Porn addiction is a cry for help from the unconscious
If you’re reading this, you may be looking for porn addiction help.
Help comes with understanding. Let’s start by looking at the porn addiction cycle.
You’re feeling down. The urge to look at porn gradually comes over you. You resist. The urge gets stronger. Resistance requires more effort and becomes increasingly painful. You have a porn binge. Relief floods you—for a while. Then the guilt sets in. Why did you do that? You swore off the porn. You failed. You’re useless. A waste a space. You’re feeling down. The urge to look at porn… you get the picture.
This cycle is common to an entire family of shame-based issues, including binge drinking, over- or under-eating and self-harm. Only the delivery method differs. But let’s focus on porn. How do you get out of this vicious cycle?
Green-eyed monster
You’ve tried resistance, and we all know how far that got you. (No, it didn’t get me very far either.) You could try getting rid of your computer but that’s pretty much impossible in today’s world. You could try porn-blocking software like Covenant Eyes. That blocks the porn—the only part of the cycle that brings you relief—but it doesn’t break the cycle.
You’re left with a longing for the green-eyed monster of porn that you cannot satisfy and cannot escape.
To break the cycle, you need a change of perspective.
Society’s standard narrative is that pornography is bad. Very bad. Beyond bad. It’s all very well to bash people struggling with porn use, but it actually helps to perpetuate the cycle. It feeds the negative part of the cycle where the addict beats himself up for being an addict.
So what would you rather do? Continue to beat yourself up for viewing porn or break the cycle by changing your perspective?
It’s all very well to bash people struggling with porn use, but it actually helps to perpetuate the cycle. So what would you rather do? Continue to beat yourself up for viewing porn or break the cycle by changing your perspective?
If you’re still with me, let’s shift to a radically different perspective.
The message
Your porn addiction is neither bad nor good. It’s a message from your unconscious. It is drawing your attention to a psychological imbalance that requires your attention.
The message is this: stop being ashamed of your fundamental sexual nature.
We are sexual beings. We are conceived through sex, we are birthed through the female sex organ, we are nursed at the breast. Our sexuality is an innate, inseparable part of our being—one that’s artificially been shamed over time.
Once you accept this premise, you can break the porn cycle because you no longer need to beat yourself up. Remove that component and the entire cycle collapses. Instead you can learn about the invisible, unconscious shame that pervades our society and drives millions of men to porn. Accept your natural sexuality and it will express itself in natural, consensual, nurturing ways.
The most important thing is to recognise porn addiction as a message that is trying to guide you to wholeness. The way to achieve that is through recognising and releasing shame. Bring it into your awareness, take a deep breath, then let it go. Over and over.
Don’t let your shame stop you from reaching out for porn addiction help.
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