A concrete tip for staying away from porn - Avoid common pitfalls

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about staying away from porn

Avoid common pitfalls

Just as there are certain practices that can make our recovery easier and more efficient, there are certain practices that can trip us up. This post is all about those practices that can sometimes be speedbumps on our road to recovery.

Regarding the "center-circle" and "middle-circle" terminology used in a couple of the items below: SAA has the concept of center, middle, and outer circle activities. A center-circle activity is something that's considered acting out, and is to be absolutely avoided. An outer-circle activity is something that's known to be safe, and is to be encouraged. A middle-circle activity is something that's not exactly acting out, but it's dangerous territory that can easily lead to a slip, so it also should be avoided. Depending on your stage of recovery, and depending on which activities serve as triggers for you, you may wish to consider some of the items below to be middle-circle, or even center-circle activities.

Without further adieu, here is our list (which will probably grow over time!) of common porn-recovery pitfalls:

• Thinking that you're "cured" - As you get more time of recovery under your belt, you may find that your path becomes easier and easier. After an extended streak of smooth sailing, you may be tempted to declare yourself to be "cured" of your addiction. And indeed, if you are not truly a porn addict, but simply someone who got carried away in the past with the dopamine rush that porn provides, you may legitimately become cured of your porn compulsion. A true porn addict, however, rarely if ever achieves a state where they can once again consume porn in a healthy fashion, without the threat of it causing quality-of-life issues. As Steve Earle once said, "Once you're a pickle, you don't get to be a cucumber again.".

• Loosening up your standards - So many recovering porn addicts have declared that, because they've achieved N days (weeks, months) of porn abstinence, they're out of the woods, and so they can relax a bit on what they allow into their environment. As we will discuss later, they may start indulging in borderline behavior. For a porn addict, the best case scenario for not following best practices is a difficult journey. Perhaps the occasional NSFW Google Image Search will not result in a full-blown relapse, but if it makes you crave more, it's just a bad idea. We should not attempt to get as close to the edge as possible, we should take responsibility to keep our sobriety safe by mindfully staying away from triggers.

• Letting your recovery languish - Many of us have discovered the hard way that we must earn our sobriety by devoting a bit of effort each day to the recovery process. Most days, only a few minutes. But if we go for long stretches of time without spending those few minutes, we can easily become less mindful of triggers, and less likely to be able to consistently recognize and resist them.

• Beating yourself up - Getting down on ourselves is the easiest thing in the world to do when we slip. But as we've discussed elsewhere, it is much more useful for us to be kind to ourselves.

• Negotiating - "Is X really considered porn?" "OK you're right, X is porn, but surely Y isn't porn, it doesn't even have pictures!" "You've been doing really well, let's just check out some SFW stuff". "Is Z considered middle-circle or inner-circle? And what's our policy on middle-circle again?" Who is asking these questions? Is it your addiction trying to negotiate with you? Do you really want to enter negotiations with someone who is not interested in achieving a win-win agreement? Some of the above questions are actually worth asking, once. Some of us can get solid answers from friends in a support group, others prefer to hash them out in a recovery journal. But rarely is it a good idea to look for a solution during the heat of temptation. Don't negotiate with your addiction.

• Nostalgia, romanticising porn - Many of us go way back with porn, and can remember days when porn was an adventure. And for those of us who are older, our distant memories of porn may remind us of times when were were younger and fitter, when life was more fun. It's little wonder that many of us have nostalgia for porn. The romanticising of the object of our addiction, however, must be considered counterproductive to our sobriety. The solution, once again, is mindfulness. Mindfulness of the misery that porn has caused us, and mindfulness of the joy that comes from freedom.

• Pornographic ideation - Pornographic ideation is a fancy term for fantasizing about porn or pornographic scenarios. For many of us, this can be highly triggering. Most of us should declare fantasizing about porn scenes, scenarios that involve sexual photography or videography, and scenarios that that involve sex workers to be off-limits. Middle-circle activities at best.

• Borderline behavior - The "Negotiating" pitfall above discusses our relationship with activities that we may consider to be off limits to us. Here are a few examples: Google Image Searches that involve nudity or adult situations, reading sex stories and other erotic literature, looking at subreddits that relate to SFW images of women, sexy Facebook and Instagram photo sets, and watching suggestive music videos. The problem with these borderline behaviors is not that they constitute relapse in and of themselves, but they can easily act as triggers. YMMV, but my personal guideline is that I don't seek out skin on pixels or paper, I don't read or write erotica, and I don't fantasize about porn or sex work. And if I do, I reset my badge.

• Giving up - I have saved the very worst pitfall to the end. We MUST NOT GIVE UP in our struggle against our porn addiction. Giving up is really the only way that we can lose to our addiction.

What have I forgotten? Let me know in the comments...