Pornography Recovery for Men

IN BONDAGE TO PORN?

YOUR FREEDOM 

CAN BEGIN TODAY

THE HABIT  THE DAMAGE THE SOLUTION

THE HABIT

Habits form throughout everyone’s life. Many start at an immature age and are reinforced over time. Most strong habits develop to meet a primary need. For most men, porn enters their life in the teen years, when curiosity and excitement are at a peak. Once it is tied to masturbation, a powerful incitement is activated by releasing strong chemical rewards in the brain. Young men quickly learn that this euphoric feeling can transport them from boredom, loneliness, emotion pain, restlessness, and rejection from others.

Neuroplasticity research shows how this automatic process alters the brain’s expectations and creates a strong subconscious drive, until the until hidden neuro-fusions are broken.

Habits & People Both Resist Change

John Maxwell astutely observed that people can only change when they:

1. Hurt enough that they have to change

2. Learn enough that they want to change

3. Receive enough that they are able to change

Change is hard for everyone. As a general rule, people will resist, avoid, even fight against change. Habits form throughout everyone’s life. Many start at an immature age and are reinforced over time. Most strong habits develop to meet a primary need. For most men, porn enters their life in the teen years, when curiosity and excitement are at a peak. 

Once it is tied to masturbation, a powerful incitement is activated by releasing strong chemical rewards in the brain. Young men quickly learn that this euphoric feeling can transport them from boredom, loneliness, emotion pain, restlessness, and rejection from others. Neuroplasticity research shows how this automatic process alters the brain’s expectations and creates a strong subconscious drive. But it also tells us how we can change the brain.

Change is the breaking of the chain that produces reinforcement of the habit. But that chain cannot be broken until the hidden needs that reinforced the use of porn is fully understood. This is the core process of our pornography recovery program. Our coaches and counselors will guide to discovering the roots of porn addiction that is specific to you. Until you dig up the root, you cannot escape an addiction to porn.

Habits are Formed in the Brain

Men often justify their porn use as harmless, victimless, and minimize the addictive allure of internet porn. However, when a habit includes strong defense against negative feelings, such as loneliness, depression, or isolation, the brain sees the habit as good, helpful, and effective. When the habit triggers enormously powerful pleasurable feelings, the reward centers of the brain flood the user with strong chemicals that reinforce continued porn use. Oxytocin and other endorphins like Dopamine are so highly addictive because they produce strong feelings of pleasure, comfort, and even love.

These chemicals are so addictive that very quickly alter the brain to create a preference for any behavior that can trigger the reward center to flood the brain with pleasure. There is nothing more addictive than evincing a strong orgasm at will. So, when porn and masturbation are combined, the potential for addiction is strong.

When fully active, this addiction can actually replace the desire to be with a live person, despite any feelings of love, guilt, or commitment. This is due to the creation of Neuro-Fusions, in the brain. Simply put, these are pathways that become wired together, and become the major routes that pleasure travels. They become extraordinarily strong in preference for achieving pleasure, reinforcing any habit that allows them to be used. The brain will drive behaviors that activate these pathways compulsively, hijacking the will of the user, just like a drug. The internet porn user becomes an addict, trapped in compulsive behavior. As a result, he or she must find new, more extreme pictures, videos, and scenarios to get to full arousal and climax since excitement requires ever new experiences, much like a drug addict needs increasingly of the drug to get high. This leads the user deeper into preferences that are unlikely to be available in real life relationships. At times, this can render a man incapable of engaging in sex with a partner.

Escaping the trap of internet porn is not easy, but it is possible. We have coaching and counseling for those who wish to stop. Individual work is important, partner support is needed, and peer support is powerful. Our recovery model is both systematized and individualized, offering a safe, effective, and targeted approach to overcoming porn addiction. Our model works and is flexible to meet the unique needs and issues of each client.

If you are ready to set up a free consultation appointment for yourself, or for your partner, to explore how to save your relationship and stop the abuse of internet porn, click here to be taken to our appointment scheduler. Schedule a New Client Consultation appointment with Dr. Chuck Carrington. The consultation is always free.

Outside the area? We accept clients from around the world! Distance clients can access our program online through HIPAA compliant and encrypted Telehealth.

To arrange a video or phone consultation, or for general questions, call

757-965-5450

The Damage

Risks and Costs of Porn Use

Addiction: You lose your self-control. You no longer have sovereignty over your own mind, heart, and body. Life becomes subject to porn. The developers of porn sites use their knowledge of addiction, much like a casino entices gamblers to take ever-increasing risks. Addiction can be easily stimulated with reinforcements like pop-ups, and ever-increasing need for a fix, drawing the user progressively deeper.

Brain Re-wiring: Your brain ties certain beliefs and experiences together, creating likes, dislikes, beliefs, and habits. This wiring together creates a unique you…Porn alters who you are, from the inside out by rewiring your brain to be hungry for porn. The result–compulsion. You have lost control.

Relationships: The typical outcome is a permanently damaged and altered relationship. In the worst cases, it is totally destroyed.

Your Family: Imagine the impact of discovery of your porn use on your children…will you lose your moral authority to teach and protect your kids in order to keep porn in your life? Is the cost worth it to you? What will your daughters think? How will you coach your son to be a respectful husband?

Sexual Dysfunction: Porn use can dramatically affect your sexual performance, leading to Erectile Dysfunction. Reinforce and re-traumatize any effects from childhood abuse you may have suffered or produce dissatisfaction with your spouse and lack of arousal.

Alters your Love Map: Exposure to extreme sexual content can alter your sex map. The slippery slope of enticement can draw you into arousal over children, same-sex, deviant acts, etc.

Loss of Self-esteem: You already know the shame that porn use brings. If it is not shaming, you would not hide it. Shame can quickly become toxic, destroying you from the inside out. The evidence is irritability, anger, lying, and blame-shifting. Porn reshapes your core self-identity.

Your Job: Porn drives risky behavior. Accessing porn at work, or on work computers can result in embarrassing confrontation, even termination. How will you explain that to your wife and prospective new employer?

Your Reputation: Church, work, family, friends, and others who look to you to lead will quickly distance themselves from trusting you when this addiction is revealed. People erroneously equate porn with perversion.

Supporting Human Trafficking and Sex Abuse: Online porn only exists because there is an audience. Many of those you use to get off are forced by economic conditions, forced by human traffickers, sold by parents, or are acting out shame from childhood abuse. Your use contributes to this evil, regardless of your denial. No mentally intact person dreams of growing up to be objectified and used in this way.

Your porn use has been discovered, and now you face the consequences

The primary struggle in dealing with porn use and managing relationship conflict is the difference in perception of the nature of porn use in a marriage between men and women.

Men tend to view porn as an activity that is not emotionally connected to a person, and is so familiar, a long-term habit used for self-soothing, that they fail to see the very real threat to their relationship, or even to themselves. To most men, porn use is no different than a few beers to relax after work, or a cigarette after a meal or when anxious. This belief is reinforced by years of excuses and social reinforcement from other men. This removes the barriers that normally exist that prevent otherwise good husbands from straying into cheating with others.

Women tend to view porn as actual cheating. They instinctively seem to know that while the man is using porn, the intimacy and trust in the relationship is under attack. Even more powerful is the faulty belief that they themselves have done, or failed to do, something that caused their man to stray. This thinking error combines with the hurt of betrayal to causes the relationship to be put into doubt.

As with most marriage conflict, the fight that ensues becomes focused on wining the argument. Lost is the actual underlying issue, the hurt that results from damage to the core of the relationship–trust. When a couple argues, they usually enter a battle dominated with circular reasoning and the transmission of points of view. Frequently, these arguments are energized by harsh words, raised voices, strong inflections, and mutual criticisms. The result, more pain, and seldom a cooperative solution.

The unfortunate truth remains that most people are terrible at conflict management and negotiating a mutual solution. Instead, we dig in our heals and insist on our point of view, because we have come to believe it is the right one. Or we defend out faulty point of view as a reflex to being attacked and not wanting to admit we are wrong. Regardless, the fight simply winds up, causes more hurt, fizzles out when energies are depleted, and then comes back later when re-triggered.

To stop the useless fight, and actually get on with healing, both sides need to learn how to stay connected, even when pain is present. The damage to your relationship is already done. Rather than add to it, learn how to come back from it. Conjoint Therapy and Porn Recovery Counseling teaches you how to stop fighting each other, and instead, focus on fighting for your restoration as a couple.

The Solution

LETS START from the beginning. Porn addiction or abuse does not simply happen, it develops. And seldom is it about sex. Yes, sex is a contributing factor that makes it perhaps the most difficult addiction to break. But it can be broken, mastered, or managed. You do not have to live life tied to porn. Like any other addiction, porn use follows a cycle of behavior. This cycle is well ingrained and automatic. It began long before porn became an issue. For most men, it began in early adolescence. Learning about one’s sexuality begins when a young man discovers masturbation. From there, curiosity, excitement, and cure for lack of sexual outlets drives the young man to develop a habit of masturbation.

When pornography is also discovered in these developmental years, the result is a mental fusion, a cognitive connection of two or more events, beliefs, or sensations that become a strong neural pathway. These mental fusions become the root of habitual behavior, as well as desire for more. The brain learns to expect and then crave reinforcement of these fusions. Mental fusions create beliefs. Some good, some faulty. For porn addicts, porn plus masturbation in youth hijacks the natural urge to pair-bond with a real partner, replacing that bond with a bond to porn to drive success in masturbation.

In short, the addict effectively becomes married to porn. Because of this mental fusion that leads to a pair-bond, the mind naturally resists any interference with the maintenance of the bond. This is why porn addiction is so difficult to beat. As an addiction, we also see typical reactions to any attempt to break the hold of the addiction over the will of the addict. Resistance, blame-shifting, and emotional anxiety (often seen as anger) will be triggered. When the addict does commit to recovery, withdraw is experienced.

Our porn recovery program focuses on three major factors required in breaking free of this strong addiction.

1. We work on establishing a strong empathetic connection between the addict and the betrayed spouse.
2. We strengthen the addict to be able to accept the confrontation by their spouse, self, and others so that relapse is not triggered when their spouse needs assurance of safety, often demonstrated by anger and frustration, suspending trust, and withholding sexual intimacy.
3. We help the addict deconstruct harmful mental fusions that reinforce the addiction, effectively learning to break the cycle of addiction by breaking the chain of events that stimulate the urge or need to use porn.

This highly effective model uses a structured one-on-one Coaching Model, plus Support Group reinforcement, and Spousal Support throughout the process. The initial Early Recovery period is 16 weeks, provided the addict-client cooperates. After care is provided to maintain sobriety from porn as long as you need it. Following success in early recovery, we then offer targeted marriage counseling/coaching, depending on the needs of the marriage and family, to begin repairing the relationship damage and opening the hearts of the couple to begin to reestablish trust and care.

Our Services:

Individual Counseling & Coaching for MEN...

Confessing that you have a problem with porn is not easy. You will fear judgment, embarrassment, and have to lower your learned male image defenses. however, as any of our clients will tell you, once you establish that you want to kick this habit and begin the process in earnest, you will be glad you did. You know you cannot do this alone because that has never worked before. If it had, you would not be searching out this website, or read the content.

We will carefully explain how our program works, and what you will discover, as well as what we will ask you to do. The basic early recover phase is designed to take about 12 weeks. During that time, you will work on learning or strengthening some skills:

1. Victim Empathy to understand and respond to the hurt you have caused to your spouse, to self, and to your relationship.
2. Confrontation Tolerance to stop your defensiveness, accept your wife’s need to confront you, and accept help.
3. How to master the triggers you have developed that drive your addiction.

You will immediately begin to rewire your brain so that porn loses its hold on you. The first 12 weeks is the tough part. However, our process is enormously powerful, and you will begin to see renewed hope almost immediately.

Men’s Support Group

This is an “open group” where new members can join at any time, based on space. However, to attend group, you must be screened for appropriateness to the group. Most members are current clients in our Internet Addiction Coaching and Recovery Skills Program. This group if for men who are trapped in habitual porn use. If you are a spouse of a porn addicted man, and would like to join a group for spouse support, please email the office at [email protected] and let us know. We also have individual sessions for wives, spouses, and partners so that you can get the help you need while he is doing his early recovery work.

Individual Support & Counseling for WOMEN

As a Betrayed Spouse, you have many conflicted feelings and thoughts. Counseling will help you deal with:

1. The pain of betrayal causes you to place the future of your relationship on hold while you wait for proof he has changed.
2. Resisting his blame-shifting messages and how to keep the impacts of his addiction focused on his ownership of the problem.
3. Accepting it is not about how you look, performance, or age. It is him.
4. Use healthy confrontation to safeguard your relationship, without trigger his tendency to relapse.
5. Understand his cycle and support his recovery without giving up your own emotional safety, dignity, or rights in your marriage.

Women’s Support Group

Cheating in a marriage is no longer limited to affairs, late night rendezvous, or sleazy motels. It can now happen right in your own home-while you sleep! The rising phenomenon of internet pornography has begun to destroy marriages and relationships across the US.

When you discover your mate is secretly using porn, it can be devastating. The first instinct is anger, then self-doubt, then grief and fear.

Two primary factors are affected by this discovery, Trust and Love Throughout the process of dealing with this very painful discovery, you will experience mixed feelings. At times, your feelings of love will battle with contempt. Your mind is trying to sort out the conflict between your desire to see him through the filter of love, and the reality of his actions, excuses, and attitudes. Trust is likewise attacked as fear of future lies, relapse, and doubt surge into your thoughts.

Sorting these feelings out, and finding a way forward, is actually the process of Grief. Our women’s group is designed to help you negotiate your feelings, grief, and find your own answers to re-balance your life.

CONJOINT COUNSELING: Not Traditional Marriage Counseling

Conjoint therapy is a unique form of marriage work. It is used when the couple’s situation does not lend itself to more traditional marriage work.

When relationship betrayal is recent or the effect on the couple is active, couples counseling is not likely to be effective. The prominent levels of pain and defensiveness blocks a couple’s ability to trust and connect at the3 heart. When the heart feels unsafe, couples counseling will not work.

In conjoint work, the partners each work separately with a counselor, or pair of counselors as a team, to deal with their own feelings and coping skills. We prefer co-counseling teams working separately with the individuals. This way, both spouses have an advocate they know and trust. When deemed ready, they are brought together for more traditional couples work.