Middle name’s The.
No doubt. I think especially in childhood and early adult hood there are a lot of things that get muddled and tied up in shame where coping mechanisms and real self reflection needs to be ingrained earlier. There’s so many little hurdles to overcome in life but having a good foundation probably makes it overall easier.
Indeed. This was the article that started me down the rabbit hole. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201808/science-stopped-believing-in-porn-addiction-you-should-too All very interesting stuff and there are a lot of peer reviewed papers on the subject as well.
Thank you for sharing that. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. Just remember that no one is perfect. The older I get the more I reflect back to times or abuses that may have hindered my emotional intelligence. Getting to the root of my own self loathing or anger has made me realize I don’t need to continue feeling that pain of the past and bringing it to the present. It’s a struggle but I try and just be honest with myself and remember that I am the one that needs to know myself better, learn to rewire that past trauma, and move on with better senses and awareness through my experiences. Let the present mold your future and keep fighting the good fight.
You know what’s crazy? The part about feeling shame. There’s been some recent studies about a lot of previously diagnosed sex/porn disorders and addictions being tied to shame due to misinformed religious conservative upbringing. If anything, we need to be talking about and teaching more about sex. Not learning about it correctly leads to hangups and shame about the human body, love, and self love that makes you nearly incapable of showing or expressing yourself correctly. That’s why all these conservatives are so fucking weird.
Totally. We really just have a lot of mental health problems in this country tied to not seeing therapy as a real tool to aid in building better foundations that lead to better outcomes by being able to build those emotionally intelligent muscles that might get miswired otherwise. Everyone has baggage and no one is perfect, but when we build a world and society that looks down on people with trauma, abuse, or bad/unlucky experiences rather than raising them up we just end up with a sicker and sicker society. We should never be putting people down or outright banning things. Rather, we should be looking at society, its systems, its flaws, and its good points and be trying to better understand it and integrating as much of the human experience into it as we can. Everything can be bad for you if you do enough of it, but it is about finding real restraint through better understanding rather than shaming it all away. At least, that is how I see the world, or at least a better one than the mess we seem to be caught up in now.