Get It At The Root: The Secret to Overcoming My Addiction

So I've dealt with my porn addiction for almost a decade now, and I've learned a thing or two about how it works. Now I'm not claiming to know the definite science behind it all, but philosophically, this is how I see the addiction working in my life.

Basically, we are creatures that seek pleasure. As human beings, we crave and desire pleasure. Porn gives us that pleasure. It is an easy, quick way to get a hit of pleasure, and it costs us almost nothing (aside from dignity and quality of life, which obviously aren't nothing, but you know what I mean). Now, the key here is that we are seeking pleasure. When I realized this, it changed things in a huge way for me. I realized I was not actually seeking porn, I wanted the pleasure that I got from porn. That is the root of my addiction: I crave pleasure, and porn gives it to me.

Now, is pleasure inherently bad? No, not at all. Without it, life would suck so much more than it does. We get pleasure from many, many things, we are hard-wired to seek and crave it because, generally, good things give us pleasure. And when we live properly, the pleasure-reward-system works quite well to keep us doing good things. For example, I get pleasure when I eat, eating keeps me alive. I get pleasure out of spending time with my fiancee, that relationship is good for me. I get pleasure out of praying to God, when I exercise a lot, when I get a big job done etc. It's when we abuse this system and find shortcuts that the problems start to occur.

And this is how it is with porn in my life. Porn affords me pleasurable bliss without hardly any effort or commitment on my part. It is the endorphins of sex without having to actually work at a relationship or interact with a real human being (as we all know, PM is not sex at all, and has very little to do with it, but the basic endorphins and chemicals that get released are similar). Yet because PM is circumventing the healthy way of receiving sexual pleasure (ie with another human being inside a relationship), it causes damage. It's the same way with drugs. Drugs essentially bypass the "work" we have to do to get that good-feeling endorphin rush. ie, we can feel awesome like we just climbed a massive mountain without actually doing anything besides sticking a needle into our arms. In the same way, porn gives us that good-feeling rush without doing any of the relationship work that we should be doing to acquire that rush.

You see, life is a system of work and reward. I work at a relationship, I have sex, I get rewarded with good feelings. Therefore, sex makes me want to work at that relationship even more in order to acquire more of those good feelings (I understand relationships and marriage are far more complicated than that, but for the sake of discussion, I am simplifying it). The whole point of sex is that it strengthens our relationship and connection with our significant other. It's when we fuck around with that system that things fall apart. When I watch porn, my brain realizes that it can feel awesome with little to no work; who wouldn't want that?! It's a dream come true! Yet as we all know, bypassing that system has terrible ramifications.

And so we get addicted to pleasure. Pleasure is not meant to be something we can acquire whenever we want, wherever we want. It is something we receive in intervals as rewards for doing good things (like eating to stay alive, working out, hanging out with friends, investing in a sexual relationship etc.). The point of the pleasure system is that it encourages us to keep doing these good things. If I felt like shit everytime I ate a meal, I probably wouldn't be really motivated to eat to live, or likewise, if sex didn't feel good, do you think anyone would be doing it? No, probably not. Again, the point of sex is that it is done in a relationship with someone else and that it strengthens the bond between those two people. When we have unfettered access to the pleasure that sex brings (albeit and empty and void pleasure), it does damaging things. Like I said, we were never meant to have unlimited access to this pleasure, it is supposed to be something we work and strive for in a relationship. With porn, all of a sudden we have all the pleasure we want without any of the benefits of a relationship (which are many) including regulated "pleasure-experience" i.e. sex.

And this is one of the many reasons why porn is so damaging; we simply were not made for that much pleasure on that large a scale. As a result, the rest of life seems dull because we desensitize ourselves to any "lesser" pleasure experiences. And so we get depressed, frustrated, empty, and we go back to the only thing we know that will give us that hit of feel-goodness: porn. And so the vicious cycle begins. This is why you get into more and more twisted and crazy stuff, because your tolerance for pleasure goes ever upward, making everything else around you seem dull and boring. Life ceases to be enjoyable because we have taken the very thing that makes it enjoyable and abused it. Porn is, at its root, too much of a good thing (the pleasure we receive) delivered in a totally detrimental, awful way (porn is destructive in many, many other ways.) I am in no way saying that a little bit of porn is okay, though, I am saying that pleasure was meant to be a good thing, and porn takes that good concept, and twists it into something addictive and awful.

This knowledge then, for me, is highly beneficial. I realize that in seeking porn I am really seeking pleasure. So the answer is not just to abstain and white-knuckle it till my dick falls off, but rather to actively search for pleasure elsewhere. My goal is to find pleasure and enjoyment in other areas of life so that I no longer need porn. I want to have a healthy concept of what role pleasure should play in my life and find fulfillment in good things. So I pursue my relationship with my fiancee, my relationship with God, making and eating good food, hanging out with friends, creating works of art or writing, working out etc. You can't just remove a bad thing and not fill it with something else. There is a story in the Bible (no I am not getting religious, the story just illustrates the point really well) that goes like this: A man has a demon living inside him, and he manages to get rid of yet. Problem is, he doesn't replace the empty space the demon left with anything else, so the demon just comes back with seven other demons more evil than him, and takes up residence in the man again. The point is this, by simply removing something bad from your life, you aren't solving the problem, you need to replace it with something good. If I just abstain from PMO, yet don't fill that empty space it left with other kinds of pleasure and joy, then I will inevitably give in and start jacking off to porn again. I need to find other sources of pleasure to fill that void and that desire for pleasure (which is a good desire) in a healthy way.

I believe this is something each one of us needs to realize: pleasure is good, and porn is an illegitimate way of getting it. Therefore, we can't just tell porn to "fuck off" and leave it at that; we need to then actively seek other forms of healthy pleasure so that, when porn comes back, it can't get into our lives because we no longer feel we need what it has to offer.

Is this a foolproof, perfect strategy? Well..I jacked off a week ago, so obviously not. But what it does do is make me really seek the motivation behind why I do PMO, and if I can put that motivation towards something good, then I will be miles ahead of where I would be if I just said no to porn and left it at that.

Hope that helps!

 

Thanks! I'm glad I could help.