Pornography addiction can be just as dangerous and damaging as any other type of addiction, and at Renaissance Ranch, we offer pornography addiction treatment options among our many rehabilitation programs. Many porn addicts feel desperate to escape the hold that porn has on them, but find themselves unable without help.
When trying to quit on their own or only with the help of inexperienced friends and loved ones, a few common mistakes are made. Here are some of these mistakes caretakers make, plus how you can avoid them if you’re close to someone dealing with porn addiction.
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Not Building on Accountability
Like anyone struggling with addiction, a support group or at least a single advisor is vital for the recovery process. This is a person or group of people with whom the sufferer can report days of abstinence and admit any slips, including details. Knowing that they’ll be forced to talk about regressions can be a powerful deterrent for certain people struggling with addiction, so having an accountable baseline is important.
“It’s Only Porn”
Many people struggling with sex addiction use pornography as just one part of their addictive behavior – and in some cases, their other behaviors are considered more overtly visible, illegal or otherwise inappropriate than porn. This leads to some people justifying the use of porn with phrases like, “It’s only porn.”
This is mistaken thinking, both from addicts and caretakers. All forms of sexual acting out can lead back to a full-on relapse, and even if porn is the only expression of sexual addiction, it’s serious and shouldn’t be justified.
Porn Limitations
It’s common for some to assume that porn only exists on a screen or via the internet – this isn’t true at all. There’s “ambient porn” across our culture – movies, music, TV and even billboards on the street, for instance. Caretakers must work with those struggling with addiction to locate triggers, however strange they may seem.
No Program of Consequences
You don’t need a system where every negative action is punished severely, but no system of consequences will make it very tough for an addict to make improvements. As a caretaker, set up basic programs of accountability and consequences – both for positive and negative actions.
Common Signs of Pornography Addiction
It can be very difficult to carry on a relationship with someone struggling with an addiction, and someone suffering from pornography addiction may present unique challenges. A porn addiction interferes with a person’s ability to have a healthy relationship, and this effect is felt strongly by partners.
At Renaissance Ranch, our pornography addiction treatment programs are aimed at healing the disease of addiction in a comfortable setting. As always, friends and loved ones are vital parts of the recovery process, and pornography addiction often begins with the partner – here are several common signs that your partner may have a porn addiction.
Withdrawal
Your partner may become more withdrawn, or make excuses to avoid social activities they used to participate in regularly. They may also spend excessive time alone.
Excessive Time Online, With Secrecy
Even relative to today’s average period spent online, someone with a porn addiction will spend an excessive amount of time on the internet. The internet offers a free, endless supply of pornography. Your partner may also be very secretive about the computer or browsing history, or may constantly be online late at night or early in the morning while you’re in bed.
Emotional Absence
Especially during sex, your partner seems absent from the relationship. You’re together in a physical sense, but they feel elsewhere and don’t seem to care that you aren’t feeling fulfilled.
Bodily Criticism
Your partner is increasingly critical of your body or overall appearance, likely due to spending more time viewing pornography and developing unrealistic expectations. Their interest in sex may also significantly dwindle, and any sex will likely be at your own initiation, not theirs.
Changing Sexual Tastes
You may have once been very sexually compatible with your partner, but things might now be slipping. They want to do new or unusual things that aren’t comfortable for you, or start talking and acting differently surrounding sex.
Evasive, Defensive, Secretive
Your partner is clearly lying to you or shutting you out, and gets very defensive when you try to have a conversation about it. They keep a private email address, or are otherwise secretive about online behavior.
The Unique Ways Porn Addiction Impacts Women
Most people naturally associate addiction with things like alcohol and other substance abuse, but another common and difficult area of addiction is pornography addiction. At Renaissance Ranch, our pornography addiction recovery programs are designed to help sufferers with the unique struggles of this disease.
Even within the porn addiction sphere, there are some misconceptions. It would be understandable to assume that only men suffer from pornography addiction, but this is far from the truth – and in fact, recent research has indicated that women are just as susceptible as men, but potentially in different ways. Let’s look at how female porn addiction differs from that of males, and how this may change the treatment approach.
Early Exposure
In a lot of cases, women begin watching pornography as teenagers just like many adolescent males, a practice made that much easier in modern times with widespread access to the internet. In most cases, this begins as a curiosity experiment – women watch porn to educate themselves and satisfy any curious urges.
These experiments can turn into something more quickly, however. Research has found that 17 percent of women consider themselves addicted to pornography. The addiction tends to develop the same way in both men and women – early exposure, increased desensitization and then full-blown addiction. But women tend to be much more secretive about their porn use, often for reasons we’ll discuss in our next section.
The Role of Guilt
Guilt is the main difference between female and male porn addiction. Pornography use is much more of a taboo subject among women, and much more generally accepted within the male community. Many women who struggle with pornography addiction feel like there’s simply something wrong with them.
In many cases, this relates back to a perceived sexual gratification women are receiving from watching other women portrayed as sexual objects. The body responds sexually to these images even as the brain is questioning their use, and this creates severe internal conflict and low self-esteem in many cases.
Effective Treatment
For the reasons above, treatment for female porn addiction involves getting below the symptoms alone and addressing the guilt and underlying causes. Identifying the true motivations for the behavior is key, and can allow subsequent therapy to be targeted in the right ways.
Are You Being “Gaslighted” by a Porn Addict?
If you have a spouse that struggles with pornography and/or other sexual addiction behaviors, it’s virtually certain that at some point along the way you have been the victim of “gaslighting.”
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where false, deceitful or manipulative information is presented, usually repeatedly, as “true” causing the victimized spouse to doubt her feelings, judgment, reality and even her own sanity. The porn/sex addict uses this tactic to hide the truth about his hidden betrayal and secret promiscuous behaviors.
The term gaslighting comes from the 1944 film Gaslight in which a husband convinces his wife that the periodic dimming of their home’s gaslights is all in her imagination. Over time, his lies cause her to question her own sanity.
Porn/sex addicts often use gaslighting as a way of manipulating their loved ones into going along with or ignoring their addiction. They often lie to their spouses/partners for years, insisting that they really did need to work late, that they’re not being emotionally distant or moody, that they’re not viewing porn or cheating. The addict twists and manipulates until all fingers are pointing at the victimized spouse as just being paranoid and unfair.