Every addiction has an emotional component, even if there's a chemical substance involved in the component. Smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts all have emotional pains and payoffs that they're trying to avoid or relive, respectively.
Each one of these emotional or "hidden" payoffs is called an assured survival feeling (or ASF). These assured survival feelings are embedded in the most intense moment of acting out, a moment which is subjective to the user, usually determined by asking the questions, "what is the most intense or exciting moment of acting out," and "What is the feeling embedded in that most intense moment?"
For some who struggle with pornography issues, that feeling is "I feel smart." Smart? "How does looking at pornography make one feel smart," one might ask.
Every ASF, or emotional hidden payoff, is used to medicate a particular wound that is the opposite of that medicine. If the ASF embedded in the most intense moment is "smart," then the logical pain is "I feel stupid".
Next logical question, "when was a time you felt stupid?"
I can't tell you how many times I've heard men who were addicted to pornography say, "kindergarten. We were doing a project, and the girl next to me told me I did it wrong." Then I ask, "On a scale of 0 to 10, how intense is that feeling of feeling stupid right now?" It's often something like an 8-9 now, so many years after the event actually occurred.
This means that every once in a while, the client feels stupid, and he goes to pornography to try to medicate that feeling like he's stupid. Commonly, the most intense moment of looking at porn for these guys is when trying to beat the filters or blocking apps. In gaming terms, you could say that's the main quest, and the accessing porn is simply a side quest, has a lesser charge to it. Many of these men report that psychologically they're breaking through the filters as a way of trying to impress the girls in porn with how smart they are, even though the girls in porn don't even know they exist. It's enough to make the pattern stick. Through breaking through the filters to access porn, they're trying to resolve that wound. Some men play sex-themed games in order to get this hit, but it's the same thing, the pursuit of resolving feeling stupid wby doing something that will make her impressed with his intelligence.
Why did this happen in the first place? Why did a 6 year-old little boy feel stupid to such a degree that it sticks with him 20 or 30 years later?
In almost every case, that little boy had a mom who had her own emotional problems to the degree that his emotions and emotional connection and safety was 2nd or 3rd or even lower in the rank of importance to her, so he already felt the vulnerability of lacking that emotional connection and stability. Once that happens, it doesn't take much to wound him to a degree that it sticks with him for decades and remains the driving force behind the addiction.
So we do some exercises to tell the mind to release its hold on the various emotional and sensory aspects of that painful experience in kindergarten. Many times, healing up that one childhood experience releases a huge amount of the hold that the addiction has on the person's life. In several cases, it accounted for 50% or more of the problem. Yes, that seemingly insignificant wound from kindergarten was an event at the root of pornography addiction.
"So you're saying that any tiny little issue like that from childhood can cause a debilitating pornography addiction?"
It sounds like that's what I'm saying, but no. There's one more piece of the puzzle.
The little boy that experienced that seemingly insignificant hiccup in childhood to such a disastrous degree because that little boy had a mother who was either low in emotional intelligence, or who suffered from depression or anxiety or some other unresolved mental health issues that resulted in the boy not having a solid female emotional anchor in his life to inoculate him against such hiccups.
In short, a mother's emotional connection, attunement, and attention to her son and his emotional state provide a layer of security in his identity that nurtures and protects him from the little bumps and bruises of life.
