Treatment and Healing of Sexual and Pornographic Addictions Part 1 Dr. Victor B. Cline

[Editor's note: In this article, Dr. Cline describes strategies that he has found useful in treating sexual addicts, particularly those addicted to pornography, and that might be helpful to other professionals counseling sexual addicts. Others interested in the nature of sexual addiction may also find it informative.]
In over 25 years I have treated approximately 350 males afflicted with sexual addictions (or sometimes referred to as sexual compulsions). In about 94% of the cases I have found that pornography was a contributor, facilitator or direct causal agent in the acquiring of these sexual illnesses. I note that Patrick Carnes, the leading U.S. researcher in this area, reports similar findings. In his research on nearly 1000 sex addicts, as reported in his Don't Call it Love: Recovery from Sexual Addictions (Bantam Books, 1991): "Among all addicts surveyed 90% of the men and 77% of the women reported pornography as significant to their addiction."
I found that nearly all of my adult sexual addicts' problems started with porn exposure in childhood or adolescence (8 years and older). The typical pattern was exposure to mild porn early with increasing frequency of exposure and eventual later addiction. This was nearly always accompanied by masturbation.
This was followed by an increasing desensitization of the materials' pathology, escalation to increasingly aberrant and varied kinds of materials, and eventually to acting out the sexual fantasies they were exposed to. While this did on occasion include incest, child molestation and rape, most of the damage was through compulsive infidelity (often infecting the wife with Herpes or other venereal diseases) and a destruction of trust in the marital bond which in many cases led to divorce and a breaking up of the family.
Many wives found their husband preferring fantasy sex (they would catch them masturbating to pornography) to making love with their partner. This had devastating effects on the marriage. One wife, in great pain, confronted her husband, "What do you see in those two-dimensional faceless women that I can't give you as a loving wife who is flesh and blood, a real person and committed to you??" The men never had an answer. To some extent they enjoyed sexual relations with their wives but most preferred the fantasy with masturbation because "these women" could do anything and were perfect in form and appearance!
I found that once addicted, whether to just the pornography or the later pattern of sexual acting out, they really lost their "free agency." It was like a drug addiction. And in this case their drug was sex. They could not stop the pattern of their behavior, no matter how high-risk for them it was.
My 25 years' clinical work, as well as frequent reviews of the literature, convince me that at least one avenue leading to the creation of these kinds of addictions is through a process of masturbatory conditioning. The work of R.J. McGuire, et. al ("Sexual Deviation as Conditioned Behavior," Behavior Research & Therapy, 1965: vol. 2, p.185) suggests that exposure to special sexual experiences (which could include pornography), and then masturbating to the fantasy of this exposure, can sometimes later lead to participation in deviant sexual acts.
As McGuire explains it, as a man repeatedly masturbates to a vivid sexual fantasy as his exclusive outlet, the pleasurable experiences endow the deviant fantasy (rape, molesting children, injuring one's partner while having sex, etc.) with increasing erotic value. The orgasm experienced then provides the critical reinforcing event for the conditioning of the fantasy preceding or accompanying the act. McGuire indicates that any type of sexual deviation can be acquired in this way, that it may include several unrelated deviations in one individual and that it cannot be eliminated even by massive feelings of guilt.
Other related studies by D.R. Evans ("Masturbatory Fantasy & Sexual Deviation," Behavioral Research & Therapy, 1968: vol.6, p.17) and B.T. Jackson ("A case of Voyeurism Treated by Counter Conditioning," Behavioral Research & Therapy, 1969: vol.7, p.133) support this thesis. They found that deviant masturbatory fantasy very significantly affected the habit strength of the subject's sexual deviation.
In my treatment of hundreds of primarily male patients with sexual pathology (paraphilias) I have consistently found that most men are vulnerable to the effects of masturbatory conditioning to pornography with a consequence of sexual ill health, because we are all subject to the laws of learning with few or no exceptions. In my experience as a sexual therapist, any individual is at risk of becoming, in time, a sexual addict, as well as conditioning himself into having a sexual deviancy and/or disturbing a bonded relationship with a spouse or girlfriend when this occurs.
A frequent side effect is that their capacity to love is also dramatically reduced (e.g. it results in a marked dissociation of sex from friendship, affection, caring and other normal healthy emotions and traits which help marital relationships). This sexual side becomes, in a sense, dehumanized. Many of them develop also an "alien ego state" (or dark side), whose core is antisocial lust devoid of most values. Raw id, in a sense. In time, the "high" obtained from masturbating to pornography becomes more important than real life relationships.
It has been commonly thought by health educators that masturbation has negligible consequences, other than reducing sexual tensions. Moral objections aside, one exception would appear to be in the area of repeatedly masturbating to deviant pornographic imagery, either in memories in the mind or as explicit pornographic stimuli which risks (via conditioning) the acquiring of sexual addictions and/or other sexual pathology. It makes no difference if one is an eminent physician, attorney, minister, athlete, corporate executive, college president, unskilled laborer, or an average 15 year old boy. All can be conditioned into deviancy. The process of masturbatory conditioning is inexorable and does not spontaneously remiss.
The course of this illness may be slow and is nearly always hidden from view. It is usually a secret part of the man's life, and like a cancer, it keeps growing and spreading. It rarely ever reverses itself, and it is also very difficult to treat and heal. Denial on the part of the male addict and refusal to confront the problem are typical and predictable, and this almost always leads to marital or couple disharmony, sometimes divorce, and sometimes the breaking up of other intimate relationships.
One researcher, Stanley Rachman ("Experimentally induced sexual fetishism," The Psychological Record, 1968: vol.18, p.25), demonstrated in the laboratory how sexual deviations could be created in adult male subjects. He was actually able to condition, in two separate experiments, 100% of his male subjects into sexual deviancy (fetishism).
Continue Part II
 
Printed with permission from ObscenityCrimes.org.
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