View All History
I was, as a child, filmed by the men who sexually abused me. Others, including my father, took photographs of the abuse. My acceptance and processing of these early experiences has now freed me from my pornography addiction as an adult. This was a long journey. I am now porn free.
As an adult I had unconsciously used pornography as a way of temporarily escaping from the world and into a place where I had complete control. A place where endless streams of beautiful women reassured me that I had value; that I was desirable. I regularly flooded my dopamine receptors with the cocaine-like rush that high-speed internet pornography dispenses. I would then fall into a bleak stupor. The cycle repeated.
I used pornography, as an adult, for the same reason the heroin addict loads up his little spoon, heats it up, and shoots it into his cardiovascular system: I was in pain. Pornography was self-medication for that pain.
As Dr Gabor Maté famously said, “Don’t ask: Why the addiction? Ask: Why the pain?” Pornography is one of our most powerful and readily available painkillers. For most of the time I was using it, I had no idea this was its function for me, because I had not taken the time and space to investigate my own past. Instead of meditating deeply into my feelings of loneliness and inadequacy, I would seek to block out those feelings. I was repelled by the idea of tracing them back to their origin. I was scared of opening the basement door to find myself, a lost, hopeless child crouched there in the shadows. Much easier to click. Click. Click. Delete history. Everyone’s doing it, right? Right?
Delete History
If the primary psychological purpose of pornography could be expressed in just two words, it would be these: 'Delete History'. Deleting my own real-life history was the reason I reached for pornography, and deleting my browser-history was the way I hid from myself the extent of my addiction.
Like Gollum, in Lord of the Rings, I desperately hoped that just one more encounter with porn would bring me the satisfaction I craved. Couldn’t I use it this one last time? Could Precious really be killing me when it felt so good for that brief moment when we were reunited? But, what was I looking for in wearing the ring of porn?
What I actually needed was something pawn-o-graphy rarely depicted: A hug; some kind words; compassion; friendship and closeness. All those things that I was rarely given as a child. This was everything that pornography promised, and everything it could never provide. Pixels can’t hug you. Pixels can’t love you. But they promise they can.
“Just wear the Ring of Power one more time,” the pixels say. “This time it will be different.”
Choose a Category
Take a look at the categories available on the average porn site, and you’ll see the deleted history of humanity: Violence; incest; exploitation; domination. I wonder now if a psychologist could accurately map the repressed early sexual experiences of a person simply by observing their preferences in pornography.
As is widely known by depth psychologists: What is not talked about is acted-out. And so much is acted out in the realm of pornography. Both by the adult performers (the majority of whom are survivors of childhood sexual abuse) and by the consumers of porn (many of whom are unconsciously reliving abuse dynamics from their own childhoods). Of course, if you are still using porn, I don’t expect you to accept this. I wouldn’t have accepted it either. Much easier to just click. Click. Click. Delete History.
A friend of mine told me she was often drawn to watching porn videos of women being handled roughly. She later came to realize this was because this same thing had been done to her by an ex-boyfriend, and by her father when he sexually abused her. Unconsciously, she had been watching these videos to place herself in a position of power during a scene in which she had originally felt so helpless. But, now, in remembering and feeling these difficult experiences, she no longer feels the need to repeat the experience by watching porn. Remembering meant that she no longer needed to repeat.
Associative conditioning likely underlies the bulk of porn preferences in the general population. When a child is subjected to sexual abuse, the child’s brain begins to connect sex with violence, or with specific objects or experiences. As neurologists say, “What fires together, wires together.”
This is called associative conditioning and was researched by the psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Associative conditioning is where one thing is paired with another thing in the mind. In other words, a stimulus is paired with a response. Pavlov would ring a bell before feeding his dog, and he kept doing this until the dog began to associate the sound of the bell with the arrival of food. Eventually, Pavlov could simply ring the bell and the dog would begin to salivate in anticipation of the food. This is associative conditioning at its most basic.
The same thing happens with sexuality. If a child’s sexual response is paired with an early childhood experience of abuse then, as an adult, that person may seek the same dynamic in their sexual encounters.
I know many survivors of childhood sexual abuse who were drawn to re-enact aspects of that abuse in adult relationships. They sought partners who were cruel and abusive to them, and they also sought out adult pornography that depicted aspects of their own abuse.
It is tragic that so many of us never wake up to the connections between our past and our present. If we did, the entire pornography industry, as we know it, would collapse overnight.
Our society has been largely shaped by international pedophile rings like the Catholic Church, the FBI and the CIA. If you are curious to learn more, look into Jeffrey Epstein. These type of authoritarian-regimes preach in the front-room that sex is shameful, while they rape children on an industrial scale in the back-room.
By raping children, and then shaming adults about sex, the church, and other institutions like the CIA, have created the perfect storm: Psychosexually arresting the natural development of human beings and then selling the ‘cure’ back to them. The result is that many adults feel unable to have open, free sexual relationships with each other, and are ushered into spaces where sex can be sold to us.
In effect, what was in the commons—sexuality—has been privatized and sold back to the people. The natural function of adult sexuality: To bind communities, build connections and intensify existing intimacy, has been nominally outlawed by the priesthood, and then commodified for private profit.
I wanted to address this question, because I think is a fair one to ask. I feel there may be a tiny subset of porn that is consensual, loving and educational. It is not impossible to depict more caring human relationships on film. But it is extremely difficult, not least because the entire dynamic of porn, and the nature of a camera which 'shoots' (and the specific term used there is interesting) people, is invasive.
Then there is the difficulty of sensitively depicting gentle human relations in the context of an industry founded on childhood sexual abuse. Additionally, there is the problem that any 'gentle' or 'ethical' porn, if such a thing exists, inevitably sits within the troubled forest of all the modern pornographic material. The users of even the most gentle pornography will ultimately find themselves walking though dense woodland where ghouls and ghosts lining the pathways, eager to usher the addict into the darkness. As every addict knows, the fastest way to fall back into substance-dependency is to kid yourself that you will be fine with "only one small sip."
What about the 'thoughtful' pornography that was created in the 1960s and 70s? Does the artistry of a small-subsection of these earlier movies permit the viewer to transcend the abuse-dynamics that besiege modern pornography? Isn't it also true that many of these 'vintage' performers are now dead, and our moral obligation to them (in the case of sensitively-made pornography) has now dropped to zero?
Sadly, there is no easy loophole to be found in older pornography. Some 70s and 80s movies are not inherently problematic from a generous ethical perspective, but the addict must seriously consider where they must go to find these films. It is increasingly hard, if not impossible, to find gentle, 'vintage' pornography without stumbling into the haunted-forest of modern porn. Personally, I feel no need to walk anywhere near that forest again, no matter if a few trees there are kind.
All the time that pawn-o-graphy was using me, I was a pawn. A pawn in a sickening game of chess played by twisted-psychologists. I have come to understand that it's no accident that children are so often raped, then later, as adults, are attracted to the porn industry. These unconscious abuse-survivors are encouraged to blindly re-enact the abuse they once suffered at home. As children, they were once paid by caregivers in the currency of attention, food and shelter. As an adult, the survivor (porn-actor) is now paid by the pornography-industry in the currency of the dollar. The dynamic however has not changed since childhood; the survivor trades their body. It is the way in which they have always been taught to relate.
It is no accident that porn videos are then used to generate revenue by luring millions of other unconscious-survivors of abuse into watching adult-performers abused and manipulated on camera. Both the porn-actor, and the viewer of pornography, are trapped in an unconscious an re-enactment of sexual-abuse. Though the specific permutations of this abuse are varied, it is a lonely, desperate pantomime.
At this point, it is fair to ask: Did a group of people actively sit down and contrive this system?
Imagine if, as a group of rulers, you wanted power and control. What if you had observed, on Earth, that human sexuality forged connections and community? What if you had observed that loving, connected sex, was one of the most powerful means of joining adults and communities together, wouldn’t you seek a way of destroying it? Wouldn’t you seek a way to make people ashamed of it? Wouldn’t you find a way to profit from it?
Our ‘leaders’ have a long history of stealing community resources and then selling them back to that community. To commodify something that is initially free to everyone, first you must create scarcity; then you must hoard what remains.
Pornography, then, is the intentional product of systematically shaming, and abusing, humanity in connection with natural sexuality. Porn is a military-operation waged against us. Once we are sufficiently hurt and ashamed, natural sexuality is supplanted by commodification. Experiences that were shared freely in our tribal communities, have been repressed, distorted, destroyed, and sold back to us.
I’m no longer consuming the products of this system. For me, as a survivor of pornography, both as a forced-participant (as a child) and as a user of adult-pornography for self-medication, I see the truth of this substance: It masked my pain and hid my past.
How did I escape the grips of this bleak addiction? I used a lot of traditional meditation practices, and a considerable amount of LSD. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising to discover that the cure to our oppression has been outlawed by our oppressors. Could it be any other way? All tyrannical systems render illegal their own demolition.
Since I have healed from my addiction, I refuse to 'Delete History' anymore. I refuse to fall back asleep. My awareness has granted me so much freedom to love. My liberation from pornography has given me my life back. I now know that everyones' personal history is worth remembering, no matter how difficult the process of healing our past.
Dear Castalia Foundation,
Thank you for this article. I have been struggling with porn addiction for many years. I have recovered from over other addictions including gambling; food; and sex, but I cannot shift my porn addiction. My dad used to distribute porn, and i was involved in this process from the age of 12. I had access to it and watched it. I also have a lot of trauma beginning in infancy. I am healing that using psychedelics, but I can’t solve my pornography addiction. I would really appreciate a bit more detail on how you got through it?
In summary, here is a summary of the steps that worked for me:
Dear Castalia Foundation, this is avery insightful article. It's so strange that things like BDSM are just blindly accepted as healthy and normal sexual expressions, rather than seen as the unconscious trauma-repetitions which they are. It’s evidence of the standard dissociative-blindness of our society, I guess.
The Castalia Foundation replies:This article originally appeared in Psychedelic Review, Issue Number 12 (Februrary 2023). It was lovingly transcribed here by volunteers at The Castalia Foundation in Millbrook, USA.
