Overcoming Porn Addiction By Changing Your Mind

At the emotional root of every addiction is a good desire. We want to be seen, known, and loved well, and when it doesn’t happen, the pain can be intolerable. We want to be free of our stresses and free to enjoy life. Good desires. The problem with addiction is that it masquerades as a solution, masking our symptoms while our condition slowly worsens in the background.

I once heard a pastor say, “Only dead things float down stream.” You’ve got to be swimming at least a little bit just to stay in one place. Addictions are like floatation devices that keep us from having to face our emotional pain and make difficult choices that might actually bring growth and change. Pornography addiction is particularly insidious, because it can seem like a “victimless crime” and it masquerades as bonding to our unconscious mind, while gradually building an addiction to our own neurochemicals. Add to that the guilt and shame which often go along with it, plus the underlying emotional structure driving the behavior, and the dynamics of pornography addiction become a complex puzzle that can take some time and effort to unravel.

Physiology

Recent studies in neurobiology have shown that thoughts that are repeated actually create stronger neural pathways in our brain. Repetition causes neural pathways to be reinforced. You may have heard the saying, “We are what we repeatedly do.” In a very real, physical sense this is true of the impact of thought and behavior on our brains. We can train ourselves to be sexually attracted to other people, other genders, other species, really any image one uses for sexual gratification will predispose the brain to be aroused by those kinds of images.

This is important: the sex drive is primal and happens in the “reptilian” brain. Whatever morals and restrictions we have in place around our sexuality to promote appropriate behavior happen in our neocortex, the thinking brain, with help from the limbic system, the feeling brain, which allow us to feel guilt. The reptilian brain does not care what we join with sexually as long as we join with something.

The ego says, “I know how to get that!” and the super-ego says, “Whoa, gear down there big shifter! You can’t have that, it’s not appropriate.” The main reason sexual addiction is so powerful is that the body releases neurochemicals at orgasm, which provide a sense of euphoria (endorphins), well being (serotonin, dopamine) and bonding (oxytocin). This is why it masquerades, even if only briefly, as bonding to our unconscious mind, and why it can be so hard to change our behavior around it.

Root Causes of Porn Addiction

We are wired to seek sexual gratification, not just to make babies, but to bond and form attachments and be in relationships that allow us to grow in a safe environment. For all kinds of bio-psycho-social and religious reasons, societies have placed firm restrictions on sexual behavior, mentioned here only because whatever the society (family, church, friends, others) in which your sexual mores were formed, those learned patterns of thinking and behaving will influence how you approach overcoming porn addiction.

If you’ve ever read early psychoanalytic thought about childhood development (Freud or Klein), you have likely seen some pretty shocking ideas about little boys wanting to murder their fathers and marry (have sex with) their mothers, and similarly for girls wanting to replace their mothers. This is disgusting and horrifying to our thinking brain, as it should be, but makes perfect sense once you understand that the young psyche wants desperately to be seen, known, and protected. The most obvious place for that to happen is in the position of spouse/lover/other inhabited by the same sex parent.

Again, this desire to be seen, known, and protected is a good desire. When we don’t get what we need from our parents, we carry that wound into adulthood, and depending on our emotional grid, beliefs, and experiences, the soothing of these wounds can become sexualized. “Wait a minute, my dad verbally abused me and mom didn’t protect me, so I want to look at porn?” If this is your story, very likely, along with any number of other potential interwoven factors. The important thing to understand is that it takes determination and commitment to overcome an addiction, especially one that has roots in the traumas that contributed to our emotional formation.

The Cycle of Addiction

There are a number of “Cycle of Addiction” models out there, but the essential elements are the same. If you struggle with addiction, you will go through these stages: Emotional Trigger, Craving, Ritual, Using, and Guilt. Then the cycle starts all over again.

Emotional Trigger – With porn addiction, a trigger can be almost anything. A frustrating day, a difficult conversation, unintentional visual stimulation (like an attractive person on the elevator), or really any experience that makes a person feel one down or aroused.

Craving – This is when the desire to use manifests. A person starts to think about it, often shadow-boxing with it, making half-hearted efforts to resist, or pushing thoughts of resisting out of the mind so the cycle can continue. There is often a semiconscious sense of entitlement, “I deserve to feel better.” There can be many subtle methods the addict employs to allow the cycle to continue.

Ritual – Now the addict is actively moving toward using. He or she seeks isolation, arranging things so as not to be caught, doing whatever they normally do to prepare to use and to ensure it is a satisfactory experience. Desire to use builds in this phase until there is no thought of interrupting the cycle. Using is a foregone conclusion.

Using – Desire peaks, opportunity has been arranged, and the person acts on the desire, experiencing whatever euphoria or feelings of well-being are afforded by the behavior.

Guilt – As the glow of the neurochemical wave passes, the thinking brain begins to reassert itself, and guilt and shame may flood, or dissociation to keep from feeling at all, and the person is back at the beginning of the cycle. These cycles can be quite regular, whether using once every three weeks, or three or more times a day.

The Role of Guilt and Shame

If you were raised in a religious context, it can be very easy to take out “the mallet” and beat yourself up when you fail, especially in the area of sexual sin. Guilt is a useful emotion, up to the point that it motivates us to change our behavior. Shame is a soul-killing emotion that may motivate a person of solid emotional structure to change, and be terribly damaging for anyone else.

Guilt says, “I did something bad and want to make sure I don’t do it again.” Shame says, “I am bad. I’m disgusting and I don’t deserve good things (like love, mercy, and forgiveness) because of it.”

When Jesus was on the cross, he used a word that vendors used when a transaction was complete. His victory over sin is contractual. It says when we repent of (turn from) our sin, He casts our guilt far away to the ends of the earth. As a pastor of mine once said, “Excrement doesn’t smell any better when you stir it. It’s only good for flushing.”

When you begin the road to recovery from addiction, put the mallet down. When you relapse, admit it to yourself, your God, your sponsor, and your therapist, and then set your jaw like flint and start again. Dwelling on your failure actually keeps you in the addiction cycle and can become an emotional trigger that begets more failure. Turn from it and with grim determination, curiosity, and kindness to self and get on with the important business of living your life.

Overcoming Porn Addiction

If you have tried to overcome your addiction and failed, it’s time to get into a recovery program or accountability group. If your addiction is mild to moderate, you can get into a recovery program like Celebrate Recovery, get a sponsor, and get into a step group.

To gauge your addiction, rate yourself on a scale of ten in the areas of Frequency (how often do I use), Severity (what am I using), and Impact (how significant is the impact on my loved ones). If any of these measures are 5 or higher, you might want to get into a Sex-Addicts Anonymous (SA) group, and again get a sponsor.

Regardless of severity, you also will likely want to start seeing a therapist to work through the underlying emotional triggers driving the behavior. Accountability is only useful to manage the symptoms and behavior. For long-term healing and relief from the desire to use, the structure behind it has to be addressed.

Try to have realistic expectations, and have an idea in mind what success looks like. If you are using porn every day when you begin recovery and after a month with a sponsor and step group find that you are using four days a week, that is real progress. For most people, a spouse who uses porn is violating the emotional fidelity of the marriage, even if they never touch another person. Jesus made it clear that if we imagine having sex with someone, we have committed adultery in our minds. I’m not talking about stray thoughts, or passing people, but the deliberate dwelling on a mental sexual scene for the purpose of gratification. You can’t keep bats out of your bell tower, but you can prevent them from building nests.

The Role of the Spouse in Recovery

If your spouse is struggling with addiction to pornography and you’ve decided to fight it together, try to remember that the very nature of addiction is that the addict cannot stop the behavior on his or her own. The aggrieved spouse is often plagued by thoughts of not being enough: “If I was enough, my spouse wouldn’t need pornography.”

This is simply not true. When it comes to early trauma and emotional deficits, we cannot ever be enough for our spouse. We would have to go back in time and replace an inadequate parent, or prevent traumas from happening to our spouse as a child. All we can do is stand beside them as they try to fight the good fight. Our work is to stand together and face a common enemy, and figure out how to do our own emotional work along the way to move toward growth and health. The enemy is not the substance, but the Enemy of our souls, in collusion with our emotional pain and the lies we tell ourselves over and over as a result.

Each person’s process has to be his or her own. Because using porn is a betrayal, the temptation may be strong to “keep tabs” on the spouse’s behavior and require regular reports. Once the addict is in recovery, that has to stop. Early in the recovery process, it can be very damaging for the addict to report every relapse to the spouse. When we dig a hole by allowing addiction to get a foothold in our lives, it can be very difficult and time-consuming to dig ourselves out. This is why a sponsor and therapist are so important to the process.

To the spouse, a drop in using from 7 days a week to 4 days may seem grossly inadequate, leading to desperation and hopelessness. A therapist or sponsor would see this change as very encouraging, and keep guiding the addict toward greater healing. We have to allow our spouse’s work of recovery to be their work, working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

It is usually helpful for the spouse to be in recovery as well, often for co-dependency, to begin to understand how they might be operating with unhealthy boundaries, or even contributing to the addiction cycle.

As we train ourselves to notice and interrupt the addiction cycle, learn about our emotional traumas and the defenses we built around them, and shut down the negative self-talk that hinders growth, we can actually rewire our brains and disempower the hold of addiction that seeks to destroy us. Obtaining sobriety in our addiction, one day at a time, one moment at a time, treating the current hardship as a pathway to peace.