People rarely come to therapy because they watch pornography.

They come because something has changed.

Perhaps the amount of time has increased. The material has become more extreme. There has been spending, secrecy or lying. Sex with a partner has become less interesting or more difficult. A relationship is in trouble. Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all, but there is the increasingly uncomfortable knowledge that I don't seem to have as much control over this as I thought I did.

I've worked with addiction and compulsive behaviour for more than twenty years, and with sexual and pornography-related problems for much of that time.

People sometimes arrive expecting me to tell them whether they are an “addict”.

I'm usually more interested in what is actually happening in their life.

If you've tried repeatedly to stop or cut down and haven't managed it; if pornography or sexual behaviour is taking up increasing amounts of your time; if you're concealing it from somebody you love; or if the consequences are becoming serious and you continue anyway, then something deserves attention.

Whatever we eventually decide to call it.

Why can't I just stop?

This is often the question underneath everything else.

And frequently it comes with considerable self-contempt.

What's wrong with me?

Why am I doing this again?

I've promised myself a hundred times.

Sometimes people arrive with an elaborate system already in place: deleting apps, blocking websites, avoiding certain situations, making promises to partners, counting days.

Some of these things can be useful.

But I've never been terribly interested in treating addiction simply as a battle between willpower and temptation.

If a behaviour keeps returning, I want to know why.

Pornography and sexual behaviour can serve very different purposes for different people. It may provide relief from anxiety or loneliness. It may offer escape from boredom, anger or rejection. For somebody else it may provide intensity in a life that otherwise feels rather empty. Sometimes it allows sexual experience without the vulnerability and uncertainty involved in being intimate with another person.

And sometimes a behaviour has simply been repeated for so long that the person barely notices the circumstances in which it begins.

Understanding that doesn't excuse behaviour or remove responsibility for its consequences.

It gives us somewhere useful to start.

Shame usually arrives before you do

The longer I do this work, the less faith I have in shame as an agent of change.

Most people who contact me about pornography or sexual behaviour don't need somebody to tell them that things have gone wrong.

They already know.

Some are carrying secrets they've kept for years. Some have been discovered by a partner. Others haven't been discovered and live with the anxiety that eventually they will be.

There can be a peculiar loneliness to it. The person may have a partner, children, friends and a perfectly ordinary-looking life while keeping an entire part of themselves hidden.

Therapy needs to be somewhere that this can actually be spoken about.

That doesn't mean pretending consequences don't matter. If somebody has lied, betrayed a partner or behaved in ways that have caused harm, those things need to be faced.

But facing something honestly is different from being humiliated by it.

When a partner discovers the pornography or sexual behaviour

Sometimes the person contacting me isn't the person using pornography.

It's their partner. Discovery can be devastating, particularly where there has been prolonged secrecy or repeated lying. The argument can quickly become about whether pornography “should” be a problem.That often misses what's actually happened.

many partners, the deepest injury isn't simply the sexual behaviour. It's discovering that the relationship they thought they were living in wasn't quite the relationship that actually existed.

Trust can be badly shaken.

The person who has been discovered may desperately want everything to return to normal and become frustrated that reassurance isn't working. The partner may become preoccupied with checking, questioning and trying to establish what else they don't know.

Both can end up trapped in a cycle neither particularly understands.

Recovery, where a couple wants it, involves considerably more than stopping the behaviour.

What happens in therapy?

There isn't a programme into which I put everybody. I've been doing this too long to believe that two people with the same behaviour necessarily have the same problem.

We will certainly look at the behaviour itself: frequency, escalation, triggers, attempts to stop and the consequences it is having. But I will also want to understand you.

Your relationships. Your history. How you deal with difficult feelings. Your experience of intimacy. What happens when you're lonely, rejected, angry or frightened. What sex means to you. What pornography gives you that ordinary life perhaps doesn't. Some of this work is practical. Some of it goes considerably deeper.The aim isn't simply to accumulate days without pornography.It's to reach a point where you understand yourself sufficiently well that the behaviour no longer has to do the job it has been doing.

More than twenty years working with addiction

I began working professionally with addiction more than two decades ago.

In 2010, while working as Director of Addictive Behaviours Centre Ireland, I was interviewed by The Irish Times about pornography, sexual addiction and the effects these behaviours can have on relationships.I recently went back and read that article again.

A great deal has changed since then. Pornography has moved from something accessed primarily through computers to something instantly available on the device most of us carry everywhere.What struck me more, though, was how familiar the human part of the article still felt.The technology changed. People didn't change nearly as much.

[Read my reflection on sixteen years of working with pornography and sexual addiction →]

[Read the original 2010 Irish Times article → https://www.irishtimes.com/news/porn-was-my-husband-s-mistress-1.667613

Do I have to call myself a sex or porn addict?

No.

There is considerable debate around terminology in this area, and different clinicians use different frameworks.For me, the label is secondary.

If pornography or sexual behaviour feels increasingly outside your control, if you've repeatedly tried to change it without success, or if it's damaging your relationships, sex life, work, finances or sense of yourself, that's enough reason to talk about it.

We can work out the language later.

Online therapy throughout Ireland

I work online with adults throughout Ireland.

For some people discussing pornography or sexual behaviour online is actually easier. You can attend from somewhere private, without travelling to a clinic or worrying about meeting somebody you know in a waiting room.

The first session isn't an interrogation and you don't need to arrive with everything neatly explained.

We'll start with what's happening and why you've decided to seek help now.

If you'd like to discuss working with me, you can contact me confidentially to arrange an initial appointment.

Contact Declan at info@meaningfulchangecounselling.com or by wattsap at 086-8056654