Anger Management

I went to bed angry last night, and knowing who I was most angry at wasn’t easy to identify. The choices were between:

• Me.
• My parents.

In truth, we both have a responsibility. My parents are responsible for not teaching me about trust and love, and I am responsible for not learning a lesson about that until now. The links to my porn addiction are obvious; porn isn’t about love, and porn isn’t about trust, and by being ‘married’ to porn for so long, I have been unable to distinguish what love and trust are.

You might be asking how I can hold my parents responsible for this? I’ll stress once again that it wasn’t a deliberate act on their part; circumstances played a big part in it. My mother and father set up home and probably did so a little beyond their means, but I admire their aspiration. When my siblings and I started to arrive into the world, it probably became clear that there were problems. My mother had post-natal depression, and as a result I don’t believe I bonded to her; I have no recollections of being comforted by her, which may not be that unusual, but I don’t feel especially close to her either. I also have a clear recollection from childhood of my father coming into the bedroom in which I had been placed alone, and shouting at me. The experience traumatised me, because I’d periodically have recollections of it but without knowing what it was. All I knew was that it scared me, it unsettled me, and it took me entering therapy for me to understand where it came from. It’s probably a smaller point, but I don’t believe we were breast-fed as children either, so the bonding that occurs through that function, the release of the bonding chemical oxytocin in the brain, didn’t happen.

I grew up without feeling an awful lot of feelings that I should have experienced. The majority of the feelings I had were ones of fear, anxiety and stress, and without any means to reduce that stress, without the bond to my parents that would have allowed me to seek comfort for my distress from them, I found my own solution.

The feelings that I got from masturbation replaced the feelings that the bond would have provided; the release of dopamine and oxytocin into the brain that I got from masturbating bonded me to the process and created, at least initially, an urge to masturbate. This tends to manifest itself when left alone, which again makes perfect sense. I soothed my feelings of loneliness and isolation as a child by masturbating, so when those conditions are recreated it is an almost instantaneous response for me to want to satisfy the urge.

Unfortunately, satisfying that urge comes at a price. I became bonded to masturbation rather than real relationships, unable to trust in real relationships but you can always rely on porn, eh?

Porn entered the equation in my teens. Being brought up in the 1970s, the newspapers of the time contained images of semi-naked women as a matter of course, and I began to make the link between them and my budding sexual feelings, collecting images from them once the newspapers had been thrown away and hiding them in my bedroom, bringing them out when the house was empty and building the already damaged connections in my brain that linked masturbation and images of women. From there, it didn’t take long for me to begin to acquire porn for myself, occasionally stealing a magazine and then, when I felt more confident that I wasn’t going to be embarrassed by being asked my age, I began to pay for it.

I hadn’t realised what I was doing in the process of doing so, but so many of the connections in my brain were being wired together in the wrong way. I would often see women who I found attractive, but would stop short of thinking about them in a sexual context. I had never understood this, I hadn’t sought to understand it; I just felt that somehow, to think of a woman who you found attractive in a sexual way was wrong, something I now know is the ‘Madonna-Whore Complex‘.

It is no surprise that I have reached the age I have uncertain of whether I have ever felt love, or feeling that if I have, it was such a long time ago that I can’t remember how it felt. Feeling love gives you the confidence to take risks in life, believing that you have the people around you who will be there to catch you if you should fall. I have ended up hugely risk-averse because I don’t know that feeling. It was never felt, and never spoken, and by seeking the answers to the problems life poses my turning back to porn again and again I have created a huge issue for myself.

Writing about my challenges gives me the opportunity to reflect on what has happened to me, and to share some of what I’m experiencing to potentially help others. The difficulty is that people may not recognise that they have a problem.