When Pornography Use Starts to Feel Out of Control

Pornography is more accessible than it has ever been. For many people, using it is simply one part of their sexuality and causes them little or no difficulty.

For others, however, the relationship with pornography can begin to feel much more complicated.

Perhaps you find yourself watching for longer than you intended. You might repeatedly decide that you are going to stop, only to return to it again. Maybe the type or amount of pornography you use has changed over time, or you have started hiding your use from a partner.

For some people, it begins to affect their relationship, sexual functioning, work or everyday life. For others, the biggest difficulty is the shame they feel afterwards.

At this point, people often arrive at therapy asking the same question:

“Am I addicted to porn?”

It is an understandable question. But it may not always be the most useful place to begin.

Is pornography actually addictive?

The language around pornography can become polarised very quickly.

At one end, pornography is sometimes presented as inherently harmful or addictive. At the other, concerns about pornography can be dismissed as simply being the result of shame or conservative attitudes towards sex.

As a sex-positive therapist, I believe the reality is usually more nuanced.

Rather than beginning with a label, I am often more interested in understanding the relationship someone has developed with the behaviour.

How much control do you feel you have over it?

What happens before you reach for pornography?

What does it provide for you in that moment?

And perhaps most importantly: what is happening emotionally when the urge appears?

For one person, pornography might simply be pleasurable sexual material. For another, it may have gradually become a reliable way of regulating anxiety, loneliness, boredom, stress, rejection or difficult feelings.

The behaviour may look similar from the outside, but psychologically it can be doing something very different.

When sexual behaviour becomes a way of coping

We all develop ways of managing uncomfortable emotions.

Some people work excessively. Some drink. Some scroll endlessly through their phone. Others exercise, eat, shop or withdraw.

Sexual behaviour can also become a means of emotional regulation.

Pornography can offer something particularly powerful: it is immediately available, absorbing, stimulating and capable of temporarily changing how we feel.

That doesn’t necessarily make the behaviour pathological.

But difficulties can develop when it becomes one of the only ways we know how to soothe ourselves.

A pattern can begin to emerge:

difficult feeling → urge → pornography → temporary relief → shame or regret → promise to stop → difficult feeling → urge

Over time, someone may become intensely focused on stopping the behaviour without ever exploring what the behaviour has been helping them manage.

That is one reason simply telling yourself to “have more willpower” often isn’t enough.

Shame can become part of the cycle

Pornography is also surrounded by powerful cultural messages about sexuality, relationships, gender and morality.

People can feel enormous shame about what they watch or how often they watch it.

Sometimes that shame reflects behaviour that genuinely conflicts with the person’s values or is affecting their life or relationships.

But sometimes the distress is also influenced by what the person believes their sexual thoughts or behaviours say about them.

That distinction matters.

Feeling ashamed of something does not automatically mean that the behaviour is disordered. Equally, telling somebody that they simply need to become more accepting of their sexuality can overlook genuine experiences of lost control or distress.

Therapy needs room for both possibilities.

What does “out of control” actually mean?

Rather than focusing solely on frequency, I think it can be more useful to consider the wider impact.

You might ask yourself:

• Do I feel able to choose whether or not I engage with pornography?
• Have I repeatedly tried to reduce or stop and found that difficult?
• Is it interfering with relationships, work, sleep or other areas of my life?
• Am I becoming increasingly secretive about my behaviour?
• Do I continue despite consequences I don’t want?
• Has pornography become my main way of dealing with difficult emotions?
• Does my use fit with the kind of sexual and relational life I actually want?

Someone could use pornography relatively frequently without experiencing these difficulties.

Someone else might use it less frequently but experience significant distress around it.

Frequency alone doesn’t tell us the whole story.

Pornography and relationships

Pornography can become particularly complicated when another person is involved.

A partner discovering hidden pornography use can experience it as rejection, secrecy or betrayal. The person using pornography may simultaneously feel misunderstood, ashamed or frightened that their relationship is at risk.

Arguments can then become focused entirely on whether pornography is “right” or “wrong”.

Often there are more useful questions underneath.

What has secrecy meant within the relationship?

What does each person understand fidelity to mean?

Has sexual intimacy changed?

Is pornography replacing something, or has it become a response to difficulties that were already present?

These conversations are rarely helped by reducing one person to “the addict” and the other to “the partner of an addict”.

Relationships and sexuality tend to be more complicated than that.

What might therapy explore?

Psychosexual therapy isn’t about telling somebody what their sex life should look like.

Nor is the aim necessarily to make someone stop using pornography.

Instead, therapy can provide space to become curious about the behaviour.

We might explore when the pattern began, what tends to trigger it, how pornography fits alongside masturbation and partnered sex, previous sexual experiences, relationships, attachment, shame, anxiety, loneliness or stress.

We might also think about what happens in the body immediately before the behaviour and whether there are other ways of responding to whatever is happening emotionally.

For some people, reducing or stopping pornography may be an important personal goal.

For others, the work may be about developing a different relationship with it – one that feels chosen rather than compulsive.

The direction of therapy should ultimately reflect the person sitting in the room.

Moving from judgement towards curiosity

If pornography has started to feel out of control, it can be tempting to divide yourself into two parts: the part that desperately wants to stop and the part that keeps doing it.

That internal battle can generate enormous shame.

Therapy offers the possibility of asking a different question.

Rather than only asking:

“How do I make myself stop?”

we can also begin asking:

“What is happening for me when I need this?”

That doesn’t mean ignoring responsibility or the consequences of our behaviour.

It means recognising that lasting change is often easier when we understand a behaviour rather than simply declaring war on it.

And sometimes, understanding what pornography has been doing for us is the first step towards having more choice about what happens next.