Overcoming Porn Addiction

Wives often consider porn use as damaging as adultery.

For Your Marriage

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While pornography has been around for centuries, the problem of addiction to pornography has increased dramatically in recent years largely due to its vast presence on the Internet.

Dr. Patrick Carnes, who in 1983 first advanced the idea that a person could become addicted to sex, calls the addiction to Internet pornography

….“the crack cocaine of sexual addiction.”

Like crack, it doesn’t take long for an Internet porn user to become hooked, often a matter of just a few weeks. And like crack, habitual viewing of online porn creates an intense cycle of addiction that is extremely difficult to break without expert assistance.

These are some of the devastating effects of Internet pornography upon marriage, the family and the individual:

• It destroys the trust and intimacy within the husband-wife relationship and often leads to the end of the marriage itself.
• It creates obstacles to real communication and personal interaction with one’s spouse and with others.
• It stimulates within the porn addict a distorted view of sexuality that can lead to the desire for riskier, perverse and even criminal sexual behaviors.
• It draws focus away from one’s family life and relationship with God and sets a destructive example for one’s children.

Epidemic proportions

Porn addiction is an epidemic that has been grown in the Internet age. Some estimates put porn use among churchgoing men at 50 percent, a figure that differs little from use among the adult male population at large.

For Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, the Internet is the primary factor in the increase in porn use.

“Particularly with the Internet, we usually talk about the three A’s: accessibility, affordability, and anonymity. Sometimes I add a fourth A, addiction,” says Peters. “Pornography is addictive in any medium, but when you’ve got this smorgasbord at your fingertips, and you’re clever enough to keep anyone from finding out about it, it’s an awful lot easier for people to get into pornography.”

The three A’s: Accessibility

Affordability

Anonymity

How a porn addiction develops

An Internet porn habit may begin out of curiosity, by clicking on a racy advertisement or e-mail or happening upon a site by accident. A man may continue to explore online porn because he feels it fills a real or perceived need, explains Mark Houck, co-founder and president of The King’s Men, a Catholic apostolate based in the Philadelphia area.

“Perhaps he is stressed at work, or perhaps he is bored with his life and looking for some excitement,” says Houck. “Whatever the case is, it begins with his false perception that the women and images he will see on the Internet will satisfy his needs. The truth of the matter is that they will never satisfy his needs, and he will be left in a worse situation than he was before. . . . He is using pornography as a substitute for real human relationships, and he is suffering.”

Factors that may lead to the development of a porn-viewing habit include stress, marital conflict, profound self-centeredness, or the “pleasure principle,” a Freudian term for the drive to avoid pain and seek immediate gratification.

Sometimes there is a contributing cause in what Fitzgibbons calls “marital loneliness.”

“The couple has drifted apart in the home,” Fitzgibbons says. “They love each other, but they’re not present to each other, particularly in the evening. They’re in different rooms, even different floors of the house. That’s the worst mistake.”

Whatever the root causes, a man’s attraction to pornographic images can bring about a mental “high” that provides a brief escape from whatever stress or unhappiness he is experiencing in his daily life.

Gradually, the porn addiction escalates as he builds a tolerance to each level of his online experiences. He may seek out more explicit or perverse pornographic. He may be drawn to adult chat rooms where Internet users can meet online.

For some porn-addicted men, the obsession can get to the point that online images and encounters no longer satisfy their desires. They seek to act out their pornographic fantasies, for example, by having an affair, seeking casual sexual encounters, picking up prostitutes, patronizing “gentlemen’s clubs,” committing acts of voyeurism or even sexual abuse of another person.

Seeking help

The increase in Internet pornography addiction has brought with it an increase in the number of men and couples seeking help to overcome the problem, although it is not usually the man’s idea to seek help, says Fitzgibbons.

“Sometimes it’s the men, but more often the wives become aware that their husbands have this problem,” he says. Most wives consider their husbands’ porn use as a betrayal every bit as deep and damaging as if they had committed adultery.

Most therapists today agree that obsessive viewing of Internet porn qualifies as a behavioral addiction. When a man views the images, the accompanying gratification tends to neurochemically “hard-wire” his brain and burn the images permanently in his memory in what some doctors call an erototoxin effect.

As Houck of The King’s Men explains in layman’s terms,

“Overcoming a porn addiction is harder than overcoming a heroin addiction. When rehabbing from a drug addiction, there is a period of detoxification from the drug. With porn, you can detox, but the images never leave your body. Scary, isn’t it?”

Because porn addiction compulsion has so many of the same causes and effects as adultery, the treatment and counseling are pretty much the same, says Dr. Fitzgibbons.

“In adultery, the wife will say, ‘I want all the details.’ So you have to be totally uncovered, transparent, and honest about all the mistakes you’ve made, when, where and why,” he says. “And then there has to be a deep sense of sorrow, a repentance. So it is exactly the same as treating adultery in that there has to be a real commitment to identify the problems and address them.”

Rebuilding marital trust is a major undertaking in itself. The man must patiently discuss all that went on as deeply and as often as she requests. He must provide her with more attention and become more focused on their marital friendship. With time, if he can be chaste and accountable, his wife’s trust in him may grow again.

Part of the recovery process as well as a preventive measure is for husband and wife to practice good interpersonal communication and to spend quality time together – in other words, to build and maintain a strong marital friendship.

“Marital friendship is based on talking, communicating, being present to the other–not just watching television, but taking time to discuss matters or to do things together, even pray together,” Fitzgibbons says.

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