Are you addicted to porn?
29. October 2024
These days it is so much easier to access pornography than in the past. The internet has brought all kinds of hardcore porn into someone’s home with a few clicks on the computer keyboard or swipes on a smart phone.
This is not an article about the moral rights or wrongs of porn, but rather the risk that excessive porn use can become an addictive way for some people, usually men, to deal with life.
In a similar way to activities such as shopping, gambling or even exercise, porn for some people can become an addictive activity. By addictive I mean that the individual feels ‘out of control’ when it comes to their porn use, that they can’t seem to be able to stop, and that it is causing negative consequences in their life.
These negative consequences may include spending hours each week (or even each day) watching porn, which interferes with other activities. It can also have a negative impact on intimate relationships and on sexuality and sexual performance.
One of the worst aspects of addictive porn use is the effect on someone’s self-esteem - the feeling that they are somehow trapped in a particular behaviour that they don’t seem able to resist. They may make an effort and manage to go several days, weeks, or even months without using porn and then find that they are sucked back into the behaviour.
What often draws people back into the behaviour, after a period of abstinence, is some kind of difficult emotional experience - an argument with one’s partner, being told off at work, feeling lonely or feeling low.
Difficult emotions
This is because porn addiction, like any other addiction, is strongly linked to problems in dealing with difficult emotions - particularly anger, sadness, depression and fear.
It is always important, when dealing with addictions, to look at what purpose they serve rather than just seeing them as a negative behaviour that indicates a weakness. One of the purposes of addictions is to help people manage difficult feelings.
Whether it’s porn, shopping, gambling or gaming, the activity can help someone lose themselves temporarily and forget painful or angry feelings in their life. It gives them a temporary ‘high’. The problem is when the individual does not develop other ways of dealing with the difficult feelings and keeps repeating the addictive behaviour.
When this happens the addiction moves from being an unhelpful way of coping with emotional challenges to a problem in and of itself. The individual gradually develops a dependency on the activity in order to feel good. But while it works in the moment, the activity chips away at the individual’s self-esteem and can create feelings of shame.
This is known as the ‘shame cycle’. Someone turns to porn to help distract them from feelings of, say, loneliness. But after using the porn they feel shame or self-judgment about the fact that they have become dependent on the activity, that it has somehow become able to control them. These feelings of shame then make the individual want to use porn again, in order to escape the feelings, and the cycle begins again.
Deeper emotional causes
While some people may view out-of-control sexual behaviour as a sign of a high sex drive, the reality is that the individual’s sexual desire is often not the issue. The main motivation for the behaviour is not about meeting sexual desires or needs but rather it is about satisfying deeper, and sometimes unconscious, emotional needs.
As Paula Hall notes in her book Understanding and Treating Sex and Pornography Addiction, “The real motive for such behaviour is escaping from reality and enjoying the aroused brain state, even more than genital stimulation.”
She argues that porn addiction has more in common with eating disorders than it does with other addictions. Anorexia or other eating disorders can be seen as an unhealthy relationship with food, while sex or porn addiction can be seen as an unhealthy relationship with sex. Both food and sex are natural and healthy parts of a person’s life but when the problem is when the behaviour becomes distorted and addictive. It’s not the food or the sexual activity in itself that are the problem but rather the fact that it has become the focus of addictive behaviour.
What can confuse people into thinking it is their high sex drive that is causing the behaviour is that they are misinterpreting their sexual desire. If someone gets into the routine of masturbating to porn when they feel lonely or sad or angry, then they will begin to associate the craving for porn with the feelings. In other words, it is the addictive behaviour that has fuelled the desire for porn rather than it being the result of a high sex drive.
Providing a release
Fundamentally, porn addiction, as with any addiction, is about achieving an altered mental state that enables the person to escape life temporarily. It can provide a release from anxiety, a feeling of excitement and pleasure, a blotting out of problems.
The problem is that, over time, the addiction stops providing the same level of enjoyment or escape that it first did and the individual needs to spend longer engaged in the activity or seek stronger forms of the drug. It gets to the stage where the addiction is simply needed to feel normal.
Many people with porn addiction may come to therapy because of the depression it is causing or the effect on their relationship. But they may not fully recognise that they are addicted. It is not an easy thing to talk about and many people feel shame about it.
In therapy it may only emerge over time that the individual’s porn use has become addictive and is causing significant problems in their life and relationships. At that stage the therapy can help the person explore what may underpin the behaviour and whether there are earlier, childhood emotional wounds that the addiction is responding to.
Working with a therapist the individual can learn how to identify the triggers to the behaviour and, over time, learn how to manage their feelings in a more healthy way so that they are not turning to a behaviour that helps them escape in the moment but which causes longer-term emotional problems.
