By Russell Nolte
Special to YNOT

MALIBU, Calif. – One of the first things I learned when I started porn rehab is I can’t trust my own judgment or perceptions when it comes to assessing how I’m doing with my recovery. I’ve come to accept this as fact, even as I bemoan its truth. As the nearly indecipherable but nonetheless great poet Robert Burns once wrote, O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!

Since it looks like I’ll never get one of the “power wads” of which Burns wrote, in addition to attending twice-daily therapy sessions and daily meetings of Pornoholics Anonymous I spend a lot of time reading advice columns, self-help books and other publications designed to help people like me break free from the mental and spiritual prison in which porn has locked us.

Reading these things doesn’t always leave me feeling better, however. You know the old saying: The truth hurts, especially when it’s delivered right up your ass without the benefit of lube.

Just today, for example, I read a post about the five universal problems faced by porn viewers, most of which I had no idea I’ve been suffering.

At the very top of the list is “porn users struggle with loneliness,” which seems far-fetched at first glance. Given how solipsistic I’ve become since I started locking myself in the bedroom for eight hours a day watching porn, loneliness is one thing I feel like I don’t struggle with, because I’ve got that shit down to a science. Honestly, all you need to do is not answer the phone when it rings, stay away from social media and avoid going on dates.

See what I mean? How can anybody “struggle” with loneliness, when it’s so easily achieved? Then again, we’ve already established my perceptions can’t be trusted, so if the XXX Church guys say I’m having a hard time being lonely, I suppose this probably means I still have too many friends, and/or shouldn’t call my mother as often as I do.

Next up is the revelation “porn users struggle with a warped worldview.” My initial reaction is we’re only two items into this five-part list, and I’m already “struggling” with two things? I’m clearly more fucked up than even my rehab counselors thought.

Anyway, after reading this claim, I spent several minutes staring at various maps of the world, and I do have to admit, Greenland simply can’t be as big as it looks to my eye. Also, since when did Alaska become an island located to the north of Hawaii? I doubt the mapmakers from Rand McNally got it wrong, so it appears to be true: I’m clearly struggling with a warped worldview.

I’m impressed; so far, these XXX Church fellas are two for two.

Next up, more “struggle,” this time with anxiety.

“The large majority of porn users do so in secret,” we’re told. “That is, they don’t want anyone to know about their porn consumption, especially the people they love or are in relationship with, like their spouse, their children, their parents, their coworkers, or even their pastors. As a result, they live a double life, constantly worried they’ll be found out, their secret will be exposed, and their world will come crashing down.”

OK, so this one might seem a little less true in relation to me, considering I regularly write blog posts in which I blabber to the entire world about my ongoing porn addiction and the various problems it causes in my life, but I can see where they’re going with this.

Plus, I must concede I don’t like the idea of my pastor finding out I watch porn, mostly because until I read this XXX Church article, I didn’t realize I even had a pastor. Before I tell this secret pastor anything too personal, I’d like to find out a little bit about him. For starters, I’d like to know precisely how he became my pastor, and whether it’s true he’s the reason I’m not allowed to buy raw milk in some states.

Fourth on the list is the counterintuitive claim “porn users struggle with a diminished sex life.” This is another assertion that appears to contradict to my personal experience, making it hard for me to accept as true without further evidence being presented.

In my case, at least, it would be pretty goddam hard to further “diminish” my sex life below the low point it reached shortly before I started watching porn on a regular basis. If anything, watching porn has made it easier to accept my diminished sex life, not caused me to “struggle” to have sex even less often than I did before.

The fifth and final struggle the XXX Church says is universal among porn users is the “struggle with shame.”

Again (and I’m sure this is just my addiction-induced, self-reflective myopia talking), it’s hard for me to imagine anything easier to do than to feel shame over watching porn. To me, it’s especially easy to feel guilty about porn right after spewing semen all over my own chest, when I’m filled with the creeping feeling the only means of redeeming myself would be to immediately jump off a nearby bridge.

Of course, instead of leaping to my death after these porn-climaxes, I usually find myself watching seven straight hours of Netflix original programming while weeping and shoveling Oreos into my mouth by the handful, so maybe I still don’t have this shame thing down as well as I’d thought, either.

No matter how you slice it, it looks like I still have a lot to learn about porn and its impact on me and other users. At the next PA meeting, instead of spending the whole time fantasizing about licking whip cream off my sponsor’s breasts, I’m going to bring up these points made by the XXX Church and see if I can’t at least get better at feeling shitty about myself.

Russell Nolte is a recovering porn addict who has not watched pornography for nearly 14 hours and has no plans to watch porn again until the house painters have stopped working for the day, or at least until they’ve finished painting right outside the master bathroom.