simply to end the use of pornography. It’s transformation: becoming a new creation in Christ — the person and couple God created you to be. This leads to true personal and marital healing.18
Chapter 3
The Disease of Pornography Addiction
It’s Not Just a Moral Failing, It’s a Disease
Clearly, pornography use and any associated sexual infidelity are objectively sinful. This is pretty easy to see. These actions violate marital vows and are in fact adulterous. They also violate God’s beautiful plan for human sexuality. In addition, these actions exploit vulnerable young women and support an industry that views people as nothing more than commodities to be used and thrown away. Adding to the evils of pornography and extramarital sexual activity, users almost always resort to numerous lies and deceit to cover up their habits, and the addiction leads them to neglect their real relationships and responsibilities. For those who engage in such actions, sex can become a false god. Most people would readily agree with this, even those who are addicted to pornography and sex. It’s easy to see the moral failing here.
Viewing it only as a moral failing, however, does not help the addict or the injured spouse. Instead, it only heaps more shame and condemnation on the addicted person. Simply demanding that the addict stop these behaviors because they are sinful is almost always unsuccessful. Their inability to stop only makes them feel worse and more trapped in the addiction. They feel like a failure, and their spouses also suffer, because no matter how hard they try to demand, plead, or bargain with them to stop, nothing changes.
While I don’t want to deny or diminish the fact that these actions are sinful, true healing and recovery can come only when we can also view the addiction as a disease. Like any other disease, this addiction requires professional treatment. This is what has made the treatment of other addictions, such as alcoholism, successful. Recognizing addiction as a disease helps remove much of the shame and stigma associated with it, and it can give an addicted person the strength to reach out for help and to be committed to recovery. Most importantly, recognizing this disease for what it is helps men and women know that despite anything they have done, they are still lovable.
Reflection
How has viewing pornography addiction as a moral failing affected the way you have dealt with it?
Are you willing to admit that your addiction is actually a disease?
If so, how does this change in viewpoint affect the way you deal with it?
How Men and Women Become Addicted to Pornography
To understand any addiction, we need to view it as two sides of a coin. On one side is the physical addiction, where a person becomes physically dependent on the substance in question, whether that be drugs, alcohol, or pornography. On the other side of the coin is the emotional addiction, where the substance is used to cope with deep emotional wounds or conflicts (“self-medicating”).
Let’s explore both sides of the coin as they relate to pornography addiction and see how they work together to leave people trapped in this addiction.
The Physical Addiction
One thing we need to understand here is that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently. All humans (men and women) are wired to be attracted to that which is new, different, exciting, and novel. Men, however, tend to be more visually stimulated than women. This is why men usually prefer visual pornography (photos, videos, and anime). Women, on the other hand, are more relationally stimulated. Thus, they are more attracted to pornography that depicts a relationship.
Because of their attraction to relationship, the types of pornography that women are drawn to are more varied than men. In addition to visual pornography, women are also attracted to pornography in written forms. This can include racy romance novels, erotic literature, and sexual blogs. It also includes social media, sexting, emails, and chat rooms. In most written pornography, a woman participates vicariously in a sexual relationship through her reading. In a chat room, a woman directly participates in sexual fantasy through live interactions with male partners. Through these pornographic chats, it’s as if a woman is writing her own romance novel and she is the star. The fantasy can be intensified if she and her partner are using webcams. The visual pornography industry understands women’s attraction to relationships and has developed a new form of pornography that feeds this attraction. It’s called femme-porn. Rather than showing women being abused and exploited, femme-porn depicts women as objects of desire who are slowly seduced into having sex with men.19
Social media is also a way that women participate in relational pornography. Through outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Snapchat, they can exchange both visual and written forms of pornography. In these cases, it’s often their own amateur pornography that they share. They can even engage in pornography in virtual reality. Through video games and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, they can create characters, called avatars. These characters engage in sex with other characters.20
For both men and women, viewing pornography has a tremendous impact on the brain. The constant stream of sexually enticing images offered by internet pornography feeds the human need for things that are new, different, exciting, and novel.21 It directly impacts the reward center of the brain (the nucleus accumbens). This triggers the release of several chemicals in the brain:
• Dopamine: a neurotransmitter that produces intense pleasurable feelings and prompts cravings for more. It instills memories of sexual encounters in the brain and directs a person back to pornography when a “fix” is needed.
• Delta-Fos-B: also known as iFos-B, this is a protein that desensitizes the brain neurons to dopamine, which makes the brain need more of it to experience the desired pleasure. It also hyper-sensitizes the pleasure center of the brain (nucleus accumbens) to the effects of dopamine, creating a desire for more of it.
• Serotonin: a neurotransmitter released in small packets in the brain that increases excitement.
• Norepinephrine: a neurotransmitter and hormone that affects the brain like adrenaline, ramping it up for sexual release. It also locks in the erotic image in the brain and activates the autonomic nervous system. So, while someone is viewing pornography, their heart will start to beat faster, breathing will get heavier, and some people may even begin to sweat.
• With all this neurochemical activity going on, a message is sent down the spinal cord to the genitals for sexual arousal.
• Endogenous Endorphins: all the neurochemical activity creates a tension that can only be relieved with an orgasm. So, the person masturbates. With the orgasm, opiate chemicals, endogenous endorphins, are released into the brain causing a sense of euphoria.
• Serotonin: after the orgasm, serotonin levels increase, providing a sense of relaxation.
• CRASH: after the orgasm, the period of intense relaxation can be short-lived. Then the “crash” occurs. The high levels of dopamine drop dramatically, creating a “dopamine hangover.” Symptoms of this can include irritability, depression, and anxiety. This can last up to two weeks.
• Return to Pornography: not liking the dopamine hangover, the brain will try to escape it. Dopamine and iFos-B will direct the brain back to pornography to return to the pleasurable sensation it has previously experienced.22
Ultimately, the largest sex organ in the body is the brain. All of the other physical and emotional sensations (sexual arousal, orgasm, euphoria, etc.) are reactions to what goes on in the brain. This leads people to return to pornography repeatedly to get that blast of neurochemical stimulation that produces the pleasurable sensations. When viewing pornography, the high levels of dopamine released into the brain stimulate the brain’s reward system, increasing the craving for more. The other chemicals and the orgasm reinforce