What My Porn Addiction Taught Me
How Trauma Can Be a Gift
Content warning: Pornography, suicidal ideation
I started masturbating at age 7 and I started watching porn at age 8. I didn’t realize then how seriously these habits would later influence my life. At the time, they just seemed like a fun way to pass the time. They were also a way to distract myself from my suffering.
I continued with these habits throughout my life. I’m now 27 years old, so I’ve been watching porn and masturbating on some regular basis (every day or every other day), for almost 20 years. It’s hard for me to fathom how much time and energy I have spent on these habits.
Throughout my schooling, things were mostly okay. I managed to get straight A’s. I actually did so well at academics that I later got full scholarships for both undergrad and grad school. All throughout this time, porn and masturbation were quite helpful in taking the edge off of all the pressure I had to excel academically. This pressure came not only from my family but also, over time, from myself. These habits also helped me numb myself every time I got rejected by women.
I then basically did pretty well through college and grad school too. Halfway through grad school, I even got a full-time job offer from a great company in NYC. So I then dropped out of grad school and moved to the city. This was in 2022.
Although it was manageable, my relationship with porn and masturbation admittedly became an addiction several years prior because I felt incapable of stopping. There were many times over the years when I tried stopping but would eventually give up after several relapses. I tried many tools such as blockers like Cold Turkey, a paid NoFap support group, apps like Fortify which provide online support, money wagering apps like Beeminder, and Covenant Eyes which tracks all your internet activity, takes random screenshots, and shares these with accountability partners. Despite all this, the most sobriety I ever managed was 1 week without masturbation and 3 weeks without porn. After all these failed attempts, I had resigned myself to the belief that I’ll be an addict forever.
In 2023 however, I noticed my porn addiction become far worse. I was not only spending more and more time watching porn. I began to watch genres of porn that were more weird, grotesque, and extreme. It saddens me that such kinds of content even exist in the first place. It was at this point that I had a wake up call that I needed to do everything I could to cure myself of this addiction.
I didn’t realize it then, but just like other addictions, one can develop tolerance to porn. Just as other addicts need more of alcohol or cocaine to get the same high, porn addicts need more and different varieties of porn to get the same high.
Porn addiction is odd because, on the face of it, unlike other addictions like with drugs such as alcohol or cigarettes, the damage is not immediately evident. In fact, even after long term porn use, I don’t believe there’s an obvious physical sign of it (unless you conduct a brain scan). However, in my opinion, long term porn use has this way of harming one at a deeper, almost spiritual level. This is because porn is one of the many ways we humans objectify and commodify other beings. We treat them like disposable tools to satisfy our insatiable desires. And over time, as we begin to see others as disposable, it becomes much easier to see ourselves as disposable.
The next wake up call came for me when I started to have suicidal thoughts. I felt so ashamed and guilty of myself around this time that I sincerely believed that the world would be a much better place without me. I also just wanted to stop watching porn and masturbating. It seemed preferable to kill myself than to spend more of my life trapped in addiction. These suicidal thoughts soon turned into suicidal ideation as I began planning different ways I could kill myself.
The internet was unfortunately too helpful with this. I considered the classic methods of jumping off a bridge or a tall building. I also just considered hanging myself somewhere. However, I was worried about the people who’d be stuck cleaning up my remains. So I had this other “foolproof” idea I fantasized about where I would shoot myself in the middle of nowhere like a desert. Although I’m grateful to say I never actually attempted suicide, there were at least two instances I remember when I felt really close to the precipice.
I’m really grateful that I had a lot of caring friends and some caring family in my life at this time. As seductive as it felt sometimes to think that I could “solve all my problems” by just pulling one trigger, I would always be jolted back into reality when I thought about how my loved ones may react to the news of my suicide. Looking back, I’m grateful that their presence helped me get through this tough time. Though, at the time, I did feel rather trapped: I was too scared to live and too scared to die.
It was at this point I realized I had one of two options: get sober or die. And so I decided that I would do everything I could to get sober. Luckily, I had a therapist at this time who recommended I try out a sexual addiction twelve-step fellowship. I was initially very reluctant to giving it a try.
“Isn’t that where all the damaged people go?” I thought to myself. Despite clearly seeing the desperation of my situation, I also had trouble admitting that there was something wrong enough with me to ask for help by joining a twelve-step group. However, after a few more relapses from trying to be sober on my own, I bit the bullet and joined.
It actually turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. It was certainly no walk in the park, but for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were going through many of the same struggles I was. For the first time, I didn’t feel so alone. During each of the meetings, each member courageously shared their stories of hardship, strength and hope. In addition to attending regular meetings, I got a mentor who showed me how to follow the program and was sortof my main accountability buddy. After spending around 3-4 months in this program, I managed to get to a month of sobriety from porn and masturbation for the first time in my life.
However, despite all that progress, I decided to leave the group. Although I was gradually making progress towards longer periods of sobriety, it felt like my suicidal ideation was only getting stronger with every relapse. Every time I relapsed, I felt like such a huge failure that all the feelings of guilt and shame would overwhelm me.
Previously, I thought that my life was in this either-or place of sobriety or death. Now I started to feel that putting so much pressure on myself to get sober was actually increasing my risk of committing suicide.
I’m grateful to say that it was around this time that I was deepening my practice in Buddhism, trying out psychedelic therapy, and exploring the Art of Accomplishment (AoA). Thanks to these modalities, I began to see that maybe there was a path for me to prioritize staying alive even if I continued to remain an addict. And then once I felt secure that I would not kill myself regardless of the state of my addiction, then I could focus on curing myself of this addiction from a place of ease as opposed to a place of desperation.
I’m really grateful to AoA for helping me see that my shame may actually be the lock that is keeping this bad habit in place. It was from that point that I actually experimented with the idea of letting myself watch porn from this place letting go of the shame.
This idea was also echoed to me from my Buddhist teachers. Essentially, one way we can let go of bad habits is by forcing ourselves to let them go (this was my initial approach). However, another approach is to let ourselves do these same habits with as much awareness as possible. If we can let ourselves do these habits over time while doing our best to see them clearly, then we will over time develop a felt sense of how these habits are not serving us and actually harming us. In that moment, we will naturally lose our desire for the habit.
I’m also grateful to my personal coach who helped me see the benefit of taking a break from all the inner work I was doing. At the time, I was doing/had done all of the following:
6 hourlong virtual twelve-step group meetings a week, and 1 hourlong in-person twelve-step meeting a week
2-3 times daily, one-on-one phone calls to other members of my twelve-step program, in addition to a weekly call with my mentor
Daily reading of the twelve-step literature books, in addition to twelve-step program work
weekly 2 hour IFS therapy sessions
weekly 1 hour calls with a meditation teacher
30+ min of daily meditation
3 psychedelic counseling sessions
two silent meditation retreats
A two month Master Class course from the Art of Accomplishment
I forget the precise estimate, but I think I had in total spent $15,000+ over the past year trying to cure my mind. And, at the time, as I kept relapsing, it felt like it had all been for nothing. I was actually about to consider another few rounds of psychedelic therapy when I decided to take the advice of my coach.
She basically explained to me that while it can be beneficial to do inner work, when you do too much of it, it’s like putting your nervous system in overdrive. In fact, when your nervous system is in that state, the best thing you can do is give it some time to rest.
At this point, this was over halfway through 2023 when I decided to take her advice and the advice I had learned through AoA and Buddhism. I decided I would try to just let go of trying so hard to give up this addiction. I began to conceptualize my situation as if I was caught in a chinese finger trap. The more I resisted, the more stuck I would get. But the more I relaxed, the more I would become free.
And so I gave it a try, I did my best to just let myself watch porn with as little shame as possible. And oddly enough, this actually worked to some degree. I still felt bad about what I was doing, but I noticed that over time, I actually started to watch less and less porn. Instead of it being a daily thing, it became once every few days. I even began to notice that the kind of content I watched was actually becoming less extreme to some degree.
After trying this method for a few months and also just completely stopping all the inner work tasks I mentioned above, I noticed myself naturally gravitating towards meditation again. I decided that I wanted to continue this positive momentum of me applying more awareness to my addiction so that it would gradually loosen on its own over time. Admittedly, I was still masturbating and watching porn, albeit a lesser amount, so I knew that while this new approach was helpful, it was not the full solution I was seeking.
It was around this time, near the end of 2023, that I received a notice at work that I was being laid off. While I will admit that I was partly happy to be let go because I was not passionate about the work, a large part of me was quite sad. I will forever be grateful to my boss and that company for taking a chance on me and letting me work there for two and a half years. I’m also grateful that they paid me quite well at that job so that I had more than enough money to pay for all the healing modalities I described above. I’m also grateful that I, for the most part, was able to leave on good terms.
Now that I had been let go and was in this place of figuring out next steps, I decided that I would finally do what I had always wanted to do: start a company! I decided that just because I was struggling with addiction doesn’t mean I have to stop living my life. Whether I’m in addiction or not, time will not stop for me. No one knows how much time they have left to live so I was going to make the most of my time, even if it was going to be sapped away or even cut short by this addiction.
I’m grateful to say that, as I felt the addiction loosening near the beginning of 2024, I started to feel much less suicidal ideation than before. It felt like, to some degree, awakening from a really bad dream. It really is true that you don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it (or at least come close to losing it). As I had been through moments where I felt very close to losing my life, I began to develop a deeper sense of gratitude for each new day. Instead of taking each new morning for granted, I felt grateful to wake up each day and at least be alive.
As I began to make plans for how I was going to spend the coming year, I decided that I would go on another meditation retreat. I thought this would not only help me with my porn addiction, but it would also help me get more clarity on how exactly I wanted to spend the coming year in terms of starting a company.
And so, around the beginning of 2024, I went on my third Buddhist silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. If you ever have the opportunity to practice there, then I highly recommend it!
This was actually my second time at this particular retreat center. As soon as I arrived there, I remember thinking: “This year, I will do a three month retreat.” I think this was not only to help me further loosen the addiction, but also to help me get more clarity on what I wanted to do next in terms of my career.
And so after that five day retreat, I came back home and signed up for literally every possible retreat at IMS in order to meet the minimum requirements as quickly as possible for their three month retreat.
Over the next few months, I attended 4 more silent retreats and cumulatively spent over 5 weeks on retreat. I can definitely say that all these retreats had a life-changingly beneficial impact on the course of my life and happiness.
I learned many things from all these retreats (and all the inner work I did prior) and I may write more about that in the future. However, I think the most important thing I learned how to do was to love myself unconditionally. Admittedly, this is, in my opinion, a lifelong practice as opposed to a one-time achievement, but I am grateful to say that I love myself far more than I ever have at any point in the past.
And as a natural extension of this, I also have a lot more compassion for myself. I began to more deeply understand why I have this addiction in the first place. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to conclusively say why I became a porn addict, but like many things, I’m sure it has at least something to do with my childhood.
Overall, I had a pretty good childhood. However, there were definitely some relatives in my life who took out their anger on me. I don’t want to get too specific here, mainly because I don’t want this piece to be about me accusing others of the problems in my life. Not only because, at the end of the day, my actions are my responsibility, but also because, I don’t want to demonize the people who treated me poorly. There were definitely times in my life when I thought these relatives were simply “evil” or “bad” for physically, emotionally, and verbally abusing me for many years. Now I’ve come to see that I was simply an outlet for their own suffering. One overly simplified metaphor I found helpful in illustrating this idea is how the employee who gets yelled at by his boss at work is more likely to then come home and kick his dog. In some ways, I have felt like the family dog. And just as as they spread their trauma to me, I was spreading my trauma to others.
As you may already be aware, the porn industry is rife with abuse. There have been countless instances of pornstars being mistreated and abused. There have also been many cases of pornstars talking about how working in this industry has negatively affected their mental health and their interpersonal relationships. While I don’t doubt that there are examples of pornstars who actually enjoy their job and lead happy lives, it seems that a huge portion of them do not. And by me being a regular consumer of porn, I was directly contributing to an industry that consistently dehumanizes and objectifies countless women and men.
Since my last retreat, at the suggestion of one of the teachers, I decided to give a twelve-step group a try again and restart therapy. This time, I joined a different sexual addiction twelve-step group. I am grateful to say that as of the time of writing this blog post, I have been porn and masturbation free for over two months! I am also grateful to say that I am, for the first time in my life, in a loving relationship with an amazing woman.
I can honestly say that this point in my life is definitely the most happy and free I have ever felt. I’m so grateful for all the people who have helped me reach this point. I definitely could not have done this alone. I want to express immense gratitude to not only all my teachers, but also my friends, and my sangha in Brooklyn.
And, as odd as this may sound, I am so grateful to have been given this gift of trauma that later led to porn addiction. Because, to be frank, were it not for all the suffering I went through, I likely never would have taken the time to do all the inner work I did. I feel pretty confident that I would not have spent so much time on meditation retreats. I also would definitely not be currently planning to undertake a three month temporary monastic ordination at a hermitage in Indonesia.
Indeed, I think the greatest gift I have received in this process is becoming Buddhist. The way I see the world has become so vastly different from the way I used to see it before this spirutal journey. I am grateful to say that I approach myself and others with a far greater degree of compassion than I used to.
However, I know I have far more work ahead of me. There is always room for improvement and I will do all I can to ensure that these two months of sobriety turns in 2 years of sobriety and beyond. I aim to also do what I can to help others reduce their own suffering and find happiness.
If you made it this far, I want to thank you for your kind attention. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please know that it’s okay to ask for help! There are many amazing organizations out there, both in terms of twelve-step groups and beyond that can be great sources of support. Of course, if I can be of help in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out! I’m happy to do what I can.
I know that it may be cliche to say this but there really can be a light at the end of a tunnel, even when it seems like things are really dark. But it’s true! And in the case of addiction in particular, it really is possible to find freedom.
May all beings be free.
