When you go to therapy or enter a treatment program, a significant part of the process involves discovering the root causes of your addiction.

Men who are regular readers of the Porn Reboot blog are familiar with the views I have on discovering root causes, though. 

I don’t take it too seriously. 

I know there are situations where men use pornography or compulsive sexual behavior to deal with a traumatic incident or incidents in their past. But I also think it’s a fallacy to believe your entire sexual behavior derives from this effort to medicate something that happened in your past. 

I’m sure part of your behavior stems from past trauma but it’s far from being responsible for the entire thing. I think overcoming pornography addiction and compulsive sexual behavior involves much more than simply digging down to the “root cause”. 

Emotional Suppression

Emotional suppression is a big part of pornography addiction and compulsive sexual behavior. Every time you experience an emotion but choose not to deal with it, you suppress it. Think about it like you’re going to bake a loaf of bread. 

You start with some dough and you take one piece of it, which we’ll look at as an emotion that comes up. If you don’t bake that piece of dough and instead press it into another piece of dough, all you do is create a larger mound of dough (or a bigger emotional problem). 

When you turn to pornography instead of dealing with your uncomfortable emotions, you’re only pressing pieces of dough together. You never take that dough and bake it to completion. You only roll it into a larger pile of raw dough and create a bigger loaf that will take longer to bake later on.

Suppressing your emotions is only a short-term solution. It doesn’t heal anything, it only pushes it away for you to deal with at a later time. Every time you view porn instead of dealing with those emotions, you double down on the pain and reinforce this unhealthy coping mechanism.

Porn Creates New Negative Emotions

Porn not only serves as a way to suppress your emotions, but it also creates new negative emotions. In case you didn’t have enough difficulty and emotional immaturity to begin with, your pornography addiction reinforces the problem.

Watching copious amounts of porn creates new insecurities that may not have even existed before. You start worrying about the size of your penis, your performance in bed, your sexual capabilities with women. Porn creates confusion about how women should be treated and what you should be doing in the bedroom.

These negative emotions and feelings progress as your porn preferences progress. Once you start watching harder genres of porn, it alters the way you view yourself and the women around you. It also leads to anger, shame, and guilt when you find you can’t stop viewing these more violent forms of porn.

Creating the Root Cause

Your life gets increasingly more complex as this pattern continues year after year. You’ve built this vicious cycle for yourself and now need to climb out of it. When you go sit down with a therapist, they’ll encourage you to dig down to the root cause because that’s what they’re trained to do. Most therapists view present-day behavior as a result of your past. 

But what if you created the cycle in the first place? What if the root cause is your refusal to acknowledge your emotions and process them effectively? If you sit with a therapist who pressures you to dig into your past, you could come up with some cause that wasn’t even an issue in the first place!

Before you ever go to a therapist to identify a “root cause” of your behavior, get honest with yourself. Why did your pornography addiction start? Did it stem from something traumatic in your life? If that’s the case, therapy is a necessary tool that will help you process through the terrible experience you had to go through.

If you’re like most men, though, you’re the root cause. Your emotional immaturity and refusal to develop proper coping skills is the reason why you are where you are today. Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. Take responsibility for your life and implement the steps you need to take to overcome your addiction.