White Knuckling Porn
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing it. Quitting porn is not as easy as simply stopping. Compulsive pornography, and all addiction for that matter, is consistently painted as a moral failing. If you just try harder, hate your sinful nature more, pray more, and have an accountability partner then you can conquer it. Frankly, that's frustrating, feels cheap, and it’s not that simple. It’s not like stopping your swearing by dropping a quarter in a jar each time you slip. Porn addiction and use is a layered, complex phenomenon with physiological and emotional components. In the physiological doman are addiction related brain changes in the form of sensitization, desensitization, and hypofrontality. The emotional world is painted in shame.
Physiological factors....or brain changes
Sensitization refers to the want that leads to compulsive consumption. It means that you get a dopamine blast (a feel good neurochemical) with each use. Your brain has wired itself to accommodate this through the formation of synaptic bundles. The brain cells organized themselves in such a way that a superhighway to your cerebral reward center exists. Each use of porn engages this and reinforces those neural connections. One neuropsychologist, Donald Hebb, said, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Porn use has become the path of least resistance for those massive dopamine dumps. Other activities that might otherwise release satisfying levels of dopamine are not interpreted by your brain as effective. In reality they aren’t, at least in the short run. Your brain is not sensitive to it and so it is an uphill battle, but it can change. The healthy activities of accomplishing something, emotional connection with another, or enjoying a good book are a more complex, challenging, and delayed reward that need to be repeatedly fostered.
Desensitization is the process by which it is harder and harder to achieve the enjoyable feelings associated with something. In drug use this looks like needing to use larger doses or more potent forms of the drug at more frequent intervals. For opioid abuse this might begin with abusing painkillers, like Percocet and Oxycontin, and then move to smoking heroin and then to intravenous injection of heroin. In porn this looks like moving from soft porn to hard porn, from pictures to video and live streams. Eventually some men find that they cannot achieve an erection apart from it. We have seen an increased prevalence of erectile dysfunction in young men as a result, but I suspect we will see the equivalent in women as porn use continues to rise among them (approximately 33% of women in one survey). We hear less about female porn addiction because of the greater stigma. It’s the double standard of “boys will be boys.” Porn use is expected and accepted among men and only looked at sideways and whispered about with women.
Hypofrontality is a phenomenon where the actual physical mass of different parts of the brain changes. There is decreased blood flow to the frontal cortex resulting in less electrical activity, oxygenation, and glucose uptake. This also means reduced frontal lobe grey matter. Other conditions like schizophrenia, ADHD, and depression create a similar situation. Since this region is responsible for executive function it means that one’s ability to make rational decisions and evaluate risk is negatively impacted. It's similar to teenagers who regularly engages in poor decision making and risks despite the fact that they can tell you the risks associated. The understanding doesn’t connect to their motivation. It’s developmentally appropriate for the teen and incredibly frustrating for the parent. It plays out in the porn addicted person as a decreased ability to think through a choice as cravings kick in. The knowledge simply doesn’t compute.
Emotional factors
To make matters more complex, there is also a pervasive shame cycle. It looks like this:
In this layer, addiction is an emotional problem. A person has a difficult time coping with emotions of discomfort and craves relief. The relief however is only temporary. To make matters worse it leads to increased feelings of discomfort (depression, guilt, shame) that they still cannot deal with in a healthy way. Resolve, and often penance, is engaged. They want to make up for the bad behavior. However, this resolve only increases the shame when emotional distress kicks in again and the cravings start up. As long as somebody does not know how to effectively cope with emotional distress, the shame cycle will feed itself.
Indeed, overcoming these layers of complexity requires a lot of hard work and prayer. Few people find healing overnight. While God can certainly do this, individuals who experience it are the unicorn phenomenon (i.e. hard to find and entering the realm of myth), not the norm. In fact I’ve only heard of and never encountered them. The road to healing requires increased self awareness, a deeper and more holistic engagement with the beauty of Creation, a deeper and more holistic engagement with God and self, and support and understanding from others. There is a lot that can be done and as you do, you can rewire your brain too.