Breaking the Cycle of Pornography (Porn) Addiction

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox you I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation. We're going to be talking about breaking the cycle of porn addiction and I'm Dr. Donnelly Snipes and I will be your host. This presentation is based in part on the book Breaking the Cycle by George Collins. And I don't know if you can see it. Glare is always a problem. It's by neuharbinger Publications. I really like this book. He uses a lot of really awesome narrative examples from clients that he's worked with that my clients have found extremely helpful because they can relate to the, to the stories. So it's worth checking out. You can go on Google Books and check out, you know, several pages of it, previews of it in order to see if it's something that, that fits for you. But it's one of the books that I really like. We're going to explore how porn addiction can be a cycle, how porn, like video games, can be addictive. And as we were talking about before class, porn addiction did not make it into the DSM 5 or the ICD 10. It was flatly rejected, but gaming addiction did. So there is a little bit of movement in that direction, but not quite yet. And a lot of it had to do with people being concerned about pathologizing those who have high sexual appetites. So we're going to look at how pornography in particular, not sex, but pornography in particular can be addictive. We'll explore technological interventions to help pornography addicts and identify critical treatment issues for porn addiction. Let's start out with the similarities between pornography and gaming. Pornography is available anywhere, any time. I've worked with clients and families where the client was in elementary and middle school and had been accessing porn on a mobile device. I have worked with adults who access porn on mobile devices on, you know, just if it's connected to the Internet, it can access porn. There's never ending excitement with pornography. Especially now that we have things like pornhub that were porn is free. It's just oodles and oodles. You can just keep clicking all day long and see new images. It's not like in the olden days when you had Playboy or Penthouse or one of those and all you had was those whatever hundred pages to look at for the entire month. Now it's thousands upon tens of thousands of Images and you never really have to see the same thing twice. Additionally, if you get bored, if you habituate to a particular type of porn, there are all kinds of other options out there, including the illegal options. So there is never ending excitement and stimulation. New stuff is constantly added. You're never having to see the same thing over and over again. There's no particular end with video games and with pornography. You know, yes, you can maybe level up on in a video game with pornography. Some people, the end is not orgasm. The end is something else that they're trying to achieve. And they can engage in pornography viewing and masturbation for six, seven, eight, ten hours a day. Both pornography and gaming increase dopamine and norepinephrine. Remember, dopamine is our pleasure chemical and it also is responsible for helping us learn and focus. And norepinephrine is an excitatory neurochemical that helps us focus and concentrate. So you get the hyped up pleasure chemical cocktail going on with both of these. It may falsely provide the feeling of social connection in video games. Those video games that are more addictive are those that have social component to it. The massively multiplayer online role playing games and those sorts of things where you're actually engaging with other humans through chat, through whatever you call the little people that you move around. I'm losing my words right now. My son would be so disappointed in me. But oh well. With pornography it's more distant, if you will, because people can develop avatars. Thank you, Gwen. People can develop a sense of connection with this imaginary person that they're envisioning having sexual relations with. So it can provide a feeling of connection when there's really none there at all. In video games. At least in video games that encourage actual player interaction, there are other people there. So there is social connection. With porn, it's more of a fantasy type connection. This is especially problematic or rewarding however you want to look at it. For people who have a high level of social anxiety, low self esteem, difficulty in relationships, fear of abandonment, you know, they have difficulty connecting with a asexual partner in real life. So porn becomes a substitute. It's easy to minimize porn and gaming as harmless online activities. You're not breaking the law, you're not hurting anybody, you are looking at pictures and, you know, usually masturbating. However, there are a lot of fallout consequences from that. Another thing that can make porn more addictive is the fact that there are some sites still that have monthly fees that encourage more use for people to get their money's. Worth. You know, you go to some of these sites and they're more vanilla type porn. But if you're looking for something that is more hardcore porn, kinkier porn, whatever, sometimes you still have to pay to access those sorts of things. There are also sites out there, and I lump it in the porn genre, where people are watching somebody who is live via their webcam, they're viewing them having sex or masturbating or whatever. So there are a lot of different varieties, and that kind of moves over to voyeurism, but. But, you know, we're going to kind of put it all in the same place. How do we recognize porn or sex addiction or compulsion? It's important again to point out that people can use porn and not develop a compulsion to use it. People can have sex and not have a compulsion to use it. What we really want to look at is clinically significant distress. One of the key characteristics is the person can't get enough. They, you know, they just can't get enough. That's easy. Easy as easy enough to understand. They spend more time thinking about it, daydreaming about it, pondering about it, reminiscing about it, engaging in it, you know, that's obvious, and recovering from it than intended. When you watch a lot of porn, if you stay up all night watching porn, you're not getting sleep. If you're not getting sleep, then you're going to be exhausted the next day. So you got to kind of recover from that hangover of not getting sleep and that hangover of all the dopamine rushes that you probably had throughout the night. You give up important social, recreational activities to engage in the behavior. When we start talking about compulsive pornography viewing and masturbation, we start seeing people who lose their desire to go out to movies. They lose their desire to go to the gym. They just want to. If they have to go to work, they go to work, they come home and they view porn. Sometimes they're even viewing porn at work. Sometimes they're finding a way to work from home so they can view porn all day. There are a variety of different permutations of that. The key is the person's life starts to revolve around their ability to view porn. It causes problems in one or more areas of your life, but you continue to do it. And that's kind of the key here. If you're doing something and you notice, hey, this is causing problems in my life, I need to back off. For example, you know, I go to the gym and, you know, I tend to be a little bit obsessive about going to the gym, and my knees will sometimes start hurting or my neck will sometimes start hurting. Well, you know, I had a good idea that it might make my neck hurt if I was going to do squats today, but I did them anyway. If I continue to do squats knowing that my neck is hurt and it's going to continue to hurt my neck, that's a problem. When people continue to do something even though they know it's causing them harm, it's a problem. Let's look at the reason they do this, though. Why are they choosing to do something when they know it's going to cause problems? And I refer back to that old adage that at least I heard when I was young. You asked the guy, why do you keep banging your head into the wall? And he says, because it feels so good when I stop. There's the porn. The masturbation is a means to an end. It's not the porn itself at this point. It's an escape. It's a rush. It's, you know, some sense of a feeling of pleasure or control that they have. Whatever it is that the porn gives them, they're not getting elsewhere, and that is more rewarding than the option. And people have been unsuccessful at trying to quit. Like I said, if it causes problems in one or more areas of their life, they go, hey, this is causing a problem. Might as well stay. And they stop, okay, no harm, no foul. But if they try to stop and they notice they can't, they're thinking about it all the time, they're getting agitated and irritable, then there may be more problems to address. So who becomes a porn addict? Well, the short version is anybody. But there are a few people who are at higher risk. And I say, well, I say anybody? Because we know that once you start monkeying with your brain's neurotransmitter system and get things out of whack, then you may feel a physiological urge, compulsion to engage in some sort of behavior to get that dopamine rush again. However, people are at more risk if they had a troubled childhood and found masturbation as an effective means of soothing thinking about, you know, maybe there was a lot of conflict in the household and they would withdraw to their own room. And they found a way to make themselves feel better. They were. And think about adult, not adolescent, young boys. It is not uncommon for young boys to hold on to themselves like they're afraid it's going to fall Off. And, you know, that's just one of those things. They discover it and they're holding on to their penis like it's going to fall away. That's kind of the beginning of where they might figure out, oh, this might be kind of cool. So it's not necessarily exposure to early sexual activity or sexual abuse, but obviously those things can increase people's risk exposure to sexually explicit material at an early age. And I'm talking about porn and even some of some of the TV series stuff I've seen lately. I'm like, I wouldn't want my 7 year old in the, in the room when this is on. The child's brain and the adolescent brain are not fully developed yet. They're not as capable of handling the dopamine surges that they experience when they view a lot of sexually explicit material. Now, there's a little quandary here, and this was brought up in a previous class. Our brains, and especially our impulse control centers of our brains don't really fully develop until about 24. Okay? So potentially the brain is more flexible, more malleable, more at risk up until the age of 24. But when do people start having sex these days? And my daughter gave me a rude awakening the other day and she's like, mom, people are starting to have sex in like seventh and eighth grade now. And I was just like, I'm so glad you're a homeschooled baby girl. You're never leaving the house. She rolled her eyes and walked away. But anyhow, there's a big gap there because when people start having sex and engaging in sexually active behavior, it is stimulating that part of the brain. It's not as stimulating in some cases as porn, because it's not that never ending stuff. But if people become involved with porn at an early age, then it can cause a lot more problems than it does for somebody who's, you know, 25, 26 who starts looking at pornography. Gunner asked a question. Are males more at risk or is this equally prevalent with females? I will look at the research a little bit more. My impressions from the research in preparing for this class are that because males tend to be more visual in nature, there tends to be a greater percentage of men who are engaging in pornography viewing and where it may become a problem. That doesn't mean that women don't do it, but it's a higher percentage of men. Because of that visual connection, a lot of women are more interpersonally motivated. But that's not true across the board by any stretch of the imagination. There are a lot of women who develop challenges with pornography. People who have difficulty in real life relationships may have difficulty with porn because pornography serves a fantasy representation in their life. It fills a void that they have. And so that can put them at greater risk if they're depressed, stressed or having difficulty sleeping. Porn increases norepinephrine, which is one of our happy chemicals. It increases dopamine, which is one of our pleasure chemicals. So if somebody is feeling apathetic and not motivated and fatigued, then masturbation may seem like an option. It may seem like a good solution. Viewing pornography increases the excitatory chemicals. It gets people revved up. So it could seem appealing. If they're feeling stressed, pornography can give them something else to focus on besides whatever it is out here that is stressing them out. And if they're having difficulty sleeping. Now this is kind of a sticky wicket here because while masturbation and orgasm can help some people feel more relaxed and sleepy if they're viewing porn regularly. If they're viewing a lot of porn, they may actually just forego sleep and continue to watch the porn. So it can go from sort of a harmless way to wind down to an addictive behavior. Anybody's vulnerable. That's kind of the take home message, whether they are younger. And the youngest person I worked with was a 15 year old male who had escalated significantly in the types of porn that he was watching, and he was watching several hours per day. Porn addiction is really about the neurochemical reactions from looking at the porn, that excitement and tension building and masturbation, the release and the reward. Dopamine, norepinephrine, gaba, all of those neurochemicals that we've talked about are involved in the viewing of porn and masturbation. But when people encounter distressing situations or boredom, they may masturbate, they may watch porn so they can get stimulated enough to masturbate. Okay, so we see that there's a reason for this. They're trying to escape, they're trying to feel some sort of pleasure, yada, yada. This produces a sensation of calming or pleasure that the person wants to experience again. They're like, oh, wow, that was relief for a moment. That was pretty awesome. Let me do that again. Because as soon as that, you know, afterglow wears off, if you will, the tension comes back or the depression may come back. So they may go back to viewing the porn. The person remembers the next time, remembers how pleasurable it was or how effective it was the next time. A distressing situation arises, so they may go back to it. Remember with addiction, when our brain is regularly flooded with dopamine, norepinephrine, anything in excess, it turns down the receptors. So you've got maybe have a bunch of neurochemicals going into the synapse, but some of those receptors are being shut down because the body's going, I can't take that much dopamine coming through my system all the time. I'm going to overload. Okay, that's self protective. That's the brain going, hoorah. We want to survive. Let's not, let's not spontaneously implode. Well, what's the problem with that? When those receptors shut down so not as much dopamine can go through. Then when the normal level of dopamine is coming through, you don't feel as good because the normal level comes into the synapses and enough can't get through the remaining open two receptor doors. And people start to feel depressed or anxious or frustrated or irritable, which is what makes them think about going back to engaging in some sort of behavior that will increase their dopamine and norepinephrine and stuff again, so they feel normal. So after a period of flooding your brain with too much of a neurochemical, it shuts down those receptors and the normal level that your body experiences isn't enough. So, so you need to. The person feels a need to influence the amount of neurochemicals in order to, quote, feel normal. We see this a lot in addiction where people just, they don't even feel like they can go unless they're high. So how do we break this cycle? First, identify the triggers. Triggers are people, places, things, feelings and events. Pretty much anything that prompts a person to want to escape or engage in this behavior for pleasure. So have people write a list. And he has a lot of good questions in the book. But for example, what emotions trigger you to want to view porn? Anxiety, anger, frustration, fatigue, boredom, depression, whatever it is. Encourage people to identify what types of feelings. When I have that feeling that I want to go view porn, what is the underlying emotion? You know, for me, I tend to be bad about stress eating. And I can be in the kitchen and I can stop myself and be like, okay, am I hungry? Or what feeling is going along with this desire to eat? Right now we want people to start identifying the same thing for porn. What thoughts or self talk prompt you to want to engage in that behavior? Some of it can be euphoric recall. You're remembering what you did Last night and how awesome it was and you want to do it again or how it felt last night. Or you may be, there may be an inner critic that is just pummeling the heck out of your self esteem and telling you you're not good enough and yada yada. So you want to shut that inner, inner critic up. And one way to do that is to focus on porn. If you're focused on that, you can't hear that guy going. What people may prompt you to feel like you want to go use porn and what situations or times of day. Maybe somebody uses porn to help them relax when they're stressed out. So if they're getting ready to go present before a big board meeting, that may be a trigger. If they come home and you know they're the only one home. That may be a situation that's like opportunity. If they are bored, if they're lonely, whatever it is at night. Some people may get in the habit of doing it before, as a relaxation thing before going to bed. And then it just kind of takes on a life of its own, encouraging people to just look at their behavior, keeping a log for a week or so of when they view porn and what was going on immediately before they used, decided to view the porn, how they felt afterwards. And that way you can see times of day people and you can start drawing connections. Address the euphoric recall. This is going to be really important. Encourage them to make a list of the unpleasant effects. Emotional effects of using porn, especially excessively using porn, include shame and guilt about what they're doing, anger at themselves for not feeling like they have the personal self control and to do things. Anxiety about somebody finding out what they're doing, or anxiety about not being able to stop. You know, anxiety about somebody finding out. There's a lot of different things that can prompt anxiety revolving around porn and depression. Now depression is a sneaky one because people can feel hopeless and helpless to stop this behavior. This is true. People can also develop depression as a direct effect of too much porn and masturbation. There's just the neurochemicals are going constantly and they're flooded so much and you've disrupted the neurotransmitter balance. And people start actually feeling apathetic and depressed cognitively. They may have obsessions about pornography. They may start having obsessions about and objectifying people that are of sexual interest to them when they're not able to view porn. They may not be able to focus or concentrate on what they're doing because they're Just constantly thinking about porn or when they're going to get to watch porn. Interpersonally, they may have the inability to get aroused in real life. A lot of things that people see on porn can be pretty extreme. So it's important to recognize that this also alters the dynamic between a. Between two people in real life in an intimate, loving relationship versus this scripted relationship. People may have changed sexual preferences and expectations. And what I mean by that is, you know, they may have preferred initially, you know, vanilla sex all the way, but after watching all this porn, they may start having much stronger desires to engage in BDSM or something else. And they may have more strong expectations of their partner and what their partner should, quote, unquote, be willing to do. They may have difficulty not objectifying other people. They may pay less attention to their kids because they're more concerned about thinking about porn. They may have less desire to interact with other people, not only sexually, but just interpersonally, Occupationally. People may lose time at work because of thinking about porn, because of being less productive, because they can't concentrate, and because of running to the bathroom a lot with their mobile device to watch porn. I know I've had clients that have been late for work. They wake up and they start watching porn. They start masturbating, and before they know it, they're late for work. And there can be legal issues. Divorce. Many significant others of people who view porn, especially people who view a lot of porn, feel very betrayed and feel like there is some sort of emotional or cognitive affair going on. They feel rejected in some ways. And some of the interpersonal problems caused by porn can also lead to relationship difficulties, leading to divorce or separation, which can also cause child custody issues, criminal charges. Obviously, this really only applies if we're talking about viewing child pornography. And that's just a whole different thing. Most people, most people don't escalate from watching run of the mill adult porn to a strong preference for child porn. It happens occasionally, but most of the time that is a very specifically preferential activity. Bankruptcy can also be an issue, partly because of divorce, but also if somebody is engaging in watching what I call live porn by watching webcam videos or webcam streams of people, then that can also cost a lot of money. You know, a dollar, $2, sometimes $4aminute. So people can very quickly lose a lot of money and time. Number three, pairing the porn pair. The situation in which you want to use porn with something competing. So if every time you sit, sit down at your desk, you think, oh, I Could just log on to that website and you know, look at images for a little while, get this out of the way and then I would be so much better focused for the day. That's the rationalization. So if that's the case, on your desktop, have pictures of your kids or, you know, your higher power or something where you see it and you're like, okay, that killed the mood. Have pictures of your kids around. You know, anything you can do to make the environment less conducive to viewing porn will be helpful. It's not solving the problem, it's just helping reduce some of the urges. Step four is to lock it down. And I've seen a lot of good suggestions on here and in a couple of forums that I'm in. Firewalls to block adult content that you don't have the password to. So if you are an adult, this is your, let's look at worst case scenario, you're an adult and you live by yourself. Well then you need to have a trusted friend that can set up your network and your firewalls and you get, they have the password and you don't know what the password is to your firewall. So you, at 2 in the morning, you can't, you know, log in and change the password settings. That's one big one. Now let's think about how ubiquitous porn is. Anywhere there's a connection. So with any mobile device you can log in and even use data. You don't even have to have a wireless connection to view pornographic images. You can't lock everything down. You can't lock down. You can not subscribe to those channels on your tv. You can have firewalls to block adult content at your home. But what about at work? What do you do at work? Well, generally people aren't going to view porn on their work computer. And a lot of offices already have that locked down through a firewall. So that's a good thing. But they do have their mobile devices at the office or they have their laptops where they are if they're, if they travel and they're at a hotel. There are what I call nanny apps and that's just a pejorative term I guess I use. Bark is one of them that you can put on laptops, iPads, tablets, phones, whatever that notifies somebody else if you go to an adult site. Now they were originally designed to be used with children who have mobile devices to alert parents if children were going to inappropriate websites or being bullied or anything else. But the interesting thing with these is because it monitors not only the websites you go to, but also chat rooms and stuff. It looks for particular words. It can be set to monitor chats. So if you are. If the person is tempted to go online to, you know, POF or one of those dating sites and engage in cyber sex with somebody, then that will get picked up just as well and notify again. It'll notify somebody external to the person. So it tattles on them, if you will. Those can be really helpful for a lot of reasons. Because, you know, like any addiction, people who are in early recovery need help not engaging in that behavior. Because that has made them feel good, that has made. That helped them escape, that has helped them achieve some sort of goal or end for a while now. And we need to help them while their brain recovers and starts opening those receptor bays again. We need to help them get through that period. Step five is to reboot. This is when we start helping the brain rebalance itself. When the brain's regularly flooded with dopamine and excitatory neurochemicals, it becomes less sensitive to those things. So things that used to make people happy don't have the same effect, you know, not as the same amount of neurotransmitter may get into the synapse, but not as much as gonna get all the way through the receptors because some of those receptor bays are closed. So people feel eh instead of excited. People may also start feeling depressed, have difficulty concentrating and lack energy. In the classes that we talked about, neurotransmitters, you know, that dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, are all involved in depression. You know, alterations in those. All three of those neurochemicals can be implicated in certain people's depression. So when that system is out of whack, we can almost guarantee there are going to be some mood effects. First step of the reboot process is to remove all pornography from the equation. If the person's willing to. Not everybody's willing to, but this is most helpful because then you don't have the stimulation. It's akin to asking somebody who has an issue with alcohol to stop drinking alcohol, at least for a period of time. Now, it doesn't mean that they have to completely abstain from all activities, but pornography right now is a trigger. And pornography right now, they're having difficulty controlling. So. So let's. Until we get some other stuff balanced out and handled, let's try to remove porn from the equation. And it's recommended to restrict sexual activity to only that between the Person and a consenting partner, somebody in real life where they're having to establish that relationship and, you know, interact with someone. That also limits the amount of time that's spent engaging in the behavior because they're probably not going to find another partner who is willing to have sex for six, seven hours a night, every single night. So you're going to slowly start weaning the person off the dopamine or whatever. The interesting thing is though, when you take away the porn because the brain starts craving it, their desire for sexual activity and desire for porn is going to go up and their desire for relief is going to go up. So they may be more motivated. Most of the time, they are more motivated to actually try to engage with a partner. Initially. The person may experience anxiety and or depression as well as sexual craving, since the brain is depending on regular doses of feel good chemicals and porn has been a staple coping strategy. You know, you take away that security blanket or that safety net and they're like, okay, I'm stressed. Now what do I do? We need to make sure people have a list of alternate activities and things they can do. As the brain recovers and those receptors open up again, obsessions about porn and compulsive behaviors will start to remit. Now, I say start because the person was likely engaging in those things for reasons other than just the pure rush of it. It was probably to deal with boredom, feelings of inadequacy, whatever. We need to deal with those two or they're still going to have a desire to return to pornography, which is less threatening in some ways. Help people unhook from their thoughts. Instead of, you know, this is where you start addressing that heckler in the amphitheater, as he calls it. Instead of having them tell themselves, I'm a failure, have them say, I'm having the thought that I'm a failure. If people are using porn in order to deal with their sense of inadequacy and the negative internal criticism helping them start to deal with that internal critic and realize that they are not their brain. Those thoughts are just thoughts, and that doesn't mean that those thoughts are true. Instead of saying, I can't wait to get home to look at porn or to masturbate, say, I'm having the thought that I can't wait to get home to look at porn. Thoughts come and go, and we've talked about that in many other classes. Helping them separate from it. Instead of saying, I must, I can't, I have to. Something that seems permanent and attached and part of Them, if it's a thought, it's something out here that they can let go, like a cloud that floats through the sky. Step six is to address the underlying issues. And there's a lot of them. First, have people take a personal inventory. Identify what is causing them to want to use pornography. What's the benefit to using pornography for them? How is it helping them in some way? And that's. People often look at you strangely when you ask them that question at first because they haven't really thought about it and they're used to saying, let's talk about all the reasons it's bad, instead of going, well, we only do things that are rewarding, so what's the benefit to you? And then let's figure out how else to address that issue. So have people take their personal history. And Collins, in his book, really does a good job of walking people through taking a personal history. And this book, Breaking the Cycle, is really interesting to be used in as part of a group if you want to do it that way. If you want to have a sex addiction group, it doesn't get too detailed where people. It would be traumatic in group, but it's enough where people can share and get experience, strength and hope. As we say in 12 step programs. Encourage them to think about, okay, what triggers my desire to use. Use pornography? What makes it worse? What makes this desire to use porn worse? One of the things can be not being able to access it. What other things make it worse? What makes it better? Have they ever had the desire to use porn? They've thought about using porn and then they've done something or something happened and they just decided, you know what? No, not right now. What was that? Most people, you know, if they're in your office, then something motivated them to leave the computer screen. So what was that? We want to increase those things. What are you doing when you're not using? What was different when you didn't have this problem? A lot of people can think back, not all of them. You know, some people started using porn as early as, you know, 8, 9, 10 years old, so they can't really think back past that. But for a lot of people, this is something that developed maybe in late high school, early college, something like that, and they can look back and talk about maybe what was different before they had this problem. And what steps do you need to do to take care of whatever this is that's motivating your desire to use porn? And we're continuing to talk about the problem. So what issues might we be Talking about low self esteem. If they have an internalized negative self object, if they believe that they're a piece of crap, you know, that's the layman's way of saying it. Then they may have difficulty feeling like anybody would want them. They may have difficulty feeling feeling like they're attractive. They may have difficulty interacting with other people. So they turn to porn in order to get some of their needs met and to feel less isolated. Depression. We talked earlier that porn can cause depression because it upsets the neurochemicals. But we've also talked about how depression can trigger people to want to use porn because it sends a flood of those excitatory neurochemicals out. Anxiety and stress. A lot of people use to deal with anxiety and stress. We want to look at that. What is it that's going on that is stressful? And what other coping skills and tools do you have that work? What else might you need to develop anger? That's another one. Insomnia. For some people, it's they can't get to sleep unless they view porn and then they get to the point where they don't want to quit to go to sleep. So insomnia may be one of those things. Insomnia can be related to. That's part of their sleep routine and they need to put something else in its stead. Or insomnia could be due to anxiety and watching porn helps them escape long enough that they can calm down enough to go to sleep. So we want to look at what's causing the insomnia and how can we solve it? If they feel isolated, if they have social anxiety, or if they're experiencing a lack of intimacy in their current relationship, some people will turn to porn. Okay, so what is causing you to have these feelings or what is causing this current situation and how else can you address it? Because porn is really not going to change. You're going to continue to feel isolated. Porn is not going to suddenly make you feel less isolated, except for right when you're watching it. If you have social anxiety, porn isn't going to give you confidence. It may make you feel less anxious while you're viewing it, but then when you're in real life, it doesn't work. And if there's lack of intimacy in a relationship, again, pornography just encourages detaching from human partners and boredom. So those are the main key issues. And for a lot of people with compulsive pornography oriented behaviors, they may have all of these. And that's okay. It's identifying and prioritizing what do you want to work on first? What is the most important thing or what is the strongest trigger for you that makes you want to use porn? Step 7. Develop alternate positive behaviors to engage in when you're feeling triggered. Have them make a list when they're feeling triggered. They're going to be flooded with adrenaline and desire and all this other stuff they ain't going to be thinking clearly about. What else could I do? Encourage them to write a contract with you and make it a contract that they can succeed in, but encourage them to write a behavioral contract. When I'm feeling triggered, I will, you know, mow the lawn. That's one of those that gets you out. I get out on my, my riding lawnmower and the troubles of the day just kind of disappear. That's just me. That's me and power equipment. You can tell my stress level based on how powerful the yard equipment is that I'm using. If I'm using hand pruners, mama's in a good mood. If I'm on the riding mower, give me a few minutes before you come out because that's my zen time out there. But mow the lawn, go to the gym, get some of that energy out some other way. Now, the caveat is, for some people, going to the gym can increase testosterone, which can kind of backfire on you, but it also can if you work out some of that stress and anxiety. It can also help you feel relaxed as the body secretes serotonin. When we exercise, if you can't get to the gym, anybody anywhere can either do push ups or wall sits. Push ups. You have to be somewhere. Like, you have to have a private office. You're not going to drop in the middle of a classroom and do 20 push ups, you know, hopefully. But you can go to the bathroom and in one of the potty stalls, do a wall sit. That's when you put your back against the wall and you sink down until your legs are parallel to the ground and like you're sitting, but there's no chair there. And hold that. And that is really uncomfortable. But that will stop you from thinking about whatever the issue is until that goes away. And these are very similar to some of the distraction techniques and distress tolerance techniques that you use in dialectical behavior therapy. You know, this DBT works really well with porn addiction. Encourage people to take a cold shower. Again, if they can't take a cold shower. If you're at work that may not work, hold an ice cube. Most places that you work, there's going to be an employee lounge and you can go grab an ice cube. This may be another one of those. You want to grab the ice cube and run to the bathroom so people don't come in and ask you why you're holding ice cubes. That's fine, but it distracts your attention. Listen to loud music. Anything to just bombard your senses. Find something opposite to watch on tv. A comedy, something that is not sexually stimulating at all. Cartoons. Whatever it takes. I'm a cartoon fanatic so you know, somebody would be it would be easy for them to find a DVD in our house to watch because I've got like every Hanna Barbera cartoon known to man. Review your drawbacks list. If all else fails, go back to that list that you made of all the drawbacks to using porn to remind yourself and get rid of that euphoric recall. Get support. Call somebody. It's important when people are recovering from or breaking the cycle of pornography. Use to be able to call somebody when they're feeling like they want to view porn so they can talk through it. After you talk through it for a while, the urge Remember urge surfing from DBT. That urge will go away in 15 or 20 minutes. We need to help them get through riding that wave until the urge goes away and encourage them to develop an affirmation statement about how, you know, what a good person they are, why they want to quit using porn, why they're not going to do that anymore, whatever. He gives examples in the book for the affirmation statement. You can learn more in the book Breaking the Cycle and it's available at New Harbinger Publications and has dozens of activities to help people step through the this process. Like I said earlier, I really like this book because it's written for the average person. It's not written for clinicians, although it's a really useful tool. You can go to newharbinger.com to find that book and save 25% by using promo code 1168 Snipes Pornography floods people's brains with feel good chemicals. People often use porn and masturbation to self soothe when they're experienced some form of distress. When people are experiencing a lot of distress for some reason, it's not just today, it's you know, all week or for the past six months. They may use porn or masturbation more because they're just they're trying to help themselves feel better. When the brain adapts to these frequent doses of dopamine and norepinephrine, it begins to expect them, which can cause people to feel kind of horny all the time. This feeling may prompt compulsive sexual behavior, hence the beginning of the porn cycle. Regular pornography use has negative effects on emotions, concentration, relationships, work, product, and sometimes legal status and finances. Breaking the cycle involves detoxing. That's the only word I could come up with from the porn to let the brain recover. So so letting the brain rest and not be flooded with dopamine as much at least. And remember I said for a lot of people, they may be willing to give up the pornography but not abstain from sex altogether. That's okay. They found that in a lot of the research that if they are only engaging in sexual behavior with a consenting person, especially in a committed relationship, it is not detrimental to the recovery process. Identify the triggers for use and what underlying issues caused them. Got to address those underlying triggers or the person is going to probably be tempted to go back and address those issues this episode of Counselor Toolbox has been sponsored in part by Foundations Events. As the behavioral health industry evolves, the need for collaboration is greater than ever. Join Foundations Events at the Innovations in behavioral healthcare conference June 20th and 21st in Nashville. Focused on listening to both the patient and provider, this conference offers two days of sessions that follow the journey from meeting the patient where they are to helping them find recovery. Special pricing for licensed clinicians is available with the opportunity to earn over 20 CEUs. Visit foundationsevents.com counselortoolbox for more information and to register today. If this podcast helps you help your clients or yourself, please support us by purchasing your ceus@allce.com or getting your agency to sponsor an episode. A direct link to the on demand CEUs for this podcast is at allce.com/podcastce. That's allce. Com podcastce. To sponsor an episode of Counselor Toolbox and reach over 50,000 clinicians per week, go to allce. Com sponsor. Thank you.