*Warning! Graphic content.
My dear Jack, if you want to put out a fire you cut off the oxygen supply. When you cut off the oxygen supply you weaken the fire. Then you can go after the residual rage of the fire. If it’s imprudent not cutting off the oxygen supply to stop a fire, imagine feeding the flame with accelerant to kill it. If you want to stop your addiction to masturbation, cut off the accelerant and oxygen to the flame in your groin – porn! You can’t be gourmandizing on porn and claim to want to stop addiction to masturbation. A fire fed accelerant won’t die.
There’s a principle of causality in nature. The problem is, we go after the effect and ignore causative factors. Always go after the root cause. If you don’t you’re only meliorating and managing the problem. From the mails I get, addiction to masturbation for some people came as progression from sexual abuse in childhood – a maid/steward abusing a ward, a family member using a child for libidinous gratification and stimulation… And for some the root cause is rape. They were raped in childhood.
Abusive exposure of an innocent child to sex has debilitating effect. It is advisable to see a psychotherapist to deal with childhood trauma, to sort out the issues involved. Not many have the emotional capacity to overcome the long shadow cast over a life by childhood abuse. It’s why we need professional help. Some traumas cannot be handled with non-professional counsel. And parents need to pay more attention to their kids. Some parents don’t believe their kids when they intimate abuse. Children in general lack capacitation and courage to spell out abuse. The worst cases are abuse by trusted family members.
For most however, masturbation addiction is the result of natural curiosity about sex gone too far. Having sexual desire is not the sin. It’s a sign of anatomical and emotional health. God put it there. The problem is the means employed to deal with sexual pressure, and masturbation is a really dangerous implement. Masturbation demands masturbation for solution and relief. That’s the logic of its addiction. It’s a cycle. Porn stimulates, stoking the imagination through graphic visuals. Men are particularly responsive to visuals. But mental sex is different from copulative sex. It’s why you can sleep with your wife and still feel like masturbating. Copulative sex cannot satisfy mental sex demands and vice versa. They’re in two different dimensions. One is in the virtual reality dimension in a computer box called the cranium; the other is in the real world. The operating system for mental sex is imagination. Without it no ejaculation by masturbation. As far as your brain is concerned, those porn materials are software.
Imagination will process whatever you feed it. But here’s the challenge. The porn stars you voyeur on are professional athletes. That’s what they do, and they must be dexterous at it or it won’t appeal to the market – you! And they’re just acting. A lot of the moans and groans are improvised. It’s acting. The producer knows those moans stimulate the primal instinct in men. Many women in the real world don’t make those kinds of noise during sex. Very few will wake up the neighbourhood. But you’ve obfuscated the line divide between virtual reality and reality. You’re fusing the two. That’s like mistaking Lara Croft in the video game for Angelina Jolie in real life. And so you expect your wife to display the athleticism of porn stars and make those noises during coitus. You want her to speak the dirty languages of porn stars, but she’s not culturally exposed to that world. And so sex with her does not satisfy you and therefore you resort to porn relief and masturbation. Were both of you culturati of the flesh world perhaps it might have been easier. Of course there are girls who have mastered the intricacies of Kama Sutra. Unfortunately you didn’t marry one of them.
I’m just saying your sexual expectations are mismatched with your matrimonial procurement. But then you have another challenge. A lot of the imagery in porn is about dominating women, “punishing” them. That’s male-speak for sexual virility – “giving it to her!” – a male ego definition of manhood. Unless your wife is exposed to that culture she will not classify “punishment” or punishment a loving notion. The people in porn movies are paid to take all that pain and sometimes dehumanisation. They have their reward. But your wife is not being paid, and even if you offered inducement the fact remains it’s not her professional career. There’s no intimacy in the porn movies you watch. (Trying to help you distinguish virtual reality from reality). No one mistakes porn for Gone With The Wind. Porn is raw sex. The package does not include emotional extras. And there’s no commitment in porn. In fact the notion of porn negates commitment. But marital sex is different.
It’s important you understand the whole gamut about sex, not just the narrow perspective of porn. The gamut is what Paul was trying to offload to those dudes at Corinth. They had a narrow perspective too. “There’s more to sex than just skin on skin,” Paul wrote. (Oh yes, that’s in your Bible!). He identified two types of sex – sex without commitment and intimacy, and otherwise. Porn and the mental sex you have in masturbation is sex without intimacy obviously. Paul says the sex that avoids intimacy and commitment leads to loneliness. (Cf. 1 Corinthians 6:16-20 MSG). Of course the loneliness Paul identified leads you to seek private intimacy through porn. You love yourself up. Which then makes you lonelier, which makes you seek more porn, which makes you lonelier… It’s a cycle. Addiction. The soulish loneliness is why you masturbate during moments of boredom.
But here is the critical challenge. Masturbation is a direct stimulation of neural wires. And so it creates neural agitation, not dissimilar to that of heroin addiction. The same principle applies. Heroin calms down heroin agitation. Masturbation calms down masturbation agitation. It’s why you find it tough to break. You must employ the same cold turkey standards to get out of it. You need to wean your body and your system off porn. You’re locked in a vicious cycle. Declare a porn fast. No porn for say a week or a month. And then maintain the fast until your system is weaned off. The deliverance you want will not happen overnight. It will take a process. Needs steadfastness on your part. You’re looking for the suddenness of a miracle, and it doesn’t work that way. You accumulated porn data for over 20 years. That’s terabytes of data. We become the data we acquire. But you can ask God to help you delete those files. If he can bring things to your remembrance, he can remove things from your remembrance. You then need to overwrite the residual attachments. That’s what Paul called renewing of the mind. Means you overwrite data with data. Ingest wholesome stuff. Paul says it’s transformational.
For practical purposes avoid staying in darkness. Simulates a conceptual environment for porn. Sleep with lights on. If you follow these instructions you will get results. The key question is, do you want to be delivered?
Your mentor, LA
© Leke Alder | talk2me@lekealder.com