Yesterday, I had a chat with a fellow priest who is working on a new treatment project here in the US that I think has a lot of promise. When he and his crew are ready, we'll talk about it on the blog. In the meantime, he had a lot of interesting things to say about our modern problems with addiction and how the institutions here are and are not responding.
As we bounced from topic to topic, the 'usual' topic came up: pornography addiction.
We chatted about it briefly, and it was apparent to both of us that it has come to be a major problem in this country. There sure are a lot of people asking for help: about 50% of the inquiries I get are related to pornography problems.
He asked me about attachment disorders and the connection to porn, and I think there is a lot there to be explored. I also think there is a lot to look at in terms of how the brain reacts to video and addiction.
Sure there are thee standard articles about how video gaming, for instance, stimulates the reward centers in the brain and have been linked to dopamine abnormalities:
But, here are some other facts we should take into account:
Here we see that the brain processing of visual information can be altered by video games. What is this doing to porn viewers and how they see? I think this is really important to examine, because it appears that video games can tune the brain into better perceiving its medium as the brain hustles to pick up more and more information.
We see with this study how video games can effect real life reflexes. So, what if this is true about porn as well? What is porn doing?
My observation of porn users is that a lot of them become 'passive' in the sense that their usage of porn is often a sedentary affair: they watch, and become 'trained' to just watch. Porn does not really involve an interactive process other than masturbation, which is really the lowest common denominator of sexual activity.
So, I think that porn trains the brain to improve how it processes the video information, but deteriorates the physical reflexes of sexuality down to mere self-stimulated climax. This is why so many couples report a higher level of dissatisfaction when pornography is introduced into the marriage.
Quite literally, porn trains the visual centers to associate sexual pleasure not with live persons, but the video images. By retraining the reward center of the brain, video can decrease our satisfaction with real life, and actually train down our reflexes.
At the same time, I think we can directly associate porn with the lowering of sexual standards among young people, and has led to deteriorating social standards in general. After all, marriage is not, in modern thinking reflected in porn, about family life. It is about sex, and so porn informs how we view marriage:
Marriage is not about sex: sex is part of it, but even modern Protestantism has bought into this limited view of marriage as the 'legalization' of intercourse. But, porn feeds into this misconception and cements it in the minds of its users. Video porn's retraining of the mind makes naturally sexual people obsessed with sex.
Now that the DSM-5, the 'bible' of modern psychology, has effectively 'spiked' the classification of sexual addiction, insurance companies are not going to pay for treatment and the for-profit and government-run treatment facilities won't be able to help patients because there will be no 'code' to assign to billing. Addicts will have to fend for themselves.
Or, the Church could also lend a hand. I think we need to start better expressing our teachings regarding sexuality and marriage. Right now, a lot of barely-converted-converts are the loudest 'spokesmen' on the topic, and they tend to parrot their previous communities' positions with a dash of Orthodox lingo and a few badly-misused quotes. The 'Crypto-Calvinists' are the worst of the bunch: if it smells like Puritanism, it usually is.
Orthodox-assisted treatment of sexual addictions could really help a lot of people, and perhaps put out some preventative education that could save a lot of people from a lot of heart-aches. We really should start working on this.
My hope is that some folks will come forward to help in this field. Right now, I am swamped, and I do not have a lot of experience in this area. If we get enough of us together to do something, we could really make a difference.
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