There is one thing that nearly everyone from podcasters and writers to mental health professionals get completely wrong about porn addiction.
Porn addiction is not about sex. It's about emotional need fulfillment.
Oddly enough, many people, Catholics too, don't want to hear this despite it being the truth. They want to hold on to the tired old trope that porn addiction is just about sex, and that men (and women) who struggle with such an addiction are just lustful people committing lust for its own sake.
Can't blame them though, the psychology experts don't understand sexual addiction either, which is why the disease model exists: "I have a disease, will aways have this disease, and have a responsibility not act on my incurable disease."
Yet how many people go through support groups, out-patient, in-patient "recovery" programs, only to continue counseling for years or decades after, only to continue experiencing periods of relapses or "falls" every year or two or five?
The experts don't understand the problem, and seem to have reduced the solution down to a lifelong symptom management program.
But behind every compulsive or self-destructive behavior are two components: an underlying trauma or neglect, and an emotional high (don't think dopamine) embedded in the most intensely emotional moment of the behavior.
A man who suffered emotional neglect from mom in childhood (think a mom who offers solutions instead of empathy) has a natural need for receiving empathy from his mother. His increase in age doesn't make this need disappear.
And true to the old adage, he married his mother, a woman lacking empathy.
But that unmet need still exists. When he feels emasculated, disapproval, unacknowledged, unsafe in his emotions especially in context of interactions with his wife, it triggers that unresolved childhood lack of emotional need fulfillment that he feels very deeply in that moment. He's not just living that one moment in the present, he's reliving years of pain all at once.
And his experience is often made worse, unbeknownst to his wife, by how she interacts with him.
Here's how it works.
We all have an animal brain. When that animal brain perceives a threat, sustains an injury, or experiences a severe lack, it automatically looks for a solution or something to medicate that pain. Think of the hungriest you've ever been. Do you remember what that felt like? Do you remember how your brain was automatically in overdrive looking for food, trying to find any solution to that hunger? Maybe you even ate something you might regret later just so the pain in your stomach would cease.
Emotional pain and starvation is not unlike the body's lack of food.
Harry Harlow was the psychologist who experimented with baby monkeys comparing the effects of having a cloth mother or a wire mother. The baby monkey that was given the "cloth mother" was able to cuddle, experience softness and closeness, simulating the experience of being nurtured. The baby monkey given the wire mother was denied that nurturing experience, and died. Harlow discovered that emotional closeness and intimacy was just as vital to survival and thriving as were food, water, shelter, clothing, and warmth.
What we see in the cases of pervasive, long-lasting pornography addiction in men is a history of feeling emotionally invalidated by mothers. When he feels the same in his marriage, the mind, like in the example of being really hungry, automatically looks for the salve to relieve the emotional pain. For the addict, the mind already knows exactly where to find that medicine: porn. What can be done?
Three main things:
- We find the feelings of the unmet needs, and any specific memories or mental images that might be associated with those feelings. We work on getting the mind to let go of those feelings and memories instead of continuing to try to fix them.
- Identify the pleasurable emotional charges connected with porn, do similar exercises to get the mind to disconnect from them so it forgets that porn was ever an effective medicine agains the pain.
- Learn new effective and healthy ways of communicating and interacting with mom and wife that allows you to exercise your own agency, and detachment from their emotions in any given situation.
What effect does this have?
When we identify the unmet needs and the associated feelings and memories, and get the mind to let those go, clients report a stronger sense of agency, of healthy emotional detachment from the difficulties and emotions presented by mom, or wife. One client felt tremendous feelings of frustration in his relationship with his wife. We did the exercise to get the mind to let go of those feelings of frustrations, and found the earlier times of feeling the same feeling of frustration. It turns out that he felt that frustration with mom all throughout childhood, never feeling acknowledged or understood by her. Once we processed out the frustration, he remarked, "I saw mom this weekend. She did the same thing she always does of invalidating my experience, telling me I was wrong, and telling me what I need to do to fix my problems instead of being empathetic. But it didn't feel the same. It was like I was outside of myself seeing that her responses were hers and had nothing to do with me, and I could just let them go with little effort. The frustration was almost non-existent."Then about his wife, "Same thing happened with my wife. She was upset about something, and I didn't collapse back into that ball of shame. I sat and listened but knew that her emotions didn't belong to me. I felt very detached, that her feelings were hers and not mine. It was very freeing."After getting the mind to release those earlier feelings and memories of frustration, the porn addict no longer has a wound that needs medicating and the urge to look at porn diminishes. Why would you take ibuprofen if you had no aches or pains?
When we've made traction, clients report that the urge to look at porn is disappearing on its own. A frequent statement made by clients with porn addiction, "I grabbed my phone to look at porn out of habit, and two seconds in said, 'why am I doing this?' and put the phone down and didn't go back to it, and it took little effort to do so. It's like the urge just wasn't there." This isn't one client, this is nearly every client who truly wants to be released.
Finally, the men learn how to have healthy interactions with their wives, covering the aspects of timing, boundaries, tactical geography, phrasing choice, and strategy planning and effectiveness of outcome. Sounds more like a military plan of action than marriage. They are more similar than one may think. If you are interested in working me to overcome your own problems, complete the contact form and I'll be in touch.
