I’m Having Fun!

Suddenly, as I was perusing a help topic on WordPress, trying to ensure my blog gets the absolute most readers it can, I noticed something. 

I was enjoying myself.  I was having fun!

Now I know that probably means nothing to you, but it can if you want to understand better how to help yourself feel good, too.  By reading what triggered happiness in me, you might find you’re responsive to the same trigger. Make sense?

I am feeling happy because I am finally doing something I struggled over for several years – producing this blog.  My struggle was caused by an unrealistic desire for perfection. I didn’t want to commit to this work until I was absolutely certain I was in complete control of the process and understood everything there was to know about blogging, as well as everything there was to know about living free of pornography.  AND that I could communicate it to you perfectly.

How many of you already know, the desire for perfection is the perfect cover for fear?

Well, I did.  Eventually.

So I took the plunge.  I started blogging.  I wanted to “get out there” what I’ve learned over the years about sex and lust and breaking free of porn addiction, as well as sharing the challenges of living porn-free as a Christian man with a healthy libido in the age of the porn plague.

Using my porn virus metaphor, you can use The One Minute Cure to free yourself of your porn addiction and you will be cured.  But unfortunately, the world is now flooded with porn viruses and they can mutate.  Unless you take steps to maintain a healthy psycho-pneumalogical immune system, you could succumb to the infection all over again.  (Pyscho-pneumalogical refers to the relationship of the mind and spirit to the whole person.)

In addition, I  decided to offer my One Minute Cure E-Course for free to whomever subscribes to my blog because I want as many men as possible to experience the freedom and victory from porn addiction I have.

So, here I am.  I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do but was ridiculously difficult for me to start.  Now, finally, I’m doing it.   Hallelujah!

And I’m experiencing a growing measure of success with it, too. 

I’m getting visitors (though no comments – yet!), getting subscribers (thank you), growing my list of posted articles as well as building a list of future articles and posts, seeking to expand my presence and exposure on the web through other outlets, studying and learning all I can about social media, looking at the possibility of using twitter and podcasting and v-pods, all in an effort to bring The One Minute Cure: A PORN ADDICTION SOLUTION, to every man struggling with pornography,

So far, so good!  

And that’s what’s was making me feel good this morning!  Happy, even.

I’m using God’s gifts by God’s grace to do God’s work with God’s blessing for God’s glory and the good of His children.

How cool is that?

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

God’s Best to you.

Does Porn Make Women Unnecessary?

The feminist Naomi Wolf wrote an interesting article in 2003 entitled “The Porn Myth.”  See it here.

To summarize, she says the warnings shouted by the anti-porn activists of the eighties were wrong.  Women like Andrea Dworkin warned if porn were allowed to flood our lives men would soon objectify women and treat them accordingly.  She predicted all kinds of sexual mayhem would result from pornography going mainstream.

She was wrong, says Ms. Wolf.  Instead of turning men into ravening beast, the Plague of Pornography is responsible for deadening the male libido (latin: lust) in relation to real women because they can’t be as “good” as porn.  She says young women are now coming to see their own sexual value depreciated.  This is leading to a generation of men and women “lonely together.”

“Today,” she quotes, I can’t tell who, “real, naked women are just “bad porn.”  Ouch!

She advocates turning off the porn because “the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.”

She’s right about the sacredness of sex, of course. But, as I mentioned on the Front Page of this site, can we ever put the “pornie” back in the bottle?

And how much damage will be done before men want to do the hard work of putting it back, if we can?

The problem and challenge for us men is, and as Freud is reputed to have said, “Everything is about sex.”  Today, that means, “everything is about porn.”

But let’s save that for the next post, shall we.

Next:  Everything is about Porn.

More Bad News – Anatomy of an Addiction, Part 2

More bad news

Click here to read Part 1.

Some learned behaviors you can’t unlearn.  Like balancing on a bike.

Unfortunately, that’s almost exactly the situation you’re in when it comes to pornography.

Any good news?

Yep.  “Almost” exactly isn’t exactly the situation with porn.”  For several different reasons.

First, although your brain has made accessing porn an automated behavior, it isn’t a “muscle memory,” a behavior programmed into your body, like riding a bike. It’s more like a trigger that sends your brain off in a certain direction, telling it what to do in this particular case.

It’s a “brain memory,” like a software program running on a computer’s RAM (random access memory), not physically written on a microchip.  And because the brain is “plastic,” as the neurologists have only recently discovered, this programming can be changed.  Brain programs can be rewritten, unwritten, and even in some cases, erased.

At least, that’s what I believe. And that’s what makes the Porn Addiction Cure possible.

Let’s talk about triggers.

A psychological trigger is anything, any stimulus, be it internal or external, that causes something else to happen.    With a gun, when you pull the trigger the hammer strikes the bullet, igniting the powder, sending the bullet out of the barrel to the target.

A psychological trigger is anything that cause the brain to go “click-whirrr” and run one of its preprogrammed behaviors.

Imagine getting behind the wheel of your car.

No, wait.  Before that.  Let’s say you’ve just decided to take a drive.  At that moment, with that thought, that decision, your Drive Car Program started running. Your decision to drive triggered the program to start.

By the time you reach your car you already have the keys in your hand. The key goes in the lock perfectly even though you’re in the middle of a fight with your wife.

You get in behind the seat, totally absorbed in your fight, thinking up new arguments, remembering facts and figures. You stick the key in the ignition, put the car into reverse, look behind you, you don’t even notice that you don’t see anyone behind you, that its safe to begin backing up.  But you have noticed and you back up.

You put the car in gear and eventually merge with freeway traffic traveling 70 miles an hour, changing lanes, speeding up and slowing down according to the ever- changing situation on the road, all the while digging yourself deeper and deeper into trouble with your spouse!

Then, just as you are about to change lanes to take your exit, out of the corner of your eye, you’re brain notices another car is fast approaching and judges it will be in the space you want to occupy a split second before you.

Click-Whirrrr!

With no conscious thought from you, another program begins to run,  first written when you were learning to drive at the age of 16, but revised and improved on through the years. It’s immediately triggered by the sight of that approaching car and with almost no conscious thought you apply your brakes and move your car back into your own lane, to the blaring of the horns of those behind you.

Each of those programs of previously learned behaviors operates automatically once it has been triggered by your conscious decision to drive your car.  And these two programs, along with dozens and dozens of others running in the background of which we are almost never aware, run near perfectly, ensuring you are able to both drive your car and carry on the important task of fighting with our wife in your mind, which is the task requiring most all your conscious effort.

And that’s what a trigger is.  A mental or environmental stimulus that “turns on” a previously learned and automated program of behaviors we determined at some point were important to our well-being.

That last part is very important. Our brain only learns new behaviors that we think are important to learn.  And it only automates them to run consistently if we have, by our behaviors, our choices, told our brain, “This is important to me. I want to do this a lot!”

Next, Just How Many Triggers Can We Have?

Anatomy of a Porn Addiction

So just how did you get addicted to porn in the first place? Seemingly, against your will?  How does it happen?

The first thing we have to understand is our conscious mind can only focus and pay attention to a couple things at a time.  And anything really intricate or important requires all of our attention.

Yet we live in an extremely complex world requiring us to do many things at once.  And we do it.  So how does the brain manage?

It creates programs, we call them habits, that allow it to put any routine behavior or series of behaviors on “autopilot”.  It writes a program to cover all the repetitive actions that make up the behavior, sets the parameters for the behavior, and then turns it loose.

Now the thing is, the brain will do this to absolutely any and every behavior it can in its effort to save energy and conserve attention for everything new and challenging in its environment.

Got it?

This understanding of brain function should be pretty self-evident.  All you have to do is look inside yourself and exam your own behaviors.  Look to your own life experiences, like learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car.

When you first started to learn, you were all over the map.  On a bike, you were a danger to yourself.  Learning to drive a car you were a danger to yourself and others!

Every action you needed to take to move that bike or car required all your attention, and still you couldn’t put it all together.

But you practiced.  And practiced.  Day after day for as long as it took trying desperately to master the intricate behaviors “riding a bike” and “driving a car.”  At times it got very frustrating, didn’t it?  Some days it seemed you’d never get it, didn’t it?

But one day, finally, something in your brain “clicked” and you could do it.  Effortlessly.

One moment you couldn’t do it.  The next moment you could. It seemed almost instantaneous, didn’t it?  But actually it had taken all those days of work and effort and sweat and frustration.  That one moment, when your head “clicked,” that was your brain finally fitting all the pieces of the bike-riding, car-driving puzzle together.

Isn’t that how it happened?

Sure.

So, what does this have to do with your addiction to porn?  Everything.

You see, you followed the exact same process when  you were “teaching” your brain to crave pornography.

“Huh?  I did that?  I “taught” my brain to crave porn?”

You bet. That’s exactly what you did.

It wasn’t exactly intentional, though.  Not like learning to ride a bike or drive a car.

I mean, you didn’t sit down one day and say to your dad, “Dad, I think it’s time I learned to use pornography obsessively.  Will you teach me how?”

And your dad didn’t reply, “Sure, son.  You’re old enough now to have your own porn habit now.  Let me get my Penthouses!”

No, you didn’t mean to do create a porn habit.  Certainly not an addiction.  But that’s what happened.

You accessed porn, it doesn’t matter from where, and you got really, really great feedback from it (lust). This told your brain, “Hey! Pay attention! THIS is really important. We like this a lot. Do this again.  And again.  And again!”

And that was all the instruction your brain needed. It got to work writing a program that would automate the behavior of accessing porn so you wouldn’t have to give it any more conscious attention than it absolutely needed.

Now, every time something in your world triggers that program (we’ll get to the triggers later), your brain goes, “Click. Whirrrrr!” and your off to the porn races.

The problem?  Once the brain writes a program for a behavior and loads it into your “hard drive,” changing it or stopping it is really, really hard.  In fact, it’s well-nigh impossible.

Go back to the example of learning to ride a bike.  Remember what it was like when you first tried to ride a bike? You were all over the place. You could barely stay balanced to save your life.

But then what happened? Eventually your brain went, “Click. Whirrrr,” and balancing on a bike became as easy as falling off had been.

And how well did your brain learn to balance on a bike?

Go see.  Go out, find a bike and get on it. Then try to fall off. Try to “lose” your balance.

You can’t, can you? It’s pretty much impossible to unlearn balancing on a bike.

That’s how well your brain did its job.  It learned what you told it to learn. To balance.  And it pretty much can’t unlearn to balance.

In fact, you can’t unlearn balancing on a bike even if your life depended on it.

Think about that. Someone comes up to you, puts a gun to your head or to the head of your wife and kids, and says, “Here’s a bike. I want to see you unlearn your bicycle riding skill or I will kill them.”

Better say good-bye to your family, because you will not be able to do it.

Next, More Bad News

Pornography as a Mind Virus

Just what the heck is a mind virus?

A mind virus is a metaphor for an idea which shares many of the same characteristics of a biological virus, only instead of infecting the body, it infects the mind.

For example, the word ‘virus’ means “toxic” or “poison.”  A bio-virus is toxic to the body, poisons it and and makes it sick.

A mind virus is a toxic or poisonous thought or idea that undermines our psychological health. A mind viruses can:

• Impair your judgment;
• Make you act against your own interests;
• Prevent your success in life;
• Prevent you from enjoying your life.

Let’s see. . . impairs your judgment, makes you act against your own interests, prevents success in life and prevents you from enjoying your life.

Hmmmm?  How many of those toxic effects apply to your porn habit?  For me, all of them did.

Sounds like pornography could be classified as a mind virus.

What do you think?

“God is only slightly less popular than pornography on the Internet.”

The above was stated by some wit on the radio a few years back.  He was actually making an argument for the strength of religion on the internet.  And he was right. Porn is the number one ‘product’ on the internet and God is number two.  Yay, God!

It’s a natural consequence of our brain’s functioning that the more ubiquitous porn becomes in society the more acceptable it becomes. Look at smoking. At one time everybody smoked and it appeared the most natural thing in the world.

It took a 40 year campaign to get American society to the place where smoking is no longer socially acceptable, where polite people don’t do it around others and preferably not in public.

Will we ever get back to that place with porn? I mean, I seem to remember a time when porn wasn’t a topic of casual conversation, porn stars didn’t get public recognition and acclaim and most men had the good graces to keep their ‘stash’ stashed away.

Are those days gone for good?

Probably.

What could change it?  Just one thing.

If the predictions of catastrophic social impact made by the religious right and social conservatives come true and are plain for everyone to see, things could change. It might also take another 40 year campaign but eventually the detrimental effects of pornography might become obvious to all, like the harmful effects of smoking, which are now accepted as self-evident truth.

Will that happen?  I’m not sure. The jury is still out.

But even if their worst predictions come true, putting the “pornie” back in the bottle will be a gargantuan task.

It’ll be interesting to watch the next twenty years or so.