Is pornography always addictive?

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Is pornography always addictive?

When viewing porn a problem from when it’s not a problem? I think a lot of people have this question. We come back to the definition of addiction. When someone has lost control, has consequences and they cannot stop because of the consequences, then it’s problematic. One of the consequences that we are beginning to see with long term pornography use, or it can be short term like three months but using it all day and all night, is that people start getting aroused only by the pornography image and unable to be aroused by the partner.

Now they have somebody on the screen that is a perfect fit for their idiosyncratic fantasy and they’ve unlocked the key to a very specific fantasy that had been lurking in their brain and now they can’t get interested in anybody else. And so when their wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend is interested in being intimate, either sexually or otherwise, they start being not only disinterested but turned off, they can’t even get aroused anymore in many of the instances that we’ve seen.

So when somebody’s using porn in a problematic way, whether you use the word addiction or not, we’ve have a person who’s had severe consequences because of porn use. And we have people reporting to us that when they try to stop, because they realize that they’ve gone too far, they start being intruded on by these porn images they can’t get out of their memory. Addiction can be viewed asa memory issue. The more you expose the brain to erotic stimuli, the more the memory system collects those images. And pretty soon, because of the hyper aroused states that may be all you’re interested in. And so the person you’ve loved for forty years, or forty days, you don’t feel in love anymore with. The brain has been altered. The good news is that that can change but it takes time.