EVAN has agreed to collaborate from time to time with Porn Recovery UK about his process of working with a 30-year porn habit. Here’s his seventh blog.

I’ve just come back from a therapy session and I’m still thinking about why, when I’ve been doing so well, I should choose to sabotage myself. I’ve just been talking about how I can see that self-sabotage is a pattern in my life – both at work and at home. I can see how I’ve been using porn to smooth out pretty much all my emotional ups and downs – just like taking a tablet. It really closes down my horizons, closes down my thinking and then my feelings. It’s really interesting to be faced with how vulnerable I am to porn. Clearly not all people who use it are like me. I long for the idea of being able to just go ‘porn-lite’.

My therapist talks about my choices, how I have to decide where to set the bar of what I can view and what I can’t. I thought I was doing okay with that idea, and then I binged on the stuff. I took myself to a really dark place with it yesterday. I looked for the destructive stuff to me. Talking about it in therapy just now, I can see how I am using it to punish myself. I’m not going to write about those details here (at least not yet – if ever) but I can see how I’m trying to work through my past messed-up stuff.  My therapist made an analogy to the way people sometimes use sexual fantasies to work out past sexual trauma – like when people have been abused. Although nothing like that happened to me, there is relationship stuff that I can see I’m trying to fix – or is it destroy? – when I look at the heavy, nasty porn.
I’m not going to beat myself up here but I do wish I could have the beautiful sexy images without it triggering me to the dark stuff. I’m not one of the lucky people who can use porn without consequences – even though my therapists says they really do exist.

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