Emotional porn is using another person in order to receive a dopamine hit, not through the visual senses by seeing nudity, but through the emotional senses that provide nurturing and a feeling of being valued. It is driven by a perceived need to receive external validation.
Emotional Deprivation
The emotional porn addict feels a desperate need to receive emotional reassurance as often as possible, but the reassurance is sexualised. The addict seeks opportunities to receive nurturing, praise and admiration from others who are of the gender that sexually arouses them visually. If a male targets watching visual images of naked females, then the targets of his emotional porn will also be females (or their usual sexual preference persons).
An emotional porn addict often suffered as children at the hands of their neglectful, emotionally abusive parents/caregivers. They were told that no one was interested in meeting their emotional needs and might even have received threats for expressing their emotions. The lesson that had to be learned and never questioned was that emotions needed to be suppressed, not expressed. This family dysfunction caused the child to develop a condition described as 'Dismissive Avoidant Attachment' (DAA). The child learns that he/she can not trust those who are in relationships with them. The child can only rely on themselves and must never expect others to meet their emotional or other needs and that they should not be expected to meet the needs of anyone else either. This attachment injury sets the child up for major relationship problems.
Children affected by DAA often develop a core belief that they are defective, shameful, unlovable. Throughout their life, they are driven to seek external validation from others to counter this painful belief.
Exposing the Core (False) Belief - Unlovable
A female child who develops DAA, might grow up to realise that she can receive external validation of her worth by wearing provocative clothing which 'earns' her the reward of men looking at her body with interest. She imagines that she is 'special' to the men. She feels momentarily better. Then she might also go on to sleep with multiple men not so much driven by her high libido or need for sexual experiences, but by her deep need to feel valued by the men who reward her with their attention. In the 'sexual abuse industry' the woman might feel anaesthetised to the emotional pain while she is stripping in a club with a multitude of men ogling her and showing their sexual desire for her. She might do escort. prostitution, porn videos, live-stream or Only Fans type activities. In reality, the woman might have sex with all the men in the world, but it will make no difference to the sense of 'un-lovableness' she believes about herself. She started believing the lie that she was declared to be worthless as a child and she doesn't seem to be aware of or able to challenge that driving belief.
A man who suffered from DAA also has a core belief that he is 'unlovable.' He often might have technical or other skills, but due to his inability to deal with emotions, he might have a very low level of confidence in his own value in relationships. Relationships require social skills to form emotional connections but he doesn't even know what his own feelings are or if he even has any. He might pride himself on being logical and unemotional, yet he knows he is missing something important. His failures in romantic relationships prove that he 'can't do emotions, but he not aware of this as being a weakness and he blames his various partners for being demanding and emotional. The partners are seeking to connect emotionally with the man, but he sees their requests for emotional connection as criticisms and unreasonable demands on him which he can't meet. Because of his trust issues, the suppression of his emotions and his unawareness of how this affects his partners, his relationships fail and he quite quickly replaces the 'critical' romantic partner with another female. He does not like being alone, mainly because of his hypersexuality problem which originated from watching porn, but also because he wants a partner who will provide him with external validation. He declares that he wants to have a permanent relationship but he doesn't understand what needs are really driving him. Sadly he never saw a normal relationship demonstrated in his dysfunctional family. He never saw others regulating their emotions and he was never taught how to regulate his own emotions, only how to suppress them. He has no clue how to experience, identify or engage in emotional transactions with a partner and he can't understand that an emotional connection is the basic foundation of a normal relationship. He is after sexual relief and external validation which he thinks constitutes a relationship.
So the man enters each romantic relationship with his focus on taking from the female. This attitude is held because he is programmed to take what he believes he needs to receive from the female to starve off the pain generated by his shame. He is unable to tolerate the fear generated from his core belief that continually reminds himself that he is 'not good enough' and that he is 'unlovable.' He has no awareness that he has a responsibility to give to his partner or to meet her needs, or that she even has emotional needs. Providing emotional security for her is not on his radar. Protecting himself is his driving force - to the point where his interaction with the female will be seen as being extreme self-centred.
Such a man will use women (generally) that he meets, so he can experience emotional porn in the form of positive expressions - external validation. He needs someone who he admires to tell him that he has value. Like the regular visual porn addict, the emotional porn addict also sexually evaluates women and ranks them on a 'sexiness' scale. In his hunt to receive expressions of external validation, this man will especially desire the attention from the type of women that porn taught him to classify as being 'high status' or 'classy.' If he 'gets with' a 'classy' female, then he believes his status will also increase to her level and his shame will be hidden. However, the 'classy' females might also cause him the greatest reminder that he is lacking any value at all. If the female declines to be involved with the man, he is often consumed with anger and falls back into his shame-pain. Often the male will respond with a revenge fantasy of the female who spurned his advances and he might mentally weaponise his sexual organs to the point of where he rapes her in his mind. His rage is because of his belief that a 'high class' female saw through his disguise and realised he was worthless. This 'truth' is too much to bear and the man often resorts to watching porn of a violent nature in an effort to pay the woman back.
Regardless of the classification the injured man labels the women with, any expressions of greeting, kindness, nurturing, admiration or praise are converted in the addict's mind, into dopamine hits. The unsuspecting target might unknowingly reward the emotional porn addict with benign and polite expressions such as, "Hello." The man might use his vivid pornified imagination to interpret that simple greeting as meaning "Oh, she likes me!" With some emotionally wounded men, such a greeting is enough to trigger instant sexual fantasies. Proof is not required because the mind has become so conditioned to live in the fantasy world of visual porn, that the same habit that was used in visual porn, is again practiced in emotional porn.
A man might believe he is porn-free because he is no longer watching pixelated porn videos, but through porn, his mind was trained to sexualise women, to fantasise that they 'liked' him and that they were emotionally safe. Thus, the man's mind still reacts in the same way as it did in pixelated porn to face to face social settings. Those lies he told himself while watching visual porn might have been, "Oh, this woman likes me. She likes what I'm doing to her. She is submissive to me. She'd never hurt me or leave me or make demands on me." In other words, the man's mind tells him that this porn actress is (emotionally) safe. She won't tell the porn addict that he is unlovable, unworthy, not good enough etc. She won't express any demands to him to confront his emotional fears, like a marriage partner would do. The same fantasised thinking is carried over into ordinary daily life and women are sexualised if they remind the man of the same emotional qualities that he projected onto the porn actresses who appeared in his pixelated porn videos. The unsuspecting woman who offered the man a polite, but non-sexual greeting, has no idea of what has happened in the man's mind. The man convinces himself in that instant that the woman must really like him and she suddenly becomes sexually arousing to him because he is convinced because of her cheerful greeting to him, that she is emotionally safe He starts wondering if she is 'available' and if he should 'make a move' on her - to flirt with her or to ask her out on a date. This very sad response occurs very often and it occurs regardless of whether the man is married with a devoted spouse or whether he is single.
At least for the married man, his sexualised response to the woman's greeting is completely inappropriate and extremely hurtful to his wife.
The woman has inadvertently triggered the man's sexual arousal system. He imagines/fantasises that this 'high class' female likes him, thinks he is special. She is seen as validating his worth. He receives a dopamine hit just from thinking 'she likes me.' It is illogical to assume such a fantasy is real considering that this woman is a stranger with whom he has absolutely no emotional connection. For the emotionally deprived, emotionally wounded man, emotional connection is an unknown abstract which he is unfamiliar. He is terrified of having an emotional connection and most likely has never experienced it in his many, previous relationships.
The emotional lies he told himself when doing visual porn rush out to ambush him when he is in the company of a woman that he has been conditioned to evaluate as being a 'high value' or 'high class' or 'sexually desirable' female.
Simple statements from strangers can trigger the sexual desire in these addicts. "Hello." "You're so clever." "Thank you so much for this important information. I can't understand that one person can know so much about such a difficult subject." "You are so kind to loan me your car, pay my bills, give me a discount etc. You are a very special person and I'm so grateful to you." "You are so wise."
Unfortunately sometimes the 'target' is actually a manipulative person, who purposely flatters the unsuspecting emotional porn addict with praise in order to gain money, status or some other reward. Many 'sex workers' (ie prostitutes, strippers, so-called escorts) use these manipulative strategies so their 'regular customers' will continue to return to them and thus continue to enable their porn addiction. Many male emotional porn addicts will insist on 'doing business' with the same, "nurturing" prostitute because she rewards not only their hyper-sexuality addiction but also their emotional porn addiction.
Helping, Serving Others
Very often the addiction to reassurance of nurturing, praise and admiration is disguised as 'helping' services. People might offer 'free' specialised advice to others such as at church welfare groups, charities, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Sex Addiction (SA) meetings. They might also seek a supply of nurturing sources by offering advice on any subject they have specialised knowledge of such as health information, government policies, teaching languages or sharing information about understanding the Bible and its various interpretations etc. While there is nothing wrong with sharing valuable information, the emotional porn addict subconsciously performs these 'charitable' acts anticipating the reward of being praised in order to have his/her value affirmed. It is as though they expect to receive a 'wage' of gratitude which makes them feel special, wanted and valued.
Why does the addict experience an overwhelming compulsion to seek out external validation of his/her worth from strangers?
Very often, the emotional porn addict has ruined their personal romantic relationships because they are unable to meet their partner's emotional and intimacy needs. These are skills that the addict did not learn in their dysfunctional family or origin. The damage to the romantic relationship comes though, when the addict (often the male) blames their partner when she expresses her needs that perhaps he is not fulfilling in their relationship. Instead of being able to recognise that the request to discuss and solve the problematic issue is separate from himself, the addict will often believe he is being unjustly criticised by the female who he then labels as being nasty, his enemy who wants to hurt him and so he hastily builds up his defense 'cone of silence' around him to barricade and protect himself. The female partner is punished, locked out and bewildered by his response to her request. She thinks that if her partner cared about her, he would be pleased to attend to the issue so that they could become emotionally closer together. Instead, the emotionally deprived addict retreats from the relationship and replaces his partner with a 'safer' female (one who does not have the "fault" of expressing her emotional needs).
Porn actresses are considered to be 'safe' females for the visual porn addict as the pixel females can't hurt him emotionally. She is unable to interact with him and thus she can be manufactured into any emotional image that the porn addict desires. The porn addict uses his imagination to craft the porn actresses into 'perfect' women - emotionally - who will be subservient to him, pleasure him with no need for him to romance her and she will never make emotional demands on him and she will never say 'no' to his advances. In his mind, the addict creates the 'perfect' emotional companion for himself. She has no needs, but only shows eagerness to meet all of his emotional needs. The porn addict convinces himself that his wife is replaceable both visually and physically as he has masturbatory 'sex' with the porn actresses, but he also replaces her emotionally for the imaginary woman he has created to satisfy his emotional needs.
Hypersexualised males often try to meet their addiction by using prostitutes and porn. Emotional porn addicts are desperate to believe that they are desirable, wanted - that the man (or woman) has value.
Visual porn addicts recognise that prostitutes demand a fee for their 'services' which convinces the customer that the prostitute does not truly desire him. If he didn't pay her, she would not grant him access to her body. The interaction addresses (and worsens) hypersexualisation, but it worsens the addict's emotional need to be convinced that he is desired and valuable.
It is only through becoming emotionally vulnerable, trusting his partner that emotional intimacy can be developed, but the risks are considered to be too high by the dismissive avoidant addict as he only understands that emotional safety insists that he remain emotionally detached. Intellectually the man understands that porn actresses can't interact with him to tell him that he is desirable. He might even become ever increasingly angry at women because they refuse to truly love him for who he is. The high rate of violence against prostitutes might have some connection to the male anger directed toward prostitutes. Perhaps the prostitutes failed to demonstrate convincingly that they 'liked' the man, that they desired him, that they admired him and were a source of nurturance to him. Popular prostitutes realise that offering nurturing (admiration, praise, empathy, respect) as part of their 'services,' is a major reason for their regular clientele and ensures the return of their customers.
However sexually compulsive (SC) males who do not frequent prostitutes but who 'use' porn, are left with the problem of how to fill the missing emotional hole in their heart. To do this, the SC man (or woman) attempts to solicit non-sexualised attention in the form of nurturance from others. The addict's partner is cast aside because he/she is categorised as being emotionally 'unsafe,' so the addict places him/herself where they can meet many other prospective sources of nurture. They are seeking admiration, praise, empathy and respect, basically from strangers, just as visually addicted porn addicts visit prostitutes and porn from strangers.
The driving force is to try to quiet the screaming of the inner being who still carries around the core belief that they have internalised about themselves - that they KNOW they are worth nothing. Living with that 'unchangeable truth' is horrifically painful, so the emotional porn addict wishes to numb the pain, anaesthetise him/herself by imagining that he/she really is appreciated and valued. The most obvious method to anaesethise the pain is to have others lavish praise onto them, and express their belief that the addict has value. This is external validation. It does not alter the internally held core belief that the addict believes, so the effects of the nurturing and praise is only temporary. Like any drug, to continue its anaesthetising effects, it must be continually sourced and refreshed. The hits must be regular in order to try to control the symptoms and pain. Thus, healing from emotional porn involves the necessity to destroy the internalised, core belief of shame and worthlessness. When the truth is enshrined in the heart, the old toxic belief ceases to be a driving force in the addict's life. Recovering addicts are often amazed to see how the core belief dominated the actions in a life-long way, from childhood through to old age. Some people are shocked when they realise the power that the false belief has had on their lives. They have been believing a lie, and thus forming a character that they do not like themselves, for all their life.
Sadly, in many cases that have not been identified by the emotional porn addict, it can be brought to the conscious mind, that they have been seeking emotional safety, reassurance and security from the most unsafe sources - strangers.
The power of emotional addiction is that it too is coupled with sexual reward. Many addicts report feeling an immediate but puzzling sexual 'attraction' in response to the person who has just praised them. This is the especially the case when the emotional porn addict was also sexually abused as a child - not in a painful way, but in a way that the child's body enjoyed, though also having a sense that 'it was wrong.' This sets the child up with a cognitive dissonance effect. The child is forced to concluded that, "This is wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway because it's the only nice feeling that I am allowed to feel in my abusive environment." Translated into his adult environment, the grown child has learnt to justify doing abusive things if it means that his needs will be met. The same phenomenon occurs with females who have suffered a particular type of sexual abuse where they were told that they 'liked' the abuse and their body tended to agree, while their mind was confused about the whole experienced.
Confusion reigns during the triggering experience for an emotional porn addict. While he is confused by his sexual response to being praised, the woman who is the object of his attention, remains unsuspecting of his response. She believes she has just given a kind or supportive statement to the man for helping her. She is completely unaware of his sexualised response, or that his brain is flooding with dopamine which was released in response to her praise. The addict's mind roars into top gear as his imagination goes down the same path as it does in visual porn. He tells himself that the woman standing in front of him, or the woman on the phone call, 'likes' him, she praises him, respects him. That false belief is not logically analysed or challenged by the prefrontal cortex of the brain. It proceeds down the same well-worn neural pathway as does visual porn - like a dopamine highway. The emotional response is so exciting to the emotionally deprived man that he becomes sexually aroused. He has a response identical to that of when he is viewing porn. Many porn addicts are unaware of the emotional compulsivity component of their addiction and believe they are experiencing just an attraction to a woman, but they are completely confused as to why the strong attraction occurred - especially when they were not even consciously sexualising that particular female. Being confused and uncomfortable doesn't help solve the issue, but understanding the 'why,' is the first step.
Steps to Confront Emotional Porn Addiction
Steps to confront emotional porn addiction:
Get rid of faulty beliefs - I'm not worth anything; challenge the shame;
Be aware of sexual response that is aroused by expressions of nurturing
Be aware of your conditioned responses - anticipate beforehand!!!
Be prepared in advance with strategies;
Implement preventative strategies;
Have some emergency strategies on standby.
Strategies
Many times in recovery, the man learns to break free from the neural pathway and get back into reality by thinking, "If I said what I'm thinking, this woman would think I'm crazy." In fact, if such thoughts were expressed, the woman might also feel afraid of him and want to leave immediately. Sadly even if the man's sexual attraction is not verbalised by him, certain women who have narcissistic tendencies, immediately see the response and pounce on the man's emotional neediness and use it against him. These women are able to manipulate unaware, emotionally deprived men - and are thus often are able to access large amounts of money from the man under the guise of 'love').
However, let's continue with the scenario where a kind woman just praised the emotionally deprived man and he responded with a sexual attraction to her. This is all happening in his mind. It was twisted in HIS mind that 'she likes me' and that leads to excitement and sexual arousal. If the man is married to someone else, it adds the extra element that he learned in childhood that, "I know it's wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway as I have needs that home is not meeting." Clearly the thoughts racing through the man's mind were not in the message that the woman had sent to him. So in his mind, the man needs to try to untwist the message that he twisted. As a strategy to get his mind back into reality, he might ask HIMSELF how the woman would react to him, if he asked her to confirm the twisted thought that was currently in his mind.
"Oh does that mean you like me and want to have sex with me?" It is not recommended that those statements be vocalised to the innocent female, but only brought to the addict's prefrontal cortex so that the sexual fantasy can be quickly interrupted. Clearly the woman is not saying she wants to have sex. The man’s mind has managed to develop crossed-wires from his childhood sexual and/or emotional abuse. She likes me (emotional nurturing) is linked with "now we'll have sex."
The man needs to realise that he is seeing others, specifically women, as a source that he can use to take something from, in order to meet his own screaming need to be convinced that he has value. He is not initially sexually aroused by her physical form and outward 'sexiness,' but he is sexually aroused by the belief that she stated that he has value to her. This same response occurs in SC females, but it occurs when a woman achieves dopamine hits when men are noticed viewing their provocatively clad bodies with admiration, desire and lust. For the emotionally deprived female, she often seeks out men to engage in sexual acts, believing that this will cause the males to want to have an emotional connection with her too. Sadly, that rarely is the outcome.
Be aware of the true message. The woman who says, "I like you" might really be meaning "I want your money."
Be aware of your own values and see if this strange woman measures up. Does this woman have ANY qualities that you would like in a permanent partner? Would you like to 'trade-in' your current partner for this stranger? Why? What qualities does this new stranger have over those your current wife/partner already has? Be fussy.
Be aware of the temptation for instant gratification. Just as visual porn addicts become temporarily blind to the negative consequences of instant gratification, choosing to betray their wife by participating in masturbatory porn, so too can emotional porn addicts become temporarily blind to the negative consequences of participating in emotional gratification with a stranger.
Walk away. Terminate the phone call. Exit the scene. Leave the situation. If you can't think of any strategies on the spot to get back to 'normal' and take time for a breather, and get away from the pressure until you can think clearly.
Shame - I'm Defective
Emotional porn is motivated by the same core beliefs as motivate those with visual porn. Shame. A core belief that is concreted into the mind - "I'm defective."
The journey to any kind of porn appears to be travelled by following two distinct pathways. One pathway is via visual temptation that traps the victim in a state of compulsive sexualised addiction (called hyper-sexualisation), while the other pathway is through the emotions and particularly arises from emotional deprivation in early childhood.
Both pathways however share a common source - inferiority that develops in a child who was not loved, affirmed or treasured or who was even abused. That child has no opportunity to develop a stable, secure attachment to his/her care-givers. That child has no parental role-model on which to learn how to make friends, to develop trust, to be rewarded for honesty, to develop personal integrity.
The neglected, abandoned or abused child who does not receive love and care from at least one source, will not learn how to love. They will most often experience the formation of an insecure attachment disorder and will be focused on meeting their own needs because that was the vital lesson taught to them by their care-givers. The deeply embedded core beliefs are not often brought to the surface of the conscious mind and yet they constantly dictate the child's decisions and behaviour.
The core belief is that "I'm worthless." This main core belief spreads out to include other harmful beliefs such as:
"I'm not important to my parents therefore my needs are not important and I don't have a right to ask anyone to meet my needs." "I have no value. I must be really defective or else my parents would value me (shame)." "My parents don't like me. I must be defective or they would like me (shame)." "I'm a burden to everyone. therefore my needs are not important and I don't have a right to ask anyone to meet my needs, so I will have to figure out (covert, secretive, deceptive, manipulative) ways to meet my own needs and that's normal (entitlement, normalising dishonesty, deception and secretive behaviour in relationships." "I can't trust anyone to meet my needs, so I have to do what I need to do, in order to meet my own needs. (Teaching the child to focus on themselves, their own needs to the exclusion of other people's needs - inability to feel or experience empathy)." "Sometimes, I need to break my parent's rules to get my needs met and that's okay and normal." "Some action might be 'wrong' but it's okay for me to do it (justification) because I need to get my needs met (entitlement)."
Basically the child learns to be selfish, to be ignorant of empathy, to be focused on meeting only his/her own needs to the detriment of others in relationships and to be completely ignorant of how to express their needs, to trust that any other person would WANT to meet their needs or the basic principles of how loving relationships operate on honesty, mutual respect, trust and love. In fact, the child fears being in any close relationship as they fear emotional intimacy and they fear being controlled, taken advantage of and of being criticised.
Many of these forced maladaptive traits are labelled as narcissistic traits, but that is not the same as having being diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) which is listed as a mental health disorder in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Having developed some narcissistic traits in order to survive an abusive childhood, does not mean a person is a narcissist, but the traits are recognisable as being destructive to personal relationships.
An unloved child grows up to be more independent of others. He/she tries to meet their own needs, but because they don't know how to share emotional intimacy, or to show empathy, they are often very lonely people. As adults they might experience a multitude of failed relationships. They are seeking emotional safety and nurturing through relationships but they don't know how to do 'relationships.' They often confuse having sexual connection with being in 'a relationship.' Emotional connection must precede sexual connection or the relationship is doomed and this plays out in the lives of the emotionally detached, dismissive attached, independent and intimacy-fearful adult. All the failed attempts at 'having a relationship' further increase the SC person's shame.
Recall that the original 'shame' occurred when the child had reached out to his/her parents asking and anticipating love, but was met with hostile rejection, apathy or neglect. This painful experience, repeated several times, caused the child to learn the core belief that being in a relationship where needs are expressed, is extremely painful and dangerous. The child learns that without a doubt, expressing his/her needs is an unsafe practice. No one cares about the child and no one wants to be irritated by the requests from the child to meet his/her needs. The child learns that he/she is a burden and that they would be wise not to bother their care-givers. Attempts to express their needs and to request that they be met, only results in irritating the care-giver who will no doubt be guaranteed to respond with anger. They will go on to cause pain, mock, tease, manipulate, minimise - but never to meet the child's expressed need. The child learns to meet his/her own needs and not to think about meeting the needs of others.
Healing from these deep emotional wounds needs to be done before the war against porn addiction can truly be overcome because emotional porn use is still intimate betrayal to the partner.
Humans Are All of Infinite Value
No one can take away the value of a human being. The Creator has already made that abundantly clear.
The value of a human being is NOT dependent on what that human being does - either to live a wonderful life or to live a miserable life. God created human BEINGS not human DOINGS.
An addict can improve their character and build their integrity. They can learn to be proud, in a healthy way, of the improved morality of their character, but they can never increase their value in any way. It is already set at infinite value.
Jesus came to show humanity how to love - how to value each individual - and He to save them from the pain, horror and death caused by selfishness. Jesus repeated that He, (the perfect man) did not come to destroy humanity, but to save anyone who wanted to live in love. That could only apply to humankind, if all of humankind had the same value in God's system.
The inner man and woman must be healed. The truth of any human's value MUST be understood and acknowledged for healing to happen. That is ground zero. That belief must be embraced and the false core belief about being defective must be removed from the mind through the love of the Creator.