Teens vulnerable to porn addiction
Access to porn is a pandemic that could be worse than drug abuse
I’VE BEEN out of town for a few days, consulting on addiction at a couple of schools in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. It’s 5.30am as I settle down to write this article. It’s cold and misty; the eeriness is palpable.
For a moment it feels like I’m on the set of one of my alltime favourite movies. There’s a scene in which they all sneak out the hostel into the woods in the dead of night.
A bewitching background tune sets the tone as the boys glide silently through the mist and trees towards The Old Indian Cave.
They just don’t make movies like that anymore. Today, it’s the movies rated 16SNVL that are instant sell-outs.
I don’t see the point of age restrictions anymore, what with all the sex, murder and drugs written into the topic of almost all the movies I’ve seen lately.
As much as this is a concern, movies are the least of our worries when we take porn addiction into account.
Access to internet porn is a pandemic on the same level – if not worse – as drug and alcohol abuse.
It is especially concerning as the exposure is adversely affecting our teenagers’ emotional development. It infiltrates their lives with unrealistic and distorted expressions of sexual relations and sets them up for sex addiction.
I use the word relations loosely because porn is centred on a sexual experience that is isolating, visceral, and void of love and compassion. It creates a scenario in which a loving relationship means nothing while immediate sexual gratification means everything.
While watching porn, the adolescent brain is being shaped and programmed to view the physical experience as real or “truth”.
It is this portrayal of “truth” that has the potential to lead to problems in sexual compulsivity and sex addiction throughout the adolescent’s life.
The brain is shaped to expect all future real-life experiences to offer them the same drug-like dopamine rush it gets from porn.
Pornography paints an unrealistic picture of sexuality and relationships that can create an expectation for reallife experiences that will never be fulfilled.
Between the ages of 12 and 20, the human brain undergoes neuroplasticity.
The brain is in a malleable phase during which billions of new synaptic connections are being made.
This leaves the adolescent vulnerable to environmental influences, including the visuals it absorbs.
Much like drug or alcohol abuse, frequent and repeated pornographic visuals, develop a strong neural pathway to that behaviour.
The activity becomes the norm and a tolerance develops, much like drug addiction.
Soon, the porn that was viewed in the beginning (gateway drug) becomes boring and the abuser looks for more exciting visuals, sexting, chat rooms, sex-dating sites and dangerous liaisons like prostitution or swinging.
For those with a predisposition for addiction, it could develop into a chronic bio-psychosocial disease, just as it would for the alcoholic or drug addict.
Even if it doesn’t develop into full-blown addiction, studies show that pornographic exposure can either cause or heighten severe depression.
And as I’ve mentioned earlier, it portrays a dysfunctional view on intimacy, love and relationships.
It’s an instant, one-sided affair at the push of a button. The sanctity of family, love and marriage is under siege. Pornography is like jet fuel to the engine of divorce and loneliness. It is naïve and dangerous to think that porn is harmless. The brain reacts to viewing images as intensely as it does to reality.
I recently counselled two porn addicts, both in their mid-20s.
They displayed physical withdrawal symptoms during detoxification (no access to a phone or laptop).
They manifested physical withdrawal symptoms such as sweating, puking, shivering, weeping and intense anxiety which lasted up to five days in both cases – something you would generally expect from heroin or aggressive alcohol detoxification.
Where to from here? Much like other addictions, we need to focus on effective preventative therapy in our homes and schools. We can no longer hide under a blanket of denial or embarrassment.
The response to “my kid is watching porn, what do I do?” is: you talk about it. You ask lots of gentle questions. Your kid squirms and looks coy. You squirm.
No one is comfortable talking about this in the beginning but you talk anyway. That’s what parents do. They talk about life.
If you don’t open the dialogue about sex education early enough, who do you think will? Someone (peer) or something (internet) is going to beat you to it.
You can also do practical things like capping data or putting explicit site filters on your child’s smartphone or laptop. Popular search engines log more than 10 billion searches each month.
Three billion of those are for pornography. With the invention of the internet and other devices to log on to, including that smartphone your 12-yearold has, anyone can watch porn at any time.
There are about 420 million adult web pages online designed to capture the viewers’ attention.
Many of which are free to a child of any age. Time to consider this, isn’t it?