“I want to stop cheating on my wife.”
“I have a porn addiction.”
“I think I have an anger problem.”
“I have a lot of lustful thoughts.”
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TLDR: Every compulsive behavior has two parts, an underlying trauma, and an emotional hidden payoff. Pornography/Sexual addiction is not about sex, it’s about emotional need fulfillment and lack thereof.
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A lot of the reason people have a hard time overcoming compulsive behaviors is because they don't understand the dynamics at play. Every compulsive behavior has both an emotional lacking and an emotional charge, or hidden payoff.
If you have a compulsive behavior, there was a time in your life for you Velten emotional lack, some of your emotional needs were not being fulfilled, they were lacking, and a certain behavior or certain material was introduced. Your mind at that moment connected that that particular action or material helps you to feel that your emotional needs are fulfilled, at least momentarily.
I have worked with many men who habitually cheated on their wives. In every case, there was both an underlying trauma and an emotional hidden payoff. The underlying trauma in each case was from having a very anger-filled mother or stepmother. These traumas cause emotional ripples, and when we feel emotions similar to those traumas, we essentially experience those traumas again to a certain degree. One husband reported that his wife saying she was too tired for sex filled him with deep and painful feelings of rejection. He then lay in bed feeling tremendous anxiety. When asked in session, “when is an earlier time you felt that same feeling of anxiety in your body,” he responded, “12 years old, terrified that my stepmother would burst into the room yelling at me, which she did throughout my childhood.”
So the underlying trauma feeling was rejection and terror. His mind then looks to get those needs fulfilled, to feel accepted, safe, and cared for, which became the hidden payoffs when he used pornography, and later had sex with other women. It’s not actual safety, acceptance, and cared for, it’s the illusion, but it’s good enough for the mind in that moment.
The other component to compulsive behaviors is that we hold onto our traumas, and reenact them in ways in order to try to make sense of them. We willfully revisit them in our minds to check and see if they’re still there, and make sure they still hurt so we can try to avoid that trauma from occurring in the future. The problem is that in order to stay safe, we have to also stay miserable.
In session, we use some exercises to tell the mind “I don’t need this anymore, I don’t want this, I’m going to leave this in the past.” When wash away the pain and terror, and deconstruct the mental images associated with the traumatic memory. Client respond, “I no longer feel anything about it. It’s in the past. I feel neutral. I feel a lightness in my body.” We recheck each week, “Do you remember that event of your stepmom barging through the door? What is your reaction to that now?” The client responds, “It’s in the past. I haven’t even thought about it.” I ask, “And was there a night this week that you were not intimate with your wife, and if so, what did you experience?” “Very little restlessness, and it left after a couple minutes.”
See, when you heal the underlying traumatic emotional triggers, the mind has fewer things that trigger it to look for remedies (cheating in this case). So then we go work on the cheating.
“What is the hidden payoff connected with cheating?”
“I feel accepted.”
“Pull up the mental image that represents cheating, and on a scale of 0-10, how intense is that feeling of ‘accepted’ right now?”
“It’s an 8.”
Then we start the exercise to remove the hidden payoff and visualize destroying the mental image that represents the cheating. I ask about it the next couple of sessions to get his reaction. “I feel neutral about it. Nothing. There’s no charge.” As we continue our work, he reports that the frequency of sexual thoughts has diminished without any effort, and that the ones that do come up have much less power, easy to push away. He has lost interest in cheating, and has not replaced that “addiction” with any others because the underlying trauma is healed.
This isn’t about coping. This is healing, and the healing seems to last.