Chapter 7 - Your Beliefs Drive Your Addiction
One of the main reasons an addict continues with their life of addiction is that they are ignorant of why they are an addict in the first place. One of the first, best revelations I can give to you on your journey to recovery is to help you to realize that it is your own beliefs that drive your addiction. Once you can successfully identify these beliefs, and then successfully change these beliefs – your addiction is toast, done, over with. The beliefs that drive you to act out in pornography addiction are the same beliefs that drive almost all addiction. These beliefs are identified in the remainder of this chapter. The good news is that once you get to the place where you can admit you actually believe these lies, then you can begin changing these beliefs. Your freedom from pornography addiction will follow.
I first became aware of the beliefs that drive my own addiction in the Life Recovery group that I have referred to in previous chapters. The first four beliefs I will list come from Dr. Patrick Carnes (Machen, n.d. p. 24). Here they are, in my own words:
1. I am a bad, unlovable person, who is unworthy of love.
2. If you really knew who I was on the inside, you wouldn’t love me.
3. I cannot trust anyone else to meet my needs, not even God. Therefore, I must meet my needs on my own.
4. (Pornography/sex/fill-in-the-blank with your drug of choice) is my greatest need.
After years in recovery myself, I eventually came to believe that there is a fifth belief that works to keep us addicted to pornography or other addictive agents:
5. I gain value and worth from my performance or what I do, and not from who I am.
These five false beliefs are what drive us to become addicted to pornography, and unless we can successfully change these beliefs, we will remain addicted to something, be it pornography or another addictive agent. The good news is that your beliefs can change. One of the more amazing abilities we humans have is the ability to change what we believe. This ability to change our beliefs has helped to bring about some of the greatest accomplishments in human history, as well as some of the darkest days in history – all depending on what those beliefs are. Without getting out of scope, let’s unpack each one of these false beliefs and examine how they drive us to become addicted to – and stay addicted to – pornography.
I am a bad, unlovable person, who is unworthy of love:
We all need love. It is one of the deepest needs of every human being from the moment we are born. When we believe we are unworthy of love or that we are unlovable, what we are feeling is shame. Books have been written on these topics, and I don’t want to get lost in the weeds on any of these points as this chapter is simply a primer, not an exhaustive treaty on these beliefs. The main point I want to drive home here is that this first false belief produces intense feelings of shame, and shame is the single-most powerful belief that drives us to addictive behavior.
If I feel that I am a bad, unlovable person, who is unworthy of love, then I will go to great lengths to get love – or the illusion of love. Saying it in terms of the word shame, it could be said this way: If I feel shame about anything, I will go to great lengths to avoid uncovering my unlovableness, my nakedness to another human being. I will do almost anything to anesthetize or numb my feelings of unworthiness or shame.
So how does this belief drive us to a pornography addiction? Sex is a basic human desire, and it is tied to the core of who we are as humans. The object of our desire (i.e. the other person) is, by definition, desired. We all want to be the object of desire in this scenario. Pornography stimulates the areas of our brains that house these sexual yearnings. Our imaginations take over and together with the aid of the pornography, we can easily create a fantasy in which we are adored, desired, and longed for by the object of our own sexual desire. In effect, we have manufactured temporary and artificial feelings of love and acceptance, thus temporarily soothing our fear that we are unlovable. It is a scientific fact that sexual fantasies, often fueled by pornographic images, cause our brains to produce the same ‘feel-good’ chemicals that are produced in an actual physical, sexual encounter. These chemicals include epinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and catecholamines, and cause us to feel a sense of euphoria and well-being, among other things (Machen, n.d. p. 36).
If you really knew who I was on the inside, you wouldn’t love me:
Pornography addiction is an intimacy disorder. If I let you know who I really am (a.k.a. become intimate with you mentally, spiritually, and/or physically), and you reject me, then I would be crushed, and my fear that I am unworthy at my core would be validated. By acting out with imaginary partners in our sexual fantasies via pornography, we can avoid revealing who we really are to an actual human being, and thereby avoid potential rejection by that person. However our sexual fantasies play out, we are the ones ultimately in control, and we manipulate our fantasies so that we can be who we really are and be adored/loved/desired for it. No matter how depraved or abnormal those fantasies are, we are the star of the show and are valued by someone else. Even in sexual fantasies where we are being abused or are the abuser, there is a twisted perception of value associated with the role we are playing out in those fantasies, so we are being ‘loved’ for who we are.
We, addicts, are terrified to let actual humans know who we really are deep down because we believe the lie. By acting out with pornography with its related chemical high, we can generate false feelings of intimacy and avoid the possibility of rejection by a real person. In the end, we sacrifice the potential of true intimacy by continuing to hide our true selves from anyone who might reject us. It is only by learning to risk rejection with safe, trustworthy people that we can ever obtain the healthy intimacy that we crave. Only when someone knows who we really are, good and bad, and still chooses to value us and show us love will we begin to heal.
This healing experience began to happen for me in my recovery group. I took a chance and, among other men who were struggling with the same issues, I began to reveal who I really was – addictions and all. Those men didn’t reject me. They accepted me as a fellow traveler on the journey with them to wholeness, and it changed my life. My experiences being accepted by other members of my recovery group for who I really was have helped bring healing to me and made it possible for me to be free of the lies I formerly believed about myself and God.
I cannot trust anyone else to meet my needs, not even God:
Addicts aren’t a trusting bunch. We may seem like it many times, but at our core, we don’t trust anyone to meet our needs. We rely on our ability to manipulate people and circumstances to our benefit to get us through life. That’s the lie we buy into – that we are controlling things through our addiction, but we aren’t. By using pornography, we subconsciously perceive that we are taking control over our sexuality, our self-worth. We addicts usually don’t understand that’s why we feel so drawn to pornography – but that’s one of the things that makes it so addictive. We crave it, and we don’t know exactly why the craving is so strong, and therefore we feel powerless to control the craving or break free from the addiction.
This belief, like all of the others in the list, is reinforced by life experiences. Many of us were abused as kids, so we learn not to trust those who were supposed to protect us but failed to do so adequately. Then we encounter betrayal by our peers at school or elsewhere, and the lie that we can’t trust anyone else is reinforced again. Maybe we prayed to God to save a loved one, and they died anyway – guess we can’t trust God either. However it happened, the lie became the truth to us, and we use pornography as one tool, in our twisted way of thinking, to meet our needs on our own.
By using pornography, we control when, where, and how our perceived needs are met. By using porn, we can produce those feel-good chemicals we have come to crave on command – our drugs of choice. We don’t realize we are playing with fire until we’re hooked. We don’t know that we are conditioning our bodies to crave unnatural amounts of sexual stimulation in order to satisfy our craving for the drugs we have been producing in our brains every time we use pornography. We don’t realize that no living human being could ever satisfy that level of craving – and they weren’t ever meant to. Having a normal, healthy sexual relationship with another human being becomes impossible as long as we are still addicted to pornography.
If we desire to break free from this false belief, we must choose to trust again. By starting to trust other safe and trustworthy people in our recovery group, or on our recovery team (which may include a counselor, trusted friend, possibly our spouse, and our Higher Power), we can begin to let go of the lie and find that we are not as alone as we thought we were.
Pornography (Sex) is my greatest need:
This false belief was the one I had the hardest time coming to terms with. I was in recovery for a long time before I could embrace the truth that I was living my life as if sex was my greatest need. Then, one day I had a hard look at the facts. The fact was that I was willing to put my marriage, my family, and my religious beliefs in jeopardy so that I could act out with pornography. By continuing to act out, I was endangering the health of my marriage, taking time away from my kids, and risking the potential loss of relationship with them in the event of a divorce (not to mention being a bad example to my kids). I was also violating my religious beliefs concerning moral purity and the sanctity of marriage.
It may help if you think about the last time you acted out with pornography. If you can get inside your head in that moment, you can hopefully admit that right then, acting out was the thing you wanted most. You weren’t thinking about the consequences to your marriage, your job, your mental or spiritual health, or your family. You wanted to act out with pornography, and nothing was more important than that. If you want to be free from your addiction, you must train yourself to desire freedom more than you want to act out, you must learn to love and value true and healthy intimacy more than the short-term instant gratification that acting out with pornography provides. Working your program in a good recovery group can help you accomplish this.
I often tell people in recovery a story to illustrate why it is so important that they ‘own’ these lies – that is, admit and come to terms with the fact that they really do believe these lies. The story goes like this: If I tell you there are a million dollars waiting for you somewhere in the city, and I give you the keys to my car, a full tank of gas, and the address of where the money is, what is the one thing you are going to have to do before you can get that money? Some people say get in the car, start the engine, et cetera, and while all this is true, there is only one thing you absolutely must do to get the money. You could walk to wherever it is and not use the car. You could call a cab or ride a bike. But the one thing you absolutely must do is determine where you are currently at. That is key. Without that piece of critical information, you don’t know what direction to go to get to your intended destination.
You can’t get where you want to go unless you know where you are at. This is very true with addiction as it relates to the lies you currently believe. Until you accept the fact that you believe these lies, there is no hope of changing your belief, and therefore no hope of getting free from your addiction. In my own recovery, once I accepted the fact that I had made pornography (i.e. sex) my god, my greatest need, then I was able to begin the process of dismantling that belief and getting free from the addiction.
I gain value and worth through my performance or what I do, and not from who I am:
Society, many religious experiences, and even our family and friends often communicate to us that we are valued because of what we can do, rather than for who we are. We are applauded when we bring home the good grades or make the winning shot in a sports game. We’re commended for keeping our rooms clean and following the house rules. We’re looked upon as an excellent role model when we follow all the rules of our particular religion or the rules that the government or society put in place for us. All of these messages communicate worth and value based upon what we do rather than on who we are.
Think for a moment about the Mona Lisa – a great work of art. This work of art hangs in a gallery on a wall – and does nothing. Yet, despite this fact, people the world over will agree that it is a great and valuable work of art. Why is it valuable? Is it valuable because of anything it does? Does it cure disease? Does it cool the air in the museum? Does it develop awesome and useful computer programs? It does none of these things. It is valued simply because of what it is – a great work of art.
Like the Mona Lisa, each human being is a unique work of art, with intrinsic value that doesn’t increase or decrease, regardless of what we do or don’t do. Yet, we are conditioned almost from birth to value others and ourselves based upon a different set of values, a set of values based upon productivity as it is defined by whatever group or person it is from whom we are seeking value.
I mentioned before that the desire to be valued and loved often drives us to act out with pornography. A pre-disposition to determine our own value by what we can do can be a direct and powerful source of the feelings of inadequacy and unlovableness that fuels our addiction. It is only when we can accept the fact that we are created by God with immutable intrinsic value, untainted by our misdeeds or apparent lack of achievement or accomplishment, that we can release the shame that is fueling our addiction and begin the road to true freedom.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the goal of this chapter was to introduce you to the five lies we believe that fuel our addiction to pornography and keep us from getting free from that addiction. Armed with this information, we can begin to examine our thoughts and see how these beliefs are driving our decision-making process and leading us deeper into addiction. More importantly, we can begin to replace these lies with the truth by choosing to think and behave differently. To the extent we successfully abandon these lies and embrace the truth, we will gain freedom from our addiction to pornography.