Free online recovery modules - made easy - up now - getting off the dopamine
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Free online recovery modules - made easy - up now - getting off the dopamine
Dopamine-led cycle of addiction
Persistent repetition of sexual and porn behaviours constantly fires up so-called neural pathways to the point where the behaviours become learned and automatic. These pathways become charged up so much that they transform into a sort of high-velocity travellator racing straight to your brain’s reward and pleasure centres. Once on this there is only one place to go and no getting off! Dopamine, one of the ‘happy’ chemicals in the brain, is mostly responsible for this ‘learning’. Unfortunately, dopamine has a built-in quality that makes it progressively more and more addictive. This devious quality is part of our primitive genetic encoding. As hunter-gatherers, dopamine served us as a primal motivator to make us seek out things we needed for survival such as food, warmth and opportunities for procreation.
This explains several things which confound sex and pornography addicts all the time:
1) The often complete lack of conscious control and feeling of powerlessness when the sensitised brain triggers off and cravings tug – a sort of euphoric impulsiveness shuts off any rational decision-making
2) The deceptive feeling that addiction is genetic or a given – therefore incurable; the ‘automated’ pathways feel more like an in-built trait rather than a learned behaviour
3) The obsessive searching for the perfect image, chat-room exchange or sexual encounter to meet the escalating dopamine expectations becomes more important than climax and explains long durations of acting out, edging and delaying climax to maintain pain-numbing euphoria
4) Escalation of the behaviours into more and more risky and sometimes illegal activities as the de-sensitisation sets in and extreme acting out stealthily takes hold, over-riding an addict’s personal values and ethics.
Here's how you can begin to switch off the dopamine dependency:
https://esteemtherapyyorks.co.uk/counselling/free-resources-for-sex-and-porn-addiction---module-2
