Psychological reason behind this addiction

hi, addictive behaviour is laid down quite early by various components. if you are interested - you can have a look at Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté's work.he has a book and several longer videos.

Knowing helps but dealing with it of course is what we're all trying to do.
all the best, tc

 

I know for me , I grew up in an alcoholic home. Which made me feel unsafe, and anxious. And when I found porn I made me feel "good" and at that age , once you find something that works , you stop looking for other ways .
For me porn took away, or distracted me from the chaos around me. It was a survival tool that was unfortunately an unhealthy one.
I used it so much , I became dependant on it to make me feel good. And as the years went by. I kept using it and using it , but each time I had to escalate it because I wasn't getting the same "high" ...the deeper and deeper you go, the more and more Shame and negative feelings grow . The more and more you feel bad, the more and more you have to use the only tool you learned how to make yourself feel good.

 

Addiction is 'coping mechanism' to receive love that was supposed for us to receive since birth until we were satiated with this love and go forward, from mother to world. The main way in which baby can be feel loved and appreciated is touch. Receiving enough touch is crucial to having this feeling of being enough, worthy, feeling yourself and in your body. If we will not receive this in childhood, coping evolutionary mechanism of our primal brain will force us to receive it from externals (mother is external for baby) to help in ending up learning process of emotional regulation. Baby through touch is learning to emotionally regulate, baby cannot regulate themsels without mother. Enough care from mother is responsible to have successful and meaningful relationship to self, people and world - the opposite is "mother wound" Addiction is primal way to self regulate. This feelings of emptiness, lack of worth, pity are still in brain of adults as an footprint of what kind of childchood we had. This also creates "perception filter" through which we all see in lens of, for example, fear ( I was). What helps is "Letting go" technique described by David R Hawkins, to release old pain and be free to live. It worked and still works for me priceclessly.
More you can find in book "Continuum concept" written by Jean Liedloff, she spent many years in Amazonian jungle with indigenous people and studying how they behave toward themselves and how they upbring their childrens. Briliant book that helped me relating it to my addiction and self-doubt and healing. Most adults due to poor childhood are living their life in survival. So is the price of modern techological world.
"The opposite of addiction is connection" said probably Gabor Mate.

 

I think everyone here has their own psychological reasons for why they became addicted to PMO. The journey that we are on is one of discovering. I have been in recovery in SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) for 10 years and I'm still learning. The best part about being in a community is that we learn from each other. Hearing other people's stories helps us to understand our own.

My "root" cause of my addiction is two fold. My mothers family was liberal and my father's was conservative - so I got a lot of mixed messages. My mother used to walk around the house naked. She said in Europe, where she grew up, that was normal, but we live in the US . . . "so don't tell anyone". This left me really confused. Sex is totally okay but also something that should be very secret. I've heard that in the US we are totally obsessed with sex, while at the same time being very repressed.
The other issue, for me, is that my mother's father was a womaniser. This affected her and her mother deeply. And those issues were passed along to me. My mother taught me that "all men are pigs" and "all they want is sex" and then made me promise (as a 4 year old) that I wouldn't be like that. For this reason, deep down, I feel deeply ashamed about having sexual desires for women. The shame affected my ability to form healthy sexual relationships with women IRL and drove me to porn as an outlet for my sexual desires. The porn and masturbation led to more shame which led to more PMO and more shame . . .

 

I'm sorry to hear this brother.

I suffer from PTSD and porn/fapping was my coping mechanism since the age of 14. Like drugs, I have used porn to cover the pain inside. Whatever happened it was okay because I could just fap.

Addressing my PTSD and going to therapy has really helped me in my NoFap journey and I would recommend going to therapy to anyone who thinks they're fapping as a coping mechanism.

Succeeding with NoFap would not have helped my PTSD, likewise, if I had not sought help for my PTSD NoFap would not even exist to me.

 

Look through these https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/rewire.298294/ https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...omatisms-so-we-can-fix-keep-or-remove.300539/ https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/what-the-hell-is-actually-wrong-with-us.300227/ https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/how-can-we-win-this-war.300489/ https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/where-does-it-come-from.299985/ https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/conquer-my-demons.299085/

 

A lot of it has to do with loneliness. Whenever I have the urge to PMO, it comes from being lonely and not being around someone. Although PMO is different for everybody. Some are never addicted, some are in a relationship and addicted to PMO, and some don’t have a spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend and continue to relapse.

In my personal opinion, I believe it’s mostly for depressed people. Because I started to PMO when I became depressed.

 

I can understand this too . My mother would depend on me and my other two brothers to make her feel better. Which was never our jobs.

 

im glad you did. it is pretty interesting and answered a lot of questions for me too. just working through it though, which is another thing altogether.

 

I so relate to this. For me it is not just "an outlet for my sexual desires" but a source of seeming acceptance of those desires. Like @Silentlyasinner I was looking for the psychological reasons behind my addiction so back on Day 379 I wrote a journal posts listing everything I got from porn, one was this:

 

There is the dopamine rush you get when you Orgasm makes your mind crave that rush again and it becomes a habit.