When you’re in the end stages of your out-of-control behavior and the beginning stages of your reboot, you might notice something peculiar.
You may find that your porn use escalates. You might start consuming more extreme forms of porn. Maybe it feels like porn is even more addictive now that you’re finally trying to stop.
But why is that? Understanding this requires you to understand the life cycle of a porn addict.
Porn addiction usually begins as a pleasant experience. It’s an enjoyable way to get a release whenever you need it. Unfortunately, it becomes a problem when you start using it as an escape from unpleasant things.
You may use it to run from strong emotions, loneliness, and unresolved issues. You might turn to porn when you’re not able to find intimacy or experience rejection. Men act out when they’re feeling stressed, irritated, or angry instead of dealing with negative emotions.
Pornography becomes a serious problem when it becomes more painful than pleasant, but you still choose to chase it compulsively. It comes with an emotional cost, filling you with guilt and shame as your use progresses.
Oftentimes porn addiction also comes with a physical price. You’re exhausted all the time, can’t focus, have very little energy, and even develop problems like porn-induced erectile dysfunction. Yet you still chase it compulsively.
The toll that pornography addiction takes doesn’t always look the same for everyone. Some men find themselves divorced with an empty bank account. Others who conceal their behaviors from everyone around them feel even more miserable, depressed, and isolated because they’re trapped by their lies.
Over time, porn addiction becomes a lifestyle. It’s predictive. It’s habitual. It’s repetitive. It doesn’t matter whether it’s every day or every couple of weeks. You subtly begin to doubt your abilities in life. You question whether you can accomplish anything at all.
You want to start a business. You want to get an advanced degree. You want to get a promotion at work. You want to get into a long-term, committed relationship. You want to write a book and share your life experiences. But you can’t follow through on any of these plans because pornography takes precedence time after time.
The lifestyle of a porn addict begins to spill into other aspects of their life. They become individuals with low standards at work. They frequent massage parlors, join questionable apps, and step outside of their committed relationships. In some cases, some men begin to engage in semi-legal or illegal activity.
Your behavior goes against everything you were taught as a young man. It goes against all the values you were raised with. Guilt, shame, and self-loathing set in. But the only way you know how to find relief is through pornography, masturbation, and acting out.
Eventually, you stop trying. Your motivation dwindles to nothing. You lose interest in almost everything else in your life. You have little to no belief in yourself, your self-esteem is nonexistent, and it feels as though you’re only living to jerk off day after day.
This usually happens slowly, sometimes it’s over a few years, sometimes over decades. It’s an awful cycle to find yourself trapped in. Occasionally you may recognize the depths you’re in and make feeble attempts to get back to being the respectable individual you once were. It builds up again, though, without fail, and you’re back to where you started.
That, my brother, is the lifecycle of a porn addict. It continues until you decide to reach out to someone and ask for help. Once you’re at this point, trying to overcome your addiction alone is next to impossible. You have to ask somebody to walk you through the process of how to escape the cycle. And that’s exactly what the Porn Reboot group is here to do.
