Today, I would like to write about positive and negative feelings in recovery from pornography.

Let's look at our imaginary person. After relapsing with porn, he feels terrible. He is experiencing physical pain in his lower back. His spirits are very low. He is feeling hopeless. He is afraid of being punished for doing what he did. He is experiencing a lot of disgust in relation to the pornographic material he has seen. In other words, he is experiencing a lot of negativity about pornography. Conversely, he is experiencing positivity in relation to staying the heck away from it, lest it hurt him again.

If this state continued, it would be easy to stop watching porn. There would be no relapses. There are things that consistently stay negative. The smell of excrement is this way. It is not difficult to keep yourself from eating excrement. Some things are consistently positive. The smell of blooming flowers in the spring never somehow becomes a dreadful experience.

Pornography, however, is not this way. Some days pass, whether it be five days or five weeks, and now suddenly the negative and positive poles have flipped. Staying the heck away from pornography is now a negative experience. You are stressed, lonely, and tired. Your stomach is acting up. It is the evening, you are at your house, and you don't feel very happy. Suddenly the prospect of watching pornography becomes an amazingly positive experience for you, while not doing it is dreadful—a dreary and barren existence. So, of course you go for the thing you perceive positive, in the same way you would always chose to smell blooming flowers in spring over smelling excrement.

The solution, then, is to flip the poles again. The solution is to make the negative positive and positive negative. But this is not very easy. Many days have passed and we have forgotten the horrors of relapsing. We forgot how disgusting and empty all that pornography really was. The body is ready to reproduce again.

What do we do? In that moment, we realize that the body is lying to us. That imaginary, loving lady angel that is there behind the barrier of porn access, isn't actually a loving lady angel. She only appears to be one. The image, the video, is lying to you. There isn't any kind of connection or communion that is happening. That person wouldn't care if you died. Wouldn't notice if you died. A truly loving person would not wish to make you more isolated, ashamed of yourself, and hopeless. Indignation and anger rise in our chest.