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Nurglitch wrote:Does he suck d***k for porn? Because that's not addiction, addiction is the broken end of a glass pipe in your mouth because you have convulsions if you don't. Besides, why the heck don't you have blocking software on your computer? Is it so hard to turn off all images so you don't have to play google-seppuku whenever you download a site?

He just couldn't stop looking at the stuff and acting on it. Another aquaintence had a divorce because of porn, since he, in his own words, "Couldn't give up his girls" . His wife chucked him and moved on to a good life while he just got more pathetic with the stuff. That in my mind is addiction, when someone can't give something up and their life goes to Hell in a handbasket because of it.

Quality of life is a relative sort of thing. That's why it becomes difficult to sort out what is a reasonable bias, and a harmful addiction.

If you're married you forfeit the ability to chase girls. That's harmful in the sense that girl chasing has been broken out of your life. Are you therefore addicted to your wife?

dogma wrote:Quality of life is a relative sort of thing. That's why it becomes difficult to sort out what is a reasonable bias, and a harmful addiction.

If you're married you forfeit the ability to chase girls. That's harmful in the sense that girl chasing has been broken out of your life. Are you therefore addicted to your wife?

Wait?..you mean you have to stop chasing girls when you get married?...Damn!maybe that explains why I keep getting divorced.

dogma:

That's why its useful to distinguish between bad habits and addictions. Habituation can apply to nearly anything, and by virtue ethics what distinguishes a good person are their good habits. An 'addiction' to porn isn't a real addiction: there's no substance that the person is deprived of apart from a preferred schedule of brain chemistry. I'd imagine that if a guy's life sucks so much that he'd choose porn over his wife, he's probably got much bigger problems that his 'porn addiction' is no more than the reaction of any other caged animal.

The trick to dehabituation is easy: a schedule. Once your habit is scheduled, you can slowly reschedule it out of your life. That's how people fall out of exercise regimes, drift away from hobbies, and so on. Addictions, on the other hand, don't respond to retraining and require chemical intervention as well as behavioural therapy.

Here's an online dictionary definition of addiction:

"the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma."

Getting a divorce or having to go to a treatment center seems fairly traumatic to me.

Your knowledge of porn habituation is deep, good sir.

You're using the word trauma in its colloquial sense, not its clinical sense. A divorce isn't implicitly traumatic, neither is therapy. Giving up pornography does not cause people to disassociate from their own experiences the way something like PTSD does.

In order for porn to be addictive, a person subject to the addiction would have to experience difficulty integrating his porn free life with memories of his porn focused life. Addiction isn't simply liking something more than another person believes that you should.

The definition of trauma, courtesy of dictionary .com:

"1. Pathology. a. a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident.
b. the condition produced by this; traumatism.

2. Psychiatry. a. an experience that produces psychological injury or pain.
b. the psychological injury so caused."

The second definition applies in the instances I refer to.

Relapse wrote:The definition of trauma, courtesy of dictionary .com:

"1. Pathology. a. a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident.
b. the condition produced by this; traumatism.

2. Psychiatry. a. an experience that produces psychological injury or pain.
b. the psychological injury so caused."

The second definition applies in the instances I refer to.

I'm amused by your screen name in this instance.

malfred wrote:

Relapse wrote:The definition of trauma, courtesy of dictionary .com:

"1. Pathology. a. a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident.
b. the condition produced by this; traumatism.

2. Psychiatry. a. an experience that produces psychological injury or pain.
b. the psychological injury so caused."

The second definition applies in the instances I refer to.

I'm amused by your screen name in this instance.

Damn! Caught me with my pants down!

Relapse wrote:
2. Psychiatry. a. an experience that produces psychological injury or pain.
b. the psychological injury so caused."

The second definition applies in the instances I refer to.

What psychological injury has been caused by giving up pornography? In the instance you described the subject went through a divorce in order to maintain his access to porn.

The psycological injury and pain was caused by the fact the woman felt inadequate and even though the person in question didn't want the divorce, he was so deep in that he couldn't give it up even to save his marraige.
The psycological injury to the boy is thae fact he went through 10 kinds of Hell to give up porn.

It was ugly times all around for all concerned that I witnessed.
A person doesn't have to be rolling on the floor in sweats to be going through trauma. I think you know that.

Relapse wrote:The psycological injury and pain was caused by the fact the woman felt inadequate and even though the person in question didn't want the divorce, he was so deep in that he couldn't give it up even to save his marraige.
The psycological injury to the boy is thae fact he went through 10 kinds of Hell to give up porn.

In both those cases the injury was caused by the intervention of others. The act of giving up pornography caused no injury. You're conflating the two occurrences.

Relapse wrote:
It was ugly times all around for all concerned.
A person doesn't have to be rolling on the floor in sweats to be going through trauma. I think you know that.

But the trauma must be the direct result of giving up a thing in order for that thing to be addictive. Otherwise its simply a matter of preference.

It seems to me that the cases you're discussing are vexing you because you simply can't wrap your mind around a set of priorities that are so different from your own.

What, you mean like the psychological pain and injury that an athlete feels because they can't accomplish a particular athletic feat? Bull-poop.

The problem is that people think that there's this "Will" and if only they exercise it that they'll be able to do something. That's utter crap. People will only successful do what they are trained to do. Nobody gets up and decides to live their life in a different way, and that's why when they do they always relapse back into old habits. The problem is not that they can't break the habit, the problem is that they don't know how to break the habit.

I used to swim with people that would injure their jobs thanks to bad habits that they had, who wouldn't improve because they wouldn't change their habits and reinforced their habits of practicing to swim slowly. Many of them eventually fell out of the habit of swimming altogether because it was too hard to change a habit of slacking off when they were actively reinforcing that habit through their daily behaviour.

There was no psychological injury in the case of Relapses son in law (brother in law?) and his wife Hurt feelings are not psychological injury. That's an abrogation of responsibility, of pleading incapacity when the real problem is ignorance. Talk to someone with a real mental illness and the first thing you notice is not that the person is simply unhappy, but that they are unhappy because ordinary social interaction is so far beyond their capabilities. The problem with the DSM manuals is that a lay person reading it reads all sorts of behaviour into the descriptions when they don't realize the extremity of the behaviour and simply believe it to be the sorts of behaviour they would identify with the commonplace, rather than the technical, meanings of the medical terms in the manual.

Basically, trying to pathologize something is understandable because any time anyone feels anything immediately out of their control is totally out of their control, adults will over-generalize that something that would merely have been difficult was actually impossible so there's no loss of face in giving up. We do this because jumping to such conclusions is an efficient (if not terribly efficacious) habit we learn (or unlearn as the case may be) after a childhood of rigorous experimentation, trial and error (presumably after getting fed up with error and noticing that prejudice is easier even when you're wrong).

The downside is that people begin to think silly things like the notion that being unhappy is a mental illness, when depression isn't simply being unhappy (that's one symptom), or that they're addicted when they've simply formed habits, or whatever else makes it easier for them to just drift along rather than taking the time and effort to change their circumstances and habits.

So yes, a person does have to be undergoing a physiological reaction to the deprivation of a substance to be addicted. Being miserable because change is hard is perfectly normal and a healthy reaction: making an easy about face is more indicative of mental illness since it indicates things like bipolar disorder or dissassociative personality disorders, or any other disordered way of trying to ignore stress rather than experiencing it and reacting to it.

@Dogma,

Just about every counceler I know would disagree with you.

"Addiction" is a good example of a word that is used more often in a metaphorical rather than an exact sense. It is of course possible to profitably compare heroin addiction with the habit of looking at pornography online (if such is your agenda) but these two things are not actually the same or even significantly alike in a literal sense.

I'm intrigued and convinced by a lot of what Nurglitch has had to say. I think Shelley Lubben's story conflates internal problems with their external expressions. What makes it so interesting to me is the casual way that she slips between talking about the natural, quantifiable world and pseudo-mystical experiences. Even Pat Robertson does not do so as effectively as this lady. She has an archaic quality about her, like a relic from before the Enlightenment. It's kind of frightening how paradoxically compelling she comes across, at least IMO.

Here's an interesting site about the subject:

http://www.sexualcontrol.com/pornography-addiction-counseling.html

I'll trade you links:

http://www.sexed.org/newsletters/issue01.html#myth

The concept of "sex addiction" is a set of moral beliefs disguised as science, as reflected in these fundamental concepts of "sex addiction" training programs and Sexaholics Anonymous:

Sex is most healthy in committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships
There are "obvious" limits to healthy sexual expression (for example, masturbation more than once a day)
Choosing to use sex to feel better about yourself or to escape from problems is unhealthy.

The concept of "sex addiction" really rests upon the assumption that sex is dangerous. There's the sense that we frail humans are vulnerable to the Devil's temptations of pornography, masturbation, "promiscuity," and extramarital affairs, and that if we yield, we become "addicted."

Here's a link: NSFW

Contains adult-content, may not be suitable for minors, etc.

Here's a simplistic demonstration of the difference between a pathological and metaphorical addiction. In the case of the former, contact (usually repeated contact) causes a chemical dependence that prefaces any psychological dependence. If this were the case with so-called "sex addiction" or "pornography addiction," then one would suspect that pornstars would be the most obvious victims of both given their frequent contact with both. But neither Mrs. Lubben nor any of the women she has helped leave the porn industry complain of being addicted to either sex or pornography.

@Manchu,

Some definite interesting points the person brings up. I especially liked what was said about that farce "Who wants to marry a millionaire?"

@Nurglitch,

Thanks for the link, but before I go, what is there that is adult oriented?

Relapse wrote:@Dogma,

Just about every counceler I know would disagree with you.

I'd wager that most counselors have a very tenuous understanding of the word 'addiction'. If only because most counselors are likely to be people of average intelligence who have been versed in a methodology that focuses on stigma, rather the precision.

Basically, the word addiction is used to label behaviors which a certain segment of people do not identify with. This is, in large part, due to the fact that most people associate their own leanings with propriety, rather than predilection.

"Counseling" itself is becoming a more and more nebulous term as the number of professional "counselers" continues to dramatically increase.

Relapse:

It's written by a person named "Annie Sprinkle" who styles herself as a sexual educator and current/former porn actress. I believe you may see her nipples if you look closely, as well as links to her repetoire of books, videos, educational workshops, and so on.

Manchu wrote:"Counseling" itself is becoming a more and more nebulous term as the number of professional "counselers" continues to dramatically increase.

I'm a self-professed Badass Counselor.

I'll help YOU channel your inner Jet Li!

@Nurglitch: I thought those were fake breasts (like bra inserts, not a boob job).

Kanluwen wrote:I'll help YOU channel your inner Jet Li!

Would prefer your course on Jean-Claude.

The course on Jean-Claude is full up.

ON BADASS PATRIOTISM!

I counsel people in the way of the platypus.

Ahtman wrote:

Orlanth wrote:explaining talking to God to a sceptic is like explaining colour to the blind.

Isn't the inverse just as true though? A skeptic explaining why it is odd to talk to a mythic being is like explaining colour to the blind. No traction will be made either way.

Not really. You see faith comes first, then the relationship. However once you are talking to God its hard to ignore the fact that He is no myth. It gets all too obvious when God says the same thing to several different people at once with none of the recipients communicating with each other at the time only to discover retrospectively that several people giot the same message. I have noticed this a number of times.

Furthermore I can understand how it is not to believe in God, and can experience what the skeptic does, but the opposite is seldom true. I am in a better position than a skeptic, the skeptic guesses at what they don't have experience of, I know what I have seen and heard. In this I am lucky, many other have a strong faith but have not been blessed this way, why, I don't know.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Nurglitch wrote:Explaining the voices in your head to a sane person is like explaining colour to the blind, except you're crazy.

Heavily loaded. I make no aspersions on the mental health of skeptics, I suggest you do me the same courtesy. There is a world of difference between a relationship with God and 'voices in your head', the latter implies persons of highly unstable behaviour and is easy to distinguish from people of faith.

@Orlanth: I think the point that Ahtman was trying to get across was that there is no reason for a skeptic to believe that a believer's perspective is any closer to the truth or otherwise more reasonable than his own. The sentiment that skeptics are like the blind compared to believers is at least of heavily loaded as Nurglitch's post, if more (perhaps unintentionally) subtle.