Porn gets in the way of my goals - S's story

Submitted by a reader on Wed, 13/01/2010 - 11:52

a reader's picture

Hello all,

After so many years of being addicted to porn I finally came to realize why i was not achieving my goals and not going anywhere in life.

As a kid I had a high sexual drive at the age of 6, I was kissing a girl who we used to play as kids and we were cousins. later in life kids from school brought porn magazines and that got me so hooked and more into understanding sex that i began to wonder what was going on with me. Prior to watching porn i had developed fears and porn increased the fears and anxiety in me. No one new what was wrong with me and as years went by with internet porn was all i liked and i could not achieve any goals.

It was until i recently downloaded jason's recovery guide that i realize what was wrong with me and why i am depressed. Now i am working hard to solve this issue.

thank you jason

Thank you S for sharing your insight, and I'm really pleased that your are finding my Porn Game Over guide helpful. It always gives me a buzz to hear that!

So many of us can remember when our sexuality started to kick in, often at a very early age. Attitudes of other kids, older siblings, signals from our parents and all kinds of other sources all add to the confusion. Even though it was a completely natural process of discovery, we can remember the self-doubt that often accompanied these exciting experiences.

And then porn comes along and adds another layer of bewilderment. On the plus side, porn tells us that it's OK to be sexual. But for many young people, an attachment to porn begins there and then. Just as you have found, it's always available on the internet to validate and stimulate you. It's so easy to get stuck there, absorbing porn's unrealistic portrayal of sexual living. It gets in the way of achieving our goals and finding fulfilment in our relationships.

The good news it that it's never too late to overcome our attachment to porn, as you are discovering. When you begin to understand how this habit began, that's such a positive experience. You learn to forgive yourself, let go of old anxiety and regret, and really go places in life.

Here's wishing you plenty of ongoing success!

I attend a 12 step group for sex addicts and of course we talk about porn a lot. I have always been a very shy person and when I was a child my shyness was excruciating. At a very young age I built a large collection of vhs porn videos and even asked my mum and dad to buy me my own video player for christmas. Thinking that I would use it to watch music videos in my bedroom, they bought it and thought they were making me happy. I even remember buying mail order porn videos from holland and paying for them with postal orders. I never got caught by my parents and that amazes me now and I wish they had done.

So when other kids were playing football and meeting girls I was locking myself in my bedroom with hardcore porn videos. It was a comfort zone because of my shyness and I thought I was being much more adult than the other kids because I was watching all this adult porn. I really did convince myself that I was ahead of the game.

At university I took all my videos with me and collected even more. I didn't have a girlfriend and didn't live the crazy fun student life. Then I went back to live with my parents and started work and within a few years I had the internet in my bedroom. The same introverted, shy lifestyle continued except I was watching even more porn and downloading every day. I even converted some of my old videos to avi files and uploaded them to filesharing sites.

It took a lot of effort to go to the 12 step group after reading websites like this one. Sometimes I cant bring myself to speak so I just sit and listen. I have noticed that a lot of the other men who are addicted to porn are very shy aswell and haven't had girlfriends. They tell stories very similar to mine about getting porn when they were kids. I didn't used to think like this but now I worry about children with the internet in their bedrooms. I had to wait several weeks sometimes for a new video to arrive from holland and it was only 90 minutes long. Now children can download hours and hours of porn and watch it instantly while it is downloading. Add to this social shyness and the childs prospects are doomed. I hope someone learns from this.

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What matters most is our real face to face relationships with each other. Porn is something that leaves us feeling more lonely & alone and more separated from each other. Using porn in the privacy of our own private space may seem like a secret past time but it cannot fill up the emotional hole we still have inside ourselves. That hole inside, that need is for love, for contact for understanding, for intimacy, for social contact for all sorts of other complex emotional needs. These needs can & never will be satisfied from using porn. Porn is utterly paradoxical it appears to offer so much but the opposite is true it leaves us with more pain than we ever anticipated.

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Here is something that we should perhaps ponder (reflect on) a little more. The creation of pornographic material (images) involves a process of dehumanization of a person (model be that male or female) down into their sexual features. The person becomes a sexual object for our gaze & for our consumption. However, the flip side of this is that we also dehumanize ourselves by the very act of using these porn images.

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Having used pornography for many years and given up in the last 12months, and on reflection there really really honestly is nothing in the slightest bit positive I can find to say in favour of porn. If I think of porn I automatically think of negative side effects, every aspect of porn is detramental and every aspect is corossive in effect. I am not in favour of an outright or total ban on porn but I am strongly in favour of putting substanial boundaries around the access to pornographic material so that its much harder to just stumble accidentally upon. I personally rate the risks of using or viewing porn on the same level as other modern day problems like alcohol & binge drinking, drunkenness or illegal drugs. These are all high risk activies but people still indulge in them knowingly or unknowlingly.

**Sadly porn is different in one respect there are no safe limits to its use IMO.

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