Why do addicts become addicted?
It’s an enormously complex question. We could answer this question in a number of different ways, couldn’t we?
From a neurobiological perspective, we could argue that addicts crave increasing amounts of the substance or behaviors to which they’re addicted in order to get more and more of a dopamine kick, the delicious chemical the brain releases when we do anything pleasurable.
“When I was eight, the imposter, or false self, was born as a defense against pain. The imposter within whispered, ‘Brennan, don’t ever be your real self anymore because nobody likes you as you are. Invent a new self that everybody will admire and nobody will know.’ So I became a good boy—polite, well-mannered, unobtrusive, and deferential. I studied hard, scored excellent grades, won a scholarship in high school, and was stalked every waking moment by the terror of abandonment and the sense that nobody was there for me.”
– Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child
Let me tell you a story about a man named Joe.
(Joe isn’t a real person. I made him up so I could tell you this entirely fictional story about him. But in a way, Joe is real enough, as you’ll see in a moment.)
Joe seems like a normal guy. He’s well-liked by his coworkers. He loves his wife and children. He hosts backyard barbecues in the summer on weekends for friends and family. His faith is important to him and he’s a respected leader in his church.
By all appearances, he’s an outstanding guy.
But Joe has a secret.
ADDICTION AS A “SPIRITUAL MALADY” If you take a look at AA’s Big Book or go to a 12-step meeting of any kind, it won’t be long before you hear about spirituality, and for good reason. One of the first requirements of any 12-step program is for...
Read MoreIf you’re reading this, chances are that your relationship is in crisis. Maybe you’ve probably discovered your partner’s pornography stash, an affair, his texts with a prostitute, or his lurid emails with women (or men) he’s met online. Perhaps you found something else entirely, or your partner has told you about it because he got caught.
It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? How could sex addiction ever be helpful?
By definition, sex addiction is a pattern of unhealthy sexual behaviors that are out of control and that create chaos in the addict’s life.
As the illness progress, the addict’s pursuit of mood-altering sexual experiences becomes central to his or her existence and life becomes more and more unmanageable.
Helpful? Hardly. But because it’s progressive, sex addiction doesn’t start this way. To understand how sex or porn addiction could be helpful, we have to look at the stories that addicts usually tell.
That we are sexual beings a basic fact of our humanity. Our survival depends on gratifying our sexual desires to perpetuate the species. So just as we need to satisfy our drives to eat and drink, we also experience sexual desires that long to be fulfilled. With the explosion of technology over the last twenty years and the birth of the Internet, it’s no surprise that we’ve found many ways of satisfying our sex drive online with pornography.
Many people use online pornography casually: they use porn infrequently and their interest isn’t sustained over time; they don’t feel guilt or shame as a result of their viewing porn; they seek out porn and cybersex activities occasionally for fun or curiosity; they find real intimacy and relationships more fulfilling than porn.
For many others, however, the story is quite different. So common is compulsive consumption of porn that “porn addiction” is now recognized as one form of sex addiction. To understand at-risk porn use, then, we need to take a quick glimpse at sex addiction.
