5 Steps to Breaking Free from Porn _Joe Dallas (2)

when young men look at photos of beautiful women.” 1 These same circuits
activated by pleasure can then hijack the brain—in essence, sending messages
to a person’s brain saying that he genuinely needs what, in fact, he only craves
but can really do without.
All of this makes pleasure a permanent prompter. That is, when you repeat
the pleasurable experience associated with porn, you actually train your
brain’s circuitry to register porn as a necessity, a need, a requirement, although
it clearly isn’t. This, in turn, prompts your brain and body to send stronger
craving signals, making you feel that your desire for porn is a physical need.
You just gotta have it. And this is when the struggle between flesh and spirit
gets ferocious. By developing the porn habit, you trained your brain to expect
the chemical rush it experiences when you anticipate and then use unclean
material.
And there’s more bad news. Some studies indicate that prolonged porn use
decreases a man’s ability to be sexually aroused by normal marital relations. 2
This, logically, creates sexual problems in his marriage. Other studies show
that viewing pornography decreases a positive attitude toward women in
general. This can enhance desires ranging from unnatural acts to violence. 3
In general, not only does the porn habit cause the brain to crave a repetition
of the pleasure, it darkens the mind as well. At the very least, you’ve done
some “mind damage” by developing this pattern of vulnerability to (and
possibly dependency on) erotic images. That’s a part of yourself that, as the
apostle Paul said, you need to “take heed to” because it accounts for much of
the temptation you’re likely to experience. The man with a porn habit is a man
who’s trained his system to expect regular doses of the chemical rush porn
brings.
Principle 2: Wounds crave remedy.
Compounding the problem of giving up porn can be the emotional pain we
may feel that, in turn, makes us vulnerable to relapses as we seek to selfmedicate
the pain. Realistically, no one is exempt from emotional pain,
whether pains from childhood or the present. But sometimes the combination of
deep hurts that have never been properly dealt with plus the habit of
medicating the hurt with the pleasure of porn use, creates a pretty sturdy
bondage.