72: Joshua Shea Talks About a Most Difficult Topic with Addiction That You Need to Hear
“The idea behind sex addiction is not to stop having sex entirely and remove sex from your life. The idea is to develop a healthy sexuality.” – Joshua Shea
The desire for love and pleasure is innate to all humans. However, as the world evolved, activities that were traditionally regarded as private and conservative are gradually becoming acceptable with the general public. Pornography is one of the industries that has dominated the web and access to it has become easier. As a result, even school-aged children are at risk of developing an addiction as their curiosity peeks and peer pressure pushes them deeper into the pleasure pool. Today, Joshua Shea, a former pornography addict, shares his battle with pornography. He lists the warnings signs of pornography addiction and differentiates the two types of pornography users. He also gives a comparison of different addictions and what makes them similar to each other. As we begin to understand pornography, the kind of intervention necessary becomes clearer and the motivation to stand against it becomes stronger. Pornography may have the power to destroy morals and psychological balance. But nothing is stronger than a family working together to uphold their integrity. Tune in and learn how to develop a healthy sexuality.
Highlights:
05:50 Internet Has Changed The Game
11:38 Warning Signs Of Pornography
20:00 Two Types Of Pornography Users
23:01 Two Things Partners Need To Do
28:11 Parallels Of All Addictions
30:40 Standpoints Of Family Members
37:33 Understanding Pornography
43:13 Addiction Is A Disease
Win the battle against pornography! Tune in as @TFRSolution and Joshua Shea dissects this very difficult topic and shares how families can cultivate healthy sexuality. #pornography #addiction #internet #psychology #EarlierIsBetter #BeObjective Share on X
Resources:
Quotes:
12:23 “We need to talk to our kids… about pornography in a very age-appropriate manner. But it has to start early.” – Joshua Shea
23:15 “Try not to judge. Try not to worry about exactly what it was they were looking at as long as it was legal.” – Joshua Shea
23:44 “If you want this person to improve, if you want this person to seek help, if you want this person to talk to you about their issues, you’re going to have to make it a safe place.” – Joshua Shea
24:48 “If you can step back and appreciate it as a deeper issue, you can actually attack the problem in a more objective way rather than an emotional way.” – Joshua Shea
29:12 “The idea behind sex addiction is not to stop having sex entirely and remove sex from your life. The idea is to develop a healthy sexuality.” – Joshua Shea
31:54 “If anybody can be a drug addict or an alcoholic, anybody can be a porn addict.” – Joshua Shea
33:48 “You cannot make any addict get better, the addict has to decide that on their own.” – Joshua Shea
43:20 “Addiction is a disease. And if you feel that you have it or a loved one has it, you need to get help for it.” – Joshua Shea
About Joshua
Joshua Shea lives in Central Maine with his two great kids and to a wonderful wife and a menagerie of cats and dogs. For years, on the outside, people saw Joshua as a successful magazine publisher, film festival founder, and city councilor. He hid his mental health issues, pornography and alcohol addictions from the world. Today, he works as an author and speaker/presenter sharing his story and educating about addiction. Joshua is the author of, The Addiction Nobody Will Talk About. He believes that if we can begin to talk more about porn addiction and mental health, others may be able to address their addictions before they devolve to the unhealthy and criminal places where his’ hit rock bottom.
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions:
Jeff Jones: Welcome everyone. This is Jeff Jones on the podcast, Families Navigating Addiction & Recovery. And today I am here with a guest, I am just getting to know Joshua Shea, his website is recoveringpornaddict.com. So I’m really excited to have this conversation, and one of the reasons why is because oftentimes substance addiction can stop per se or at least the family sees that the substance addiction is in recovery and the addiction can come out in other ways. And one of those ways is process addictions, specifically sex addiction. So I’m really excited to have this conversation with Joshua Shea.
Welcome Joshua.
Joshua Shea: Hi Jeff. Thank you very much for having me today.
Jeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. So how I would like to start is if you could say a little bit more about who you are so that people have a good idea of who they’re listening to.
Joshua Shea: Sure. As you mentioned, my name is Joshua Shea. I live in Maine. I am now a pornography addiction expert, author, educator. I’ve written two books. I have that website you mentioned. And I also do go around to libraries, churches, other kinds of civic groups who want to learn about pornography addiction. And what I do is I mix my personal story, which is about 20 to 25 plus years of not only porn addiction, but also alcoholism. I was, did have the co-occurring addictions, and I mixed that with a lot of statistics about what’s happening in the world of porn addiction today, because the internet over the last generation has really mixed things up. So I think that society really needs to know about where things stand right now because we’re not talking about this and we need to be.
Jeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Well, so how about if you can say a little bit more about how you’re so passionate about this topic? What led to that?
Joshua Shea: Well, when it finally came time that I was largely forced to address the issue, I, being a former journalist, I made most of my professional life as a journalist or an editor for newspapers and magazines. My natural inclination is to go ahead and start doing some research. And back in early 2014 when I finally got my act together, I looked online, I visited bookstores, and there was really nothing for the pornography addict. I could find plenty to deal with my drinking. I could find plenty to deal with drugs or even food disorders, but a disorder like pornography addiction, there was just nothing out there. So when I started to get my act together, learn about why I was an addict, start developing the tools to overcome the addictions, I decided that I wanted to give something back, so to speak, and create resources for people. So as I mentioned, there’s that website. My first book was largely a memoir, talking about the last four or five years of my descent into porn addiction. And my second book, which just came out in the end of 2019 is actually for the partners of porn addicts who suddenly faced the fact that this person who they are married to or in a relationship with reveals or is discovered to have this massive secret who feel like they’ve been betrayed and don’t know the person that they’re with, and really how to handle that situation, and I wrote that alongside a licensed marriage and family therapist out of California.
Jeff Jones: Oh, great. All right. All right, well thank you. Thank you. So you have your own experience which has thoroughly educated you. You’ve gone through this, you’ve come out the other side, and you see that one, you mentioned how the internet has changed the game and I have an idea of what that means, but I’d like to hear more from you as to, what do you mean by the internet has changed the game?
Joshua Shea: Well, if you look back when I first developed my pornography addiction, which was very late 80’s, you had to largely go and find a magazine or find a videotape for pornography. When I developed my addiction, I was first shown hardcore pornography magazines by a cousin when I was probably about 12 years old, and I knew immediately that I had found something special. Most addicts, whether it’s sex, porn, gambling, food, drugs, alcohol, have some kind of trauma in their background, and I’m much like everybody else who was an addict. I have both sexual abuse and emotional abuse in my background at the hands of a babysitter I had when I was very young, and I’m kind of textbook in that when I discovered pornography, I discovered something that helped me repress those memories, helped me deal with life on a different way. Same thing happened with alcohol a couple of years later when people still say that there is no such thing as sex or porn addiction, I try to tell them the exact same thing happened to me the first time I got drunk as the first time that I saw hardcore pornography.
So anyway, back to your question, when I was 13, 14 years old, I found a video store by my house that would rent videos to me so I could go and pick one up after school, which I did on most days, but we didn’t have the internet in my house until the mid 90’s, there was no real internet until I started to go off to college that people were using regularly, and there was no high speed internet for another couple of years after that. So it wasn’t like it is today where every 12 year old kid who has a cellphone has the greatest porn computer that’s ever been invented in their pocket with a couple of keystrokes they can see the most depraved stuff that you and I didn’t even have access to when we were young in any videos or magazines. It’s the ease of use has made such a big difference because while the pornography industry tended to market itself to the straight white male up until the internet. Now that access is equal to everybody, your seeing groups like black men, white women, religious types, especially in the Catholic and the LDS churches, the rates of pornography addiction with these four groups is exploding because there is so much content out there. It’s to get at and the content specifically targets these different demographics. You don’t have to just appeal to the widest audience anymore. So now that you’re finding out that gee, every person on earth has these sexual curiosities, has this interest in this stuff. So you’re seeing all of these other non just straight white male groups get into pornography, especially at young ages.
And one of the most startling statistics to me, which just came out a year and a half, two years ago, which was done by the Barna Group out of Texas, they surveyed thousands of men, and they found out that in the age group of 18 to 30, and this is the group of men who largely don’t remember a world before the internet, 32% of these men have said that they either feel like they have a problem with pornography or they have a full on pornography addiction. And that’s one out of three men under 30 saying they have an issue with pornography. When they attribute households, 47% of households said that pornography either currently is or has been a problem at one time. So you’re looking at half the households in America, pornography is an issue. One third of the men under 30, pornography is an issue. This has to do with the ease of use that the internet has brought to our lives.
Jeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I get it. So quick little reframe, what I’m hearing is the internet has kind of focused different kinds of interest in this kind of porn, or that kind of porn, or another kind of porn. And the other thing that I think of with the internet is it delivers information in the form of pictures really, really quickly, boom, boom, boom. So much quicker than like back before the internet when there was a magazine or something like that. I really get what you’re saying, the internet has amplified this problem in a really big way, and then the statistics that you put out there are kind of scary. I mean, this is a secret issue, and sex is oftentimes not something that people make public. And I’m kind of thinking, wow, how can family members start to get a clue and start to like understand warning signs and know what they can do?
Joshua Shea: Well, when it comes to that 18 to 30 year old group, I think that you’re looking at kind of the route that I went, which was first actually going to inpatient rehab. And there you start to develop not only tools to deal with the addiction and the cravings, but you start to understand why you became an addict in the first place. When it comes to people who are under 18 who perhaps haven’t seen pornography yet or haven’t been exposed to the point that they develop an addiction, I think that parents have to play the biggest role, and it’s not fun, and yeah, I’m sorry that in the year 2020, that this is what parenting has come to be, but we need to talk to our kids starting at a young age about pornography in a very age appropriate manner. But it has to start early. Just like drugs or alcohol, or crossing the street, or being nice to your friends. You know, you can tell a five or six year old child that they should not look at pictures. If somebody shows them pictures of a naked person, they should not look at them, and they should come tell you, and you don’t ever let anybody take any pictures of you when you’re not dressed, and you don’t take any pictures of other people when they’re not dressed, and you just simply leave it at that because kids don’t know what pornography is. Kids don’t see it as this dirty, despicable thing, or this wonderful thing to be celebrated. It just is what it is. Kids look for direction, as they get older, I think that you can get a little more in depth.
“We need to talk to our kids… about pornography in a very age-appropriate manner. But it has to start early.” - Joshua Shea Share on XFor instance, you look at say 12, 13 year old boys. Now a lot of them, statistics would suggest have started to see hardcore pornography and that’s the age why was when I first sought and started to develop a bit of a compulsion towards it. Now, much like those boys, I was somebody who wanted a girlfriend, and I believe that most boys want a girlfriend. And you talk to 18, 19, 20 year old guys as I sometimes do and you hear these stories of erectile dysfunction that shouldn’t be happening to guys their age. I talked to a guy, I do a bit of advisement for a pornography addicts and their families through my website, and I talked to a guy not too long ago, he’s 22 years old. He’s got one of the most beautiful girlfriends I’ve ever seen. The only way that he can be intimate with her is if she is in the other room and they’re talking to each other on a webcam similar to you and I am talking now, it gets sexual that way. And a lot of men have to have pornography on in the room if they’re going to perform with their girlfriends and wives. But these guys are 17, 18, upto age of 23, 24, I think we need to start telling 13 and 14 year old guys about these guys who are 10 years older than them because I think that will scare them. And I don’t necessarily think we should lie to them. Like we don’t lie about drug abuse, we don’t lie about drinking, but let’s tell them the facts. If you develop an unhealthy relationship with pornography, this is what can happen to you. These guys can only pray that they are able to have a normal physical relationship with their girlfriend or wives. You don’t want to go down that road. So I think again, it’s education, it’s age appropriate education, it’s talking to our kids.
And does that mean that they’ll never ever look at it? Of course not. Almost all of us try to cigarette despite the fact that our parents said don’t do it. Almost all of us try to drink aside from the fact our parents told us not to do it, but most people stayed away from it. Most people who did it didn’t develop horrible addictions. And there are some people who do, and there’s just nothing you can do about the fact that there are always going to be people who developed porn addictions. There were people who developed porn addictions going back to the 30’s and 40’s. Pornography is not going away. You can look at cave paintings from 50,000 years ago, and there is pornography on those cave walls. I don’t think we try to fight the substance itself. I think that we just try to educate people about what it can do to them. And then as we do with alcohol, smoking and these other things, we let them make their own decisions based on the education.
Jeff Jones: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I’m hearing in what you’re saying here, Joshua, is kind of the interpersonal connection between people and how that has changed. And it may, I mean, how kids learn to be connected emotionally, first, with their parents, and what is appropriate, and what isn’t appropriate. And for kids to learn how to navigate uncomfortable feelings with another. And that’s a whole nother area of education, and it’s an area that I think parents or family members also, they’re in this whether they want to be or not.
Joshua Shea: Absolutely. And it’s not like you take marijuana or you take cocaine and you give it to your kids and say, this is bad, so don’t do it. You don’t have to show them pornography. You don’t have to get into it beyond it’s pictures of naked people doing things with each other. When I do my presentations to libraries or churches, it’s very non graphic, it’s very straight forward, and I think that’s how we need to look at it. We’re so squeamish as a society when it comes to this because despite the fact that statistics suggest that more people under the age of 60, especially men under the age of 60 look at pornography than don’t, we still act like it’s something that individually none of us do. And collectively as a society, only the outlier perverts do when the fact is the majority does. And we need to be willing to talk about it. But because it involves, I think naked people, naked people in intimate situations, it involves people’s little kinks and kind of what drives you personally, it’s very embarrassing, it’s very shameful, not to mention the activity of masturbation that most people take part in when they look at pornography. Everybody wants to pretend that they don’t do this. So if people pretend that they’re not looking at pornography, how are we ever going to talk about pornography addiction?
Jeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, that’s a great question. And I mean, in my own mind, in my own thinking, I keep going back to when someone goes after pornography, they’re trying to get a need met that isn’t being met. So like my question or rambling question before about learning emotional intimacy and attachment at a very early age, and how people connect with one another in a very real way. And I’m kind of like just off the top of my head, kind of wondering about emphasizing that angle as well because I really hear what you’re saying Joshua this is going to be a national problem, and it’s secret, secret. It’s way more secret than substance abuse or substance addiction, and I’m kind of wondering, yeah, how to start changing those statistics? And what family members can do? And family members who are parents, that’s one thing. And there are some obvious things they can do, some of which you’ve already mentioned. But then family members who are like a spouse or something like that, this is a huge, huge topic here.
Joshua Shea: Absolutely. And you mentioned, we talk about chemical and substance abuse issues more, I make the joke to people, although it’s not that much of a joke. I actually went off first to inpatient rehab for alcoholism, and I make the joke that when I told people I was going off to rehab for alcoholism, they patted me on the back and called me a hero, and then I mentioned I’m going off to rehab for porn addiction, and they go running away looking for the hand sanitizer. It’s viewed so differently when it comes to supporting, or actually what I should say first is there are two types of pornography users. You have your recreational user, and you have your addict. What’s kind of ironic is the recreational user is the one who is using as a substitute for intercourse, as a substitute for physical intimacy with their partner. That’s the one when the girlfriend or the wife says you’re picking the porn over me. That’s usually what that guy is doing, and that’s a relationship problem unto itself. When it comes to an addict like I was, I wasn’t trying to replace physical intimacy with my wife. I wasn’t trying to replace a lot of what people think is trying to be replaced. I’m trying to deal with this trauma from years and years earlier. I’m trying to escape to a fantasy land where I don’t have to face myself, and who I am, and what I’ve been through. I’m looking to numb my body much like people do with drugs or alcohol. It’s the same thing that happens in the mind when somebody is an addict. I’m looking for the hit of my pleasure sensors. This isn’t just that I want to have sex with myself that night because I don’t want to put in the work with my wife.
There were a lot of porn addicts who actually don’t have massive changes to their sex lives because it’s not that they’re trying to not have sex with their partner, replace sex with their partner. They’re dealing with some much, much deeper, darker issues. And I tell people that because a lot of times, even if a guy is an addict or a partner is an addict, the other partner will assume that it’s a rejection of them, and it never is. If somebody is a true addict, their partner has nothing to do with it. I was an addict for a dozen years before I met my wife. She had nothing to do with it, whatsoever. And a dozen years into it, I was fantastic at hiding it from everybody. So it was very easy to hide it from her. And she wasn’t your prudish, Puritan type person. She didn’t love pornography, we didn’t watch it together or anything like that, but she was just kind of a live and let live person, so she wasn’t looking for that kind of stuff with me, and with the fact that I was outwardly clearly having issues with drinking, that took the attention away from that as well. If partners find themselves in that position where they suddenly recognize that there is a porn addiction within their relationship.
“If you want this person to improve, if you want this person to seek help, if you want this person to talk to you about their issues, you're going to have to make it a safe place.” - Joshua Shea Share on XThere were really two things that they needed to do. Number one is try not to judge, try not to, worry about exactly what it was they were looking at as long as it was legal. Everybody has their little things that they like, don’t judge them on what they were looking at specifically they were looking at pornography because it served a much deeper purpose of soothing their trauma, soothing their addiction. So don’t start shaming them and judging them based on what they were specifically looking at. The second thing that you need to do is create a safe space. If you want a person to improve, if you want this person to seek help, if you want this person to talk to you about their issues, you’re going to have to make it a safe place. If you are going off the handle about what they’ve done to you, and how they’ve been, how they betrayed you, and how they chose porn over you, why would anybody who is being berated like that want to share their problems with you when they’re being shamed and embarrassed? Why would they open up their mouths about it? Why would that force them to go get help when that’s happening? So in my second book, which was for partners, I don’t stress the partners that they should go get divorced. I don’t stress the partners that they should stay married.
“If you can step back and appreciate it as a deeper issue, you can actually attack the problem in a more objective way rather than an emotional way.” - Joshua Shea Share on XWhat I stressed the partners who have a pornography addict in their life is to take a step back and just think things out slowly. Because this is not your garden variety. Oh, he’s a pervert who likes to look at porn. This is a much deeper issue, and if you can step back and appreciate it’s a deeper issue, you can actually attack the problem in a more objective way rather than emotional way.
“Try not to judge. Try not to worry about exactly what it was they were looking at as long as it was legal.” - Joshua Shea Share on XJeff Jones: Oh, my God. Joshua, I love what you’re saying. So you went over several points that I’d like to emphasize that I, for me, is really helpful to distinguish what’s going on here. And the first one, I heard you say there’s essentially two types of porn users, and one is the recreational user, and then the other is the addict. And when you started talking about that, I really got it how like, once the brain pathway is set up for addiction, if it got set up with a substance, or if that is the main way it’s been set up, it’s like someone’s going to become an addict if they’re vulnerable, if their wiring is vulnerable to that. And I really liked the way you framed, if they have historical pain, historical trauma that they can’t feel, they don’t want to feel, and they need to numb out. And then the two suggestions that you gave was the try not to judge them, and understand that it’s serving some purpose for them, and create a safe space for them to talk about it, to acknowledge it openly. And when you were talking about your book, I really appreciate you kind of emphasizing two partners to go slow because one of the things that I know is that partners of people in addiction, their nervous system is activated and all the blood goes into the limbic, the emotions, all that kind of thing. And when they go slow, and I think as you said, take a step back, then it allows them to take a pause. And how I understand the body is when they take a pause, it engages the parasympathetic nervous system that calms them down, more blood flow to the cortex where they can do their best thinking. So wow, there is a lot of messages in here, and I really see how process addiction, specifically sex addiction just meshes so closely with substance addiction. And how this is so dangerous and oftentimes not talk about. And just from the treatment centers, the substance treatment centers that I’m aware of out there, I’m curious how in their own initial intake and screening, do they screen, are there questions in there that explore for where this person’s at with porn recreationally or addiction, and if they’re in a treatment center, they’re going to be vulnerable to porn addiction, I’m guessing.
Joshua Shea: Right, absolutely. And the one that I went to, which was just outside of Dallas, Texas on the intake, there was a two hour online or on a computer questionnaire that I had to fill out that really went in depth about the trauma that I had, what happened if I remembered it, which I said started to at that point. And also what it was that I looked at in the pornography? What were my routines? The type of pornography I was looking at? They really do, at least where I went get in depth in it. And what I found was fantastic about this second rehab that I went to, it did have people who were drug addicts and alcoholics. It also had people who had eating disorders. And it was very interesting how I became close with several of the women who were in the eating disorder program. Because if you think about it, the idea behind sex addiction is not to stop having sex entirely and remove sex from your life. The idea is to develop healthy sexuality. When it comes to alcoholism, or heroin addiction, or meth addiction, the idea is just to stop. But when I was talking to these women, it’s like they can’t stop eating. They need to develop a healthy relationship with eating. Much like I had to develop a healthy relationship with sexuality. So there really was a lot of parallels there that I had never thought of until I entered addiction. And they actually had a lot of the different classes and different seminars they had, the eating disorder people, and the pornography and sex addicts mixing together, because a lot of the messages were the same about how to create a balanced lifestyle.
“The idea behind sex addiction is not to stop having sex entirely and remove sex from your life. The idea is to develop a healthy sexuality.” - Joshua Shea Share on XJeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. So I’m curious from the standpoint of a family member, what you said, the two points that you made before. I’m wondering if you could follow up with a little bit, and the two points where the first one was try not to judge and to realize that this behavior is serving a purpose. And then the second one was to create a safe space. And I’m kind of wondering, can you dive into that a little bit more for family members who are curious what that might look like?
Joshua Shea: Sure, absolutely. And I should also stress that, try not to be in denial, whether you’re the partner or whether you’re the addict themselves. A lot of people, for some reason or another think I can’t be this kind of addict. They imagine a pornography addict as some 19 year old pimply faced boy in his mom’s basement who’s never kissed a girl in real life, and that’s just not who it is. When I was in rehab, and as I’ve gone and met people through the work I’ve done, I have met doctors, and lawyers, men, women, black, white, rich, poor, smart as a whip, stupid as a stump, there is no stereotypical porn addict. So the belief I was a professional guy who owned two businesses, had a great wife, two kids, two cars, two dogs, I was the quote unquote American dream but this was happening to me, and I hit it very well from people. So the belief you cannot be a porn addict, or the belief that your partner cannot be a porn addict is just simply wrong, and it’s something that needs to be removed. If anybody can be a drug addict or an alcoholic, anybody can be a porn addict. Now that said, when you do discover that they are a porn addict, to follow up on your question, first, they’re usually two responses. Either the person who is the addict is thrilled to finally be outed, they might’ve even outed themselves because they know they need help, and they want to go get help. The other person is the one who needs some prodding or might deny that they have, that they need help. For the one who is kind of making it easy on you, what you have to do is get them into therapy, and create a plan for that person, which may be inpatient rehab. It may be an intensive outpatient program, it may be 12 steps, it might be a mixture of things as it was for me, but you need to have them sit with somebody and create a strategy to try to get better, both developing tools and figuring out why they became that way in the first place. Tougher for the situation where the addict is in denial, and that’s where the partner really has to do some pushing, and do some soul searching, and really create some boundaries that hopefully forces the person to get help.
“If anybody can be a drug addict or an alcoholic, anybody can be a porn addict.” - Joshua Shea Share on XAnd I speak with many wives who it’s like, okay, I understand you love this guy and you’ve been married to him for 8, 10 years, but are you going to be able to stay married to a pornography addict if nothing changes? And if that answer is no, you have to let him know that. And you don’t have to say, I’m leaving right away. But what you could say is, if you don’t attend a 12 step meeting every week, you’ll be sleeping on the couch and I’ll be in the bedroom. You can build these other types of boundaries that push them into exploring recovery. You cannot make any addict get better. The addict has to decide that on their own. But when it comes to sex and porn addiction, I think that the partner can create certain boundaries, create certain ultimatums that forces the addict to really face up to who they are. And that may ultimately end up with the partner leaving, either for a period of time or for good. But again, as the partner, as the healthy one, you need to take care of yourself. There’s a huge piece of self care when people are around addicts, they get ill themselves. My wife, for instance, gained a tremendous amount of weight. It wasn’t until I entered my second rehab that she got therapy and she started dealing with things. She went and did a Bariatric Program at our local hospital and had the Gastric Sleeve Surgery, and ended up losing a 100lbs that she had gained during the end of my addictions because she was just trying to take care of me and keep the family together. So you do need to take care of yourself if you are the partner of an addict. Maybe a group counseling situation is good, but you do each need to go to your own counseling because you’re the only one who can take care of yourself, and the addict is the only one who can take care of themselves. But you can be there to push them along. And unfortunately, sometimes it does end up with divorce or relationship breaking apart, but you have to do what’s right for you.
“You cannot make any addict get better, the addict has to decide that on their own.” - Joshua Shea Share on XJeff Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so I really appreciate when you first started talking about this, you mentioned the potential for family members or partners to be in denial. And I really appreciate that kind of warning. And one of the things that I’ve seen that can be helpful for that is for people to just challenge their own denial simply by allowing natural curiosity to happen. What if this? What if that?
Joshua Shea: Right.
Jeff Jones: And then the point about self care, and that, I mean, I think is so very important, and the reciprocal kind of thing that happens with any addiction in the family, and the reciprocal thing that I’m talking about is that the addiction, I think of addiction as an addiction disruption. I’m sure there’s an epicenter with one person there who is suffering the biggest problem with the addiction. But then there’s others around them that have impact, and oftentimes they don’t see that impact. So yeah. Wow. This is so very important. And I think to myself, wow, how can sex and then porn, this is such secret behavior and if it stays secret, the risk factors just go up, and up, and up. And it seems like, I mean, whether it’s families with children or families where it’s just two partners kind of thing, but really creating conditions in the family that increase protective factors, or potentially, or inhospitable to active addiction, addiction meaning porn addiction as well.
Joshua Shea: Absolutely. And I’ve developed this experiment for people to try if they want to learn about addiction. And I think it really works well, especially for people who are under about 40 years old. If you want to know what addiction feels like, if you want to understand the pull of addiction, because a lot of people would just say, well, just don’t look at it. And that’s not the way that it works. That would be nice and simple. I’m somebody who, I can go to a casino with my wife once or twice a year. If I win $50, great. If I lose $50, whatever. I had a good time. I don’t have that gambling gene that gambling addicts do. So people who don’t understand the need to look at pornography, I bring it to them as the need to look at their phone. Some morning, take your phone, turn the volume all the way up, turn on every little chime and open up your applications. So when anything happens, you hear something, take a post it note and just put it across the face of your phone, and put the phone next to you, and never have it leave you all day. And especially for a lot of younger people, when there’s a Snapchat chime, or a Facebook chime, or a text comes in, or even a telephone call comes in, don’t answer it, just let it go.
Jeff Jones: Yeah.
Joshua Shea: And what’s you’re going to find, and I’ve talked to people who’ve tried this, they start at 9:00 in the morning, by noon, they have to rip off that post it note and find out what’s happening there. Because people are addicted to their phones, people need that little validation, people need to get that little hit of dopamine to find out, Oh, my God, what’s going on there? When you and I remember a world before everybody having a cellphone, we had phones on the wall, and if there was an emergency, somebody reached you that way, and it might not be immediately. And 99.99% of what comes across our phones is not an emergency. We feel like it is, and we’ve trained ourselves to believe every little chime needs to be seen right away. So like I said, I urge people to try this experiment for a day and see how long you can actually deal with it. And that is a perfect comparison to what any other addict feels. They feel an internal pull towards a substance and it changes them. You’re going to notice that you start getting agitated when you can’t look at your phone. If somebody brings up, Oh, you’re not looking at your phone, how come? Or, Oh, you used to look at your phone a lot, this must be killing you. You’ll get angry, you’ll start denying it, for somebody who’s not addicted to their phone, this is a very easy thing to do, and that’s when you’re looking for addiction within your family, it’s kind of that way as well. If you called me a gambling addict at any point in my life, I just said, no Jeff, I’m actually not. But had you called me a porn addict when I was 20 or 30, I would have taken that the wrong way. It would have made me frustrated. It would have made me lash shout because you were hitting a nerve. So if you happen to mention pornography to a loved one and they get a little bit agitated, that can be a red flag.
Another red flag is when, and this is kind of more for the addicts themselves, when you start replacing your addictive behavior, or when you start replacing normal behavior with addictive behavior, you’re not watching TV, you’re not hanging out with friends, you’re not doing what you normally do, you’re scheduling your day, or your highlight of your day is feeding that addiction, that becomes the focus of your life. And that can eventually lead to having trouble at work, having trouble at school, getting in trouble with the law, even actual physical problems with your body. Like I said, the erectile dysfunction, and other things like this where you fry your dopamine receptors and it’s really hard to come back from that. So there’s a lot of red flags that both the partners, the families, and the addicts themselves can look for as it’s developing. I don’t think I ever heard of porn addiction until I was actually in my alcohol addiction rehab. And it started to come up with my case manager who had me talked to a certified sex addiction therapist, and I realized that, gee, my sex addiction and my porn addiction actually even predated my alcohol addiction. If you’re not looking for it, you may not see it there. So along with just educating people about the addiction, we need to teach them how to look out for it.
Jeff Jones: Yeah, well, what really touched me, what you said was the little experiment that you propose about the telephone, and people turning on the alerts, but putting a post it note over the phone to where they can’t see anything. And in my mind, that really shines light on how our environment, our culture has created conditions that are so hospitable to addiction forming.
Joshua Shea: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Jones: So, wow, this has been a really great conversation. So Joshua, is there anything that you wanted to say that we haven’t gone into? I haven’t asked about?
Joshua Shea: Not really, I just want to underline the fact that this is a real thing. Addiction is a disease, and if you feel that you have it or a loved one has it, you need to get help for it. This isn’t like a broken leg that heals on its own and you’re done with it. Addiction is something that you battle your entire life. I still have dreams about drinking alcohol. I personally have found it harder to kick alcohol than the pornography, thank God I haven’t had a relapse on either in six years, but I still deal with it.
“Addiction is a disease. And if you feel that you have it or a loved one has it, you need to get help for it.” - Joshua Shea Share on XJeff Jones: Right.
Joshua Shea: It’s something more like heart disease or diabetes where it needs to be treated throughout your life. So if you’re not treating it, it’s not going to go away. You need to get help, if you believe that you have an issue. Maybe you don’t have a full addiction, maybe you’re wrong, but isn’t it better to go get checked out and find out if you’re wrong? Isn’t it better to talk to somebody about the use that you have with it? And I know that, like I said earlier, it can be shameful, it can be embarrassing, but this is really your life and the quality of life of the people you love that we’re talking about here. And for those who want to put their head in the ground and pretend it doesn’t exist, we did that for 30, 40 years with the Opioid crisis. You can go back and watch Dragnet from the late 60’s, and they’re talking about heroin use. And you can go listen to rap music from the 80’s, and they’re talking about abusing drugs like Vicodin. It’s not like the opiate and opioid crisis came up upon us secretly. We should have seen it coming, 30, 40 years in advance. And I believe, if you look at these statistics with pornography addiction, if you look at how they’re growing, by the time we hit year 2050, we’re going to be in a very sad shape in America. If we don’t start dealing with this now, we need to look at something like the AIDS crisis of the 80’s, what happened there? Everybody got behind it. Money was put towards research, everybody was educated, and now you know, it’s still out there, it’s still a big deal, but we have the science to help deal with it. We have the education to know what’s going on there. It’s not a shameful thing as it was when it first came out. We handled the AIDS crisis probably as well as we could as a society, but we absolutely dropped the ball on the opiate and opioid crisis. And my question to society is how do you want to handle the pornography addiction crisis?
Jeff Jones: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Wow. This has been just a great conversation, and I really appreciate it. So for people who are listening to this and would like to learn more about you, your work, the books that you have written, how would they do that?
Joshua Shea: The best place to visit is the website, as you mentioned earlier, it is recoveringpornaddict.com, I write articles on there couple times a week, there’s a page of resources, 12 step groups, rehabs, online forums, so you can start to learn more about it. There is a page where you can listen to all of the podcasts or interviews I’ve given if you want to learn more about me and hear me talk more about this. There’s also a page where you can buy my books and a page where I do offer my advising services. I kind of look at myself as playing a role of being the first porn addict a lot of people ever talk to. And while I don’t have the schooling and experience of a professional therapist, I can talk to you as another person who’s dealt with this, or as somebody whose family has been through this, and nudge you towards getting the proper professional help. It’s easy to break the ice with me, and that’s what I try to offer to people.
Jeff Jones: Very nice. Wow. Well, Joshua, thank you very much. I appreciate your time.
Joshua Shea: And thank you so much, Jeff. Like I said, there are a lot of people who want to stick their head in the ground about this, and the only way that I can get out there and educate about it is for people like you to give me a platform. So I really have to give you a lot of respect as well for being able to tackle a topic that people sometimes want to shy away from.
Jeff Jones: Well, thank you.