How To Stop Porn Addiction – Interview With Gary Wilson

Today we have brought on porn addiction expert Gary Wilson to discuss how to stop porn addiction and the effects of porn addiction on the brain.

While we’re happy to discuss this topic, we also believe that viewing porn isn’t a sign that someone is addicted – and that’s why we’d like to discuss this topic with Gary.

If you feel like your partner is avoiding intimacy with you, is watching porn too much, or watching porn is hurting your relationship, be sure to keep reading.

To be clear, we are in no way saying watching porn is flat-out bad. In fact, one of our guests says it’s a way to spice up sex and create healthy conversations. Some of our guests, who have ranged from sexual education experts, marriage therapists, and researchers, have all said, “watching porn alone isn’t bad.

In fact, it can be good if the couple can talk about it and create healthy agreements.

But, if it’s not used properly and intelligently, it can do much more harm than good – from sexual dysfunction, sexual interest, to the way your brain works.”

Watching porn affects relationships

The best takeaway here is – time watching porn alone isn’t good or bad. What matters is how it affects and impacts you, your partner, and your relationship.

Porn addiction is a problem for more couples and singles than most of us would like to think it is.

Sadly, many porn addicts are in the closet and would never admit it to themselves or anyone else.

Quite often in my work, I have found that it’s usually wives who feel hurt by their husbands who have an urge to watch porn.

Not certainly, because porn use can become the ‘second woman’, and then watching porn becomes a replacement for intimacy for men.

In this interview, we talk about the research, the impact of time watching porn, and how couples and singles can quit their addiction. In one of our upcoming episodes, we’ll also discuss how can you talk to your partner about their porn use, how to request more intimacy, and why it hurts that your partner is watching porn (even if they’re not addicted).

Today, we’ve done our best to touch on these points, but more than anything, this episode is to look at what is porn addiction and what it does to the brain.

As a relationship coach who’s worked with nearly 1,000 couples and participated in the nation’s largest research project on marital success, I know that when there’s a porn use addiction or just an unhealthy relationship with porn – it can hurt relationships.

What Is Porn Addiction And How To Spot It

Porn addiction can best be described as having such a strong compulsion to watch pornography that you’re willing to risk your marriage, job, friendships, and life in order to watch it.

In many cases, time watching porn itself doesn’t mean there is a sex addiction. When the urge to watch porn interrupts your marriage, or the health of your job or disrupts your ability to have a healthy sex life with your partner – then it’s time to consider that it’s become an addiction.

According to many reports and studies with sex therapists, they found that 86% of people who have the urge to watch porn were negatively affected, and 90% of people saw an increase in relationship problems due to porn.

Why Does Porn Hurt Relationships?

In my work as a relationship coach, I’ve learned that watching porn hurts couples when:

• Someone is sneaking off to watch pornography and can’t talk about it with their partner (it feels like a betrayal to one partner or like a secret)
• Someone who may want to watch porn and has wild fantasies that they won’t share with their partner (it makes one partner feel inadequate and insecure)
• One partner watches porn but won’t initiate sexuality with their partner (porn becomes like a secret partner and makes the relationship devoid of fun, sexy connection)
• Someone is spending a lot of time watching porn (it starts to feel like the partner has a sex addiction and time as a couple is being lost)

Related Article: Should I Be Upset That My Husband Watches Porn?

These are just some of the ways that porn use can hurt couples. Watching porn doesn’t certainly hurt relationships, but if the issues above are present in your relationship – the best choice is to talk about it.

How To Ask Your Partner To Stop Watching Porn

If you feel that your partner is watching porn too much or it’s hurting your relationship and affecting the intimacy (sexual and emotional) of your relationship – try to talk to your partner about it. Don’t shame your partner, but try saying something like:

“I’ve noticed you’ve been watching porn. I don’t want you to feel shamed by me. I just feel sad about it because I’ve noticed we’re not connecting intimately and sexually like we used to. I’d really like to connect, and I’m afraid porn use is getting in the way of that.”

This may not certainly make your partner agree with you, but it gets the conversation started. It also gives you a way to communicate to your partner that you want more intimacy and that you feel porn use is causing a divide or is being as an outlet.

Quite often, it’s not porn use alone that is the issue. It’s that your partner and you aren’t connecting.

Related Article: My Husband Watches Porn, What Can I Do?

Some Interesting Stats Regarding Porn Addiction

According to stats, 12% of website pages are pornographic. As you listen to today’s episode, it’s good to be aware that if someone watches pornography – it doesn’t mean they’re addicted.

It could mean, though, that their brain wiring for intimacy is affected. As for addiction, studies indicate that 5-8% of the population is addicted to porn – meaning they can’t control themselves and feel such a strong impulse to watch porn that it negatively impacts their lives.

Here are some other stats from Psych Central regarding pornography that you may find interesting.

Stats on what happens when you watch porn excessively

• 25% of search engine requests are related to sex.
• 35% of downloads from the internet are pornographic websites.
• 40 million Americans say they regularly visit pornographic websites.
• 70% of men aged 18 to 24 visit a site with pornographic material at least once per month.
• The largest consumer group of online porn use is men between the ages of 35 and 49.
• One-third of all internet pornographic content users are women.
• Sunday is the most popular day of the week for viewing porn.
• Thanksgiving is the most popular day of the year for viewing porn.
• About 56% of divorce fillings cite, ‘an obsessive interest’ in pornographic websites.
• About 28% of people who use computers at work also view pornography while at work.

Pornography use can hurt healthy relationships

When you watch porn, there’s a potential that it can hurt a couple’s relationship. Heavy watching porn and certain types of porn use can lead to disinterest in sex with your partner, dysfunction in sex, and lack of intimacy in marriages.

If porn is a part of your life (or your partner’s) and you’re finding there is unhealthy porn addiction, a dull sex life, infidelity, or an abusive relationship – today’s episode could be very enlightening because porn could very well be playing a part.

Do you want to know how to stop porn addiction and get your life back? Addiction to internet porn not only causes sexual dysfunction but it also destroys relationships.

In this podcast episode, Gary Wilson, porn addiction expert and author of Your Brain on Porn, explains why men tend to get addicted to pornographic content. He also talks about how porn affects people. Gary Wilson shares tips on how to stop porn addiction and how partners can help each other to overcome their addiction.

Key Takeaways From Interview With Gary Wilson How To Stop Porn Addiction

• The biggest problem is it’s probably altering sexual taste, sometimes reducing the attraction between partners and interfering with pair bonding.
• Guys who quit internet porn experienced positive effects like increased concentration and confidence, and motivation. It is so important to know how to stop porn addiction.
• Many older men started to develop erectile dysfunction when YouTube was invented in 2006, which made streaming videos very easy.
• A picture is different from a video when it comes to how it affects the brain.
• The second leap was when smartphones came around, and the speed of the internet has increased every year.

• Porn addiction can happen when you rewire your brain to raise dopamine in the reward center.
• In terms of good and bad porn, that doesn’t exist. The question is not what’s on the screen. It’s the result. Therefore, learning how to stop porn addiction is very much important.

The first step in addiction is rewiring the brain.

• If you need to watch a screen in order to get aroused to the level you used to be aroused with your partner, then maybe you’re addicted to porn. Learn how to stop porn addiction so that you can have a natural arousal.
• Men end up using genres because they become so desensitized to earlier genres that they need extreme stuff.
• It’s very important for the couple to do bonding behavior – Such as kissing, touching, holding, looking into each other’s eyes, and retraining the ex-porn user to get their jollies, their arousal, and their reward from real interaction.
• People are compelled to do sexual acts that were uncomfortable and painful because they saw it in porn. The sooner you learn how to stop porn addiction, the better it is.
• Men watch more porn because they’re more visual.
• What the man is watching now may have nothing to do with who he really is.
• Men who have sexual dysfunctions quit porn or do rebooting are often cured.
• Men can do a porn fast for 90 days to see how porn has affected them.

The adolescent brain is completely different from a child’s brain and adult brain.

Two big differences in an adolescent brain

• There’s an imbalance of power between the thrill-seeking parts of the brain and the more evolved part of the brain, which is our frontal cortex. It loves things like clicking on internet pornography or Facebook or other things.
• There’s an explosion of new nerve connections, and over the next several years until about age 23, those nerve connections are pruned. You’re really constructing how you deal with the environment.
• The adolescent is shaping their brain to the sexual environment and is especially susceptible to what the internet has to offer in terms of novelty and sexual reward.

Rewiring the addiction

• Try to stop the addiction, and know the steps for how to stop porn addiction.
• Replace porn with other activity.
• You have to get away from the computer and do other things.

A wife or a girlfriend needs to understand a few things if their partner will quit porn.

• He’s going to have withdrawal, and he’s going to feel irritable, and he might take it out on you.
• Many guys experience a flat line. Once they quit porn about a week or two into it, they lose their libido and often cannot get an erection.

Transcript From Interview With Gary Wilson How To Stop Porn Addiction

Luis CongdonToday, we’re going to be talking about pornography addiction and how it impacts your brain, your relationships, and your intimate life. We’ve brought on one of the top researchers Gary Wilson. 

He talks to us about how to stop porn addiction and what he and his lab have discovered. Here we are with Gary Wilson, a professional, author, and researcher on pornography and how to quit porn addiction. Welcome to the show, Gary.

Gary Wilson Hey, how are you doing?

Luis Congdon We’re doing fantastic. It’s so great to have you on the show. We are excited to talk about how to stop porn addiction. In this modern-day, where the internet, porn sites, television, and streaming from cell phones is rampant, sex and pornography have become so intertwined.

I thought it was so important to have you on the show to talk about how to quit porn addiction. A lot of people aren’t talking about how to quit porn addiction, but yet we need to.

Gary Wilson Good. I’m looking forward to talking about how to stop porn addiction.

Kamala Chambers What do you think is the biggest problem with internet porn, and how does it affect people? How to stop porn addiction fast?

Why You Should Stop Watching Porn

Gary Wilson The biggest problem is that it’s probably altering sexual taste, sometimes reducing the attraction between partners. It’s interfering, perhaps even with pair bonding.

Interestingly enough, not only studies but many guys who have quit have found that it also affects them in ways they didn’t expect. Such as they could think better, and their concentration problems went away.

They have more motivation, the socio anxiety went away, confidence increased, even depression went away, and emotional numbness went away. How to stop porn addiction is a really big question that probably has to be broken down into a single part to address the problem.

How To Stop Porn Addiction Easily

Luis Congdon As you’re talking, I’m reminded of interviews I’ve seen with world-renowned athletes. Specifically boxers and how they talked about not having sex lives or masturbating before a match.

Gary Wilson That’s a different question than what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about masturbation. I’m not talking about ejaculation. I’m not talking about orgasm. I’m talking about a new stimulus, a supernormal stimulus that never existed before 2006, and when I say “2006.”

I mean, the invention of YouTube allowed streaming videos of short clips. That’s when many of the older guys in their 40’s and 50’s, start to develop sexual problems. They’ve been using porn for 30 years.

This isn’t about sex.

It’s not about orgasm. It’s about a different audio-visual stimulus where we can control our arousal simply by clicking our mouse.

Luis Congdon So we dated back to 2006.

Gary Wilson Yeah, I dated back to 2006 as a big leap. High-speed internet hasn’t been around that long. It no longer takes guys four minutes to download a single picture.

A picture is different from the video. If you’re an adolescent, for example, and you get a picture of a naked lady, all you can think about is feeling up her boobs. If you’re an adolescent perking your own and you get a streaming hardcore video of gang rape, you’re seeing real people have real sex.

That’s what you think may be real, whether ejaculating over the face or anal penetration or all these strange things.

How To Quit Pornography Addiction And Get Your Life Back

Gary Wilson So leap was when we had videos. We then had a second leap when smartphones came around, and the speed of the internet has increased every year.

So now they can just stream high-definition videos like crazy. So yeah, there’s been a big change, and the technology is what’s different. It is so important to educate ourselves on how to stop porn addiction.

Luis Congdon I know one thing about you is you do a lot of research on how to stop porn addiction. Right now, you’re really looking at the impact it has on the teenage brain.

I’d love to hear some of the science and research that you’ve been finding. Can you tell us why you should stop watching porn?

Why is it important to know how to quit pornography addiction?

Gary Wilson The first thing to know is that they’ve been doing a lot of research on the adolescent brain. May be over the last 10-20 years, both in animals and now, with the brain scan in humans.

What I used to think was there was this old model that an adolescent brain is just like an adult, and they’re just not mature enough. However, what they found is the adolescent brain is completely different from a child’s brain and adult brain.

The adolescence really starts around age 11 and continues until about age 25, in terms of brain changes. Two of the big things they found that are different are that there’s an imbalance of power between the thrill-seeking parts of the brain, the reward circuit, the primitive brain, and the more evolved part of the brain, which is our frontal cortex. 

How To Quit Stop Addiction As A Teenager

Gary Wilson So what that does is it makes the teen seek out novelty and thrilling things, to seek out anything that’ll get its dopamine. It’s neurochemical flying, and it gets such a bigger buzz from novelty and sex and anything exciting.

So it’s really controlled by this primitive part of the brain, and it doesn’t have the breaks to put on that seeking. It loves things like clicking on internet pornography or Facebook or other things. That’s one of the changes.

The second major change is that there’s an explosion of new nerve connections. Over the next several years until about age 23, those nerve connections are pruned, about a hundred billion of them. So, you’re sort of set with your addictive behavior and you’d way you deal with life.

You’re really constructing how you deal with the environment.

Why did evolution have an overactive reward circuit seeking pleasure and an underactive higher brain?

Evolutionarily, they wanted the animal to leave its tribe in the face of danger. Go out and seek new mates and new territories in order to successfully reproduce.

The bottom line to this whole story is the adolescent is shaping its brain to the sexual environment. It is especially susceptible to what the internet has to offer in terms of novelty and sexual reward.

Luis Congdon You’re really reminding me of my interview with Dr. Dan Siegel. He was talking about teens and the amount of dopamine and pleasure-seeking that they have.

That’s why they seek novelty and how much it is a parent’s job to help guide them to find novelty in healthy ways. However, one of the things you’re talking about is what’s streaming on the internet and whatnot.

It’s a lot harder for parents to really monitor that nowadays. How can parents help children to learn how to stop porn addiction cold turkey?

How To Stop Porn Addiction As An Adult

Gary Wilson Since we know that the job of the adult’s brain is to wire up to the environment so it can successfully reproduce and leave. An adolescent’s brain is wired up to sit in a chair and click from a 3-minute video to a 3-minute video, masturbating and ejaculating. 

Doing whatever is on the screen and doing that for 3 – 4 – 8 years before they have a sexual encounter. They’re wiring up those nerve cells, nerve cells that fire and wire together.

So they’re wiring up sexual arousal in one part of the brain with all the queues associated with porn use in another part of the brain. Yet, when they meet a real person, it doesn’t match that reality. So, in essence, they’re training for the wrong sport.

Kamala Chambers It is very exciting to have you here. Welcome! I love how you’re breaking that down with the nerve cells. Firing to match up with sexual arousal and how much that probably affects them later in life.

You have this book Your Brain on Porn, which is a fantastic breakdown where you start to talk about how the brain’s affected by porn. Why do you think people get addicted to porn in the first place? Why learning how to stop porn addiction is essential?

How To Stop Porn Addiction – Rewire Your Brain

Gary Wilson One model of pornography addiction is that you have a pre-existing condition or other mental health issues. Like depression or OCD or anxiety, and you start using porn, and then you use it compulsively.

However, here’s what’s wrong with that general model. You can only become addicted to cigarettes by smoking cigarettes. You can only become addicted to gambling by compulsive gambling.

You can only become porn by compulsively using porn.

The first step in pornography addiction recovery is to rewire the brain.

To rewire the brain with that model of nerve cells that fire and wire together. It’s wiring in the active smoking or gambling or using porn. It’s wiring the brain so it blasts the reward centers, so you’ll get a much bigger buzz for that one particular thing you’ve been overconsuming.

That’s the first step in pornography addiction. You’re asking how it can happen with internet porn. It can happen because all addictions occur with the same first step, and that’s raising dopamine in the reward center.

Whether it’s meth, whether it’s gambling, porn, or whether it’s alcohol addiction. You can sit and click on video and video for hours on end while you’re masturbating, raise the dopamine in your reward center wire in those associations, and start the pornography addiction treatment process.

Luis Congdon One of the things I’ve been asked about is, “Is all porn bad?”I know some people that liked to watch porn. They’re a little bit more leisurely about it, and they even watch it with their partner.

I’ve also known people who have been addicted. One of my friends had a really hard challenge with this to the point that he didn’t want to go to class. He just wanted to stay at home and watch pornography and then.

On the other spectrum, there are people who just completely have a complete disdain for it and think that it should just not exist. Is there a middle ground for how to stop porn addiction treatment?

How To Spot Porn Addiction And Pornography Addiction Treatment

Gary Wilson That’s a good question. Is there good porn and bad porn, and that’s really a red herring. Just to let you know, I’m a far-left liberal, I’m not religious, and I don’t want to ban porn.

However, in terms of good and bad porn, that doesn’t exist. The question is not what’s on the screen. Certainly, there’s some stuff that I think is disgusting, like gang rape or bestiality.

Most people can agree with that. However, some people can’t. So what you do is you end up in endless debate about what’s good and bad, and no one will ever agree.

Porn habit and sex addiction and the brain

Rather, we need to go back to the brain and be affected. If you’re sitting there and I got nothing wrong with Playboy or anything like that. If you’re a young man and you’re 15, and we’ve had a guy do this who masturbated to just nude pictures.

Another guy just masturbated to swimming suit pictures. He ended up with erectile dysfunction because he needed to click through 1,000 to 2,000 separate images to get up enough energy to just ejaculate with a limp penis.

So he wired his sexual arousal to click from picture to picture to picture in rapid succession. Without porn? No. But he wired his brain into it. It’s not that’s something good or bad.

It’s the result. And what results do you want? Do you want to wire in your arousal with screens, or do you want to get more excited with a real person? That’s a question you should really ask yourself.

Kamala Chambers How pornography does affect sex in relationships? How to stop porn addiction to save relationships?

Gary Wilson In terms of sex, I’ve only seen the negative effects on sex. Now, there are people who say, “They can spice up your life,” and maybe you can learn something. I don’t know. 

How To Stop Porn Addiction To Save Relationships

Gary Wilson If you need to watch a screen in order to get aroused, aroused to the level you used to be aroused with your partner, you’re doing something wrong with your partner. 

Gary Wilson I personally don’t want to have to need a screen to be aroused. I’d rather connect with my wife and get my arousal that way.

Kamala Chambers I think you really made a beautiful point of connection. How important that is for tapping into a deeper sense of arousal rather than just these flashy images?

Gary Wilson It’s just clicking from thing to thing. Is that what you want to become aroused to? Where does that stop? Once you can no longer get aroused with your partner like you did in the old days, then you go to porn.

Becoming desensitized with compulsive porn consumption

Once you can’t get aroused in the old porn, then you go to new porn. You start escalating through genres and genres until you need something that you didn’t even want to use.

We see this over and over. Men end up using genres because they become so desensitized to earlier genres that they need extreme stuff. I don’t think that’s where most people want to end up.

Luis Congdon One of the things you’re really talking about is how we wire our addictions. This can apply to all sorts of things. Am I right?

Gary Wilson Yes. We are constantly wiring ourselves up to things and then unwiring all the time. If you take out juggling, then they can look at it at a brain scan.

See that you’re making more nerve connections than certain parts of your brain. They can see these connections, and of course, you become better at juggling. 

How To Stop Porn Addiction – Mold And Shape Your Brain First

Gary Wilson So yeah, we’re constantly molding and shaping our brain. The common term is neuroplasticity, and a great book I suggest is The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. In fact, he has a chapter about sexuality in there that’s very good.

Kamala Chambers I have this ex-boyfriend who watched porn, and he tried to hide it from me. Whenever he had been watching porn, and we started to get sexual.

I could always tell because he would touch me differently. He would seem more disconnected. He wouldn’t make as much eye contact, and he just seemed to be more often in his own world. Is that because of how pornography is affecting the brain? Can it just affect the brain in short-term usage?

Short term porn habit effects on sexual behavior

Gary Wilson I’ve seen some clips of pornography I didn’t want to see, and it affected me. I’m a 60-year-old. I’ve seen a lot of stuff. So I think it can affect you, and it positively can affect an adolescent.

Going back to your question, we’ve seen many guys who decided to take up the challenge of giving up pornography. They were not addicted. The reason I know that they weren’t addicted is they could easily stop, and they didn’t have withdrawal symptoms.

Yet, what they experienced was much more arousal during sex, being much more present and focusing on their partner. So they found that occasional use, maybe once a week, just for one masturbation session, had altered their arousal template.

So I would challenge anyone out there to take a 90 to 120-day fast completely and just be. If they find their partners more exciting and their sex is better.

How To Stop Porn Addiction With The Help Of Your Partner

Luis Congdon One thing I’m curious about is, if you are addicted to porn and you’re in a relationship, how can you start to rewire that pornography addiction, and how can your partner help you?

Gary Wilson The first thing to do is try to stop the addiction, and that can be quite challenging. There are several forums you can find on my site, and you can click to where you can get support. You have to replace porn with other activities.

You have to get away from the computer and do other things. In terms of help, a girlfriend or a wife needs to understand a few things. First of all, if he’s genuinely addicted, he’s going to have withdrawal and going to feel irritable, and he might take it out on you.

Negative consequences of quitting porn

Another thing is many guys experience a flat line. Once they quit porn about a week or two into it, they lose their libido and often cannot get an erection. They don’t find sex very exciting, and that can last for weeks to even a few months, depending on how addicted they are.

So that’s something to be aware of. And you need to be understanding around that. Then, there’s sex. It’s very, very important for the couple to do bonding sexual behavior such as kissing, touching, holding, and looking into each other’s eyes. Helps the ex-porn user to get their arousal, and their reward, from real interaction so they can replace the porn.

Luis Congdon Have you found in adults who watch hardcore porn and have an addiction to it, has there been any correlation between abuse and that addiction?

How To Stop Porn Addiction According To Research

Gary Wilson There’s is just one study, maybe from several years ago. They suggested that there was some correlation of some abuse with about 8-9% of the porn users.

Here’s something about the questionnaires in many of these studies they don’t often ask the right questions. For example, anal sex wouldn’t be considered to be abuse.

However, a study from a couple of months ago on 16-18-year-old in The UK found that among young people, there is a tremendous rise in anal sex and that most of the females were cursed into doing it.

None of the females questioned enjoyed it, and most of the males didn’t like it either. Yet, both felt compelled to do it because they saw it in porn.

That wouldn’t show up in one of these types of surveys, but both people are engaging in sexual acts that were uncomfortable and painful, and yet, that wouldn’t be part of abuse. It’ll be normalized. We really need better studies to look at some of these different layers of what occurs.

How To Keep Yourself From Watching Porn

Luis Congdon All this research about how to stop porn addiction is fascinating. For anybody who’s interested and wants to have this sort of discussion further because in the 30-45 minute dialog here with Gary Wilson, myself, and Kamala, it’s just not going to be enough.

You’re providing a really valuable service with that. A lot of people are really scared to even open up about this subject. I’ve watched some specials on MTV and different channels.

Many people Dr. Drew for example, or some other well-known therapists, will work with somebody on porn addiction. Most of the time, anytime I’ve seen it and if it and if anyone else was around me.

They tend to feel uncomfortable. It’s not that we’re watching the show, but it’ll flash on or something, or watch it for a little bit. However, most people were just afraid to have this discussion.

Gary Wilson That’s the way it is with sex. Even parents having the birds and the bees discussion with their kids is tough. Now, they have to have not only the birds and bees but bestiality, hardcore porn, and gang rapes. That’s not something they had to do a few years ago. It’s even harder these days.

Do Men Watch More Porn Than Women?

Luis Congdon I’m curious about your research. Have you found that men tend to watch porn more than women and women who watch porn? Is there something any kind of particulars specifics about them?

Gary Wilson Yes. Of course, men watch porn more, and that’s just through all the studies that verified because we’re but far more visual. Think about it evolutionarily in terms of mammals. The male brain is sort of designed to seek out novel sexual partners.

Thus he impregnates a bunch of different females so that he can pass on his genes. Even though we’re humans and we fall in love. We’re pair bonding. That program is just sitting in our brains. Because heck, a beautiful woman walks by, and our head goes into whiplash, and look at her. That’s a novelty.

How To Stop Porn Addiction And Bridge The Gap Of Secrecy

Gary Wilson Men are more likely to do it, but the females are getting stuck in this too. Looking at it, often, the anecdote of the women look for more of a storyline where the men look for rapid, very quick videos. However, there are no hard and fast rules about this. I don’t think.

Kamala Chambers I see that there’s a lot of secrecy between partners around pornography. I just even recently had a friend tell me that she felt really betrayed by her husband, who she caught watching porn.

He lied to her about it. There seems to be this big gap between partners sometimes around the subject of pornography. Maybe they never talked about it.

What do you think are some of the important keys to helping couples bridge that gap of secrecy?

Related Reading: When to Leave a Lying Spouse

How couples can help each other how to break free from porn addiction?

Gary Wilson I don’t know if I have many answers to that because guys lie about using porn. That’s just the way it is. Some women are fine with it, and they don’t have any problem. That’s what they’re going to have to figure out on their own. I’m not a relationship or a counselor. I’m just a physiology teacher and work on addiction recovery, so I’ll leave it up to the relationship expert.

Luis Congdon I guess that’s definitely a discussion that we’ve been having with some of the people in our lives. On the blog and in various other places about porn, “Is it okay?” “How do you and your partner deal with it?” and it is. It’s a discussion that’s very open. I’ve heard so many different opinions, and yes, you’re right. In my own empirical research, men watch porn more. It’s interesting to hear from you the different slants that men and women have. 

How To Stop Porn Addiction With The Help of Therapist

Luis Congdon We’re about to wrap up, but I would love to hear about your website in case anybody else wants to jump on that.

Gary Wilson We just put out a book called Your Brain on Porn, and you can get that there, too, if you want a summary of the website and don’t want to look around through it.

Luis Congdon You ask a question, and Kamala was telling me this is a question that we should probably address before we jump off the call. You asked how can partners talk about this, and you said you would leave it to the professionals.

Really for us, it varies so much from couple to couple and person to person. People have to make up their own minds in their relationship how that’s going to function for them.

Your partner can be an accountability partner

What I’ve found is that couples can just openly begin to have the dialog. If it’s the man who likes watching porn, tell your partner what kind of stuff you like watching, and the wife asks questions, and it might be incredibly uncomfortable.

But for all you know, he might have an addiction, and that might be the beginning of a conversation that leads from not having to lie to getting completely off of it and improving your life, or it could come to a conclusion where it’s okay and it’s not as big of a deal as you thought. It’s really dependent upon the couple, and it goes back to the core essentials of communication and how you talk about things.

Ways To Quit Watching Porn

Gary Wilson There are a couple of things here that are important. The first one is that they’re watching porn because she’s not good enough. The thing is, it’s so attractive.

Just to be able to click from video to video. He may love his wife. He may even like sex with his wife though he’ll like it a lot better if he quits. The novelty of the internet is so overwhelming that a female cannot compare to that. 

The second thing is you may ask him, “Oh, what are you watching? Are you watching porn?”Or, what he’s watching now may have nothing to do with his true sexual taste where they were before he started watching porn 7 years ago.

He may be in a place where he’s escalated to weird stuff, but it’s not really him. So, he really needs to unplug and find out what his true sexual nature is.

The bottom line is she cannot compare to porn. Keep that in mind.

He’s watching porn, but that may have nothing to do with who he really is.

Kamala Chambers Wow. That’s powerful. One thing you recommended was doing a porn-fast or abstaining from porn. Do you want to say more about that? Or, how long do you think someone would need to abstain to actually see results?

Gary Wilson Here’s the funny thing. It’s called Rebooting. It came up probably on the internet about 8 or 9 years ago. It came with guys who are having sexual dysfunctions, erectile dysfunction, and inability to orgasm.

They quit, and they were cured. That’s why most guys actually quit. They hit the wall of sexual dysfunction. The older guys took only about 8 weeks to recover, and they were back in the saddle. 

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Gary Wilson What we’re seeing now are the younger guys who are about 23 – 24. It can take them 6 months, a year, and 2 years to get their erectile functioning back to normal.

The fast, for some of these guys, is very long, so I can’t give you an amount of time, but if someone doesn’t have sexual dysfunction and doesn’t have an addiction. If they give it 90 days, I think they’ll be able to see how porn has affected them.

Luis CongdonThere you have it. Gary, you’ve made two excellent points. That there’s a myth around porn. What it means about the relationship and people’s porn interests can change and quickly escalate as well.

People do need to be careful and just keep tabs on what’s happening in their lives. Again, it comes back to that communication and talking with your partner.

The other thing I’ve found was the porn fast and how that impacted people’s sexual libido and the sexual dysfunctions. Men are oftentimes told, “If you want to last longer if you want to be more sexually potent. You need to masturbate.

You need to learn how to last longer,” and some people use porn for that purpose. However, what it’s actually doing is it’s wearing you down.

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Gary Wilson Yeah, and what happens is you wire up your sexual response through clicking from scene to scene, and then, when you get with a real partner, you can’t sit and click and change from person to person.

So when sex doesn’t match what you’ve been training for, what happens is your dopamine drops, and dopamine is what powers erections. So your penis drops, and you can’t get an erection.Yup! It can really affect sexuality, and that’s what we’re seeing. That’s why guys are quitting.

Luis Congdon There you have it, everybody, Gary Wilson. Thank you for coming to the show. We’ve really enjoyed your thoughts on how to stop porn addiction. Thank you so much.

Gary Wilson My pleasure.