Much like gambling, pornography is designed to be addictive. It is a very large industry and people in the industry know how to reel people in – and they make a lot of money doing it. Using it, or using too much of it, does not make you a bad person. But it can cause tremendous problems in a relationship.
My approach to treating it is very behavioral in nature. Unless you have a history of childhood sexual abuse or childhood exposure to pornography, I will not focus on childhood experience, but on your current, or at least recent, life. We will work on two things that I believe are critical to either minimizing or eliminating use:
- Identifying deficits in your current life and/or relationship that are being replaced by pornography use and figuring out how to make your life and relationships better so that you will have less motivation to seek out pornography.
- Learning how to avoid triggers for use and learning skills that can be used to avoid it in the moment that you have an urge to use it.
