The Porn Circuit | Covenant Eyes Internet Accountability and Filtering

CHapter 6: Habits of Freedom
create new and positive neural pathways. Simply avoiding bad habits leads to failure. Spending
time thinking about avoiding porn can bring up the mind’s storehouse of images, videos, and
encounters, which can lead to anxiety and tension that begs for release. New and rewarding
pathways are needed to avert crashes.
Neurologists agree that the old pathways that exit toward uncomfortable behaviors and acting
out won’t go away, but intentionally creating new pathways allows a person to avoid swerving
off the edge toward the crash. Over time and after building new and positive habits and
ignoring paths to porn use, the cravings for porn and the constant cues for sexual thought will
diminish and willpower will return. With practice, patience, and perseverance, freedom from
porn can be the new reality.
While that sounds simple, dopamine-driven habits developed over years of repetition are
extremely difficult to ignore in favor of new healthy alternatives. Men and women who have
masturbated to pornography since adolescence have massive numbers of pathways and cues
that lead them back again and again to pornography. The desire feels more like a survival need,
similar to food, water, and shelter. Avoiding acting out feels unhealthy, both physically and
mentally. How will they cope with stress, boredom, painful memories, sexual impulses, and
even their daily routine?
Often when the porn struggler thinks about avoiding pornography, the desire and obsession
for acting out becomes even more intense, dominating his or her thoughts and fantasies.
Because personal resistance to these porn cues is so weak, acting out is typically not far away,
and with each failure the notion of being free sounds like a fairy tale. It’s typical for a man
who is struggling with porn to convince himself that no man is really free from pornography,
avoidance only occurs in short spurts, and living without pornography will cause his mind, his
marriage, and his life more problems than wellbeing.
Of course, with help and work, men and women do break free from bad habits and addictions,
including those who feel unable to break free from masturbation and pornography.
Instinctively, the vast majority of those struggling with porn know that freedom is possible.
They are just unsure of how to get there.
There is likely no single magic formula, no one-size-fits-all recovery system, but therapists and
neurologists point to common strategies and steps that lead to real and long-term freedom.
The coming pages will briefly explore a handful of those concepts and will point to resources
for further investigation. Books and therapy practices are built on these strategies, so it will
be impossible to review each of these selections to their full extent within a few paragraphs.
However, this cursory discussion can be a valuable start.
Eureka!
Most of us have had moments of clarity that often came after working at a problem for some
time. This might happen in a classroom where a student finally understands a formula, or a
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