Sixteen Years Later: What Has Changed About Porn Addiction — and What Hasn’t.

I stumbled across an old Irish Times article from 2010 where I was interviewed about pornography and sexual addiction. Sixteen years is long enough for the internet back then to look quaint. Smartphones were just taking off, social media was young, and while pornography was accessible, it lacked today's immediacy, privacy, and endless variety.

Yet re-reading it, I was struck less by what had changed than by what hadn't. Technology evolved; people didn't.

In over twenty years of working with addiction—whether alcohol, drugs, or pornography—certain themes repeat endlessly: secrecy, shame, morning promises broken by evening, and the surreal experience of watching yourself do something you desperately want to stop.

Pornography is complex because it sits where sexuality, fantasy, loneliness, and shame intersect. It is tempting to reduce the issue to the mechanics: How often? What are you watching? Why can't you just stop?

These are understandable questions, but in therapy, they miss the point. The harder, more useful question is: What is the pornography doing for you?

What happens in the minutes before you reach for it? What feelings—loneliness, anxiety, rejection, boredom, a sense of inadequacy—are you trying to avoid?

When a behavior has been repeated for years, it becomes a primary way to navigate difficult emotions. Simply stopping doesn't resolve the underlying issue; sooner or later, you still have to face those feelings without a buffer.

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

Most people arrive in therapy already overloaded with it. They have lied, spent money they couldn't afford, crossed their own boundaries, and damaged relationships. They know there is a problem. But shame is a terrible teacher. It fuels the cycle: a person uses, feels disgusted, promises to stop, feels overwhelmed days later, and returns to the behavior to escape that very distress.

Breaking that loop requires honesty, not condemnation. Good therapy holds space for responsibility without humiliation. It allows someone to look clearly at their actions and consequences while remaining curious about why a part of them keeps returning to it.

Experience has made me skeptical of simple explanations. One person uses pornography to regulate anxiety; another to avoid intimacy; another to find a world free from rejection. The behavior looks identical from the outside, but the person underneath is completely different. Treating a human being as a diagnosis misses the person behind it—their history, fears, and capacity for self-deception.

Language has shifted toward compulsive sexual behavior, dopamine, and behavioral addiction. Access moved from dial-up to pocket-sized devices. But beneath the terminology, people ask the same painful questions: Why do I keep doing this? What does this say about me?

The answer to that last question is usually far less damning than people fear. It simply means a coping mechanism has become entrenched and now costs far more than it provides. That is serious, but it is workable.

Technology will keep changing. The core work—helping someone understand themselves well enough to choose differently—will remain the same.

Original article: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/porn-was-my-husband-s-mistress-1.667613