Why Can't I Quit Porn?': Therapist Reveals Why He Believes So Many People Can't Shake Their 'Heartbreaking' Porn Addiction

A Christian counselor penned a piece for the XXX Church ministry this week to try and explain why so many people struggle to overcome porn addiction, calling it "heartbreaking" to see peoples' "endless attempts to get sober only to succumb to temptation over and over again."

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Eddie Capparucci, who is a sexual addiction therapist based in Georgia, said in a piece titled, "Why Can't I Quit Porn? Get to the Root," that people need to get to the root of their addiction if they truly want to conquer it.

"At the heart of all addictions is emotional pain," Capparucci wrote. "Addictive behaviors are used in an attempt to conceal the hurt we feel by serving as a distraction. And they do an excellent job keeping our emotional pain in check – for a brief time."

But he said that once the "high" wears off, people find themselves back where they started. It's a dynamic that Capparucci said many porn consumers might not realize is unfolding.

"Now you may be saying to yourself, 'I don’t feel any emotional pain. I use pornography simply because I like it.' This is not unusual. It tells me you have done an excellent job suppressing troubling emotions," he continued. "In fact, you may have a difficult time in expressing any emotion beyond anger, happiness, or sadness."

In the end, though, he said that there's something "lying at the core" of a person's addiction: the reason why they "abuse sex," saying that there are many causes, including: a need for affirmation, entitlement, control, a thirst for attention, weakness, a failure to emotionally engage, and a variety of other potential factors.

In the end, Capparucci argues that "a key to freeing yourself from abusing sex is learning to identify and manage your emotional pain," urging readers to use XXX Church's "My Pilgrimage," a program intended to help people combat porn addiction.

As TheBlaze previously reported, porn addiction has been a subject of increased discussion of late. In fact, top medical researchers explained earlier this month at a pastors gathering in North Carolina how pornography use physically affects the human brain, revealing information not well-known outside of the medical and scientific communities.

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“Porn is all of the sex — without the body,” Dr. William Struthers, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Wheaton College in Chicago, told TheBlaze. “It gives you every aspect of a sexual encounter without the physical touch or the smells.”

During his presentation at the event, dubbed “The Set Free Summit,” Struthers explained and elaborated on many topics, from how the human brain changes under repeated pornography use to how the brain naturally has its own “mirroring” effect to how natural bodily hormones — such as oxytocin — can bond a person to pixels on a screen.

Read more about what experts have to say about porn addiction here.

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