CLEARING OUT PORNOGRAPHY

We could think of getting rid of pornography from your life like decluttering. You might think it’s a simple case of throwing out what you don’t want but you often have to sift through to work that out. Using pornography is often not as simple as it seems. It is symbolic of many other needs, and before you can get rid of it, it’s important to work out what it represents. It could be the search for appreciation, or an outlet for anger, or lust.

 

Let’s take an example, a man who could represent many of those with whom I have worked. Let’s call him Edward. Edward has used pornography since the age of 12, when he found that looking at it served to take him away from thinking bout how people called him names for being a “nerd”at school. This is pornography drawer 1 – he puts his feelings of frustration and hurt in there and covers them with things that represent fun and being taken away in his mind. If he were to simply throw out the whole drawer, in a bid to get rid of the pornography…what would become of those feelings?

As Ed hits his teens, he realises that he doesn’t understand how relationships work and he struggles to get a girlfriend. He starts to fill pornography drawer 2. It contains feelings of futility, thoughts about himself as useless and unattractive etc. As the years go by, he buys more chests of drawers to keep these thoughts in. If he just threw them out, without understanding those thoughts and feelings, he would just go on filling more drawers. These chests of drawers are cheap and fall apart easily.

 

Ed grows up and throws himself into work, where he is very capable and gets called on to do a lot. He is getting worn out but it gives him a sense of worth. He comes home and it feels empty there. To fill the emptiness, he watche pornography and fills a new drawer with feelings of loss for a life he once hoped he would have, plus frustration as he doesn’t know why he can’t say no to his boss. Buried deep at the back of a drawer is his feeling of worthlessness but he’s not going to want to look at that, so he covers it up with pages that represent the feeling of power he gets by looking at BDSM.

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Looking at more extreme things, because Ed has become inured to 'vanilla porn' doesn't make Ed feel good about himself so he starts filling another drawer. This one is marked 'shame'. Looking at it makes him feels worse about himself and more inept so he shuts the door to the whole room.

 

As Ed hits his forties, he looks arund his house and take sit all in. Some rooms are neat – the drawers are all tightly locked shut but if he were to open them they would collapse on their railings with the weight of what he has crammed in there. Other rooms are a mess. The drawers are spilling out all over the place.

 

It seems to Ed like a simple task, like he just needs to tidy up the one room…but that thing happens where you pick up things from one pile, and realise that something relates to something else in a different room…so you go there, and then you find all the things that need tidying there too…and so on. Plus, you need space for the things you are tidying away to go into, but when you go to put them in a drawer…that drawer is already full of other things you need to get rid of. In my work, I usually find that there is a lot of rearranging that needs doing before people feel any sense of tidiness and order.

 

Let’s now say that Ed experiences the loss of his father. He puts the feelings associated in a drawer and covers them with pages representing escape and avoidance. When he realises that he needs to take those feelings out because the drawer won’t shut any more and it’s falling off the railings, he finds he has nowhere to put them. He might have other drawers but he has filled them with distractions. He probably needs to build a whole set of shelves, a proper good quality one where his thoughts and feelings are easy to access, to show to appropriate people, but no one taught him carpentry, so he is stuck. He will probably just go back to putting up with the mess as it’s what he knows. Dealing with all this feels like an enormous effort without the carpenter to guide him