- These days I hear a ton of really desperate stories, mostly from young guys. I've heard from maybe four or five women on this, but literally thousands of young men about porn addiction. Every time I hear about it, I feel so fortunate that I grew up in a time where, or maybe I just don't have the wiring for it.

And if I did, I would be, I'm pretty open on this podcast. I, it's never been an issue for me. And they're telling me that they can't stop watching porn. I get the sense that they're not enjoying this experience anymore because they're reaching out to me saying, how in the world can I quit?

And what do I tell them? - I remember, and again, I don't know this study, but I remember somebody referencing many years ago when I was first getting in the field that porn addiction at the time, specifically related to video pornography, which is what it all is now, right?

It was having the same impact on the brain and young men as crack cocaine. I mean, it's extremely powerful. Has a lot of other effects in that it sets up a very unrealistic idea and perspective of what sex and intimacy is. It also can help or can lead to kind of setting their sexual template.

You know, they can quickly escalate, just like you would escalate, kind of back to the hot fudge sundae where it doesn't work anymore, from something that might seem like normal sex to violent sex to really out there things that can bring a lot of shame that they're even watching, and it can escalate quickly.

And then have an impact on their own lives and relationships, because they're playing out those relationships or that amount of intimacy, depending on what they're doing. Also, if there's masturbation along with it in a fantasy. Well, what I'm also hearing is that anytime they are in a real life intimate scenario, which seems to be fewer and fewer times nowadays in the younger generation, that they're having sexual anxiety, sexual performance issues, which makes sense if their brain and nervous system is getting wired by porn to observe sexual behavior, as opposed to being in the experience of intimate sex.

behavior, right? Two different things to be in the experience versus watching someone else's experience of it, which is what pornography is. Yeah. This was probably 10, 15 years ago, where we're treating some, but we were treating a lot of soldiers that had come back from Afghanistan or Iraq. And, you know, they had access, this was like the first wars where they had access to the internet.

And there's a lot of other things. So there was a lot of kind of combining of sex and violence, right? They're around a lot of violence, and then they're watching sex. And then that kind of sexual template would set around, like, in order for them to get pleasure out of sex, it would need to be aggressive or even violent or very risky.

You know, so there's all these things that kind of collapse together. There were other things going on. It was like the first time that they had also really had access to video chats to be able to, like, be on a battlefield and then come back and be talking to their spouse about something that's going on with the kids.

It was a very confusing environment for those guys, men and women. You know, the porn addiction is a tough one, you know, because it's everywhere. I mean, now you can find it on any social media, almost. Maybe not anyone, but it's not really limited, you know. And even if it's not, you know, I know certain states have just put in where you have to put in your ID to get it, but there's tons of ways around that and other sites that people can go to.

And I've run into that with a lot of, it does seem to be young men, you know, and it's a way for them to play out some sort of fantasy around connection and relationship. And it makes their world really small. I don't think it's the same as gambling, but it can make it, it can make their world very, very small in that they're, instead of finding relationships out in the world, and it's not necessarily a relationship, but they're what they believe they're getting out of a relationship, they're then getting out of watching porn.

It seems like basically stopping completely is the answer. And people say, and I'm not trying to moralize here, right? I'm not telling people what's moral about this. I just know that any behavior or substance that leads to quick repeated inflections and dopamine is going to create a groove in the nervous system where you're going to crave that thing.

And it's going to give you a lower and lower sense of satisfaction over time. And the only way to reset that circuit is to stop and do something else in its place. Ideally, that's adaptive. These are people that are asking you how they can stop. You know, they're telling you, I can't stop.

How do I do it? So it can be similar to other addictions. You know, I mean, first, the admission part that it's a problem or awareness that is, and then being able to start to talk to somebody and start to take some accountability around it. Not accountability like you're doing something wrong, but to be able to have some sort of identify the behaviors that start leading to that.

You know, I mean, there, uh, that can be done in therapy and there's other 12 step groups that can help people with that to identify what their sobriety would look like. If you want to call it sobriety, what it looks like. And if it does involve not watching any porn, then that's the rule set that they have.

And then they figure out either with their therapist or in their treatment center or with their sponsor or community in 12 step, like, how am I going to be held accountable to that? And that might be doing the things like we talked about laying out, looking at your, your day ahead at the beginning, they might need to look at things like, you know, uh, there's ways and software out there to not be able to look at that on your phone or have an accountability partner that can, you know, you have to, they have to approve websites you go to.

And, and that, that, that's not to say that they have to do that forever, but it's something that's available right. You know, 50 years ago or 30 years ago, someone had to like find their dad's porno mag somewhere and then look at it. You know, now it's on their phones or computers.

Well, we know that accessibility, increasing accessibility increases addiction, right? This has been studied over and over again. And people say, well, what about red light districts and things? And there's some caveats that have to do with when you, uh, create areas within cities where certain things are allowed, but you know, this has been tested many, many times.

Um, it's also true and it's kind of a duh, but to quote Anna Lemke, it's impossible to get addicted to a substance or a behavior that you've never taken or engaged in. Right. So some things are best avoided entirely. Um, are there specific 12 step programs for porn addiction that are separate from say sex addiction?

If you, people look it up, I'm sure there's meetings out there that, that are specific to that. There are, um, some treatment centers that have tracks that deal specifically with that. There's therapists that work very closely with that. And I, I believe that there are some 12 step, I mean, there's pretty much 12 step programs for any sort of, you know, within things like SA or SLA, there'll be subsets of meetings for people that are with a very specific condition.

And one of the reasons I wanted to discuss this today is because I hear about it so much is unlike alcohol or drugs, there's a kind of extra layer of shame associated with, with pornography addiction for people. Um, you know, so many times we've heard, oh, like this celebrity was an alcoholic or drug addict, you know, wrapped their car around a pole, was arrested, this and that, then they get sober and everyone still loves them, loves them more.

Right. If we knew that a given celebrity was like a porn, porn addict or something, we look at that person differently, especially if they're male, we just look at them differently. And so reducing some of the shame around it, I think it's key to, to helping them recover. Because I can tell you there's the, the questions initially came in kind of like, as is often the case with, with men, when they're trying to talk about issues that they were kind of cloaked in, like, what are your thoughts about NoFap?

Which is this thing where guys, um, withhold ejaculation. Okay. Does it increase testosterone? It turns out in the short run, it does. In the long term, it's probably not good for the prostate, et cetera. But then it turned out they were really asking about masturbation. They were really asking about pornography.

And then all of a sudden, I don't know what changed out there, but there's been this deluge of, of questions from young guys of how they can stop engaging in online porn. A key to that is what you said about, we look at them differently. You know, they're going to keep it secret, you know, and there's a saying secrets keep us sick, but I believe there's like a real, almost a biology to that.

And that, you know, if you're holding it in, not sharing it, you know, where there's no really place for it to go, but shame and shame separates us and separate. We're not connected and not connected. We're alone and alone. We're, you know, we keep carrying that forward alone. We're dead, you know, maybe not in that sense anymore.

Like we talked about earlier, but like, we're not really living. And so they're, you know, these guys are hearing you on a podcast and then DMing you, right? They're probably not in a personal close relationship with you, right? It's easier to send it there than maybe go ask for help with somebody in their area or go to a meeting or something like that because of the stigma.

So it's good that you've opened up the ability for people to do that, but to continue to direct them back to, you know, let's try to treat this like we would any other addiction, at least from the standpoint of you've got to talk about it. You've got to have some sort of admission.

You've got to be able to find a community around it. You want to be able to do work, you know, most likely with a therapist or a team of therapists that can help you understand what's driving that behavior.