Living With His Porn Addiction
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This is a hard one for me to write, probably because it is where I was cut the deepest. This is the area of my life where deep trauma still resides and where I can feel anger and pain still bubbling in my depths. It is an area that my mind torments me with, thoughts of not being enough, not being beautiful, never being able to let my guard down totally. It is the part of me that got so raw that I didn’t even know if it would heal as much as it has done so far. The emotional and mental abuse fell well behind me in many ways but the sexual abuse lingers and haunts my thoughts, stealing my sleep and exhausting me.
When I first started dating him he told me he hardly watched porn and wasn’t interested. All men watch porn these days right? As women we are just expected to accept that the man we are with wants to see as many other vaginas as he feels entitled to alongside our own and that we should feel confident and secure enough within ourselves for the man we are with to satisfy their desires. We are pressured to accept the objectification and degradation of women as a normal thing. We are also increasingly watching porn ourselves as we take on the attitudes towards sex and intimacy that have been portrayed in the world around us. So, I accepted that he sometimes watches porn and got on with life. What he didn’t tell me was that he had an almost thirty year porn addiction and I had no idea what I was about to be subjected to.
I was seeking healthy intimacy in the relationship but it couldn’t ever be just between us. All of his fantasies involved other people, he constantly needed the visual and mental stimulation of other people and he began to pressure me to do things that others were doing in porn. Things I did not want to do and would never have agreed to do. I talked to him about something that happened when I was a child that I can’t fully remember. Something that caused me such severe anxiety as a child that I couldn’t even leave the house without vomiting and I didn’t feel safe anywhere. I remember being at my friends house when I was around six years old to sleep over. I remember her mum being drunk and two men being there. I remember my friend laying down on a bed while a man touched her and I remember another man touching my face, the stale smell of beer on his breath. I am sure this man masturbated in front of me but it is all hazy. Part…
