Pornography Addiction: Why It Happens — the VitaModo Method’s View

When someone asks how to get rid of pornography addiction, the method’s first step is not fighting the act itself but understanding why it is used. For one person this act works like a medication: it removes the thoughts, the spiraling, the fear and the anxiety. Then the question is no longer “how do I stop,” but “what exactly am I treating with it.”

The sexual act as a tranquilizer

In the method’s logic, for some people the sexual act is used not for closeness but as a sedative. The doctor says it plainly: it works like a tranquilizer, and in heavier cases “like opiates.” Its physiological effect serves the person as medicine — it relieves tension right here and now. And, as with any such “medicine,” dependence then grows by the same mechanism as smoking or comfort-eating.

A crucial distinction: a self-soothing habit vs. a disorder

The method insists you cannot “measure the average temperature across the whole hospital.” In some cases this is a self-soothing habit — “like people overeat, like people drink.” In others it’s a different mechanism: a painful obsession, where right after the act the person spirals — “what if it never works again, what if something’s wrong with me” — and restarts the cycle. That belongs to the obsessive range (like biting nails, pulling out hair) — a different, pathological mechanism. This difference must be felt, because it determines where help should even be sought.

A new generation, the screen, and a “convenient” substitute

The method also looks at context. A new generation grew up on pornography: a big screen, a good computer — and a living partner turns out to be “harder” than the substitute. Reaching release alone becomes easier than building compatibility with another person. This forms a habit of getting by without the other — and thus without the depth that relationships exist for.

Where “the norm” and “power over the norm” fail

The method refuses to turn the topic into a moral verdict. The doctor recalls the danger of giving psychiatry the power to enforce a “norm” by force. So here it matters to see not “vice” but a disorder — something that can be treated, like lungs, heart or liver are treated. The approach is individual: “approach a person as a person,” listen as if for the first time, without clichés, and the patient will tell you himself what he is treating with this act.

What is really being treated — the capacity to love

The method’s core point about the cause: the deficit is closed not by abstinence or willpower, but by the quality of connection. Mutual masturbation “on camera” or a new “Zoom orgy” will demand the same again tomorrow — it gives no satiation. Satiation comes only from full intimate relationships where people enrich each other financially, physically, emotionally, psychologically. The more such “layers,” the steadier the person — and the less need for a substitute. That’s why the method says not “stop,” but “keep your capacity to love”: then sexuality finds its rightful place.

Practice

Self-observation steps strictly within the method’s logic (not a diagnosis):

1. Name the function. Before an episode, note: what am I relieving right now — anxiety, fear, spiraling, fatigue? This turns the act from an automatism into a visible “medicine.”
2. Distinguish the mechanism. Is this “like overeating/drinking” (self-soothing) — or does a painful obsessive “what if…” follow afterward? Different mechanisms call for different kinds of help.
3. Find a living layer of connection. Ask where today there was even one real moment of closeness: a conversation, a hug, support. The method calls exactly this “satiation.”
4. Protect trust. Notice the domestic “bang-bang” — shouting, quarrels, contempt: these are what break the closeness, after which a person “shuts down and can no longer open up.”
5. No drama over the past. Don’t turn your own experience into a verdict on yourself: “this is life, don’t make a big production out of it” — the task is to move forward while keeping the capacity to love.