Porn Equals Pleasure over Pain - Experiential Avoidance and Emotional Debt

Are you someone who dislikes being in debt?

I think we all have a sense that we don’t want to be in debt to anyone for any reason.  Better to pay for it upfront than over time.

But for many of us, there have been times when we’ve pulled out our credit card so we can make a purchase, whether it is because we need something, like car repairs or furnace replacement, or because we want it, like that 65-inch flat screen tv. 

Credit card debt can be tough to unwind because of its high interest rates and ease of use. 

If we think of emotions as a currency that keeps us balanced, you might start to be able to see how you have become an emotional debtor when choosing pornography.

For example, I used to turn to porn when I felt lonely on business trips or when the family would be out of town.  Instead of going through my lonely feelings, addressing them directly and then creating connection with myself or others to flex that muscle, I would often retreat to feeling good and getting aroused by choosing porn.

Thinking about emotions as currency, say each emotion is like a dollar.  Then each time I choose porn to avoid loneliness, I have loneliness as a single dollar and I have arousal as a dollar.  

That would be fine, if that were where the exchange ended.  I trade my loneliness for my arousal - break even everything balances out. 

But for most of us, that’s not how it works. 

After the arousal fades, the loneliness is still there.  We haven’t acutally gotten rid of it, we’ve just avoided it.  So, along with that loneliness, we add, guilt, then shame, then frustration, and even disappointment. 

Essentially, each time I create arousal to avoid loneliness by choosing porn, I create 4 new emotions with that.  But those emotions are future emotions so I don’t think about them that much.  They are interest on that good arousal feeling.  

Because, instead of paying them back like money, at some point I have to face them.  If I don’t face them, they compound and I keep feeling worse and worse.  

This whole idea is what experiential avoidance or buffering breaks down to. 

Using an artificial boost to your emotional state in order to negate the unwanted emotions in the moment at the cost of your future emotional state. 

To go back to thinking of emotions as dollars, I often ask my clients, “If I offered you a shiny, brand new, $1 coin in mint condition with no blemishes, would you give me your 5 dirtiest, oldest, most wrinkled $1 bills?”

No one ever takes that deal.  Because a dollar is a dollar.  By the same token, an emotion is an emotion, and if we don’t get good at dealing with the unwanted difficult ones, we will find ourselves compounding our negative emotions.  

If we took it as a math equation, and every day we traded 1 dollar for 5 every day for a year, we would receive 365 good feeling emotions at the cost of 1825 negative emotions.  Year after year, that would put you in quite a hole. 

Each of us has discomfort that we deal with regularly. 

Pain comes in many forms, some more painful in a moment than others.  Some are physical pains like going to the dentist, and others are emotional pain like loneliness.  

The thing is that when we avoid painful things in search of short-term happiness and pleasure, we are usually setting ourselves up for long-term pain that is worse and more damaging than the pain we were avoiding. 

A perfect example of this happened to me this month. 

As I was flossing my teeth a chunk of what I thought was tooth came off my bottom back right tooth. 

Immediately I thought, “oh, how much is this going to cost.” Being an entrepreneur, I pay all my own dental bills.  

You can see my dilemma, put it off, don’t deal with the cost of fixing the tooth now and keep my, what turned out to be $152, or pay for it now, get into the dentist 

I worked as a dental assistant growing up, my family dentist gave me a job and I loved it. I thought I would be a dentist before I got to organic chemistry.  

Having worked in a dental office, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone neglects dental work.

Anything from needing heavy-duty cleaning with a machine that basically jackhammers your teeth with sonic waves all the way up to pulling everything out because not a single tooth has enough integrity to stay in the mouth without the possibility of getting infected. 

I honestly thought I needed a crown and it was going to be really expensive.   

Taking care of my teeth is important to me and the idea of losing a tooth because of neglect is not on my list of awesome. 

Facing the bill now also means that I don’t have to face it later when it might be more expensive and have implications for my other teeth.  

A lot of what we do in life is a trade-off.  

I work out knowing that a little pain now will help me get stronger in the long run, keep my metabolism up, and help me feel good. 

We get shots knowing that the vaccines, steroids, and even painkillers that hurt some going in, will help us avoid worse, even excruciating pain in the long run. I take a testosterone shot every week, I do not like the idea of stabbing myself with a needle, but I like it better than what happens when I don’t have that shot. 

When it comes to pornography use and the struggle that you have been dealing with for years, ask yourself, am I willing to take a shot now in order to avoid an even more painful future?  What’s the value of that to you?  

What’s the cost of continued therapy sessions for you and your spouse before finally resolving this issue?  What’s the cost of all the time you’ve spent doing something that is tearing at your self-confidence?  What’s the cost of sleeping in your car because your spouse has asked you to leave?  What’s the cost of the hurt you are putting into your relationship and the trust you are breaking because of pornography use? What’s the cost of a divorce?  What’s the cost of living separate lives?  

Just like dental work, working on ourselves is something that if you don’t get in as early as you can, the cavities in your capacities can fester, grow, and get infected.  

The emotional pain that you feel when you are frustrated, stressed, lonely or even just bored are all types of immediate pain that, if we choose to ignore it, we are creating a long-term pain that will eventually become unignorable.  

When I was deep in my pornography use, there was this huge gap between how I felt and how I wanted to feel. 

I struggled so much to feel wanted, loved, and worthy that I would have done anything to get those emotions in my life.  But, like so many of us, I didn’t know how. 

I thought that when I was lonely that no one wanted me.  What I didn’t realize is that my thoughts were the cause of my loneliness. 

The problem is, that without a coach, it is really hard to see how our thoughts are keeping us from dealing with our pain in the present and taking us off into the momentary pleasures of pornography use, overeating, and social media zone out. 

Then, when we come back to ourselves, we still don’t feel wanted, loved, or worthy.  In fact, we probably feel less of each of those things and we feel worse for having done something that we might have said, “I’ll never do that again”.

One of the key skills I use to help people deal with their emotions as they come up is mindfulness.  

This is a skill that I think so many of us men have been conditioned to ignore because we have been taught that our feelings don’t matter. 

Being aware of your feelings and allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable is a skill that we don’t cultivate in our culture.

Unfortunately, that is the very thing that handicaps us when working through our pornography use habits.  We think we can push it down, fight it off, and keep it at bay.  

I can tell you from personal, long-standing experience when we choose to avoid the meaningful experience of our feelings, we are creating a long-term effect that is more harmful to ourselves and others. 

The old adage, no pain, no gain, has a ring of truth, at least in this arena, because if you try not to feel your pain, you will never be able to grow past it and become the person you want to be. 

If you want to learn more about this, I am holding a webinar on how to deal with your urges on Thursday.  You can register at my website, zachspafford.com by clicking the “free masterclass” link at the top right of the page. 

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zachspafford.com/freecall