From PoSARC’s creator:
What does Sexual Anorexia and Porn Addiction have in Common?
I’m excited to share with you our new three-part video series in which I interviewed a porn addict who’s been in solid recovery for over three years and has been on the Katie Couric Show, Canadian news, he’s written insightfully about his addiction recovery for Huffington Post and Cosmo…and I think you’ll glean a lot of insights from him.
When I first had Discovery in my own relationship, I understood nothing about how my partner could have become so accustomed to engaging in secretive sexual behaviors that he actually became addicted to them. In my quest to understand, I became a research aficionado, but quickly realized that the books written by therapists about sex addiction usually left me with more questions than they answered. I wanted to speak with someone who was in recovery, who would speak truth to me about their inner experience while still involved in sexually addictive behaviors so I had a metric for what recovery looks like if/when it happens. This interview will give you that inside view.
Click Here to View the Video Series
Since creating PoSARC, many PoSAs (partners of sex addicts) contact me saying that after years, sometimes decades, of being told by their husbands/partners that sex for them isn’t physically possible, that they’ll find a bottle of Viagra or Cialis stashed in back of a drawer somewhere. Initially they would suspect their partner was having an affair but, after investigating deeper, they became even more vexed by learning that their partner was using these powerful drugs for the purposes of masturbating to internet porn! How shocking it is for a partner to discover that secretive porn use has been the reason she’s been denied an intimate life with her husband!
One of the lesser known side effects of compulsive internet pornography use can be PIED, an acronym for Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction, which results from the brain’s reward circuitry becoming dysregulated from the supranormal stimulation that online porn provides. PIED, an alarming wake-up call for our times, is especially prevalent in young men in their teens and twenties (though certainly not exclusively). The rate of PIED occurrence is high and growing steadily among young men, and tragically, the rate of recovery can be extremely slow, largely due to this condition not being properly diagnosed.
Health care practitioners frequently exempt pornography as a factor in erectile dysfunction. This belies the lack of information and training that ought to be mandatory for these professions, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of teens and, in fact, men in general, are using internet porn, many on a daily basis.
The inability of health care providers to correctly diagnose this increasingly common condition results in anguish and confusion for those affected. As a result, forums and websites are being created by young addicts desperate to make sense of and heal these terrifying symptoms, with some forums hosting over a hundred thousand members. The addicts interact on these forums to help support each other in abstaining from pornography. (More)
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