There’s no escaping the media buzz surrounding the US election. It’s everywhere and endless , and I can easily believe that people are getting hooked. With up-to-the-minute news updates, fever-pitch blogging and fierce online debates, it’s strong stuff indeed.
So I read Mike Elgan’s observations at Datamation.com with interest. He lists the striking parallels between Election Addiction and Porn Addiction, and brings some intriguing insights to the whole topic.
For people struggling with porn, some of Mike’s observations are right on target. Let me explain…
“Election Addiction is justifiable in part because it’s rare and temporary”
We often find ourselves using similar justifications for porn habits. This is particularly applicable when we’re getting the stuff for free: shared P2P downloads and torrents, rare passwords, hacked paysites and videos posted on non-pornographic sites that will surely be taken down at any moment.
Many addicts will recognise the internal reasoning: “Yeah I’m cutting down on porn, but this file/site/download is RARE! It’ll never be available again… if I don’t download it now… just this one file and then I’ll quit…”
Nothing stirs up our gotta-have-it instinct more than access to rare or ’special stuff’. In recovery, we really start to wonder what all the excitement was about. It’s embarrassing really.
“Like Online Porn Addiction, Election Addiction is fueled by skilled professionals”
Hollywood produces 400 feature films a year. According to Adult Video News, the porn industry churns out 11,000. That’s big, lucrative business.
The porn industry drives technical innovation. Porn drove the VHS video market and it also drove broadband internet; it now looks likely to influence the next generation of movie format, which it has chosen as HD-DVD.
So we’re talking about a sophisticated and savvy industry that continues to expand. Compulsive consumers are repeat customers, to put it mildly.
“We’re unprepared for it because some of the Internet applications are so new to us. New Web 2.0 tools like Digg, YouTube and Facebook are enabling Election Addiction like nothing the world has ever seen”
And for every Digg, YouTube or Facebook, there’s is now a porn equivalent with many thousands of participants.
Porn video sharing, webcamming communities, porn bookmarking, porn blogging. There’s no shortage of web 2.0 porn resources to feed our habits.
Which leads us to the next observation…
“It feeds off of the Election Addiction of other people. It’s viral”
Many of us remember the old, pre-internet days of feeding those porn urges. Seedy bookstores and sticky cinemas, often operating on the fringes of the law. Awkwardly shuffling past other customers was the only contact we had with fellow porn enthusiasts.
Things are different today, of course. The slick and socially connected sites put porn in a very different light and on the whole, that’s probably no bad thing. But for people struggling with porn, it provides additional, deluded justification.
“Camming… homemade porn… DVD-ripping… everybody’s into it.” Bored with vanilla porn sites and movies, more and more people are making their own. Filming themselves or their (often unaware) partners, they contribute to sharing and voyeur communities.
For the compulsive porn user, this means an endless source of fresh porn, and some regrettable experiments with their own cameras. Again, recovering addicts look back with cringing embarrassment.
I’ll wrap this up with a final quote from Mike Elgan:
The Internet is simply the Mother of All Enablers, providing a medium through which addicts can indulge real addictions, including porn, gambling, news, video games and socializing (a.k.a. social media addiction).
At least in a few weeks time, the election fever will die down and avid watchers will get on with their lives. For porn addiction, there’s no such end in sight.
Soon after they married, K began to discover the true extent of her husband’s porn habit. She explains how his obsessional behaviour makes her feel:
I’m 32, just got married 3 months ago, we love each other. Before we got married, my husband told me that he like to open porn website and I accepted him and I thought that it’s normal for a guy. After we married, I found a lot of his porn download video collection in his computer. When I asked him, he said that video could make more intimacy between us. Once again, I accepted his reason.
I love my husband, he is faithful and never cheating, I trust him. What make me pity of him, his sleeptime is changed now, he’s easy to get tired because he spent a lot of time in front of his computer by watching or downloading porn video or some politic news. He awoke in very early morning and again he downloaded porn video. It made me unhappy that when we watched tv show together, he seem that he was concerned about his download porn video, made him not concentrate for our tv show, he was back to his computer.
After we hang out together, he always said ‘Can we go home now?’ and after that he’s back to his computer and enjoying his porn video. I feel like that I’m his #2 and porn video his #1. I never doubt that my husband never cheated to somebody, he is lovely husband. I don’t want to change him but I do want him to change his addiction. Can you give me advice? thank you
When a new boyfriend or husband is initially open about their fondness for pornography, it’s easy to accept that this is just something that guys do. And that’s certainly true - many men and couples do look at porn, without damaging their relationships or intimacy. Unfortunately, his interest in porn might already be out of control.
Your husband may have been compulsively collecting porn for a long time. When he tried to justify his habit by talking about the benefits to your relationship, he may have been trying to convince himself too. Addicts continually try to explain and justify their habits in their own minds. When a relationship or marriage comes along, they might try to sell the delusion to their partners.
At first, their justifications can be very convincing; he might feel desperate to somehow balance the new married lifestyle with his solitary behaviours of the past. As you have found, this becomes an impossible situation and the partner becomes a casualty of the bizarre conflict.
Addicts do find themselves living in a state of almost constant tiredness. As well as the late night porn surfing sessions, their energies are drained by the permanent state of anticipation for getting back to the computer. As you have found, guys can be at work, watching TV, playing sport or even out socialising - as long as there is porn downloading at home, they are distracted by the buzz of anticipation.
In recovery, guys are usually staggered at how much mental energy they wasted on the empty pursuit of pornography. It’s embarrassing for them. The fact that they could have continued living in the addiction bubble whilst their relationships and careers fell around them is ultimately a very scary one.
As you say, this painful situation is different to traditional ‘cheating’ because he is still around the house. Partners of porn addicts experience the emotional neglect, disappointment and sometimes the self-blame of a cheating husband, but retain the small security of knowing there is nobody else involved. Either way, you are entitled to a better relationship and lifestyle with your husband than this.
The first step in addressing this problem is to honestly tell him exactly how his behaviour makes you feel. Explain that you feel like you come second to porn in his life, and this is definitely not the relationship you chose. He really needs to understand this.
If he responds with the ‘intimacy benefits’ argument or tries to discount the problem with ‘but all guys are the same’, simply refuse to play the justification game. Explain that this is a very real problem in living with the man that you love.
If he acknowledges the problem, this is definite progress. If you are both able to openly discuss your feelings, you will be able to explore possible reasons for his habit. It may be an old coping or escape mechanism that really is not needed any more, but has become too ingrained to recognise and let go.
Ideally, he will take responsibility for this problem and agree to take some positive steps in facing up to it. It may be useful for him to make a counselling appointment, or research the many helpful resources available online.
Recovery is often a step-by-step process, and there can be frustration and some painful realities along the way. It certainly is achievable though, and loving relationships can be rebuilt. Thank you for sharing your story with such openness, and I wish you every success in taking these important steps now.
I soon became very bored with the David Duchovny sex addiction scandal. It’s been done to death in the gossip columns and news blogs, and I’m sure many readers are feeling the same.
But there’s always a positive aspect: the ongoing media coverage of the wider problem. For example, a great article appeared in The Sun a few days ago.
Steve Cole, Addiction Services Manager at the Cygnet Hospital in London, explains one of the most common symptoms of pornography addiction:
“It means it can be conducted in secret and the wildest fantasies can be lived out online. Addicts may start to spend more and more time online, amassing collections of pornography.
The partner of a sex addict may not even know what their other half is going through, but bizarrely a big warning sign is usually when they stop wanting sex.”
He also offers sound, practical advice for facing up to the problem:
The first step is recognising there is a problem and then seeking help from an addiction counsellor. And he stresses that it need not be a dedicated sex therapist since the mechanisms of addiction are the same.
He says: “Addiction therapists will look at addiction across the board whether it’s drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping or sex. The sufferer may not experience actual withdrawal symptoms but will still need time to detox from the compulsion in a safe environment.”
I should add that ‘detox’ from porn addiction is not about private clinics or therapy retreats… unless you have the finances of a Hollywood A-lister. As part of a recovery plan, we can all take steps to create our own ’safe environment’. I’m planning to blog some more on this very soon.
Sometimes when I refer to compulsive porn use as a coping mechanism, I get some pretty blank looks. Especially from wives and partners.
It comes as less of a surprise to the guys who are caught up in this trap. For them, the novelty of porn is long gone. It doesn’t even feel sexy anymore, except from the occasional buzz of discovering some new niche or fetish (a troubling trend in itself, but we’ll leave that for another blog post).
So why do guys keep doing it? Why continue to invest such vast amounts of time in porn, all the while diverting their emotional energy away from their relationships and real lives?
Well, the answer lies in that diversion. Porn is an escape mechanism, albeit a hazardous one. For so many people, the routine of seeking and absorbing porn distracts us from the things in our lives that we’re desperate to avoid. When pressure or anxiety builds, so does the allure of pornography.
This article in the Daily Telegraph illustrates the point nicely. Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist has seen a threefold increase in the number of Wall Street workers seeking help for their sex addiction as the economic meltdown gathered pace over the last six months.
Jodi Conway, a sex addiction specialist based across the Hudson River in New Jersey, explains that the financial meltdown has triggered the “maladaptive coping mechanisms” of bankers. Among her clients in recent weeks are Wall Street financiers who have been caught looking at pornography on their work laptops as share prices tumbled.
Mr Alpert counsels his patients to confront the reasons for their addiction and then helps them with other methods of alleviating stress, like taking more exercise or improving their diet. He says:
“Like many addictions, you have to help sex addicts question the purpose it is serving. They’re using it to escape from the anxiety and pressure caused by the crash of the market. They like to live on the edge.”
Of course, we still have a choice. This is an explanation of the drive behind porn addiction, but not an excuse or justification. We all have options for how we de-stress and get through difficult times. The process of recovery means learning to recognise and act on these options.
Last week’s Irish Times featured a detailed review of my approach to tackling porn addiction. I was really pleased to read the positive comments from counsellor Padraig O’Morain, the author of the article.
Final thought: people who have a dependence on pornography are not bad people. They are just people who are hooked on a very strong drug and who need to make new choices.
They could start off by looking at McClain’s website at www.quitpornaddiction.com which promotes his e-book but also has a link to his blog with lots of good, free information. If you are married to somebody with a pornography addiction, you will find much here to interest you as well.
Imagine a piece of software that figures out just how many hours we have clocked up surfing internet porn. On second thoughts, we’re probably better off not knowing. But what about the hours we might be wasting today, or tomorrow..?
Web surfing devours our time. Whether we’re battling with constant porn urges, or successfully making progress in overcoming a habit, we all know how easily those ‘couple more minutes’ turn into hours. Even when we’ve overcome the compulsion to surf porn, we very often find outselves left with a twitching mouse hand. YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, news sites… the urge to surf remains overwhelming.
So this tip applies to everyone who wishes to use time on the internet more productively. MeeTimer is a free plugin for Firefox, which ingeniously measures just how much time you spend procrastinating online. And it can provide some scary numbers.
So how does MeeTimer work? It simply enables you to create categories for the websites that you regularly visit. Some categories are set up for you: work, communication, search and of course, procrastination. Porn sites would definitely fit in this last category.
As you surf, a click of the mouse enables you to place your favourite sites in the appropriate category. All other sites you visit are classed under miscellaneous. It’s as simple as that. And then the plugin just sits in your browser and keeps count, revealing the harsh truth whenever you wish to know!
There are options for warning you about procrastination sites, and even options for blocking them out. But this is not a filter. Running this plugin is a voluntary action that you can take to become more accountable for the time you spend online. As the author’s website says:
Understanding just how much time is disappearing is key to actually acting upon it. No deterrent-based system will work if you actually want to get round it; it has to be your choice.
So thanks to creator Andy Mitchell for this unique tool, and potentially providing us with one hell of a valuable shock.
Prompted by Susan Cheever’s new book “Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction”, an article in The Sunday Times adds to the ongoing debate: does sex addiction really exist, or is it simply being used to sell books and fill cinemas?
With brief comments from therapists representing both sides of the argument, Marty Klein and Patrick Carnes, the article neatly summarises some of the key arguments. There’s clearly much more debate on the way:
The term “sex addiction” was officially listed as a mental disorder in 1980 but was removed from the list in 1994 as the belief took hold that only substances, not behaviour, could be addictive. However, a medical task-force is considering restoring it to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
For me, Cheever’s comment at the end highlights one very common problem faced by people trying to overcome their obsession with porn: habits reinvent themselves.
When we cut out the porn sites by filtering or moving the computer into a more public space, we might find ourselves aimlessly surfing YouTube for hours on end. Sometimes, there’s a risk that the habit could turn to offline obsessions, such as adult phonelines or kerb crawling.
Of course, this applies to all forms of compulsive behaviour. Cheever noticed a shift from alcoholism to sex addiction:
“In 1999, when I wrote about alcoholism,” she said, “I had no idea that there was such a thing as sex addiction. It’s only in writing this book that I’ve come to see that all addictions are one addiction.”
She went on: “Addiction isn’t about substance – you aren’t addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings. And if that substance is taken away, you’ll replace it with another substance.”
So ‘cutting it out’ isn’t really overcoming the problem. Breaking out of addictive games requires a clear action plan. For recovery in the long-term, we need to delve a little deeper into what drives the compulsion in the first place.
As the author of a self-help book about overcoming addiction, my ears pricked up when I heard about the release of Fireproof. It’s all about a guy who, inspired by a self-help book from his father, overcomes porn addiction and a raft of other problems to recover his marriage from the brink of disaster.
Not a subject commonly featured in Hollywood blockbusters, I think you’ll agree.
Can such a movie deliver a message of hope and support to those spending-too-much-time-watching-porn guys in the audience? Is it really possible to get these issues in front of mainstream audiences in the first place, and then avoid preaching or alienating them?
I was intrigued. And then I watched the trailer…
… and the answer is a resounding no.
Ok I haven’t watched the movie. I’m not going to bash a Christian-made film aimed at Christian-filmgoers. I might chortle at the line “Marriages aren’t fireproof, Michael… sometimes you get burnt” but I appreciate what the makers are trying to achieve here.
But I just can’t relate, and that’s the issue here. As porn addiction films go, Confessions of a Porn Addict undoubtedly hits the wider target, probably with more poignancy than creator Spencer Rice ever intended.
FF describes her struggle with a porn addicted husband, and the painful dilemma that she faces:
My husband is addicted to pornography and our relationship is breaking down. We’ve been locked in the “emotional games” cycle for so long with him denying and being defiant and me becoming more and more controlling.
Our marriage is no longer a marriage — it’s been taken over by this sick cycle. I love him very much and I want to be able to repair our relationship, but I think we’re on the verge of a divorce. He blames me a lot for all our problems and has told me he’s very angry at women in general because of his issues with his mother.
How do I tap into this clinical detachment you keep mentioning? It’s so difficult to let go when I feel like I’m losing my husband to this horrible addiction. I want to hold on tighter, but it’s making him pull away.
Thank you FF for sharing your situation. It’s a sad fact that many partners will recognise the heart-wrenching set of circumstances that you describe.
As instinctive and natural as it is, your controlling reaction is pandering to his addiction-warped vision of your relationship. As you suggest, he is leading you into ongoing games of persecutor and victim. By desperately clinging to the victim role, he tries to justify his habit and build further resentment towards you and your relationship. It’s a cruel, blaming game called ‘Just try and stop me’.
I’ve recently blogged about the ‘clinical detachment’ approach for partners. It is a short-term strategy for breaking up these games, and I certainly hope that you could find it helpful.
However, it would appear that there are other issues driving your husband’s attitudes and compulsive behaviour. I encourage partners to offer support in facing porn addiction problems, but his historical issues concerning his mother require help that you cannot, and shouldn’t be expected to, try to resolve. He may well be using porn to indulge deep-rooted feelings of misogyny, and this should be addressed in professional therapy.
It pains me to say it, but until he accepts and gets help for these issues, little progress can be made. Unless something triggers a significant shift in his outlook, you are just going to continue receiving the same.
I wish you the very best, even if it means moving on from this impossible relationship.
Although it made me cringe more than once, this recent advice article makes for an interesting read. Psychologist Dr. David Moore and addiction expert Bill Manville touch on various aspects of porn addiction, and serve up a couple of curveballs in the process.
Dr. Dave risks losing us early on with a tenuous comment about Jesus, but gets back on track with this simple summary of the problem:
A quick bit of self-diagnosis will help. Has your porn viewing begun to harm your health, your job and finances, your family and marriage? And do you continue to do it anyway? That’s no longer an amusement. That’s an addiction.
Well said.
Upon being asked about 12-step programs for porn addicts and their partners, things get interesting. I certainly have my reservations about 12-step, but here’s one you don’t hear every day:
I’m going to surprise you and say “no” - primarily because too many of those narrowly-focused groups are filled with known sexual offenders.
Well I was suprised. Instead, he advocates addressing an obsession with porn in the context of larger issues. There’s some contradiction when he suggests attending alcohol or drug related 12-step groups, but I appreciate that these issues are sometimes related.
Our experts then consider how addictive behaviours feed on isolation, and how this leads to objectification.
Seeing others as “nasty” sexual objects feeds our fantasies. Turning away from the solitary pleasures of computer porn to focus on increasing your partner’s emotional pleasure is Step One. The reward is that this maximizes your own sexual response; removing the motivation, and even ability, to objectify a sexual partner.
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