I need help facing the shame - A's story

Submitted by a reader on Tue, 23/03/2010 - 00:38

a reader's picture

I am 19 years old. But I have a struggle with pornography and masturbation since I was young.

I started masturbating at the age of 10, and pornography at 13. Since young I could never tell my parents about my habit. I was quite a mommy's boy and the least I wanted was to incur the anger of my parents. So this habit was a dirty secret for me since young.

As I grew, I started to make more friends and I wanted to ditch the porn. However I thought it was abnormal and so I never tried to tell anyone about my struggle with pornography. Over time I found a way to deal with my habit. I started to use my image and seeked acceptance so I could convince myself that I wasn't struggling with pornography. I was avoiding my problem rather than facing it. However, no matter how I tried, or how normal a life I had lived, I would always give in in the end.I would always give in when I was alone and feeling insecure without any of my friends around to support my image.

Fast forward a few years now, and I feel like this pornography habit is destroying everything I know in my life now. It's become so great that I find it impossible to live a normal life, and I find it so shameful. So much so that I tend to revert back to who I was, acting in a way to pretend that I'm not an addict. This avoidance and hiding of my shame is eating me up.

I've become more and more perverted in my thoughts. And each time I give in and watch pornography and masturbate, the feeling gets even worse. Yet I don't watch pornography every day. I watch it only when I give in to the notion that I can't face my shame, and it has been happening only about once a month for the past year or so. It's become so bad that I've avoided many of my friends I used to hang out with.

It's only recently that I started to realize I have been avoiding the problem rather than facing it; I pretend I don't have a problem in front of my friends. I've come to realise I need to come out and face the shame and accept what I've done, but it's so much harder than I thought it would be, considering the way I've lived for my whole teenage life. I need help facing this shame, and getting rid of all the negative and untrue lies about myself that porn has put into my head.

Hi A,

Connecting with other people is massively helpful in breaking an unwanted habit or addiction.

We have a fundamental human need to socialise and build intimate connections. For some people, obsessing over porn and masturbation is an attempt to meet the need. They mistake the intensity of the experience for intimacy. They lose sight of the fact that their primary relationship is with an object (the computer screen, the DVD, the magazine) that can never satisfy the need. Interacting with real people is vastly more fulfilling.

Addiction also causes us to objectify other people. In the case of porn addiction, this happens in the extreme. The habit drives us to evaluate people as sexual objects, and compartmentalise them in our minds. They are either 'sexy' people to leer at and absorb into our obsession, or 'non-sexy' people who just get in our way. And because even the sexy people don't live up to the fantasies of porn, we might find ourselves withdrawing from people altogether. Again, fully interacting with people challenges these delusions and keeps our social outlook real.

It sounds to me as if you are making social connections, and have experienced the great benefits. But feelings of shame and dishonesty are spoiling your experience, and that's very common for people who struggle with porn. Honesty, with yourself and others, is another essential key to overcoming addiction.

I have heard stories where an addict's craving for honesty has backfired. There's the husband who took the plunge after a particularly intense porn session, and humbly poured out every detail to his unsuspecting wife. There's the guy who announced his long-standing porn habit to everyone in the office. That really did happen. When the people who mean the most to us are freaked out, we risk withdrawing right back into porn and never chancing honesty ever again.

Now you're probably not preparing to gamble with your entire social standing, but there are recommended ways to go about these things. A good way to come out is by talking to a trusted friend, relative or professional counsellor. This will help your confidence and perspective, one small step at a time. Everyone who faces up to their porn habit is entitled to their privacy and dignity; who they choose to tell is entirely down to them.

In many ways, the image you have presented to your friends is your advantage. It's your target; the assured and fulfilled guy that you would like to be. The guy who forgave himself for clinging to some unhelpful early learning, and gave himself permission to let go. By releasing all the guilt and shame, and tackling the remnants of your porn habit, there's no reason why you can't step right into that image and make it your own reality.

Thank you A for sharing your story, and I wish you every success.

From reading these stories and from my own experiences with porn, it is apparent to me that shame is one of the things that keeps us trapped. I think it gave me stability and could always be depended on. If I watch porn all day today, I know that it will send me into a trance and then I'll feel wretched and shameful afterwards. It will purge me emotionally, a bit like self-harming. That's a horrendous way to live, but we forget all the other options.

A, if you can cut yourself some slack and realise that shame is part of your obsession it will really help. Trust me.

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Hello A,

I agree with what Jason & DuncanS have both said. I can really relate strongly to your story too I spent many many years using porn, I was a very lonely person as a teenager & I was shy because in those days I felt fat & ugly (what girl would like let alone love me etc) and because I grew up in a dysfunctional family with an absent father I too buried my pain & shame for a long time. Porn was much more difficult to get hold of in those days before the internet with the added shame of having to buy it over the counter at a newsagents shop & face another human being.

**I think beating ourselves up about our porn habit is not very helpful, I think its much more useful to try & forgive ourselves.

**I do think this is a great website because people here tend to be pretty free from being overly judgmental and sharing your story shows your NOT alone and that many others share your struggle with porn. Porn is a phenomena of our times along with the internet.

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Further thoughts,

If you have a porn habit I think deep down it starts off as a half aware conscious choice, i.e. we do make a decision to view porn but porn triggers our irrational sexually reactions over time. And thus the more we view porn the more irrational the choices become to the point were irrational behavior takes over and in the end we don't even know why we are just acting out the same old broken record type of behaviors.

I guess if my basic assumptions about why we use porn are accurate, then my question to you A, would be what would you have to face up to feeling i.e. what buried emotions would surface if you stopped using porn. If porn is a stopper on the bottle what would come out of that bottle? If you stopped taking porn as a pain killer what feelings would you face?

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Thanks everyone for the comments, and for publishing my story. I guess one problem I have is feeling the need to be perfect in front of others, maybe because of my childhood introversion. It's the reason why I started hiding this problem and the shame that comes with it in the first place. The second problem is when I started really becoming addicted, and certain thoughts that went through my mind really made me ashamed of myself when I was with my friends, instead of accepting that the shame is due to my addiction, I chose to hide the shame and pretend I was the person I was before I became seriously addicted, with no such problems with shame. Maybe it was the immediate relief, or the attractive imaginary image that I created, which made me continue in this mode for at least a year. Each time I could really act like the confident and self-assured person, it made me start thinking that I was that person, and that I didn't really have a porn addiction. But inevitably, deep inside this porn addiction still stuck with me, and I started watching porn again. I would watch porn, then feel ashamed, stop for 1 month, then I would watch it again. Each time I watch porn, I could feel that the image I created slowly erode, making me think I created the image just to hide my addiction. It really confused me, making me wonder who I really was. Together with the porn addiction and my self-imposed social isolation, I started thinking really perverted thoughts that I felt were almost becoming part of me.
But recently, I started to realize that these thoughts were because of my consistent falls into porn when I felt I could not face my shame, my friends and my life. I look back at myself a year back, and I know I didn't have those thoughts which reside in my mind now. I guess I could not accept that pornography was causing me to have these perverted thoughts. Maybe it was my desire for control or my unwillingness to give up porn, but unconsciously I never accepted that pornography could change my thoughts. I would always beat myself up and blame myself for the thoughts I were thinking, not realizing that I had these thoughts not because I wanted to, but because I was addicted to pornography.

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One more thing, I've started to accept myself as a pornography addict without feeling my own self beating myself down for being such a useless person. I guess by projecting a confident image, I was trying to avoid seeing myself as an addict. Because then, I felt I wouldn't be able to talk with my friends anymore. But not accepting the truth is an even worse outcome, and now I don't even dare meet my friends anymore. I've seen why I need to see myself for who I am, and not see myself as the person I wanted to be.

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