UNDERSTANDING PORN
This week we break from our integration series to get to the bottom of the porn affliction decimating male confidence in this digital era.
The first thing I want you to understand is that you are run by your nervous system with conscious awareness along for the ride. Furthermore, the brain is predictive, not reactive.
Your nervous system is trained by experience (what else?), so if you feel something today, it is likely that you have felt it before.
There is nothing new to the brain. You see an ocean; the brain has seen a big lake. You see mountains; the brain has seen a hill. Everything is compared to what the brain knows already.
The brain takes in information from your environment through your skin and senses creating an internal condition called affect in two kinds, valence and arousal. Simply: comfort or discomfort, aroused or relaxed.
This internal state is kicked up the neuron chain into the brainstem where the brain considers the circumstances and then runs the messaging by your databank of prior experience and learned concepts from all the way back to birth.
From this, a hypothesis or prediction makes it into your awareness… which you then prove or disprove using the social reality before you. All done in a few hundred milliseconds. It’s amazing.
How many times have you walked in on a conversation and thought people were saying one thing, and found yourself getting pissed off, only to listen more carefully and then relax after you discover they were actually saying something different or were not even talking about you? Happens all the time.
Or caught something from the corner of your eye and gone, “Whoa, what was that?” only to look again and see reality… knowing your brain had fooled you into seeing something that was not even there.
This is the predictive brain in action. It works really well most of the time, and luckily, it corrects! The concepts the brain learns are critical here.
All addiction is an addiction to fear. What do I mean by that? It means that when stress hits certain people who have had their nervous system trained in such a way, they tend toward putting their physiology into a combined excited/fear state. It both feels normal and may temporarily relieve stress, although maladaptively (in a fucked way).
Furthermore, dopamine and adrenaline always fire together.
The addiction use effect is a fight, flight state that changes breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate. More importantly, it narrows focus and thereby relieves stress by turning many thoughts into fewer or different thoughts.
Normally this mechanism is used to escape life threatening danger.
The addicted use it to deal with a bad day… or any day.
A man is not thinking about his tax bill or how brakes on the truck need to be done or how he’s not seeing his wife’s pussy often enough while he has his dick in his hand and watching porn.
You have a brain and a brain stem, a spinal column that commands peripheral nerves instantly for fight or flight, and a nerve called the vagus which winds all over the inside of your trunk to every organ, your stomach, your skin, even to your balls. It has two parts, upper ventral vagus and lower dorsal vagus.
The lower dorsal vagus nerve is known for rest and digest. This part of our nervous system controls digestion, sexual function, and immobilization (the freeze part of fight, flight or freeze).
The upper ventral vagus controls heart rate, breathing (lungs) as well as the throat and voice and facial muscles. Whereas your peripheral and dorsal nerves for freeze, flight, fight are there in the first months of gestation, the ventral develops in the third trimester presumably when the baby starts to hear its mother’s voice.
In infancy, “motherese” from mom’s sing song voice as she talks, coos and coddles and holds her baby further develops the ventral vagus.
Mom is the primary caregiver 99% of the time and the ventral vagus is how you connect first with your mother and from there, eventually learn to communicate and regulate emotion with others.
A baby will seek facial expressions and voices of caregivers to be comforted. This human need never, ever goes away.
How well we connect with others is a pattern largely set over the first fourteen years of life.
As adults we achieve emotional homeostasis (balance) and feel safe, accepted, understood and belonging through ventral connection.
I explain how porn use activates first the fight, flight peripheral nervous system (using the neuromodulators dopamine and adrenaline) and then the dorsal vagus—specifically the parts governing sexual function and post-orgasm immobilization.
Talk about narrowed focus…
While using porn, like any addiction, there is no true ventral activation and so, no possible homeostasis (internal emotional balance). This then affects relationships, decision-making, motivation and every aspect of being.
After engaging in sex, an old saw has a woman complaining how the man has fallen asleep while she stares at the ceiling wide awake. Some men use this porn-induced immobilization as a sleep aid.
All addictions activate the peripheral and dorsal systems while tricking you into thinking you are also using the ventral vagus to connect with others.
I show how this works in the book SIPPING FEAR PISSING CONFIDENCE in that the booze buzz making a person glib and friendly amongst others is more likely derived from a weak form of hysterical strength.
Find that explanation in the book’s introduction. The Crux Bamboozle section of chapter one also sheds light on how this works.
Similarly, the porn user gives himself the semblance of human connection by listening to the oohs and aahs of pornographic video, and seeing the facial expressions of the players involved, and imaginarily associates himself in the scene if not as a participant, as a present voyeur.
I believe this confuses a brain that has evolved for real human contact, replacing it with a phony substitute, and thereby creating unreal concepts for the predictive brain’s use going forward.
An exception might be using porn with a sexual partner, but even then habituation occurs and escalation is required over time. If a couple watches the screen more than each other, the same shit as follows happens.
A porn habit erodes his natural ability to get his dick hard and perform sexually with a real live partner because his brain’s conceptions are all out of whack. The simulation throws off the brain so much that eventually he either can’t get it up for real pussy, or live pussy seems so tame he can’t get excited enough to orgasm.
This kills confidence. Plain and simple.
It has to, and it can’t be any other way.
His mind has been infiltrated by the equivalent of replicating digital brain worms feasting and supplanting his neuronal connections to crowd out his old concepts.
Furthermore, it becomes his dirty little secret, tragically compounding his shame.
The shadow parts of his personality—those parts he hides from others and even from himself—grow in the darkness… like mushrooms in the damp cellar of his psyche feeding on his old conceptual roots.
His identity becomes façade and charade. He claims less for himself under this compromised existence. His only sure thing is porn.
He also can no longer find or build towards a life of real meaning.
His deeds feel hollow, relationships are compromised, and overcoming obstacles only bring him back to porn as he falls deeply into weakness as his confidence heads south.
By default, he gains no freedom from the suffering of this existence.
A decade or more may go by.
He may realize one day that he did not in fact live those ten years… but rather, he has lived the same one year ten times…
So he endures, held in limbo, folding in on himself, puzzling loved ones, remaining disconnected from them while suffering quietly…
… with nothing to look forward to but relieving his self-inflicted stress…
… with his dick in his hand.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Questions? Comments?
True and free…
cw
1. Need help with this? Don’t fuck around brother. Call me, invest in yourself.
Since 2014, all my clients have resolved their addictions.
I’ll show you how to defeat porn and take back your life.
You may want to do this today
Book here:
https://go.oncehub.com/ChristopherWallace
CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE
Advisor to Men ™
advisortomen.com
2. If you have read or listened to SIPPING FEAR PISSING CONFIDENCE, we appreciate your review. During a recent call Robert Glover called it the best book he’s read on addictions and a top-three must read book for men. (send me your review and I’ll send you some stuff)
Blessings! Stay powerful…
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