Free Resources for Sex and Porn Addiction – Module 1

Free Resources for Sex and Porn Addiction - Module 1

V2V Module 1 helps you start your recovery journey on a sound footing. To recover from sex and porn addiction in the most effective way it is important to first of all put these critical foundations in place. Approximate time required: 1 hour.

Audio version available

Module 1 will get you started on the road to recovery from porn and sex ‘addiction’ (see optional notes below about terminology and definitions) and compulsive behaviours with 6 really easy techniques for building and fortifying your commitment to change.

Before we go any further, let’s touch on the nature of commitment and why it is so vital to recovery. Commitment to change is the most critical element of being successful in achieving full recovery from addictive behaviours. Steely determination, willpower and/or partner ultimatums can go a long way but without personal commitment to the cause you may lack the emotional and psychological momentum to behave differently when it counts. Porn-addiction-counselling-and-treatment

I’m not expecting you to have 100% commitment right now.

By reading this you have some commitment to change and with this and the resources in the early modules of V2V your commitment WILL grow and grow. By module 3 or 4 we need to get your commitment to 100% (or more!).

Common to all addictions is the all-powerful tornado-like pull of the cravings and other maladapted neurological processes – commitment has to be bullet-proof to withstand this pull. Re-aligning the brain into what is right or wrong for you is the key to securing commitment. Think of your brain as a part of you that has been led astray by those neurological processes (more on these in later modules) and has been working almost independently to get its own biological needs met. Just several years of automated repetition by these neuro-processes gradually erode your commitment to being ‘good’. Your brain has become wired up to acting out.

Working through the following exercises will help you to re-access, reinstate, and strengthen your commitment. Slowly but surely your persistent footfall along these revitalised neural pathways to healthy aspirations will make them your brain’s automated routes of choice. Old neural pathways to addictive behaviours will fade away – like untrodden forest trails in a far off landscape!

Activity 1

just for a few moments, close your eyes and seriously reflect on your level of commitment to change and then score it on a scale of 1(weak) to 10 (unshakeably strong). Honesty to self is the best policy here.

Anything more than 7 probably means your commitment is steady enough to withstand the pull of many compulsive urges. You should crack on with the V2V programme. Between 3 and 7 means you have sufficient commitment to get you underway with this work but you need to focus hard on building this up in the early stages before moving on too quickly. Less than 3 is likely to mean that whilst you have a fragile sense of a problem that needs sorting out you are not yet ready to tackle it – certainly not independently and without the helping hands of a treatment therapist. In this case stay with this module for a few weeks to a month or two to crystallise your commitment to change.

Adopting the strategies below will help to build commitment if you scored low and to sustain it where you scored more highly.

Activity 2

over the next few weeks make a concerted effort to apply the following 6 small, simple but smart mental exercises that will help to automate commitment.

1. The huge benefits of stopping need to have a higher profile in your automatic thinking than the pull of the fake benefits of acting out. Reinforce through hourly reminders what these benefits are (write them here):

2. Now start to build your automated disapproval about the COSTS and NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES of acting out – experienced or potential. Write these down below and look at them every day – spend 5 minutes every few hours training your brain to keep these at the forefront of your daily thoughts. Typical ones are loss of marriage/family, loss of job, loss of money, loss of self-esteem and police knocking at your door.

3. Likewise, your core values need revitalising and adding to your daily mantras so that your brain is reminded where you stand on boundaries and what it means to you to be doing the right thing. List your top 10 values and look at the list daily. If you struggle on this send me an email and I will send you a free values worksheet. Typical values are respect for self and others, integrity, honesty, resourcefulness, being caring or reliable etc.

4. Commit yourself to the view, which you should reflect on daily, that addictive behaviours are precisely that – behaviours. This will give you more power and control over addiction. This makes recovery do-able because we know that behaviours can be restricted, controlled, and stopped for good. Porn-addiction-counselling-and-treatment

5. Accept your problem as a pre-requisite of your commitment to change. Clearly you have got this far so there is something in you somewhere saying this isn’t right. Stop avoiding or denying the issue. Stop self-destructing. Don’t look elsewhere for a definition of the problem – YOU decide what feels wrong and right for you then mentally sign up to the cause. Define precisely what it is that you want to stop and write this down.

6. Focus on a pruning rather than cold turkey approach to stopping. Scaling back or de-escalating your behaviours over time can be a less daunting prospect than facing the instant loss of acting-out and its associated (fake) pleasures. Your brain is less likely to be overwhelmed and immobilised by using such ‘baby steps’ approaches. Chipping away at addictive behaviours is perfectly fine if it suits you and you can sustain it. Don’t over-preoccupy with ‘stopping’ tomorrow or next week which can sound like too-daunting a task leaving you exposed to the self-fulfilling assumption that you are helpless and just have to give in to addictive urges.

Treat the brain as if it needs bringing back into line. You will need to use covert methods to win this war of attrition against addiction, such as the baby steps to stopping or making benefits, negatives and values more prominent in your neural pathways. Daily intonations on these will produce tiny incremental improvements day on day until commitment becomes more automated.

NEXT: Vicious to Virtuous (V2V) Module 2: Knowledge is Power – Answering the question, ‘Why?’ this module leads to understanding the roots of your addictive behaviour patterns and gaining the power and techniques to break them.

Note: I will be referring variously to sex and porn addiction and not sticking to one precise terminology or definition. I don’t think it’s helpful to split hairs over the use of the words and terms addiction, compulsivity, compulsive behaviours, hyper-sexuality and so on except perhaps in academic circles. The variety of terms is a reflection of the myriad views on the topic and a need to categorise by the leading experts and researchers in the field and not necessarily the best ways to capture or describe what is actually going on for individual clients. I will also make reference to ‘addicts’, ‘compulsives’ and ‘those with sex and porn addictive behaviour patterns’ and ‘those with sex and porn compulsive behaviours’ out of convenience of writing and avoidance of trapping myself into fixed and dogmatic rules. My use of the term ‘addict’ is also a convenience in that we all know roughly what this means – it does not mean that I believe all those seeking help are ‘addicts ‘and nor does it mean that I subscribe to the view that ‘once an addict, always an addict’.