Sunday Supplement

Today is Sunday, and it feels like possibly the first day on which I have woken up with a new mindset in place, one that says that I don’t need porn, nor do I want it, and that I am becoming much more determined to stay away from it.

By writing this blog, I suppose I have been forcing myself to consider the harm it has done to my life, the lives of those I have been close to and probably the lives of others with who I have either interacted or simply watched on-screen. I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice; I simply wanted to talk about my experiences in the hope that others might find something in them that resonated and helped them to consider their own use of porn and how healthy this might be for them.

Looking back on it, my porn use wasn’t ever healthy. I discovered masturbation as a way to soothe my anxiety when I was fairly young, certainly before the age of 10. I can imagine some readers might think “what’s wrong with that?”, conscious perhaps that this is something that they do even now. It certainly works, of that there’s no doubt, but in my case I used this ‘self-soothing’ to take the place of an emotional connection between my mother and I.

Something I need to stress is that this is in no way her fault; my mother was beset my post-natal depression following my birth, and wasn’t able to form an emotional connection with me. In trying to be a wife and support to my father, who had to work hard and long hours to support us, my mother buried herself in housework and making sure that our home was tidy, that meals were prepared, and so on. None of this is bad; regrettably, what she wasn’t able to do at the same time was to respond to me emotionally when I expressed my needs for comfort. The result of this unintentional neglect can be hugely damaging. A child’s self-esteem and sense of confidence about the world around them is developed in those early years of their life, and unfortunately I took on board a lesson that I needed to find ways to comfort myself, because my mother was unable to respond to me.

I cried in therapy when all of this started to emerge, notably sobbing the words “My Mum wouldn’t help me”, but I don’t think what I understood at the time was the link to my urges to masturbate, the urges that would eventually develop into an addiction. Now it seems much more obvious; having internalised the idea that no-one was coming to my rescue, I sought whatever would produce a good feeling, whatever would give my developing brain the shot of dopamine that it needed to make me feel that everything was OK, even if everything wasn’t OK. It’s not a good lesson to learn; the brain goes back to what it knows, and so for me, my brain would direct me towards ‘self-medicating’ rather than being able to talk to anyone about my worries. Finding out about attachment theory is what led me to therapy, and in particular the work of Harry Harlow; I haven’t shared any of the videos about Harlow’s work here, as if this is new to anyone they may find it distressing, but the link below explains the theory, theory which, for me, has been fact, the facts of my real life.

Harry Harlow, Monkey Love Experiments | Simply Psychology

I had many worries as a child, and unsurprisingly I had, and still have, many worries as an adult too. Dealing with those worries by masturbating to porn isn’t going to make them go away, it is just going to make them multiply, and my worries multiplied, except I couldn’t see them. I became depressed, and the cycle of being addicted just makes it go away for a short time, until it returns, amplified by shame and secrecy.

None of this makes it easier to face now. This would have all been easier to deal with had I been willing to face up to the problem years ago, but like most addicts I was blinded by the need to just keep feeding my addiction. Worse still, the depictions of sex and relationships I took on board through watching porn began to take root inside my head as being real, and something to be desired. Instead of emotional connection, I thought the way to deal with my problems was to seek relationships that didn’t involve emotional connection. I am not certain that I can remember what it feels like, indeed if I have ever known what it feels like, to engage in sexual activity where my emotions were engaged in the act alongside my body. You often see the question posed “Do you remember your first time?”, and the fact is that I really don’t. To remember it, I’d have needed my emotions to be fully engaged, and my attachment issues mean I don’t think that’s ever happened. I can remember who it would have been with, but to recall the feelings is something I have difficulty with. I guess to remember the feelings, I’d have had to experience them, and knowing that I probably haven’t ever done so is something I reflect on with dismay.

For all of this time, I thought I was living life in the same way that others do, but the truth is probably very different. Porn numbed my emotions, and led me to believe that the type of sex seen in porn was in some way normal, that people’s real sex lives resembled what is seen on screen. For some people that may be the case, but what is seen on screen is a ‘Supernormal stimulus’, it is sex as depicted for a specific reason; to hook you into the idea that what you see is in some way ‘real” and that if your sex life doesn’t look like the sex you see on a screen then you are doing it wrong.

What I now tell myself each time I am tempted to open a window on my laptop and search for porn is that what you are seeing there isn’t real, and that those involved are complicit in selling you an idealised version of what a healthy and emotionally-engaged sex life looks like. For that reason, I have to turn away from it and seek something better, something healthier, so that I can know what that feels like.