Addiction is a grief after a loss; we lost something at one point. We may not even remember what we lost; we forgot that we had it at one point. It makes us worship the picture; it teaches us temporariness. We tend to get bored easily; we watch different videos. We rarely watch the same video twice. It does a pornofication of the mind; it corrupts the view. Porn does not only interfere in your life when you are watching; it does when you are walking outside, but fantasizing. Porn makes us want to get free from any attachment or commitment; we just want the body, the picture. We don't want to date, to feel loved, and to love others. We are afraid of responsibility, of commitment, and this view gets wider and applies to everything else in our life. We don't like deadlines, commitment to anything, gym, missions; we start things then we quit. We even quit life. When we watch porn, when we are hooked up to the screen, we are disconnected from the world; we don't think about anything else. We feel that our life is unmanageable. But why are we afraid of commitment? Why are we afraid of what's behind the picture? Why do we just want to see the naked body, but not to have a relationship, listen to the other, and talk to them? We are very superficial. This applies to the single, taken, and married.
There are some very good books on trauma that I have been reading that help me understand the purpose behind the addiction, why I have it, and what to do about it. "The body keeps the score" "In the realm of hungry ghosts" by Gabor Mate "What happened to you" by Oprah "Dopamine nation" by Lambke There are amazing books out there exploring the questions that you raise
People who are addicted to something generally lack mental peace. There is something in their life that is causing them pain and they fill that void with their addictions.
There's a lot of truth in what you've written. Especially about what porn does to the mind, and how it colors our perception of the world, particularly our perception of women. And I absolutely agree with you about how we can so condition ourselves to instant gratification that it pours over into our professional and personal lives. I do a lot of my work from home, and I can attest to how brutally PMO destroyed my ability to focus and meet deadlines. But I would suggest that we instead of being resistant to connection and intimacy, it's probably more likely that addicts crave connection and intimacy, but are fearful of rejection. After all, what beautiful, intelligent, sexual person in their right mind would want to be with such pathetic men as ourselves? And so we resign ourselves to a life of fantasy, where we stare at screens and imagine the relationships we don't feel we will ever have ... not realizing that to the extent we STOP staring at those screens is the extent we will be more likely to not just attain the relationships we dream about, but everything else we dream about, too.
I like and agree with some things you mentioned, but it was the first part of your paragraph that really hit home for me. I believe what I had lost was a sense of compassion and friendship towards myself after being molested. To make a long story short, I blamed and hated myself for it, and never got the professional help needed to sort out the trauma. It wasn't until my late twenties did I start to open up to a CSAT who really helped me process the trauma and start the path of recovery.
Good luck on your journey, I feel good when someone likes something I said, not because it boasts my ego or makes me feel special, but I like the fact that someone somewhere around the world, using his laptop, read my words, and felt peace for a few seconds, or felt happy, or discovered something that he has but isn't aware of, keep pushing forward my friend
After the first time I watched porn, I started to look to women in another way. If the first thought you have of a women when you first see her is how she looks naked, you're pretty corrupted. Most men nowadays don't appreciate facial atributes like smile, hair, eyes, mouth, etc. We just analyze their butt, breasts and so on.
