Porn Addiction

In the immortal words of Robert Palmer, “You might as well face it…”

Being ‘addicted to love’ is not easy, especially when you’ve trained your brain that love comes out of a laptop or a phone screen. Porn Addiction dare not speak its name, and that’s because of the deep shame that we attach to this condition.

But if I’m not willing to write about it on a Therapy blog, then why should I expect my clients to talk about it in session?

The Key Takeaway  

The thing that I want every reader to know about Porn Addiction is that it is both common and reversible. Do you experience reduced sensitivity? Reduced or hyper-specific arousal? Has porn affected your relationships?

In all these cases, you are not alone, and help is very much available.

Skeletons In Your Hard Drive

The REAL evil of porn addiction is not its severity but its tendency to be unnoticed. After all, your porn consumption will be limited to the time in the day that you spend masturbating or preparing to masturbate. Even if those hours start to pile up, you might still go about the rest of your day believing everything is hunky dory and never think about the dependent habit you are forming.

What’s more, we don’t WANT to think about it, we want to compartmentalise these habits because they are difficult to integrate with our identity. You want to be “Sam the Engineer”, not “Sam the Engineer and Porn Addict”.

David Richo said, “Our wounds are often openings into the best and most beautiful parts of us.” (This is the last quote of the article, I swear!), but certain wounds are located in our most private places.

How do we begin the journey to clearing our path and patching up wounds like that? Well, this is a therapy website after all, so you already know: We find someone we trust and start talking. 

“If I’m not willing to write about it on a Therapy blog, then why should I expect my clients to talk about it in session?”