

## Pornography specifically

Compulsive pornography use is the most common presentation and the one people are least able to say out
loud. A few things worth stating plainly, because the internet is full of the opposite.

- The clinical question is not how often. It is whether you can stop when you decide to,
and what it is costing you. Plenty of people use pornography without a disorder.

- Escalation of content is not a moral fact about you. It is a tolerance effect, and it is
the most reliable sign that the behaviour has become compulsive rather than chosen.

- Blockers and abstinence challenges treat the delivery, not the driver. They are why
people relapse the moment life gets hard. The work is on what the behaviour is being used to manage.

- Shame is the mechanism, not a side effect. Shame drives concealment, concealment drives
isolation, and isolation is what the behaviour then medicates. Group work breaks that loop faster than
anything else we do, which is why residential treatment tends to work when solo attempts have not.

## What usually sits underneath

Very little of this is about sex. In the assessments we do, the recurring picture is trauma, often sexual or
developmental, shame carried a long time, social anxiety, depression, or a relationship in which intimacy has
become impossible. Where trauma is genuinely present, EMDR is available and delivered by someone trained in it,
not offered as a universal add-on.

Cross-addiction is common in both directions: people arrive with alcohol or cocaine as the presenting
problem and this underneath it, or arrive here having stopped a substance and found this waiting.

## Partners and families

Discovery is its own injury and it deserves its own help. Our [family
programme](/family-programme/) exists for that, and we will say plainly that a partner is not a treatment plan and should not be
asked to be one. Where the relationship is in question, that question is worked on with both people
acknowledged rather than around one of them.

### Not sure whether residential treatment is proportionate?

Nerea, our director and a registered psychologist, will tell you honestly, including when the answer is that something closer to home would serve you better. No obligation, and no referral fee is paid to anyone for sending you here.

[Speak to a clinician](/contact/)
[+44 1202 653136](tel:+441202653136)

## What a day here looks like

Time

What happens

08:00

Breakfast, cooked by our Michelin-trained chef

09:15

Planning: the day is set out together

10:30

Process group, the harder one

12:00

Therapeutic group

13:15

Lunch

14:30

Psychoeducation, working through the curriculum

16:00

Group activity, often outdoors or with the horses

18:30

Dinner

20:00

Day closing, together

Saturdays turn to holistic and body-based work. Sundays are a supervised excursion, because reconnecting with the world outside a clinic is part of the treatment rather than a break from it.

28days, the typical stay

3group sessions a day

17curriculum modules

1986PROMIS method, developed in

## What the treatment actually involves

The programme is the same one everyone here follows, because the machinery underneath a behavioural
addiction is the machinery underneath a substance addiction. What changes is the content of the work, not the
structure of the week.

- Three structured therapy groups a day, five days a week. Group is where a behaviour that
has been private for years stops being private, in a room where nobody is shocked.

- Individual therapy three times a week. Enough to do trauma work properly where trauma is
part of it, which it often is.

- A seventeen-module psychoeducation curriculum. Module seventeen is cross-addiction, which
matters more here than anywhere: behavioural addictions very commonly surface during recovery from a
substance, because the need for regulation has not gone anywhere.

- Equine and holistic work. Useful for people who have spent years in their own head and
need a way back into their body.

- Aftercare agreed before you leave, with a written handover to your GP with your consent.

## What we are, and what we are not

Sierra Recovery is a registered health centre authorised by the Junta de Andalucía under
N.I.C.A. 67331. It is not a hospital and not a detox unit. That rarely
matters for a behavioural addiction on its own, but it matters a great deal if alcohol or a drug is also in the
picture: where a medically supervised withdrawal is clinically needed it is completed in an appropriate medical
setting before admission and billed separately.

We do not admit anyone who is acutely suicidal, acutely psychotic or in psychiatric crisis, anyone needing
hospital-level monitoring, or anyone whose primary condition is a severe eating disorder. If that is the
situation, we will say so on the first call and point you somewhere that can help.

## The therapies you will actually receive

Group work
Psychoeducation
One-to-one
Holistic
Equine
Aftercare

### Three group sessions a day, five days a week

The day opens with a process group at 10:30, a second therapeutic group runs at midday, and a psychoeducation session follows lunch. A group activity fills the late afternoon and the day closes together in the evening. That is roughly fifteen structured group contacts a week, which is the part most people underestimate before they arrive and value most afterwards.

Groups are small, in English, and run by the clinical team. Hearing someone else describe your own thinking back to you does something that individual work cannot, and it is the fastest route out of the isolation that the behaviour builds.

### A seventeen-module curriculum, not a rest cure

The psychoeducation strand moves through a fixed seventeen-module curriculum written by our clinical director. It is the core of what we call the Regulation Model, which is our adaptation of the PROMIS Clinics methodology to this centre rather than a model of our own invention. It covers skills training, communication styles, boundaries and decision-making, trigger recognition, self-esteem and self-concept, dual diagnosis, self-care and habits, emotions, crisis identification and management, suicide prevention, goals, grief, values, trauma and relapse, perfectionism, loneliness and isolation, and cross-addiction. Every module runs the same structure: check-in, theory, an experiential dynamic, shared reflection, and a commitment carried into the week.

The cognitive work uses the ABC model, the same structure that underpins cognitive behavioural approaches: the event, the belief you attach to it, and the consequence that follows. It is taught, practised, applied between sessions and reviewed, rather than talked about once.

### Individual therapy alongside the group programme

One-to-one sessions run three times a week and are where the material that will not surface in a group gets worked. For most people that is the thing underneath the use rather than the use itself.

You are treated by the same small team throughout, in the same house. Nobody is handed between departments, and there is no rotation of therapists mid-stay.

### Yoga, meditation and body-based work

Saturdays turn to holistic and body-based practice: yoga, meditation and mindfulness, breathwork, art, and time outdoors on the land. This is not decoration and it is not a spa timetable. Early recovery is a physiological event as much as a psychological one, and sleep, appetite and the ability to sit still are usually the first things to return.

The self-care and habits module runs alongside it, treating rest as a right rather than a reward and food as connection rather than control.

### Equine therapy on working farmland

The horses live here, on the forty hectares around the house, and equine work is part of the working week. Horses respond to what you are actually feeling rather than what you say you are feeling, which is why the work reaches people who have learned to talk their way around a therapy session.

### What happens when you go home

Aftercare is planned before you leave rather than mentioned on the last day. For clients returning to the UK, care continues online or in person at the PROMIS clinics in London, with a weekly session for a full year, more than 48 in the twelve months after discharge, and a written handover to your GP so nothing has to be explained from scratch. For clients elsewhere in Europe we arrange continuity online and help find local services.

Alongside that, mutual-aid groups are free, run everywhere, and are worth using whatever else you choose.

## Who will actually treat you

### Nerea Encinas Sánchez

Director · General Health Psychologist

MSc General Health Psychology. Leads clinical standards, the assessment you have before you travel, and admissions.

### Berenice Paramés Jones

General Health Psychologist

Individual and group psychological work inside the house, crisis follow-up and coordination of the group programme.

### Marta Leal

Social worker

Family mediation, links to services back home, and preparing for independent life after discharge.

### Robin Lefever

Founder of Sierra Recovery; MD, PROMIS Clinics UK

Founder of Sierra Recovery and Managing Director of PROMIS Clinics, whose method this programme adapts. PROMIS has been treating addiction in the United Kingdom since the mid-1980s, and Robin has worked in addiction treatment for around 35 years, with thousands of patients treated with the PROMIS method in the United Kingdom.

[Meet the whole clinical team and their qualifications](/clinical-team/).

## How admission works

- Compare on licence, not on photographsAsk any centre abroad for its registration number and the register it sits on, then look it up yourself. Ours is N.I.C.A. 67331 on the Junta de Andalucía register.

- Get the medical picture togetherCurrent medications, any previous withdrawal, and any diagnosed conditions. This is what the pre-travel assessment needs, and it is what decides whether a detox is required first.

- Ask what the price actually includesOurs is published: private room, meals, the core therapy programme, and a year of weekly UK aftercare, with medical, psychiatric, laboratory and hospital costs quoted separately. You get an itemised written quotation before admission.

The pool and terrace, open through the day

Your own private room, included as standard

The veranda, where most groups spill out to

Cooked by our Michelin-trained chef, three times a day

The horses live here, on the land

Forty hectares of working farmland, forty five minutes from Malaga

[See the full gallery](/facilities/) · [how people get here](/travelling-to-spain-for-treatment/).

### Talk to a clinician today

You will speak to our admissions team, all of them clinicians. Confidential, no obligation, and we will tell you honestly whether this programme fits or whether something closer to home would serve you better.

[See how admission works](/admissions/)
[What £9,900 covers](/pricing/)

## Questions people actually ask

Is sex addiction a real diagnosis?

ICD-11, published by the World Health Organization, includes Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder. It is classified as an impulse control disorder rather than as an addiction, and that distinction is still argued over clinically. What is not argued over is that the presentation is real, that it responds to treatment, and that the treatment looks a great deal like addiction treatment.

Is porn addiction the same thing?

Clinically it is treated as the same condition. Pornography is the most common vehicle for compulsive sexual behaviour rather than a separate disorder, which is why we treat them on one programme rather than selling two.

How much pornography use is too much?

The threshold is not a number of hours. It is whether you can stop when you decide to, whether the content or the risk has escalated, and what it is costing you in time, money, work or relationships. Frequency alone tells a clinician very little.

Will I have to talk about it in a group?

Yes, and that is the part that works. It is also the part people dread most. The group is small, everyone in it is there for something they were ashamed of, and nobody is shocked. Most people report the first disclosure as the hardest hour and the most useful one.

What does it cost?

The 28-day residential programme is £9,900, published in full, with a private room included as standard and an itemised written quotation before admission. We neither pay nor accept referral fees in either direction.

Do you treat this alongside alcohol or drugs?

Yes, and that combination is common. Where a medically supervised detox is clinically needed it is completed in an appropriate medical setting before admission, because we are a registered health centre and not a detox unit.

+

## Talk to a clinician today

You will speak to our admissions team, English-speaking clinicians who know the programme and the people in it. Callback within 24 hours.

Step 1 of 3

Confidential, and no obligation

Registered health centre. Authorised by the Junta de Andalucía, N.I.C.A. 67331.

### Related pages

[The Regulation Model](/the-regulation-model/)[Assessment & detox](/medical-assessment-and-detox/)[Our programme](/our-programme-at-sierra-recovery/)[Dual diagnosis](/dual-diagnosis-rehab-spain/)[Pricing](/pricing/)[Admissions](/admissions/)

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Source: https://sierrarecoveryspain.com/sex-addiction-treatment/  
Retrieved: 2026-08-27  
Canonical HTML version of this page: https://sierrarecoveryspain.com/sex-addiction-treatment/
