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RE: Pornography and Me: How and why I escaped.
"tragic that so many of us never wake up to the connections between our past and our present. If we did, the entire pornography industry, as we know it, would collapse overnight"
Most porn viewers aren't damaged goods like you though. I like violent porn and had a perfectly normal childhood.
Thanks for your perspective @viraldrome.
A perfectly normal childhood in our modern societies is one filled with sexual violence, so it makes sense that sex and violence has wired together for you. This was the case for me, and for many people. The problem is that it is very, very difficult to access the deep-level at which this was programmed. In short: we repress the experiences that encode these connections.
One example is that a mother may hit or restrain a baby if the baby interacts with its own body in a way that the mother (or father) feels is unacceptable. You can see how this will set up early associative conditioning between sexuality and pain in very early infancy. A person rarely has easy recall of such experiences.
Add to this the problem of more than 1 in 3 children being sexually abused before the age of 18; then add the sex-negative programming of.a quasi-religious culture; then add things like circumcision; media programming and numerous repressed pre-verbal experiences and we have a maze of conditioning experiences, few of which we consciously recollect.
You could look at the themes and scenarios that occur regularly in your porn use, and you may be able to potentially determine ways in which you were yourself abused by our culture. However, this requires significant self-insight and a determination to be free of conditioning. Most survivors choose to repress these experiences and simply to re-enact them through consumption of images in which they regain a sense of control over the original triggering experience.
Of course, the survivor will often deny this (as I once did).
The difficulty with subconscious material is that it is exactly that, subconscious, we are simply not aware of it. Digging into your past will bring good long-term results, but I can understand why it feels less challenging to adopt the mainstream view that pornography is simply entertainment. It was a view I held myself until I decided to go back and connect with the kid I once was.
I wish you insight and peace.