Why do I currently have a porn addiction? How can I address it?
Why do people watch porn? Why do I watch porn? Because they want to feel connected to someone? I think I lacked that intimacy with anyone growing up in my life. I know as a child there are always experiences that shape who we become. Our fears, insecurities, that we have to address as a result.
Hmm side note, life like any project. Put up the work up front and you’ll see the results down the road. If you fail to plan properly, then you’ll be realizing all that misplanning debt for the duration of the project. The quality and success of that project will be a fraction of what it could be when you first started it. Same with life - put up the work up front of raising a child the best way possible. Then they won’t be spending the rest of their life trying to recover from that emotional, mental, psychological, and spiritual debt.
But with porn, were there more defining experiences in middle and high school compared to earlier in childhood? Porn was a way of feeling cool. To fit in. To watch it because everyone else would watch it. Especially the accessibility and availability of it. The more prominent the internet becomes, the easier I could access it.
Side note, notice how the accessibility and availability of things in society are trending. Usually the less accessible and available they are, the more valuable they probably are. Healthy food, healthy lifestyles, etc. Money is a proxy for that to quantitatively gauge these characteristics.
It became more accepted because movies, TV, music, etc. became more sexualized. You have to try harder to find ways that didn’t make sex and porn more readily accessible and available. The action of watching porn is motivated by fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of not being accepted. Because in a video you don’t have to be rejected. You can be the hero of your own story.
Is that why I like foreplay so much? Because I want the story. Not the actual sex piece of it. But the process of being loved and accepted. That intimacy.
Why?
I didn’t feel loved or accepted at a certain stage(s) of my childhood or adolescence? How so?
If the seeds were planted for this addiction in early childhood, then I kept watering the seed throughout middle and high school and definitely in college. But how do you reconcile that things that became more ubiquitous like alcohol with prohibition or legalizing marijuana, people have less of an inclination towards them?
Well so I think it’s like fame. Fame doesn’t change you. It just reveals who you are. So same thing here. Porn doesn’t change me. It just reveals to me who I am.
And who am I?
I am a child that’s scared of rejection and not being accepted and not feeling loved.
[5 min meditation]
Got it. So growing up I would be told that my process or how hard I worked would be rewarded. Put in the work and the rest will work out. That my effort would be rewarded. The thing is, which I remember from the Childhood Matters book, that the parent or teacher or society must validate and recognize the effort made by the child, not the end result of whatever happened. It’s the intention that you’re recognizing, not the result. Validate and recognize and celebrate the intention and effort.
However, society taught me to feel validated by the results. Academic, physical, intellectual, sexual. That in a partnership there is a winner and a loser. A hero and a villain. That to be with someone is a victory. That the end result of being with someone is a victory. The process and intention of being intimate with someone was not recognized.
With porn, it’s the climax and the orgasms that are celebrated. I was looking to be validated during the process. I viewed the result of wanting to be with someone as the validation. Sex was shown to me as the way to get closer to someone. So that’s what was validated by my peers and people around me. I wasn’t shown how to properly be intimate with someone. How to properly love and be loved. Not for what my actions necessarily are, but for what my intentions and effort are.
Sex was the way to feel validated that my intentions and efforts were recognized. Porn made it universally accessible and available.
So if others don’t recognize my intentions and effort, then I must recognize them myself.
How?
Every day, I set intentions for myself. But I never follow through on the efforts of those intentions. I just go from intentions to judging the results. However, there’s a middle step of efforts. So when I don’t do the actions that were aligned with my intentions, I don’t feel validated that my efforts were recognized.
Intentions → Effort → Actions
So to change that, not only must I set my intentions, I must also recognize the effort I made to follow through on those intentions. If I make the effort but the actions or results didn’t fully reach to what I wanted, then I must still have the courage to recognize those efforts. Build it into my system for ensuring that I always do that, no matter what the result ended up being. After a while, it’ll become second nature to do that with myself and then with others.
So with porn, I must set the intention that I will not watch porn. Then recognize the effort I made if I did indeed make an effort to not watch any. Then I’ll be fine with the result either way. And then hopefully over time, I’ll overcome this addiction.
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