It was too hard...

You were brave to get out of the relationship, and show him that you are worth more than that. You are right, no one deserves that.

Healing will take time, but you will be happy again!

 

Congrats on your choice.

What exactly would you say you learned from dealing with a porn addict ?

Are you open to dating another one in the future ?

Is there anyway to prevent the mistakes (if any) in selection from reoccurring ?

Curious to hear your wisdom on this?

 

I would say, that you have at least learned to avoid certain red flags in your future boyfriend(s). As you mentioned it yourself too. I also believe that betrayal trauma teaches the betrayed partners to view the world differently. At first it can be worse, but as we heal from it, I hope our view will be better than before. I personally feel that I'm growing day by day, and becoming wiser and better person. If I didn't have the experiences I have now, I wouldn't be able to grow wiser this way.

 

I am so proud of you for identifying these specific things.

I don’t know how many addicts you have met, but sex addicts are probably the HARDEST to help and the hardest to identify.

I mean, alcoholics, narcotic addicts or drug addicts are all relatively easy to diagnose and recognize. But sex or porn addicts is an addiction where the stigma of getting help feels worse than the cure for getting help.

As a result, many deny themselves the help they need. They have shame on top of shame on top of fear.

I would guess, the “cut him loose” attitude will likely mean he can end up worse than he was while being with you. But none of what you describe is surprising.

I even like the “cannot take the trash out “.

That is because sex addiction attacks the brain. It rewrites the decision- frontal lobe pathways and re-directs them to the Limbic pathways.

In an other addictive scenario a smoker doesn’t lose this ability to think and reason. He may hate the idea of quitting but he can reason that it makes sense. In a pmo laced addiction (your boyfriend had both sounds like PA and SA), the challenge is to consider him as a mildly handicapped.

Lower the expectations. Many addicts don’t recognize they ARE even addicts until they cannot do basic functions.

As far as him wanting to change , that’s not something you control. You need to establish healthy boundaries to ensure you stay on your side. Leaving is a healthy boundary, but you can do that without leaving too.

Codependency. Ahh this one is classic and easy to understand too. Pmo hollows out their victims. Like an adder’s poison liquifies it’s prey from the inside.

Watching other people have sex, or role playing like other people having sexual makes it hard to love. And live for oneself. You just substitute the actor for your own lifestyle choices. Eventually, you are hollow and unable to decide ANYTHING.

I hate the codependent part of this especially. It’s so hard to undo.

A partner to an addict is not ever (or should ever be) the solution for the addict. All that does is shift responsibility.

I am sorry you didn’t get good feedback on how to deal with someone like this. Progress is not linear. Your expectations would have brought you all kinds of frustration I can see. For you, leaving probably makes you feel cold, but the boundary you set is good. If you wanted to help him, you did. If you still want to see him get better , and not be involved romantically , the irony is—-now you could easily.

I am rooting for you. Addicts aren’t impossible to love —- we seemingly have people willing to love us all around but it’s hard to trust within the walls of shame and fear.

I agree with Liina. Now is a good time to deal with your own trauma (if you have any) so that you don’t jeapordiZe your next one.

 

Just to clarify: even if he gets worse, it has nothing to do with you. He is an addict most likely long before you met.

SO’s don’t usually hear this said this way: but addicts cannot love until they learn to stop using. The two things are opposites and exclusive. We SAY we love , but the evidence of an addiction indicates a contradiction. We are using our bodies’ dopamine generators to escape some kind of problem. We could be using our partners also to escape our feelings. Either way; it has NOTHING to do with the partner. Please understand this first so that you don’t get frustrated when you see you can not leverage your relationship to get him to change. His addiction is NOT about you— it’s about him.

He can get help but he needs to draw circle around himself and start making very very small micro decisions. He won’t be able to make ANY major decisions depending on his gravity of despondency and addictive state. It’s like a slow ride to a vegetable state.

I would say—- you love(d) him, and didn’t see why getting help was hard. But any addict resists because addictive belief systems are not based on logic, freedom and love. They are based on fear , suspicion and secrecy. Everything is a calculation and manipulative chess game.

You were a piece in his game Board. He has to admit Lots of things before change is possible. To make it worse, You can not force him to change either—love does not work this way. Love shares truths and gives a choice, love does not hide the truth and force a certain path.

Each must choose our path.

A healthy boundary is a great step to restoring him.

On the other side —- you DO need to worry about you. You aren’t a therapist so worrying about a guy who is in denial is not your job.

I think compassion unfortunately can sometimes mean we unwisely erase necessary boundaries. Addicts need boundaries and that’s what I mean when I say he will probably get worse. You were a boundary for him. In other words didn’t pmo in the open. You don’t need to be his solution though. I’m just saying that because it’s likely how this would play out.

 

This is a perfect line of questioning.

Yes. The manipulation is very much Par for the course ...

Sadly the most important first step to successful taking any remedy is to admit the problem for which you need the remedy....

Getting “called out” doesn’t work with everyone. I don’t even know if it works on most.

Men do not think like women in this regard—- we compartmentalize to the extreme when maintaining an addict lifestyle. It’s easier to deny anything provided we have a cover story.

This is why isolation for men is healthy. The book “men are from Mars women are from Venus “ described the isolation men often do as “retreating to the cave.”

Think of it as a hyperbaric chamber. Designed for one.

A man needs to be able to relate. Trust. Share.

Men don’t open up because they do not trust.

Pain. Trauma. All contribute to this.

You would need to ask:

Who does my man trust ? Why?
Who can he relate to? Why?
Who does he share with? why?

 

Ahh I see what you mean...

Let’s analyze the addict brain for a second.

They have emotions and moments of logic. But they don’t connect these items. They live in isolated moments not a continuous flow (like you might observe them.)

If they have a problem they disconnect to deal with it. Over time the compartmentalizations have an effect on the brains ability to pass information from the right to the left hemisphere. That pathway becomes short circuited with orgasms which ping the limbic system.

Now with a fragmented perception, we ask them to “connect all the experiences and failures with porn and sex to indicate the problem is porn.”

However, the Problem now is they have to take emotional information (that they normally discard through coping with pmo) and hold it, then push it from one side of the brain and to the logical side. Attempting this back and forth process where the brain pathways have been unused can often create an error message.

So in other words—- an addict will struggle in recognizing his reality. He may see he has problems (focus, pied, eating, grooming, working etc).

He should be able to comprehend it technically but in order to believe it he needs to engage his frontal lobe and here is where porn wins. This part can be very damaged with a hypofrontal disengagement— so that his perception sensors are disincentivized to ever kill porn. Its far too powerful.

Thus he struggles to be able to apply the principal to himself.

Imagine phantom pain. A psychosomatic connection to a missing appendage brought on by the brain. This is similar to what pmo does. He no longer can switch hemispheres as easily as before. He cannot recognize that his “appendage” is gone. He is feeling pain that is not real.

So when we expect the brain to catch up to reality we need to account for the trauma that it has suffered. In this case , the consequence of pmo creates a delay between reality and and addicts perception.

We DO need to adjust our expectation. Just telling him to “quit” or trying to do the “homework for him” is not likely to work. This is a self- journey in the end.

It helps to break this down into small steps first.

 

Yeah — I have found only one female poster here who gets it. She shares how she beat her own addictions and a huge part of it is routine.