Tentatively Improving…

Just to put it out there: I think things are improving.

I can’t say for certain, I learned not to say “I’m better for certain” the hard way – by repeatedly saying it and then watching porn again. But this isn’t just a phase of successfully not watching. In fact, I have been watching. Which I know makes my optimism sound a little far-fetched but actually it’s not. It’s like this:

I am almost absolutely certain now that my porn addiction is not about sexuality. (Another contradiction I hear you cry? And It’s only the third paragraph!). Wrong. Not a contradiction: just a complex situation. Pornography is an escape, as I explained pretty badly in my previous post. What I have been doing these past few weeks is trying to identify exactly what it is I am trying to escape from. And it’s working. It turns out my emotional detective powers are pretty good. Especially now that I have a little help from my therapist.

I won’t go into what it is that porn aides me in running from, that’s for a different post when the cuts aren’t so fresh and hindsight works its mighty magic. But there is little question in my mind this evening – the need is lessened. The overwhelming necessity to consume pornography is just not there. I am sad. Sad about the things I have been running from, they are not fixed. But they are at least now visible. Or beginning to become so, beginning to wonder and whistle in the fog where once they were not to be seen or heard. I’m learning them, and in doing so I think I am unlearning pornography.

I can’t take this to mean I am cured. I don’t for a second expect to be. I don’t know if there is such a thing really, but right now, on this evening, I feel positive that things are improving.

I don’t think I have the control I once learned where I could not watch porn even when NEEDING it bad. I’m sure if one of those cravings hit I would fall. But this is even better. Because I don’t even need that control, because I have very little to control. It’s lessened. And that, quite frankly, is friggin’ great.

I wonder if that’s why I am so hungry. But that’s for a different story….

Where do you feel your feelings? The translation of difficult emotions into problematic behaviour.

The heart is perhaps the organ most closely associated with human emotion in this culture, especially, for some reason, the bottom of the heart (which, by the way, would be the cardiac muscle and the inferior vena cava). But crudely literal interpretations of cultural poetics aside, my point is this: I do not feel from the heart. I feel, mostly but not exclusively from the legs.

From discussing this with friends I have come to the conclusion that this is not typical. Of those I have asked most have said their chest, stomach and neck are where they feel from most regularly.

I have thought nothing of this for a long time, filing it alongside the likes of the placebo effect, photosynthesis and the astonishing speed and vibrancy of a butterfly’s short life,as just another of the perplexing and wondrous curiosities life. But this week, that has changed.

I have recently begun seeing a therapist with whom I am discussing my struggles with pornography, among many other things. Unsurprisingly, we got onto the subject of feelings and I mention in passing:

“I tend to feel those kinds of difficult emotions in my legs…” To which he replies,

“Your legs, the things you use run away.”

This is possibly the single most insightful thing anybody has ever said to me. Blossoming from this brief exchange has come a whole abundance of understanding that I could never have hoped to achieve alone.

Frustration. That is the sensation I feel most acutely there, in my upper thighs and calves. “The things you use to run away.”

Frustration. That is almost exclusively what leads me to watch porn. Because porn is another form of running away: door locked, curtains shut, reality and all it’s haunting anxieties briefly expelled in a few stolen moments of false freedom.

When I watch pornography, for those few and brief moments I am running faster than any legs could take me. Physically, the worries of everyday existence are too agile, too clever, too sly to be outrun. But psychologically, pornography outwits even the cunningest of anxieties.

Unfortunately this is ephemeral. When you pull off the motorway for a coffee and a piss the rest of the traffic doesn’t stop in solidarity, it hammers on insatiably. You are left behind whilst you escape the rush, temporally your destination is distanced from you with every second you are not driving. Every second that the curtains make their feeble attempts at blocking out the daylight, every second that computer comes on and those same letters are typed with shameful speed into the search-bar – every second continues whilst you are lost.

And just as my legs can’t outrun worry and frustration and failure, neither can they outrun lost time. It takes days to catch up again. To get to a place that is light and free and good and solid takes time.

Perhaps learning not to run, learning how to embrace, or wrestle or minimise difficult feelings, perhaps that is the key to walking beyond pornography addiction.