Porn addiction – the cure is known to the disease
In my blogs I’ve written extensively on the principles and processes of porn addiction and how to heal it. This blog might be entitled, ‘the philosophy of healing porn addiction’. The core of this philosophy is that the cure is known to the disease.
“The cure is always known to the disease”
In The Sufis, philosopher Idries Shah quotes from an obscure Islamic text, the Tibb-al-Arif (Medicine of the Gnostic) by Abdul-Wali: “When the lion is sick, he eats a certain shrub and cures himself. He does this because the illness has an affinity for a certain plant, or for the essence of it. The cure is always known to the disease. Release this knowledge and you will know more than the doctor who can only recall facts and memories which seem to apply.”
American artist and author Walter Russell (1871-1963) believed this principle to be all-encompassing: “Everything that is, is of everything else that is; nothing is of itself alone.”
In other words, the disease is in a symbiotic relationship with the diseased. At its core, a disease is an unbalanced energy that can only exist along with its balancing opposite—the cure. If we search for that opposite with genuine intent, life leads us to new life. (I’m getting all philosophical now, but you get the drift.)
Many years ago, I discovered that the same principle applies to porn addiction.
Hessa
As I describe in Hessa – my first experience of porn, I was exposed to porn at 10 years of age on a hillside in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland. The event was traumatic, causing a repressed memory that took me five decades to recover. I didn’t look at porn at all through my teens of twenties. Only in my late thirties, after some years living out of a suitcase as an IT consultant in America, did I feel the slippery quicksand pull of porn.
By that time, (see “Pipes everywhere” – how Process Manufacturing maps human emotions), I’d learned to analyse a specific kind of manufacturing process that turned out to closely resemble human emotional dynamics.
Finding myself increasingly drawn to porn, I unconsciously applied my process analysis skills to my own behaviour during porn binges.
The result was a eureka moment and freedom from long, uncontrollable porn binges that left me feeling frustrated, guilty, ashamed, and burned out.
Reverse engineering
I reverse-engineered my way out of porn addiction by seeing that the specific images I was attracted to reflected my psychosexual wounds. Porn is the most intelligent visual language available to us for portraying imbalances between masculine and feminine energy.
So if you’re looking for a porn addiction healing methodology that involves simply stopping looking at images, this isn’t it. Those porn images you’re deeply drawn to—what I term ‘Holy Grail images’—that’s the cure calling out to the disease, or the disease calling out to the cure, whichever way you want to look at it. It’s the siren song of symbiotic healing.
Those images convey precious jewels of information capable of healing the deepest wounds in your psyche, the masculine/feminine imbalances from six millennia of patriarchal shame and sexual repression. That information can be retrieved by uncovering the 4 layers of a porn image.
Like any buried treasure, grasping those jewels isn’t easy. Yet, when it perseveres, the lion finds the shrub. The cure is always known to the disease.
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