Your Porn Addiction Recovery Timeline: How It Works
If you are a porn addict and this is the first time you have ever attempted to stop your porn habit, you might wonder what your porn addiction recovery timeline will be. Is there a porn withdrawal timeline? Depending on the severity of the addiction, your recovery process will be different and individual to you. When you’ve decided to stop, the first step is to educate yourself about what lies ahead.
Recovery time from pornography addiction depends on several things:
- The Severity Of The Addiction: How often you accessed porn and how long you spent viewing it play a role. The strength of feeling you experienced while indulging your addiction can also play a part in determining how long it will take to recover.
- The Nature Of Porn Addiction: In other words, what type of porn you were addicted to. The more deviant types tend to take longer to resolve
- Negative Effects: If you’ve experienced devastating effects when caught or discovered. For instance, if your marriage broke up because of it and you are not allowed to see your kids anymore, that can be a powerful motivator to recover quicker for most people.
- Support System: Having a good support system can help you recover quicker from this addiction
- Professional Help: Getting the right professional help can be a great aid to recovery.
- Support Groups: joining a support group such as Porn Addicts Anonymous can be a great help in the recovery process.
What Is Considered Porn Addiction?
Have you ever looked at porn, wanted to stop but just couldn’t? Did it feel like a compulsion? Like something you just had to do and had no control over? That is essentially porn addiction. It typically develops over a long time. You might start off accessing some internet porn for five minutes and get a bit of a thrill from it.
Then gradually over time, the frequency of accessing that site might increase. Maybe each session is longer and longer. It’s different from those people who choose to access porn and feel like they can stop any time they choose. The key element of any addiction is the feeling of lack of control.
How To Recover From Porn Addiction
If you are a porn addict, you could be really confused when you think about how to recover from porn addiction. You try to stop but you just can’t. What do you do now? I hear many clients who have been discovered watching porn, talking about the shame they feel.
How To Help Someone With Porn Addiction
If you are a partner of someone with a porn addiction, it may seem like the right thing to express your disgust. One client of mine even went so far as to ring up her husband’s parents, brothers, and sisters and tell them all about how much of a pervert he was. When the poor guy came to see me, he was on the verge of committing suicide.
The easiest thing to do is also the worst thing you can do. Blaming an addict for their behavior doesn’t actually help them. Shaming them for their behavior doesn’t work either. As a matter of fact, either of these tactics can make the addict feel even more hopeless and helpless.
If you want to help a person in your life overcome their addiction, the first thing to do is show them a little bit of compassion. I regularly tell my porn addict clients to relax because they didn’t murder anyone. For the healing process to have any chance of success, the addict has to feel like they have a support network. They also have to learn coping mechanisms and be encouraged when they show even small signs of improvement. Remember, feelings of shame lead to low self-esteem if allowed to continue.
Just as with any substance addiction, a porn addict is highly likely to experience porn addiction withdrawal symptoms (which I will discuss in greater detail in the next section. When the use of pornography is no longer an option, that leaves a vacuum. The brain’s reward system notices this deprivation and those dopamine receptors in your brain have a bit of a tantrum. This is in an attempt to get you to sneakily relapse so that you can feel those brain surges of dopamine again.
Common Porn Withdrawal Symptoms
These symptoms are pretty much common to all behavioral addictions:
- Mood Swings: By far the most common symptom of withdrawal from any behavioral addiction is mood swings. To the addict, these bad moods seem to just “come over” them. It’s not like they are trying to be irritable or frustrated – they just are.
- Erectile Dysfunction: For example, if you’re a guy who has watched a certain type of porn (eg. FFM) you are training yourself to get turned on when there are two females in the scene. In real life, your normal sexual activity includes only one female, now you may find you have difficulty getting turned on. This typically presents itself as the inability to get or maintain, an erection. Over some time, this can develop into a low sex drive.
- Anxiety: If you go cold turkey and just eliminate porn from your life, your mind starts asking the question “What do I do now?”. If you have no idea, that’s when you can start feeling anxiety because all anxiety is about an uncertain future. If you have a plan, however, you probably won’t experience anxiety.
- Grief: Whenever we experience loss, most of us tend to mourn the loss. If you’ve ever had a relationship breakup, then you might have experienced an emptiness or sense of loss. This is very similar to the negative impact of the withdrawal of porn from a porn user’s life. It can cause mental health issues such as constant fatigue, brain fog, and depression.
Stages Of Recovery From Porn Addiction
There are a couple of stages to the recovery from addiction model. They are
- My Behavior Isn’t A Problem: This is the stage where most people are getting the maximum enjoyment from their addictive behavior and it hasn’t even crossed their mind that there is anything wrong with it.
- I Think I’d Better Change: When the addict starts getting concerned about the behavior or when they have been discovered and shamed by it. Now they start to think “I’d better do something about this”.
- What’s My Plan?: Looking up Google for advice on the addiction, reading up about it, or finding a therapist might all be part of this stage.
- Taking Action: Now you put your plan into action. This can be a relief and quite enjoyable for some people, but for others, it can be stressful. This is where having professional help can be very effective in eliminating stress and keeping your motivation high.
- Keeping It Going Long Term: On the first day that anyone makes any change, they are all fuelled up with motivation. They know exactly why they are doing it and that first day, or even a couple of days can seem easy. After a couple of weeks have gone by, the realization sets in that you’ve got to keep this up forever. This is the stage where motivation can wane and thoughts about relapse can start.
- Relapse & Getting Back On The Wagon: It is important to realize that many people who successfully overcame their addiction had a relapse or two along the way. For those in a relationship who perhaps were originally caught by their partner, the partner needs to know that a relapse can happen. Withdrawing support or being hurt by this is just simply not facing up to the facts. Many addicts relapse. That does not mean they are not serious about quitting.
My Dopamine Levels: Why This Matters
As I mentioned earlier, there is a change in brain chemistry caused by addiction. Essentially, the addictive behavior causes the brain to produce dopamine, endorphins, and other pleasure-related chemicals. Our mind essentially says “Oh yeah, I like that. I want that again!”. It craves similar experiences that will also produce the “dopamine hit”. With some of those symptoms of porn withdrawal that I discussed a couple of sections ago, the brain is essentially missing its old “hit” and it wants it back.
As part of the process of recovery, if you can substitute a new dopamine hit (a healthier one) for the old porn addiction, you’ll have better success in your recovery journey. There are hundreds of healthy ways to get a dopamine hit. For instance, you could go to the gym and get a “buzz” from exercising, or you could go for a walk in the countryside and get the same “buzz”. Some people go hill climbing, or paragliding. There is no end to your options but try to find something that genuinely does give you a “buzz”!
What Are Your Treatment Options?
You could just go it alone and try by yourself. Some people actually do succeed by doing this. The ones who tend to succeed the best are those for whom the shock of discovery or the shame has made it an absolute “must” to end their porn use forever.
Another option is to get some professional help. Typically, this might be a counselor or someone who specializes in sexual addiction. There are two major benefits to getting professional help:
- Coping Mechanisms: You will learn tried and tested tips and techniques that will help you stay away from your addiction
- Accountability Partner: Your counselor will be a person you are totally honest with so, therefore, you’ll be fully accountable to them. When we share our problem with someone else and they ask us to make a change during the coming week, we feel like we’ll be letting them down if we don’t do it.
You’ll find a counselor or CBT therapist in pretty much every locality. However, I suggest making sure your therapist has significant experience in dealing with addiction issues, specifically sex addictions. Many therapists find talking about porn distasteful or alien to their particular religious beliefs. This is why it is quite important to make sure your therapist is comfortable dealing with these issues. If you go to the wrong therapist, there may be an undercurrent of disapproval which will negatively affect the therapy.
I am qualified in hypnotherapy, life coaching, CBT, and EFT and my personal opinion is that a mixture of hypnotherapy and CBT can be really effective. I have achieved significant success with porn addiction clients using both therapies.
Self-Hypnosis For Porn Addiction
If you decide not to seek professional help on a face-to-face basis, there is another option. Having a self-hypnosis audio to listen to every night can calm down any stress associated with going cold turkey on your addiction. It will help you to see a bright future where porn is no longer part of your life and where you are completely sexually satisfied within the confines of your relationship.
You’ve just got to set aside 25 minutes (approximately) every night for at least 30 nights. This will help to convince your mind that the old addiction is in the past and that you are perfectly fine without it.
Author: Paul Hunter
Although thousands of people read his blog every month, Paul's path to success was not an easy one. Click here to read his amazing story "From Unwanted Baby And Adopted To A Respected Self Help Blogger". If you want to send Paul a quick message, then visit his contact page here
