How to Overcome Porn Addiction and Get Your Life Back
It could seem like a strange topic to be discussing. It
doesn't come up much in polite company. Yet, we know that as many as 35% of
U.S. and U.K. males under 50 will be struggling with it to a degree they
themselves find somewhat dispiriting in their reflexive moments. In its most
extreme form: using up hour after hour, it starts to sap relationships,
motivation, and sheer well-being. The first move is to insist that the problem
is neither ridiculous nor unfathomable. It starts with a simple design flaw in
our brains, brains that evolved to respond powerful to stimuli like, sexual
attraction or sugar, in conditions where these were very scarce indeed.
These brains just never acquired a capacity for self-control
commensurate with the temptations offered by the modern, technologically
enhanced world. Levels of discipline that, were at one point, entirely adequate
to deal with sexual opportunities in the small villages of the east African
grasslands, just can't cope with galleries filled with images of millions of highly
fertile, well proportioned, digitized, naked people. Why ever do anything other
than look? The problem of porn is identical with that of food: brains that were
geared to take quick advantage of the occasional presence of a few berries are
now defenseless before the vats of artificial sweeteners turned out by our
remorseless technologies. People don't spend hours looking at pornography on
the screen because they are bad, but because the porn is so very good, that is,
devilishly well adapted to breaking down all arguments against it. Crucially,
in all cases of addiction, it's never that we're simply greedy, or lusty, or
depraved; the real reason is always more poignant and more worthy of sympathy. We
get addicted because we're sad. The business of living is so desperately hard, relationships
are so challenging, work often so unfulfilling or boring, family dynamics so
tricky, and the capacity for honest, kindly conversation so restricted, we may,
through no particular fault of our own, fall into despondency of a kind that
leaves us extremely vulnerable to the sudden intense highs offered by short
films about lesbians trying anal, or plate after plate of iced buns.
What we call addiction, invariably, has the same structure: a
difficult life, plus a very intense diversionary pleasure, plus a
technologically induced way of increasing that pleasure to a pitch which breaks
our minds natural muscles of self-control. The cause of porn addiction isn't,
therefore, porn. It's careers that are fraught, and relationships where we
can't get our point across, and essays that are devilishly tricky to author. The
real cure to addiction is, hence, simple in structure: to find something nicer
to pursue than the thing we're addicted to. But of course, that's going to be
very hard, for comparable highs are not widely to hand.
Yet, a chief and immediate enemy is shame, which reinforces
the feeling of low self-worth and helps inspire the addiction in the first
place. It's therefore helpful to insist on a few points that addiction is
normal, that it's not our fault, it's that of a brain that wasn't made to cope
with the temptations before us, that there's no need for self-disgust; the
addicted are almost in the majority, though we'd never know it, that we should
draw courage from the confessions of others, that we should acknowledge the
sadness in our lives, that we should interpret it with the necessary dignity, that
we should hold the pain and incompleteness in mind without fleeing it, that we
should use it to power something more relevant to our talents, reroute your
manic energy, try to heal someone else's pain, swap this addiction for another,
slightly less fruitless one, become compulsive elsewhere. And then, a banal,
but critical point: we should try never to be left alone with a computer when
we are in a vulnerable state. Let the rational parts of our structure life so
that we'll be less at risk in moments of sadness. It's simply the ultimate
cruelties that the machine we do all our work on also happens to host the magic
door to a play land more phantasmagorical than anything the Marquis de Sade
could have dreams up. Secular, modern people often automatically assume that
sexuality can't exert a momentous power over our minds.
They're being too sanguine, and therefore unwittingly,
rather mean. Online porn has an unparalleled power to get in the way of almost
every other rather important and precious thing around, starting with the rest
of our lives. We should forgive ourselves for being so drawn to these intense,
often rather harmful highs in a world that's mostly grey and arduous. Then,
with all the will we can muster, we should try to switch off.
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