The porn addicts I envy

I have spent fifteen years listening to people describe how they want to stop hurting. Most clients come to me because they are experts at avoidance. They have built elaborate, fragile structures to keep anxiety at bay. They have turned their lives into fortress cities where nothing happens because they are too afraid of what might happen. I spend my days trying to coax these people out of their basements. I spend my hours trying to convince them that feeling something, even something painful, is better than the grey safety they have perfected.

I have realized lately that my fatigue after a day of work is usually a response to this lack of movement. I am dragging people through the mud of their own resistance. But then I see the other kind of client. I see the man who cannot stop looking at porn. I see the man who has spent ten thousand dollars on private cam shows in a single year. I see the woman who spends six hours a night lost in a digital labyrinth of increasingly specific sexual fantasies.

The clinical literature tells me to treat these people with the same somber concern I bring to the depressed or the anxious. The diagnostic manuals suggest I look for the trauma beneath the behavior. My peers at continuing education units talk about dopamine loops and the dysregulation of the prefrontal cortex. They want me to see these clients as victims of a neurological hijacking. They want me to see a broken person.

I do not see a broken person. I see someone who is possessed by a ferocious, unyielding appetite. I see a person whose central problem is that they want something too much. This realization changed the way I sit in my office. I noticed a specific response in myself when these clients describe the sheer scale of their pursuit. I felt something that looked like professional concern on the surface, but underneath that mask, I felt envy.

I do not envy the specific imagery they consume. I do not envy the shame that follows their sessions or the wreckage of their marriages. I envy the fact that their lives are organized around pleasure. I envy the vitality of their desire. Most of my clients are powered by a cold engine of fear. These clients are powered by a hot engine of pursuit. Even when that engine is driving them over a cliff, it is still running at three thousand revolutions per minute.

I sat with a man recently who had lost his job because he could not stop his behavior at his desk. He did not come to me to talk about his childhood. He did not want to discuss his father. He wanted to talk about the intensity of the hunt. He described the way he felt when he had forty tabs open at once. He described the specific tension in his chest when he found exactly the image he was looking for. He was a man who knew how to want something. He was a man who knew how to chase a feeling until his legs gave out.

I looked at him and I thought about my other clients. I thought about the people who spend three years trying to decide if they should buy a new car. I thought about the clients who are so disconnected from their own bodies that they cannot tell me if they are hungry or tired. I thought about the people who have replaced desire with a list of obligations.

The porn consumer has a problem of excess. The clinical world treats this as a pathology, and in a functional sense, it is. It destroys lives. It ruins intimacy. It creates a distorted view of human connection. I know all the reasons why it is a disaster. But I also know that desire is the fuel of a human life. When I see a client whose desire has grown so large that it has swallowed their career and their marriage, I am seeing a perversion of a very powerful force.

I prefer this force to the absence of it. I find it easier to work with a forest fire than with a desert. I can redirect a fire. I can build a trench. I can use that heat to power something else if the client is willing to do the work of strategic redirection. But I cannot easily start a fire in a desert. I cannot invent desire for a client who has spent forty years strangling it.

I think I envy these clients because they remind me of what it looks like to be fully, dangerously alive. They are not careful. They are not measured. They are not living a life of quiet desperation. They are living a life of loud, messy, self-destructive pursuit. There is a quality of presence in their descriptions that I rarely find in the rest of my caseload. When they talk about their behavior, they are not reciting a script. They are describing a mountain they climb every single night.

I have noticed that my colleagues get very uncomfortable when I say this. They want to maintain the distance between the healthy therapist and the sick client. They want to believe that we are the ones with the answers and the clients are the ones with the problems. But I believe my envy is a diagnostic tool. It tells me that I am hungry for the same intensity that my client is misusing. It tells me that the clinical life, with its boundaries and its ethical codes and its careful language, can be a very dry place.

I spend my life being a professional witness. I observe the lives of others. I analyze their patterns. I offer strategic interventions. I am the person who stays outside the fire so I can tell the person inside which way to run. But sometimes, I look at the person inside the fire and I admire the heat. I admire the fact that they have found something that makes them feel so much that they are willing to lose everything for it.

I am not suggesting that we should all become addicts. I am saying that the clinical literature ignores the attraction of the behavior because it is afraid of it. We call it a brain disease because that makes it feel manageable. We call it a lack of impulse control because that puts us in the position of the adult in the room. We refuse to acknowledge that the client is experiencing a level of peak intensity that most of us will never touch.

I have a client who curates his collection with the precision of a museum director. He knows every name, every category, every nuance of the digital world he inhabits. He has developed a mastery of a specific, useless domain. When he talks about it, his voice changes. He becomes articulate. He becomes focused. He is a man who has found a vocation, even if that vocation is his own undoing.

I compare him to the people who sit in my office and tell me they are bored. I compare him to the people who tell me they don’t know what they want. I compare him to the people who are waiting for life to happen to them. This man is making life happen. He is making it happen in a dark room at three in the morning, and he is making it happen in a way that will eventually kill his soul, but he is the architect of his own experience.

I think the reason I feel envy is that I see the potential in that intensity. If a man can bring that much focus and that much energy to a screen, what could he do if he turned that energy toward the world? The problem is not the energy. The problem is the target. Most therapy is about finding energy. For the compulsive sexual behavior client, the energy is already there. It is overflowing. It is a surplus.

I find myself tired of the language of lack. I am tired of the language of trauma. I want to talk about the language of appetite. I want to acknowledge that some people are simply built with more hunger than the world knows how to satisfy. They are the ones who become the addicts, the ones who become the obsessives, the ones who cannot find the off switch. We treat them as if they are broken, but maybe they are just calibrated for a world that does not exist.

I look at my own life after a day of these sessions. I see the ways I have optimized for safety. I see the ways I have moderated my own desires to fit into the professional box I have built. I am a senior strategic therapist. I have a reputation. I have a mortgage. I have a retirement account. I have all the things that my clients are busy throwing away. And yet, there is a part of me that watches them throw it all away and thinks: at least you are throwing it. At least you are not just watching it rot.

I do not say this to the clients. I maintain the frame. I do the work of helping them regain control. I use the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy to help them identify triggers and build new pathways. I am a good therapist. I do my job. But I am also a person who is paying attention to what happens in the space between us. I am paying attention to the fact that I feel more alive when I am talking to a man about his darkest, most compulsive habits than when I am talking to a woman about her low-level social anxiety.

The anxiety is a contraction. The addiction is an expansion, even if it is an expansion into emptiness. I prefer the expansion. I prefer the person who is reaching for something, even if they are reaching for poison. There is a dignity in the reach that the clinical world is too timid to name. We are so focused on the poison that we forget to look at the reach.

I am arguing that we should stop looking at these clients as if they are merely suffering from a malfunction. We should start looking at them as people who have a relationship with pleasure that we might secretly desire for ourselves. We should acknowledge that their problem is a surplus of vitality. When I acknowledge my envy, I become a better therapist. I stop judging the behavior and I start respecting the force behind it. I stop trying to extinguish the fire and I start trying to figure out where else we can point the flame.

I think we are afraid of these clients because they represent the parts of ourselves we have worked the hardest to domesticate. We have spent years in school and in supervision learning how to be the calm, objective observer. We have learned how to regulate our own emotions. We have learned how to be the person who does not have an excess of anything. Then a man walks in who is nothing but excess, and he reminds us of the cost of our own moderation.

I don’t want to live his life. I don’t want the shame or the secrets. But I do want the capacity for that level of wanting. I want to remember that the human animal is not just a collection of defense mechanisms and trauma responses. The human animal is a creature of appetite. Sometimes that appetite gets stuck in a loop. Sometimes it fixates on a screen. But the appetite itself is the thing that makes us move. I would rather work with a client who is moving too fast in the wrong direction than one who is standing perfectly still.