Getting To the Root Cause of Porn Addiction pt. 1

This post is part 1 in a 3-part series about how to begin the process of getting to the core of who you are as a person and how to get to the root of your pornography addiction. When starting the recovery process, we think we know ourselves. Still, the fact that we have failed to fully control our addictive habits says that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think, because if we did, we’d know how to stop ourselves from falling back into our addictive behaviors. This begs the question: how well do we really understand ourselves?

To answer this question, we must first acknowledge that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think and begin to look inward. We have to also acknowledge who we are. Meaning we have to acknowledge what type of person we have become. We then must question some of our motives and track compulsive behaviors. What habits do we currently have that aren’t serving us in our recovery journey? What type of negative thoughts and beliefs are we holding on to? What are our triggers?

The recovery process requires us to continually look inward to make progress as we deal with the negative consequences of our behavior. This is not an easy thing to do. Most of us have spent years, and in my case, a decade, going through daily life being self-absorbed and not self-aware. This is a side effect of our porn and sex addiction. It focuses all the attention on ourselves. It places us in a mindset where most of our thoughts are geared towards how we feel, what we want, what we like, what we don’t like, and what serves us. Our moments of relapse are consumed with those feelings because we've chosen to use porn as a coping mechanism for our present pain. This will have to change while on the road to sobriety. The first step to getting to the root of pornography use pushes us towards replacing our self-absorbed nature with a self-aware nature. What we'll obtain when we do is the removal of low self-esteem and decrease in compulsive porn use. We will no longer be driven by our emotional pain. Still, instead we'll be driven by a desire to understand what's causing us emotional distress. The reason this has to change is that if we don’t replace our tendency for self-absorption with self-awareness, we can’t deal with the root issues that cause us to choose pornography over other alternatives for coping with our triggers. This is not a short process for some people. Especially those with a lot of unresolved trauma. For me, it took 10 years. Which I feel is a long time. That doesn't mean it'll take you that long, though. The good news is I'm giving you the formula no one gave me. I had to figure it out on my own, but you have my past experiences to learn from. 

Remember the goal of being on the road to sobriety is to get to the ROOT causes of pornography addiction or sexual addiction and not just change our behavior. I like to think about it like this. If pornography has taken figurative ROOT in your life and if your life represents your world, then we can say that your world has been corrupted by the tree of pornography. We could imagine that your world looks something like this:

Your World Corrupted By the Tree of Pornography

Your World Corrupted By the Tree of Pornography

Notice how dark this world is and the number of roots that have dug into it. So, how do you get rid of a real tree that’s taken root in the Earth in the real world? Let’s think about the anatomy of a tree. We are all familiar with trees and understand that trees have branches, stems, and roots. If you cut off a branch from a tree, the tree continues to live, and the branch you cut off either grows back or other branches grow from the stem.

Over time, humankind learned that the only way to completely eliminate a tree is to pull up its ROOTS. That is what the road to sobriety is all about. Each milestone you reach should be a moment where a ROOT has been removed from the tree of pornography that has taken ROOT in your life. Another interesting thing about trees is that there is no way to know how many roots a tree has when you are standing on the surface next to it and looking at the ground. The only way to find out is to DIG! I hope this is sinking in. Right now, you are navigating the world, which is your life, and a tree has taken ROOT in your life. The tree of pornography. That tree corrupts your world, and you are working to uproot it from your life, but you’re standing on the surface.

All you can see is your unwanted behavior, broken relationships, failures in life, or possibly a depressed state of mind. All you can hear is your negative self-talk and voices that tell you that porn isn't a bad thing. You can’t see the ROOTS. The ROOTs are what’s causing all those things. Traveling along the road to sobriety inherently leads to you digging up the ROOTs from the tree of pornography that has taken ROOT in your life. Recovery at it's heart is all about getting to the root cause of porn addiction in the life of each individual. As you dig, you will find out the truth about what is driving your behavior. What’s making you so angry, depressed, lonely, etc. What psychological factors are at play that lead to us spending excessive time on the internet? What effect do our current relationship problems have on our behavior? True freedom comes in when you're able to answer questions like that. That’s where deliverance comes in. That’s where happiness and stress relief come in.

There are moments when you have dug far enough to get to a ROOT that is ready to be pulled up from beneath the surface. Those moments are what I longed for during my recovery journey. The 1st time I experienced a moment like that, it felt like a 1000lb weight had been lifted off of me. In that moment, I truly understood what this whole recovery journey was about. I craved more moments like that. Moments where I knew I had gotten to the ROOT of my behavior because that brought me closer to living the life I really wanted to live. Every person experiences something different as they go through this process, but each person knows what their life should look like, and the feeling of having gotten to the core of what's driving our behavior is unmistakable. 

In the next post I'm going to share how you can take advantage of support groups, professional help, and relationships with family members to get the root causes of porn addiction. There is always hope, and we must continue to believe that good things are supposed to happen to us, even if we suffer from negative feelings that come from our addictive behavior. 

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