Root of the addiction?

[glovert]

My Roots
- not being popular/accepted by everyone
- easily vulnerable and peer pressured when I was younger
- shyness
- dissatisfaction with life

I think most of the underlying roots, were layed out between the ages of 5-8. As part of my PA recovery, I'm trying to work through most of them

[Vorlan]

I think the root of my addiction is that when I was younger I moved school - seems harmless but I was totally uprooted socially and I didn't have very many friends or confidants till after the start of secondary school. I tend to think it was my lonliness coupled with my sxual frustration (the classic teenage "getting a girl" problems) led to me MB and watching P as a method of stress relief. It gave me a "safe" place where I was anonymous and could do whatever the dark voice in my head urged me to do. Forturnatly I am not in the same situation as I was then; I have a great group of friends and have learned to get on with people and I'm still single but not as bothered by it as I was. In short I guess I've grown up, in many ways.

Good thread this, kudos for bumping it up!

Best wishes,

Ben

[Farmer]

I grew up in a dysfunctional family, but like most kids I was very resilient. I had a strong network of friends, was active in sports and I had girl friends too. I could get by.

I was moved to a new town and new school at the age of 13. This was my worst nightmare. With my network of friends disappearing and my “isolation” with my dysfunctional family it became a nonstop horror show. MB became my tranquilizer.

This move caused all those emotions, depression, anxiety, and loneliness and so on that I used MB to medicate.

This perpetuated more dysfunction as timed passed and I grew older.

I think it can be helpful to identify all of life’s garbage but only to dispose of it. Not to dwell on it. I have fond this to be quite challenging to do but rewarding.

Farmer.

[lonesome_soul]

Personally I feel that the root to my porn addiction is depression. Plain and simple. I use P and MB as a distraction from bad feelings, as a means of filling a void in my life. Like Jessica said, the root of addiction is pain, and for me the source of that pain is my depression.

So I guess the bigger question for me is, what is the root of my depression. It's crazy, because when I look back I can see that I have had periods of depression all my life. I remember being six years old and feeling depressed... seriously, I used to hate school so much I would cry every day on the bus and in the classroom. I just wanted to go home and be with my mom and my little brother, I couldn't handle being in that environment. It may seem like I was just being a cry-baby or a mommas-boy (that's certainly what I got called a lot) but when I look back analytically, the same feelings of sadness, emptiness and hopelessness I felt at those times as a child would stay with me for most of my life.

I am sure part of it is genetic. I know I come from a family of gloomy-gusses. We all have our patterns of depression. The fact that my mother was abused sexually, and took her lifetime of anger out on me verbally as a youngster didn't help either. I think I learned to empathize and emulate my mothers anger and patterns of depression, leading to many of the self-esteem issues I have today.

An interesting discussion I had with a friend the other day lead me to a seemingly simple yet elusive method towards recovery from such issues: forgiveness.

It seems so easy, so simple. It's almost a cliche: "To err is human, to forgive divine." "When I forgive I forget" "Turn the other cheek." etc etc. But to forgive the people who have done you harm in the past, to forgive yourself for the mistakes you've made is the first step in letting go of the past. If you can let go of the past, maybe you can stop obsessing over things, including P or whatever vice you have chosen to self-medicate yourself with and fill the emptiness and sooth the pain. Maybe some of that pain and emptiness will go away if you're able to stop carrying around with you this burden of hate and anger and bad feelings. Maybe you can find some happiness and good feelings to put there instead, if you stop burning up so much energy and feeling bad and replaying the past and you give life a chance.

Maybe.

[Newman]

Being obsessed with sex all the time, constantly looking at and downloading new pictures, movies, etc., is a waste of precious time on this earth, and damaging to my relationship. There is no way that a person can consume porn everyday, and invest their sexual energy into it, and not have it negatively affect their relationship with their SO or even friends and family.

I truly feel that pornography can destroy families and relationships, and this cannot be stated loudly enough.

It is also a pursuit of diminishing returns, and makes anything in life that is not "porn" dull and unexciting. It really does drain the excitement from the little things in life. They go from being ok to "the things that keep us from our porn" which means that a huge percentage of life is frustrating and irritating.

I have decided that I want to live a happy, fulfilling life, and I realized that I cannot achieve those goals while porn is part of my life.

Bingo! Home run! True that! Amen! What he said! I heard that! Me, too! For sure! And whatever else I can come up with to express my unreserved agreement with and thanks to Light for stating the futility of porn use so well.

[illumination]

I think there are cultural roots and personal roots of this problem.

The cultural roots are in our culture's schizophrenic attitude to sex. Our mainstream culture constantly tells us that our attitude to sex is open and unrepressed, in contrast to supposed repression in other cultures and other parts of history. But it's not really unrepressed. The old repressive attitude is still there (which I consider to be an unhealthy growth on the original ethic of Christianity, created by priests to make people feel guilty). The real religious message is to take sexuality seriously, not to repress it and regard it as 'bad'. So after hundreds of years (not the whole history of Christianity though, see for example what Tertullian has to say about it) of being told that sex is bad and dirty because the body and the instincts are bad and dirty, rather than being taught to integrate all levels of consciousness which I believe is the only real spiritual path, we still believe that sex is bad and dirty. Then our modern culture just comes along with a pornographic overlay on top of these centuries of guilt. It doesn't actually deal with the guilt, it just makes the dirt explicit. Sexuality is not normalised by pornography or by the pornographic attitude to sex that is almost totally pervasive in our culture. We still think of it as dirty, but we wallow in the dirt. This attitude does not allow us to think of sexual relations as normal human relations that need to be taken seriously but are actually just part of life and absolutely OK.

All of this provides a ready-made cultural psychological complex that anyone who is vulnerable to it can be dragged into. Images of sex have a very strong hold on the mind (in fact all images do, which is why TV is such a powerful form of corporate and state propaganda). I agree with Jessica that the personal root of this vulnerability is a kind of despair. But it may not be a wholly conscious despair. As Kierkegaard describes, there is a kind of despair in just living a superficial life where we are unable to contact our deeper emotions. By refusing to look into ourselves, in a way we are killing ourselves. And any addiction, especially one that involves the mind, eyes, body, emotions and hormones, is a way of not looking into oneself. Dante's images of the Lustful in Hell show what the real state of the soul is when it is wallowing in lust. We have to negate ourselves in so many ways to watch porn. We have to negate the fact that it is not relieving our frustrations because we do not possess the object of desire represented by the images, in fact it is probably taking us further away from ever possessing the object of desire because it is destroying our personality and our ability to relate to other people.

After a terrible lapse into porn use, I have been made painfully aware of the desperate state of my soul, how much I am suffering, and how little I am able to deal with my suffering. This is a difficult state to be in. It's easy to see why we would want what seems to be a way out, even if it really makes things worse.

[Dewvis]

So no easy answer - a combination of social awkwardness, early exposure to sexual texts and images, abundance of P, anxiety and stress.

I think this describes me pretty well, social anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder from a young age made normal sexuality impossible and so porn was for me a safe refuge that I've been unable to leave.

[Dewvis]

It is also a pursuit of diminishing returns, and makes anything in life that is not "porn" dull and unexciting.

yeah this is so true. This is why i always hate my job, hate wherever I'm living at the time, etc.

Porn is my greatest passion.

I've gone to career counselors and they ask "What is your passion?" (I get asked this question frequently on job interviews as well) and I can't answer them because my answer would be "PORN!" 8-x

[jrock123]

wow, I don't even know what to say. I am addicted as well (49 days P and MB free) but I could never say porn was my greatest passion. do you have any important people in your life? do you exercise? read? what are your 2nd and 3rd passions in life? If you are still saying its your no. 1 passion, then you don't want to quit, correct?

[Dewvis]

I didn't think that my post would be so surprising to anyone here.

I used to hike a lot, I don't any more because I prefer to stay in and look at porn. I used to read a lot, I don't any more because I prefer to stay in and look at porn.

I prefer to watch porn than be with friends or family.

I moved to a new state to pursue music (which I thought was my passion), but rather than seeing shows and meeting musicians, I've generally stayed in my room looking at porn.

So, if porn isn't my passion then I don't know what is.

I'm 4 days sober, mostly because I'm moving and I have too much packing and whatnot to do and literally can't spare the time for porn.

I apologize if my post sounded as if I were praising porn, I'm just saying it like it is.