When does porn use become a problem?

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0:53Kimberley Wilson:information. In today's episode, I'm exploring problematic use of pornography. And it's worth saying that for many people, porn is not a problem. But I really want to explore this topic because porn misuse is on the rise, and there are concerns that it's affecting our mental health, especially for younger people.

1:22Kimberley Wilson:A survey earlier this year by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy found that over 50 % of therapists are reporting an increase in people seeking help for their porn use which has become problematic. And a report from the Children's Commissioner found that exposure to porn has become a common experience for young people. Roughly three quarters of boys and nearly two thirds of girls have seen it, with the average age of first exposure being 13 years old. And there's growing evidence to show that what we see on the screen is increasingly what we expect in the bedroom. And the issue is that a lot of porn is not what we might consider as normal or healthy sex, but it is becoming increasingly normalised.

2:11Kimberley Wilson:now as you know we are not here to judge we're here to explore and explain the psychology of what's going on because a lot of people are concerned about their own porn use their partner's use of porn or their children's exposure to it and the evidence shows that porn use can lead to poorer mental health and poorer relationships. So you can expect some sex-related and strong language but as always what we're looking for is a route to a healthier mindset and healthier relationships. I've got a very special guest with me today and together I hope we can be your guides from the drifting sands of misinformation to the sandcastle of understanding.

3:02Kimberley Wilson:Today we're welcoming psychoanalytic and forensic psychotherapist and group analyst Dr Stuart Stevenson into the Complex studio. Stuart, hello. Hello, nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you for being here and let's start off with your job title. What exactly is it that you do? I had a career in children's safeguarding and child analysis of mental health for many years do lots of risk and parenting assessments around childhood trauma and abuse. I have a busy private practice working with people with a range of difficulties. My training as a psychoanalytic and forensic psychotherapy takes me into more ordinary social problems and relational problems to much more severe pathology and criminality.

3:46I also work in groups and in teams and organisations around the impact of trauma on group and organisational relationships.

3:54Kimberley Wilson:You've been practicing for 25 years. Yes. Have you noticed any shifts or trends in the way that your patients are talking to you about pornography or their use of pornography? Yes, I have. It's much more accessible. It's much more extreme. There's a lot more anxiety about it. It is increasingly framing expectations. It's affecting the actual relationships with other people. some young people live in a very pornified world then more concerning i would say i've been seeing a significant increase of adolescent boys being ensnared by much more dangerous pornography you said the average age of pornography is 13 but my experience it's more like 10 or 11 that they're getting access to it when their young minds are growing and developing and they're getting bombarded with very highly arousing and disturbing images of pornography and sexuality and it's shaping their young minds and how they see their own bodies and the bodies of young girls and other young boys.

4:59Kimberley Wilson:Thank you. I really think this is going to be not just an important conversation but one that's really timely given what you're describing, what we're seeing online and also in terms of recent legislation that feels a very live topic for us to be thinking about.

5:19Kimberley Wilson:So Stuart, in your clinic room, when does pornography become a problem can we define it i think we can but it's complex and nuanced and one has to if it's possible i don't know if it is to leave shame and guilt outside of the room just for a moment and also more controversially if this wasn't about sex what would it be about so as a psychoanalytic clinician i don't just rely on the what of pornography it's the why of pornography so if they're using it to regulate themselves emotionally to take vengeance on people because they're angry to satisfy some gratification in themselves it becomes problematic so we're thinking for your patients the inquiry is what is the function of your use what is it doing for you and then potentially to you yes and then as an extension perhaps the relationships around you um after that and what is the function of the pornography saying about what you are unable to think if you're lonely and isolated and depressed in your bedroom by yourself and you haven't got the words to describe or communicate what you're feeling and you lean into pornography to regulate yourself emotionally it's not just a release it's not just a supplement to an ordinary development of a sexuality it becomes a problem in and of itself and in the research to it there is quite a consistent link between problematic porn use and things like anxiety depression loneliness are you seeing those associations in your work pornography gives you something that you can't put words to it promises you something that you can't you don't know what you're asking for if you're feeling lonely you watch some pornography you think you're not going to feel lonely you mightn't during the course of the hour and a half you're watching pornography when you put that pornography away you'll feel lonely but you'll have the feelings of the anguish of what looking at pornography when you didn't want to yeah face the fact that you're feeling lonely people feel very shamed particularly men in my experience and they are anxious and frightened of women in many situations and the power of women and being rejected humiliated by other men and humiliated by women and it really frightens them and pornography gives them a let out, so they think.

7:45It gives you a very temporary one, but the problems are still there when you sober up, so to speak.

7:52Kimberley Wilson:So in that case, is it possible to have two 28-year-olds who are watching the same type, quantity of pornography and it be healthy or non-problematic for one, but problematic for the other. Yeah, I'm glad you made the distinction between the content. If the content was for all the adults in consensual situations, then it could be okay, probably would be okay for them both. But if one's conflicted about it, then it is a problem because they say it's a problem. Whereas an internal conflict or as their girlfriend or partner has seen it and doesn't like it in the house and has sent them. So it really depends on that.

8:33Kimberley Wilson:Yes, and I think that touches on this idea of moral incongruence which came up in the research, which is this idea that people can be troubled by their porn use even if it isn't what we might consider excessive or unusual or illegal. And so what you seem to be describing there is actually it matters what the internal conflict is around the use. That's essential, what the internal conflict is. He might be a married man watching gay pornography. he might not dream of having sex with a man in his real life book gets fairly highly aroused by watching gay male pornography and he might be a Christian or a Muslim and he's highly conflicted about it so my job as a psychotherapist would be different then now I'd invite him to think about why is he conflicted because you're not committing a crime when someone comes to see me with some sort of sexual dysfunction I ask them a number of questions such as is it getting you in trouble with the police?

9:27the answer's no is it affecting your job? if the answer's no? Is it affecting your relationship if the answer's no? I'll say, well... What's the problem? You want to come in and pay all this money and go to all this, just get rid of something that you enjoy doing. So do you want to think about why it's a problem? So the psychotherapeutic task is different in that context. The issue of conflict is very, very important. Are they conflicted? If someone's not conflicted, if their girlfriend sent them, then you're just wasting your time.

10:00Kimberley Wilson:At this point, we would usually have a listener's email. But actually, Stuart, it feels as though I could invite you to almost offer us a kind of composite patient. Someone who arrives at your clinic door saying, I've got a problem with my porn use and it's affecting my relationships and behaviours. If you could paint a portrait for us of that, what would it look like? I will do that. Mindful of confidentiality. So it is a composite, but it is based on what I've seen over the years. A mother contacts me and she's discovered a 17-year-old son looking at pornography. He's maybe come to her and said, I was looking at this pornography and somebody's come online and started trying to blackmail me.

10:48Unless you show me your genitals or send me some money, I'm going to go to the police and I'm feeling suicidal. so something blows up in that situation that's one thing or the mother's discovered that the young person is looking at pornography and she can't tell the ages of the people in the pornography they could be underage she's not sure he's not sure so it's terrified and terrified him i have people coming to see me for more generic relationship reasons they're struggling in their relationship life and then during the week they do talk about their use of pornography and what comes to pass is that they're using the pornography as a metric to measure their sexual performance and ideas about their body such as penis size and what they should be doing in bed or not doing in bed and they're not measuring up to porn stars so they think they've got a problem when i say well i would say you have not you're just using the wrong type of metric to measure how you're performing sexually and how well you're endowed etc a lot of young people are looking at that and thinking well that's what my penis should be looking like and that's how long it should stay erect and aroused and this is what should be happening and it isn't sometimes i can't get erections sometimes it's not really working out sometimes the sex story lasts in five or ten minutes and if they're looking at pornography to sort of measure themselves as a metric that they think they have a problem and i say they haven't so pornography is starting to distort notions of

12:24Kimberley Wilson:normality individual difference performance it's not starting it has it is the biggest form of sex education for our young people so if you're looking for what sex is in pornography which a lot of young people are then we're in trouble these are what my objections to pornography or when it becomes problematic, when it sets standards and metrics that are not realistic and people become very anxious. Our adolescents are very anxious about their bodies. It used to be more the girls, now the boys are just as anxious about their bodies and the pornography industry is feeding on that. Moreover, I would say when you have sort of a young man who's struggling in his relationships and he's not got the girlfriend he wanted or a relationship ends, if you start to watch a pornography, there's no such thing as known pornography.

13:10that pornography will always say yes to you. So there is a sense of being in control of the pornography and it's just there to suit you when you want it and when you don't want it. You can pick it up and put it down when you don't want it. Yeah, because two things are happening.

13:24Kimberley Wilson:One is that pornography used to be, you know, sharing a magazine behind a bike shed and it was kind of what I consider soft and very limited. but now there is increasing access to more extreme and hardcore pornography if we're thinking about 10 11 year olds before they have the capacity the social awareness the psychology to understand or contextualize what they're seeing and then after that it's this idea that pornography then becomes a manual for sex so that these extreme and hardcore practices things like suffocation and strangulation are not just being normalized but that people believe that they should be doing them or that they should be complying with them or people on the receive that like them girls like to be choked they like to be dominated they like to be spattered they like to be racially abused this all gets normalized in some parts of pornography and i think the important thing that you mentioned is accessibility the accessibility is very important because when it was behind the bike shed and it was more out in the open on a top shelf in a brown paper bag yeah it was more socially controlled now you're getting a 10 year old 11 year old and they know about computers they know what they're doing and they can access this stuff in a room by themselves for long long periods hours sometimes fed up depressed not socializing and they're getting bombarded with all these distorted images in your work how do you see porn impacting real world relationships so your your patients other relationships in their lives shame and guilt and secrecy there's also impacts on there's a lack of empathy sometimes towards towards the person that you might want to have sex with after watching pornography if you're teaching people young people this is how to have sex and this is what the other person wants and they're just there to gratify your needs and there's no such thing as no it's a kind of dehumanization dehumanization and there's a lack of empathy some studies suggest that heavier porn use is linked actually to lower sexual satisfaction in real life particularly in men have you seen that and if so what's driving that relationship?

15:52I think that's a good question but it's very very complex as we could generalization about it because how do you measure what sexual satisfaction is and I think if you're measuring your sexuality in relation to a metric such as pornography this is how other people are having sex and I'm not then of course you've got to be dissatisfied what's really important is where is the love where is the intimacy where is the relationship where is the desire to want the other to feel good and give them a really nice time and if you see some pornography it doesn't seem like fun it's it's it's heavy it's it's quite brutal it's very serious very often yes and the

16:29Kimberley Wilson:thing about pornography is that it reduces the sexual act purely to the sexual act it reduces that person almost simply to their their genitals their sexual organs and nothing else they're just there to satisfy you and they can't say no which is completely unrealistic if that generalizes into how we engage with people in the real world you know if i encounter someone and i expect them to just do what i say that's going to distort the way i relate to people it does it does i think what more the issue is that dating and sex can be very stressful it could be very anxiety provoking in terms of the risk of rejection and humiliation making mistakes absolutely the competitiveness don't forget particularly those boys as well the competitiveness pornography allows an exit just like that away from all this business so it can give you the promise of a stress-free relationship to your sexuality i think it's a false promise and i think it can turn on you but in that moment it takes you away from a great deal of stress and the thing about stress so we think about stress in social situations that the point of it is to get better at managing that stress none of us wants to go up to someone in a bar and say hello and feel rejected but there is there's something in the kind of stress inoculation of tolerating the distress or the embarrassment that might come or the opposite of of having that sense of satisfaction when someone does give you their number or whatever it is.

18:05It feels brilliant to be fancy, doesn't it? It feels to be desired. But in pornography, that's not happening.

18:11Kimberley Wilson:So does that de-skill us in the real world? Excellent point. This is a really important point, so I'd like to say it very clearly. When young people start off entering a movement towards courtship, their sexual life, it's full of false thoughts, clumsiness, difficult situations. It's horrible.

18:33It's learn the skills and to develop the thickness of their skin in order to negotiate a sexual realm pornography can circumvent that very powerfully or if they do ask somebody out on the surface and says no they'll have some very very difficult feelings and they might turn to pornography to regulate the feelings rather than be with the feelings and work them through so when i'm working young people in my private practice as a psychotherapist i'll help them talk about the feelings what it feels like to be rejected because it means different things to different people and if they can stay and tolerate those feelings it can draw wisdom and help them mature and grow and be mature sexual subjects rather than immature sexual objects again i would emphasize the difference between problematic pornography use and pornography use that some people use occasionally to supplement their sexual selves i'm talking much more about the problematic use of pornography people don't come see me because they're happy with the pornography use.

19:30Kimberley Wilson:But let's take that point. If we were to put it on a scale, what would it look like? What would it look like from the healthy end to something that was more problematic and worrying? So what would maybe a healthy use of porn look like? Certainly, at first I think I'd look at the content. Are the people aging consent? are they consenting to what's going on is the violence in the pornography how often it's used are the people using it to regulate themselves should they be coming to a psychotherapist or getting some proper medication for emotional difficulties that will help them properly instead of looking at pornography so at the healthy end someone might be occasionally watching pornography that involves adults who are consenting and where there's a sense of self-respect within yeah it's also what the conflict is if people are looking at what you just described adults consenting and they're not conflicted and they're happy with it then it is a matter for them they may choose not to be involved in actual sex with another human being it's not for me to judge that it's only a problem if they think it's a problem i will try to help them with it but it becomes more problematic if we move across the scale as you say in terms of the the conflict someone is experiencing that they're using it to regulate or numb or shut down some type of difficult emotion when someone comes to us to see a psychotherapist they're conflicted it sounds like a cliche that people want to change because there are some people who are involved in sexual offence and pornography and they're not conflicted about what they do so they wouldn't come near the psychotherapist's office so the people that come to see me you've got to work with them very very carefully because they if they're conflicted they're full of shame and guilt or what they do and you want to help them work through that shame and guilt to look at the why do you have a sense of the direction of that shame and guilt though is it that the porn use precedes the shame and guilt, they feel guilty about the porn use, or is it that actually the shame and guilt drive them towards the use of pornography?

21:50It's a cop-out response because it's both. It's a circular thing. Often problematic porn use, they're not feeling very good about themselves. To begin with, it becomes problematic.

21:59Kimberley Wilson:In terms of? Self-esteem, self-aware. They feel very rejected. They feel, my penis is too small. Who would desire me? I've just been dumped by a girl. And once they get into a very highly aroused state of mind, they become very impulsive. They're placed looking at things they wouldn't normally look at. They've pressed what I call the fuck it switch. And they've gone into realms that they wouldn't normally go involved with. And they think, who am I now? What type of person am I? I've been getting involved in this type of stuff. They can't reach out to say to someone, I'm struggling with this. They can't go into the parents coming in the next bedroom.

22:34It's not unusual. and they don't feel able to reach for their parents in those moments. They could be a young gay person looking at gay pornography and the parents might not know that they're gay. And that's quite an extreme way to find out to come out to your family in that way. It's very, very difficult.

22:51Kimberley Wilson:It's really fraught. And at this point, I want to speak directly to anyone who's listening who recognises themselves in what we're describing. Because I want you to know that you do not have to tackle this on your own. and I urge you to seek support from your GP or a specialist organisation. You can find some sources of mental health support on BBC's Action Line page and the details are in the show notes.

23:18Kimberley Wilson:Stuart, we have walked through some of the, I guess, key difficulties around problematic use of porn. And for the listener, I wonder if we can now think about some of the things that we can do so first off if our listeners are concerned about their porn use or somebody else's what are the steps the first steps that they can take shame and guilt are not your friends here i think the shame and guilt will imprison you so you need to look at your relationship to shame and guilt how would one start you need to be brave i know it's easier said than done what I would do, I'd begin by writing myself a letter a letter that I'm not going to send anywhere a letter to me just saying what's going on and how I'm actually feeling get it out of you you might want to speak to somebody outside of your network outside of someone who doesn't know you, a stranger but a professional you don't necessarily have to go into a great load of detail about what you're watching you can talk much more generally about your porn use you might at some stage want to look at the content and talk about what it is you're looking for in the pornography that's disturbing you and that's compelling you to look at and return to it time and time again but initially do it incrementally strategically stage by stage at a pace that's suitable for you it's likely if you speak to somebody who's got some training on it or specialist in pornography you're going to be recognizable to them you're not going to shock them very easily that's really important to say because I think often clients and patients will come to us so full of worry.

24:56Kimberley Wilson:And it's really important to hear, particularly with a topic like pornography and problematic use of porn, that can be so filled with shame that if you're going to someone, particularly someone with a specialism in working with sex issues, they are not going to be shocked. They are not going to shame you. this is a space where you can talk about these things and open up that's so essential it's so very difficult but if someone can get to that point sounds like a cliche if someone recognizes the problem you're halfway there but it's true and you can put that problem into words because i think part of the compulsion why pornography is so compelling is that you're possessed by emotional states or states of mind that you can't find the words for and as psychotherapists our job fundamentally is helping people to put their experiences and their pain and their trouble and their anguish into words words that can be listened to heard and protested by another person also more controversially if you are looking at illegal pornography is this person going to phone the police on you and that's a big question for some people that's a big question for clinicians as well it's an ethical dilemma so i would start off perhaps not talking about the content of the pornography initially but just talk about your compulsions to use it until you build up a degree of trust and maybe alongside or while waiting for therapy are there other forms of self-help that people can engage with when the impulse do write yourself a contract when the impulse to look at pornography it's also starts to get hold of you what can you do maybe agree to yourself you're only going to look at pornography once a week for an hour or twice a week for an hour or something like that see if you can write yourself a contract but the problem with that it's like with addiction and i'm not saying pornography is necessarily addiction if you sort of say i'm not going to drink again ever and you don't manage to do it that can make you feel more shamed and you get very very frightened because you feel more and more out of control so it's important to set yourself a reasonable goal like i'm not going to look at pornography today i might do tomorrow who knows but not today so set yourself a reasonable goals.

27:14Kimberley Wilson:Stuart, this really has been an illuminating and fascinating conversation. So thank you for being here and helping me unpick such a complex, nuance, and as I said, timely topic that can be so filled with shame. Thank you so much. You're most welcome. Thank you for having me. And what What I in particular have loved about this conversation is that I think it allows us to do what I think mental health professionals are particularly well placed to do. Hopefully illuminating a kind of dark corner of people's psyches, their worlds, and allowing them to feel as if they can step into the light with something that they might have been struggling with.

28:00I think that's a very nice way of putting it because there is something unspeakable that happens that takes people into problematic porn use. and they need to be able to speak it. But the shame and guilt stops them from speaking it.

28:12Kimberley Wilson:And for everyone listening, I hope that this episode has created an opportunity for you to consider if your use of porn is problematic and if it is, how it might be affecting you and the people around you. And to reassure you that help and understanding is out there. And if you're with someone who is wanting to practice sex like they've seen on the screen and it makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to accept it.

28:46Kimberley Wilson:We are coming to the end of our show. Thank you to my guest, psychoanalytic and forensic psychotherapist and group analyst, Dr. Stuart Stevenson. And thank you to everyone listening. As you can hear, I'm on a mission to clear up the mental health space and to have important, if difficult conversations. So please be part of that conversation and tell me what you want me to talk about. Email us your stories in a paragraph to complex at bbc.co.uk. Please note that I can't answer you personally. So if you have a concern about a medical or mental health issue, then I'd strongly urge you to seek expert help.

29:26Kimberley Wilson:And that just leaves me to say thank you to the lovely production team at Loftus Media. Producer Rami Zabar, Assistant Producer Katie Chandler-Clark Researcher Grace Revel Technical Producer Ruben Huxtable Studio Engineer Matt Hewer Sound Engineer Ruth Rainey And at BBC Sounds Assistant Commissioner Izzy Lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rianne Roberts I'm Kimberley Wilson Thank you for listening Take care and go gently

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