Larry Wheels spent up to $300,000 on OnlyFans and cam sites during an addiction that isolated him from everyone around him. Psychologist Samir Gardner explains how shame and self-labeling as deviant deepened the cycle, arguing that understanding the root causes matters more than quick judgment.
How much money do you think you spent on OnlyFans, cam sites, porn? Hundreds of thousands because it was never enough. And I was at a point where like, this is gonna be the end of me because if I didn't fix that problem, it was just gonna get worse. Because at that time, if I'm making $100 grand a month, whatever I had left over after my overhead, after my living expenses, was just gonna go to getting that high. I had $1 million a month, I would spend every single dollar of that million dollars to get that high. Like nothing materialistic excited me, like cars, watches, acquiring assets, none of that was scratching that itch. So that was the lowest point in my life. The money was devastating to spend that kind of money on what I was spending it on, but the worst of it was the time wasted. Because many addicts, no matter if you're addicted to crystal meth or porn or whatever your choice of addiction is, you isolate. So I would just spend time by myself, isolated from friends, family, whenever I had the opportunity to, just to indulge.
The issue with these struggles is that the person feels so much shame. He feels like a deviant so much, he then labels himself as someone who is deviant, who is different than the rest of people, which means that now he isolates himself out of shame, out of fear of being judged. And obviously isolation makes everything worse. And then that creates the desire to escape even more. So he goes back to that same behavior over and over again as he uses it as a coping mechanism. But what we need to talk about, what we need to focus on is why does the individual want to indulge in this behavior in the first place? We are often so quick to say, oh, this is terrible. This guy's probably addicted. This guy's a deviant. We, we throw these labels. We come to the conclusion right away instead of looking behind the curtain.
