Intimacy: The Cure for Pornography Addiction

One of the biggest reasons men struggle to have sustained sobriety from pornography addiction is they never get to the root cause of their compulsion to cope in such an unhealthy way. They work really hard to stop their acting out behaviors, not realizing that what they are actually doing is just addressing the surface-level symptom of the underlying problem. While how you arrived at being addicted and what has kept you addicted differs, the underlying issue is the same. The addiction has created an intimacy disorder which you then try to cope with by doing the very addiction that caused the intimacy disorder in the first place.

Intimacy disorder is clinically defined as “a struggle to form secure relationships.” Practically, it means the inability to connect with real people in a vulnerable and authentic way. Instead, the preference is to escape into fake interactions with fake people in the form of pornography use. So what you end up trying to do is fill a “people shaped hole” with fake images on the internet.

It is no coincidence that almost all men who seek recovery for pornography addiction report having few or no male friends. This is another symptom of the underlying intimacy disorder. It is not even because these men do not want to have friends; rather, they do not know how. As a result of years or decades of pornography use, addicts condition themselves to automatically lie, hide, and deceive out of fear of protecting their secret. The conditioning for deception and hiding makes having authentic relationships impossible. As soon as someone gets close, the fear of being found out takes over and they push the other person away or completely sabotage the relationship to make sure their struggle stays hidden.

When you are caught up in your addiction, you do not realize that what you are really craving is love, belonging, and connection with other people, and you are substituting it for content that will never meet your needs. It is like starving yourself of food and eating wax fruit every day. You are more and more hungry, you eat and eat and eat, but you just keep on getting even more sick. The only cure is having real, nutritious food. Just like eating real, nutritious food is the cure for starvation, having real, vulnerable connection with others is the cure for pornography addiction and the underlying intimacy disorder.

The good news is, since pornography addicts condition themselves to deceive, they can recondition themselves to tell the truth. An unwavering commitment to rigorous honesty and telling the truth is what will allow for healing in current relationships and allow new relationships to flourish. Being truthful is the foundation of true intimacy.

As someone who walked the road of recovery from pornography addiction, I know that this reconditioning to telling the truth is very scary, extremely overwhelming, and at first sounds impossible. The hard truth is, if you try to do it in isolation, it is impossible. You need the community and support of other men who know what it is like to struggle with addiction to help you learn how to be intimate with real people. You need to meet with a recovery coach who can help you uncover all of your deception so you can recognize it, face it, and bring it into the light so it can be purged from you. Admittedly, I had to first learn how to tell the truth when I first started in recovery in order to be able to learn how to have real intimacy. My counselor and the guys in my group held me accountable and pushed me to be completely honest. Learning to live this way brought healing and intimacy to my marriage and saved my life from decades of pornography addiction.

If you are reading this and you are struggling to stay sober from pornography, I encourage you to stop just trying to manage the symptom and start addressing the underlying issue, intimacy disorder. I know how scary it is to be faced with bringing your secret into the light. It takes a lot of courage to start telling the truth about your struggle. You cannot do it on your own. Reach out for help today. I invite you to schedule a consultation with me. I would love to hear more about your story and discuss how my recovery process can help you have recovery that lasts.