Porn addiction does not exist in isolation

Ever since the 1970s Japanese electronics revolution swamped the world with easily made, easily distributed and easily consumed porn, we’ve been treating porn addiction as if it exists in isolation.
It’s easy to see how someone struggling with porn unconsciously creates a worldview that they are a basically decent human being who’s just got this single teensy habit.

Symptom management

This leads to an array of porn avoidance therapies based on symptom management, such as porn blocking software, avoiding emotional triggers (e.g., sex scenes in film and TV), accountability buddies, or counting the number of days we’ve been porn-free.

The problem with all these strategies is that being porn-free does not mean being free of the impulses that drove us to porn in the first place. That’s because porn addiction does not exist in isolation.

What I see in my coaching work—and in myself—is a constellation of problems of which porn addiction is only one and, quite frankly, one of the lesser issues. This constellation includes (but is not limited to):

• Abandonment (current life and/or inherited)
• Arrested development (failure to mature healthily and responsibly)
• Inherited trauma (a wide range of possible effects)
• Porn addiction and other sexual issues (e.g., ED, premature ejaculation)

These issues cross-pollinate and affect each other, creating a dense tapestry of dysfunction that’s hard to unpick. I recently found an instance of premature ejaculation that was inherited from sexual trauma experienced by the person’s grandmother which was passed down as severe sexual shame.

Isolation and the mother wound

Like the layers in the image above, all these issues are concealed by a fog of shame and denial—the false belief that porn addiction exists in isolation.

At the core of this constellation lies the mother wound—humanity’s single point of failure, the place where we are all in some way and to some degree broken, the root cause of what we call ‘the human condition’ and driver for the rise of patriarchy.

The mother wound is a disturbance of the mother-child nurturing bond that occurred due to prolonged famine some six thousand years ago. It spread around the world through patriarchy and is transmitted from generation to generation through epigenetic inheritance.

This disturbance affected our connection to life energy—the energy that creates and animates all life, which is what we call sexual energy. It is only to be expected that this disturbance shows up in our sexuality—like porn addiction—and affects every aspect of our lives.

Development arcs

In What is the father wound? I describe how, as human beings, we have three key psychological ‘development arcs’ that lead us from infancy to maturity:

• The mother-child arc from conception to about age 6½
• The father-child arc from about ages 6½ to 13
• The puberty arc from about ages 13 to 19½

Clinical psychologist Timothy Leary calls these the first three of eight circuits. I use the fairly exact span of 6½ years for each circuit because it’s no coincidence that thirteen to nineteen is a specific life stage.

Each development process can only unfold to the extent that its predecessor unfolded healthily. The damage to the mother-child circuit, the mother wound, means that the later circuits are disrupted to some extent.

In The Function of the Orgasm (1942), early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich describes the legacy of the combined arrested development of these three key circuits: “The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture, is typified by… armouring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This… armouring is the basis of isolation… fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

From Reich’s laundry list we can see that “sexual misery”—such as porn addiction—is one of many issues and does not exist in isolation.

Yet porn addiction holds a special place in this web of affliction. It’s our core life energy disturbance crying out for help, using the most intelligent language at its disposal—the information contained in the specific porn images we’re attracted to.

Will you heed that call?

Next steps

For further resources on porn addiction, both free and paid, please click on this image.

For further resources on the mother wound, both free and paid, please click on this image.

Photo by Matt Sclarandis on Unsplash