Resources for Addicts

Free Resources for Sex and Porn Addiction - Module 6.2

Common Triggers for Sex Addiction and Porn Addiction – Part B – Emotions and their role in the addiction spiral

Guide to the Free Recovery Resources - Vicious to Virtuous (V2V)

The following resources are in the form of learning modules from 1-6; It is best to start from the beginning and work through as your recovery grows and you feel ready to move to the next stage.

You can read right the way through and return to the start and work through the steps at your own pace. You can return to any module at any time for recaps.

The V2V resources are based on the idea that recovering addicts are shifting from a vicious circle of self-destructive addiction and on to a virtuous circle of self-care where they are able to look after themselves healthily and protect their own well-being, safe from cravings.

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Emotions and their role in the addiction spiral

You may remember from module 2 and 3 that in the V2V model of sex and porn addiction that the addiction spiral is powered by triggers including emotions. So its worth exploring the role of emotions and in particular trying to understand your own version of experiencing them as a core strategy in managing sex and porn addiction and attaining sustained recovery.

Related video: Causes of Sex and Porn Addictions and How to Stop

What do we know about emotions? Well we know that they are probably unique to humans and are often categorised into 8 groups each of which is a constellation of similar emotions or feeling states including; joy, sadness, love, anger, disgust, embarassment, shock and fear.

Within each we can expand out of course so anger will be associated with irritation, frustration, agression and hate whilst embarassment will link with shame, guilt and humility. Why is this important to know? Well, I am always surprised (or mildly shocked!) at how many of my addict clients do not recognise some of these or cannot recount experiences of them. This is not to say they can’t or haven’t – its just that they don’t notice, or perhaps quickly deny them – an unconscious device that somehow protects them when they need to avoid something that doesn’t feel quite right.

So it is good work for an addict to firstly recognise their own relationship with emotions so that any discrepancy can be addressed as part of the work of recovery. For example, recognising that you don’t experience shame or guilt related to acting out with porn or other sexually compulsivbe behaviours, is an important step in breaking through denial so ‘normal’ protective emotional responses can be re-introduced as healthy defences.

Another example might be an addict who doesnt experience joy, contentment or happiness enough can begin to understand what part in their causal factors for addiction this experience plays. Such work might point to someone who has normalised their lack of fulfillment or inability to enjoy life’s experiences so that a low mood is the prevailing state. New ways of understanding a different way of experiencing life by challenging the normalisation could be one route to recovery for someone in this scenario.

Looking at the role of our emotional experiences also helps us to understand why we might need to act out – sex and porn addictions are often considered methods of ‘affect regulation’. A clever way of saying that escapism-type experiences help us to avoid the spikes or pits of emotions so we can manage on a day to day basis and keep powering on. Clearly, acting out, by say Netflix bingeing or going to the gym a lot, is a lot less destructive than acting out with porn, escorts and sex webcams.

The challenge here is developing a new relationship with your emotions, feelings and mood states so that two things can be done; a) you can begin to notice and then manage the influence of these on driving your addictive cycle, and b) put in place strategies to make emotional responses to life’s experiences more normalised because it’s okay to get frustrated, even angry with life’s challenges and disappointments. However, too much of this type of response can push us over our tolerance level where the anger becomes unbearable and we find ways to disown it through dysfunctional acting out.

Culturally, some of us are de-entitled from feeling and expressing emotions. Remember being told to ‘stop crying, that’s for babies’ or ‘don’t make a fuss and get on with it’?. It’s a feature of the British culture to have a ‘stiff upper lip’ and ‘carry on’ regardless. In short, our parents, teachers, vicars and priests, the media and others try to condition the natural emotions we need to feel out of us. We become adapted to these persistent messages and develop maladapted relationships with our true, but denied, feelings. This varies between genders – it’s often normalised to be surprised when women get angry and likewise for men not to cry. It’s perhaps not so surprising that some turn to acting out more often than others to keep their feelings at bay. But they can’t of course, it’s a primal bit of evolutionary encoding hat we feel them, perhaps for reasons of survival or superiority over other species.

Within the complexity and diversity of emotional experience, each addict will have their own thresholds of discomfort where they might be pushed over or under the line into some form of instability. Knowing where these lines are for each group of emotions unlocks an important understanding for addicts about their unique tolerances for different situations and responses to them. For example, to identify the emotional response of fear underlying anxiety and stress can be a turning point for addicts. Work on re-framing the perceived fear will alleviate the dependence on addictive behaviours as the anxiety diminishes.

Ultimately it’s not healthy to deny, avoid and otherwise circumvent emotional states – its what makes us human. Equally, its also not healthy to allow emotional responses to experiences to be what defines us and drive us. Some one who is unhappy all the time, or angry or sad all the time is likely to experience a compromised quality of life.

Freud, the grandfather of psychotherapy, held the belief that life was a constant pull between two unconscious drive states, Eros, the energised, creative striving for self-actualising; and Thanatos, the opposing pull into inactivity, dormancy and ultimately death. We can see this push-pull playing out in the human experience as we oscillate between creative motivation and sometimes inexplicable lethargy. I’ve always felt that as a species which has now evolved into a modern creature-comfort saturated world that we are more inclined to be lazy than motivated. In other words, we often default to the path of least resistance (or challenge) and follow ‘the desire line’.

I teach all my clients to understand their emotional ups and downs, mood states (a more enduring and permanent version of an emotion) and feelings. This work is usually referred to ‘mindfulness’ and like an internal CCTV helps to improve our self-awarness through more frequent monitoring and recording. Sometimes a timeline is used to plot out the highs and lows over a week, month or lifetime to make the impact of these emotional highs and lows more conspicuous. Sometimes, periods of acting out with sex and porn can be over-layed with these swings of emotional states so a pattern of the addiction emerges and forms into a clear target for work.

Related video: Causes of Sex and Porn Addictions and How to Stop

Some Theories About the Brain

Three theories (in addition to Freud’s ‘drive’ concepts above) help us understand better why emotions are so key to sex and porn addiction. Firstly, there is the biological science about the structure of the brain and how this plays out in our everyday lives. In essence our 3-part brain consists of a brain stem (storing the programming for our most basic but critical involuntary functions like breathing), our limbic system (where our experiences and emotions are processed) and the pre frontal neo-cortex (where we do all our thinking). This is useful to know because this leads us into understanding that emotions can be driving us quite independently of cognitive processing, the second set of theories.

Our early childhood experiences and later traumas are closely associated with our basic survival instincts which are also located in non-cognitive parts of the brain, and can mean for some that survival systems are being activated more often than for others. For excample, an adult who as a child experienced neglect might have developed a more acute sense of vigilance underpinned by a lack of trust and fear of others. Constantly activated survival responses mean that these adults are always on edge and prone to levels of anxiety and consequently depression. This re-traumatisation triggers a need for self-medicating addictive behaviours such as sex and porn use.

In these types of situations adults are not able to quickly mobilise cognitive processing of their experiences (for example, by reminding themselves that are no longer a vulnerable child and as an adult now have coping mechanisms and other rescue factors to call on) so that their responses very rapidly appraise danger via the so-called ‘quick and dirty route’* in the brain. This leads to panic mode. Here, such adults adopt a range of safety behaviours such as avoidance, including distracting behaviours such as sex and porn. Therapeutic work in this case would help clients to slow down their survival system just enough to divert the sense experience via the ‘slow and careful’* route, that through the rational neo-cortex where it can be appraised realistically, rather than just being reated to.

* terms taken from Glyn Hudson-Allez; Child Losses Adult Searches.

The third theory helpful here is proposed by Daniel Kahneman in his book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ which echoes the above to some degree. This idea is particularly helpful for those experiencing addiction and compulsive behaviours. In this theory our thinking is divided into two sorts, System 1 and System 2. Automated thinking is System 1 and this is where our habituated cogntive activites reside. Such things as our daily routines are so automated that our thinking is barely detectable due to its speed. We all know how this works when we consider some regular daily actitivites such as driving. It is reasonable to consider that the outcomes of the survival and panic response explained above, such as a self-soothing few hours of looking at pornography are also in the system 1 category of thinking. We can say this because this response is fully automated after a short period of habitual use which as we saw in module 2 and 3 is reinforced by the effect of dopamine.

In his book Kahneman says that we can shift this sort of thinking into system 2, slow it down and manage it rationally. This is analogous to when we stretch our mental capacity to work out more complex calculations as opposed to automated simple ones. When we calculate 2+2 we don’t need to figure it out because our brain automatically pulls this from our long-term memory due to its simplicity and rote learning . Whereas calculating 789×34, a complex and uncommon calculation, would take most of us some considerable mental effort

A big chunk of the work overcoming habituated addiction is in slowing down the thinking and apllying progressively more and more rational processing, such as considering the adverse consequences as we did in the MIDAS toolkit in module 4. Another way of thinking about this is that we are shifting from an emotive, survival and panic response to situations into a cognitive one to regain control. To use Kahneman’s ideas again, we also have to expend some ‘cognitive effort’ in making this switch.

Will power, as in simply telling yourself over and over not to do something, is by itself not enough to manage addiction, as we can see in this context. Slowed down thinking, brain re-training and reciting the dis-benefits of acting out are far more powerful agents of abstinence. As we saw earlier, we are inclined to be lazy as a species, and denial and helplessness are part of that condition as they justify non-action and staying in what is often an illusory comfort zone where sex and porn give a false sense of pleasure and well-being.

To consolidate where these 3 theories take us with regard to emotions we can work on limiting the effect of often instinctive survival-type episodes of emotional states or the more learned and habituated reactions to threatening situations. Aiming to convert these into the slow and careful or System 2 thinking parts of the brain is powerful ammunition in winning the battle with addiction which thrives on emotional processing of experience. This is not to say we should all become emotionless automatons but it is saying we need to keep things within an acceptable band of tolerance so we can maintain balance in out lives; not robotic or perfect, but good enough.

Next steps

Look at the emotions ‘galaxy’ diagram above and identify which emotions you:

don't remember experiencing - make a note of these

if the lack of these emotions in your experience ie if you can’t remember feeling happy or excited for example, what effect might the lack of these have had on your life – would this gap be a potential,causal factor in your addictive patterns?

experience all the time - make a note of these

you can be exploring if there has been an over-abundance of one or several emotions that has dominated your life and experiences. It is widely accepted that emotions very often drive our behaviours – we feel angry so we lash out or we feel sad so we look for ways to lift ourselves such as alcohol – so finding your influencing emotions can indicate a possible recovery strategy.

Free Resources For Sex and Pornography Addiction - Audio

How To Achieve Commitment to Stopping

( Link to free audio resource – no sign-up required. )

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