What do you do if you have essentially trained your brain to become desensitized to normal situations of sexual arousal, like your real life partner, and can only be aroused with erotic imagery? It can actually be a major problem, and isn’t dissimilar from drug addicts that need greater quantities of drugs when they become desensitized to smaller amounts and don't feel the same degree of pleasure.
This is why despite the denials of many, sex addiction and pornography addiction are genuine problems that only figure to increase in relevancy as Internet pornography becomes even easier to access. If we aren’t satisfied with our real life partners and our erotic imagery, what do we do? We seek more deviant and extreme pornography and eventually act out physically, as the five stages of porn addiction show.
The five stages are：
1. Early Exposure
2. Addiction
3. Escalation
4. Desensitization
5. Acting Out Sexually
Though these are the five steps of general addiction, I’ll tailor the discussion to pornography to provide better context and explanation.
The first stage is early exposure, and it occurs when pornography becomes an accepted and normalized part of their life. They may have discovered pornography as a youth, or their parents kept it around. Their friends may have even been the ones to show them. Whatever the case, they develop an interest in pornography from a young age, and there is very little stigma against it that would keep them from it.
The second stage is addiction, and it occurs after first viewing pom casually, then enjoying it and starting to integrate it into your daily routine. It becomes a regular part of your life that is at first benign, but eventually starts to disrupt your life. You begin to base your decisions and planning around access to pornography. It’s as essential to your day as eating and sleeping, maybe even more essential. You develop a dependence on it.
The third stage is escalation, and it occurs after you are firmly addicted to pornography. What happens when addicts are able to indulge freely? They want more, and in this context, greater quantities, and more novel and extreme porn to keep them titillated and excited. You are now looking for the type of pornography that would have disgusted you before, and you find that it actually excites you more than so-called normal porn. This is where fetishes are created.
The fourth stage is desensitization, which occurs despite seeking out more and more deviant and extreme types of pornography. Even the most graphic or bizarre pornography doesn't do anything for you anymore. The dopamine isn't coming like it used to, even though you are viewing pornography more than ever, and finding fetishes you never even knew existed. You are doing everything you can to feel the same arousal, but nothing you view through pornography seems to get you close. That leads to the fifth stage.
The fifth stage is acting out sexually, which is a natural progression of attempting to find the same thrill and arousal. Most people never make it to this stage, but those that do are driven by an all-consuming need to find arousal because they can’t find it anywhere else. They are completely numbed to pornography, and may not even be able to have sex in normal situations because it doesn't measure up to their pornography habits. Making the jump into acting out their fantasies in real life is a means of increasing their sexual arousal, yet further removing them from the realm of conventional arousal.
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