What is Pornography Addiction?

What is pornography addiction? When I was growing up and as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints anyone who views pornography is essentially labeled as a pornography addict.   I’ve talked about my experience with the Addiction Recovery Program or ARP that I attended in both Wisconsin and California. I have talked about why I don’t believe in the idea that most people are pornography addicts.  In episode 54 I covered in-depth how believing you’re an addict is basically a self-fulfilling prophesy that creates more harm than good.  But I want to take a moment and talk about what I believe we mean when we say that we are addicted to porn and how changing the narrative around this pervasive idea will do more good for those who engage in viewing pornography than continuing with the current narrative that they are porn addicts.   As members of the Church, we often talk about pornography in absolute terms.  Either you’re addicted or you’re sober. Based on the way that I have observed others discuss the issue, being a pornography addict means that you are experiencing arousal while using graphic media. This media depicts the bodies of men or women in any state of dress. They could be fully clothed, wearing bathing suits or standard underwear, all the way up to and including the most graphic sexual imagery.   This is my observation, so, I could be wrong or misperceiving the intent of others as they speak about this.  But, I think, after having spoken openly about pornography for so many years now, I’ve gathered some sense of the issues.   This definition is problematic, for a few reasons.  First being, this definition is so broad and encompasses so much that it would be hard for anyone who wanted to purchase a nice bathing suit for their spouse not to identify as a pornography addict because they found the swimsuit models attractive.  This definition pathologizes into addiction the sexual arousal of a teen boy (or grown man for that matter) merely noticing the beauty of another person depicted in media.  It makes us bad, simply for seeing something that we might find attractive on some level for some reason.   The problem with that is, as humans, we all experience the reality of noticing the beauty of another person at some point.  I think that most people have even experienced a sense that they might want to have an intimate relationship with someone because of that noticed beauty.   Unfortunately, when we define sexual addiction or pornography addiction in this way, it loads so much meaning onto our shoulders that it becomes nearly impossible to carry in a healthy or meaningful way.   Please don’t misunderstand me, I want to be clear, I am not advocating for us to swing all the way to the other side and stop using judgment to determine what appropriate media we want to view in our lives.   But, if we can redefine pornography addiction, in some small way to lighten that burden, I believe that would be the most valuable thing we could do to decrease pornography viewing in the lives of those who struggle.   When we speak about pornography addiction, I think that we are actually talking about experiential avoidance.  I use the term buffering as well, but Experiential avoidance is the term that I think best describes what is really happening.  I’ve worked with thousands of men and women, individually and in the membership, each of whom started to realize one thing when they dropped the idea that they were addicted to pornography.  What they realized is, that they were avoiding something and pornography was the thing that was helping them do it.  Simple questions like, “what were you feeling in the 5 to 10 minutes before you choose to view pornography?” provide the insight that I needed and...