The Porn Cave

It seems so clear in retrospect.  Life got difficult.  Job stress.  Marital strain.  Loneliness.  Things just didn’t feel right.  During those moments, a switch flipped in our heads.  We wanted those negative feelings to go away.  We wanted the world to leave us alone.  And there it was, the place where we could find some respite: the porn cave.  Dark, inviting, enveloping.  A place many of us had first discovered as awkward adolescents stumbling through the social pain of middle and high school.  A place that had only grown deeper and darker and more enticing as we (and the internet) aged.  
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Again, and again, and again, we returned to the porn cave to escape from our lives.  Sometimes we told ourselves we’d just duck in for a minute or two, but we almost always ended up staying for hours.  Often, stopping by the porn cave became an automatic ritual at the end of a long day.  Over time, our resistance to the sudden urge to escape to the porn cave weakened to a hair-trigger.  We even found ourselves heading for the porn cave when we felt happy about something.  The porn cave was our refuge.  When we disappeared inside, the chaos of life didn’t feel so overwhelming.  In its darkness, stress and tension and sadness and anger seemed to disappear.

But outside the cave, those feelings kept roaring back. It didn’t help that long nights in the porn cave left us feeling physically and mentally spent, unable to give our all to our work, families, and lives.  We made things worse by breaking repeated promises to ourselves that we’d stop going into the porn cave, hating our inability to keep those commitments.  To soothe our anger with ourselves, where would we go?  Back to the porn cave, of course.  Where else?

New research, described in this Psychology Today post, confirms something that many of us already know from long and ugly experience.  “[W]ith porn there is a clear link between repeated attempts at mood regulation and problematic usage.”  Translation: many problem porn users head for the porn cave to avoid bad feelings, only to create a destructive feedback loop; escaping from life’s problems into the porn cave causes negative consequences, which in turn strengthens the desire to take refuge in the porn cave.

Yes, it all seems so obvious now.  The porn cave was a dive bar by another name.  A drug den.  A raid on the refrigerator.  An all-night blackjack game.  Many of us were too young or caught up in our busy lives to recognize our growing dependence on the cave’s destructive isolation.  We finally woke up to the reality.  Hiding in the cave, flooding our brains with dopamine, had become the only way we knew to quiet our minds, but our dependence on the cave was only making our problems worse.  It took confronting the painful emotions we had suppressed with porn and, with help from others, developing new ways to cope with them, to keep ourselves out of the cave for good.