In this thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Rena Malik, MD and Dr. Eric Sprankle delve into the sociocultural and psychological ...

are-you-addicted-to-masturbation-ft-dr-eric-sprankle

Are You Addicted to Masturbation? Ft Dr. Eric Sprankle

can you get addicted to masturbation people can think that they are addicted to masturbation uh absolutely people come into treatment all the time saying I'm a porn addict I'm a masturbation addict I'm a sex addict and for them it's real and so this debate uh it's a pretty very heated debate has been going on for decades now in our field of like is that a real thing and we kind of do a disservice by just saying no it's not a real thing because it kind of minimizes and dismisses and invalidates a lot of people's real like experience and and pain and like ending relationships because of this right so how I usually start this conversation is like yes people can think that they're addicted people can masturbate in a way that's unhealthy for them that's a problem for them personally or relationally so absolutely but like what we talked about earlier there's no magic number of what is considered like too much so then it goes back to it's too much for them and that may just be masturbating once and so if you're telling yourself that I shouldn't be masturbating at all it's a sin it's considered cheating because I'm in a relationship but you know you had a moment of weakness one night and you masturbated and you wrecked with guilt afterwards and you feel out of control and you feel addicted research has shown like that is more likely to predict the self diagnosis of sex addiction porn addiction masturbation addiction that this what's called moral in congruence that your values aren't lining up with your behavior your values are saying don't do this your behavior did it anyways that's an in congruence you're feeling out of control you're feeling addicted those without that in congruence they have no problem masturbation no problem masturbating they think it's fine it's healthy it's not interfering with their life their partner is cool with it they're not going to have that in congruence whether they're masturbating every day or just once a week and so they're not going to feel out of control they're not going to feel addicted to it and so I don't like that word Addiction because it doesn't operate similarly as like substance use disorders but that's the kind of the language that we have to work with uh right now that's what clients are and patients are coming into treatment for labeling themselves as a masturbation addiction but it just doesn't work that way but that doesn't mean that they don't need treatment treatment just looks a little bit different than like 12-step or abstinence-based treatment so what does a treatment look like for someone who has that incongruence yeah and so it's identifying that in congruence knowing that it exists for them so that's a little bit of Education of like what are your values how do your values align with your behaviors and often times with more of like a sex negative approach to treatment with some of these issues when you have this in congruence between values and behaviors the focus is just on changing the behaviors it's like okay you're you're masturbating or you're watching porn that's bad because that's not living up to your values or your standards so we need to get rid of masturbation get rid of porn in your life and then you'll be congruent it's like okay well that's one approach but let's also look at your values where did these values come from are they very important for you or are they just kind of leftovers from what your parents gave you so there's some wiggle room within those values too or there could be wiggle room in those values in which you can kind of decrease the the harshness of the anti-masturbation attitudes and values a little bit where masturbating like once a week now is permissible right they still don't want to do it daily they think for whatever reason that's going to be bad for them or interfere with their life or hurt their relationship for some way but you gave them a little bit of wiggle room now that their values are permitting them to at least masturbate like once a week if the urge arises so that's really it of just kind of trying to find that where that nice balance is between values and behaviors all the while being very accepting of like you're a sexual person you have sexual desire this behavior isn't coming out of nowhere all right it's being driven so to speak and so we kind of have to like honor and respect that and trying to repress it and say no I don't want to do that that's wrong that's where it comes out kind of sideways that's where it comes out in in secret ways and that's what's going to get the the person into trouble relationally int psychically things like that sometimes like legally and so it's acknowledging and accepting that you have sexual desires you have sexual fantasies and then sometimes those fantasies are atypical and that and of itself creates its own level of like guilt and shame so you have to work with you know normalizing and validating even atypical kind of fetishes or fantasies and realizing that yeah this is just who you are and if there is truly a conflict between who they are and kind the value system that they've built around themselves then they have to recognize like that's kind of their cross to bear so to speak right it's like you are this person you're placing these rules in front of you that's going to be hard work right and at that point it also almost becomes more of a religious issue than a sexual issue it's like you're struggling adhering to your faith I'm trying to help you recognize that you're a normal sexual person but it's just coming in conflict with these pretty strict religious beliefs so this is kind of more of a religious issue than a sexual issue yeah it's tough it is you know you mentioned that as a fetus we use masturbation to self soothe but sometimes it doesn't have to be sexual right it can be also just a soothing Behavior yeah yeah yeah that's definitely true for fetuses and infants but we carry that with us for the rest of our lives masturbating for pleasure is always uh what the research shows it's the number one motivation but in the laundry list of other motivations yeah self- soothing it's relaxing can help you sleep sometimes it can alleviate pain at least the perception of pain so it has all these different values all these different motivations as to to why we may engage in it and it can just be simply as like yeah it's just kind of relaxing and you may not have like sexual desire or feel like horny so to speak and like oh yeah I just need to masturbate to kind of have an orgasm it's like no masturbation feels good it's pleasurable got a few minutes why not what about masturbation to pornography I think people have um as you mentioned the porn research is sort of all over the place in terms of quality I think a lot of people lump pornography as this evil thing and that masturbation to pornography is somewhat inferior or um or horrible for people to participate in what what what can you tell people about that yeah so very very complex issue a lot of times when we talk about BN effects we're just talking about masturbation effects right because even the language we use around it when do do you use pornography like we don't say do you use Netflix it's like so what are you using pornography for to masturbate right so a lot of times we kind of deflect our anxieties and our concerns and our insecurities about masturbation on the porn when the actually underlying issue is you know guilt and shame still about just masturbation with her without pornography but with porn is what's interesting is that you can have a lot of ideological opposition so it's important when we have these conversations uh when I speak to it from like more of a scientific perspective it's like I'm not arguing it based on like religious values so thinking like watching pornography is a sin right that's an ideological argument I'm not arguing it in the sense of it is furthering the objectification of women that's an ideological argument we can talk about does the watching pornography impact like misogynistic attitudes or behaviors that would be scientific but just the fact that pornography exists is misogyny that's an ideological argument so I want to focus then on the the scientific piece of like is porn destroying your brain is it destroying your penises is it destroying killing love like some of these claims uh are making and the answers to that like maybe sometimes it depends no it really depends on the user and kind of goes back to what we were talking about is like does masturbation addiction exist like for some they can same thing with problems with pornography it can certainly be a problem for a lot of people and they shouldn't actually watch pornography largely because of that or in congruence that they think it's wrong it's unhealthy their partner thinks it's cheating they did it anyways yeah it's going to be a problem in their life thinking about it though scientifically and why the research on this for 50 years has just been a mess is think about like what are we actually studying within pornography like what about porn could be so detrimental to our our health because so many of the themes that are pointed to is like oh it's it's violence against women it's it's a distortion of kind of regular body sizes you know things are extreme in terms of like breast sizes penis sizes things like that uh the behaviors are like ridiculous and so it's not typical of like what sexual behavior looks like for most people gendered roles are very stereotypical but all these things exist in all other media as well because we live in a very kind of like superficial and sexist kind of society so that's going to exist in like Disney movies and romcoms so that's not unique to pornography so is it really just the explicit depiction of like a penis going into a vagina that's like damaging our brain so much I have a hard time like believing like that's the case I think it is more about our attitudes going in as a consumer as a watcher of pornography and how we're making sense out of it more so than what's actually on the screen I think you did mention that you've done some work on the misogynistic View is there a correlation between pornography use and misogyny or uh views of you know uh gender rules or things like that can you touch on that a bit yeah one interesting Meta Meta analysis because the big thing definitely um back in the 70s and 80s with porn research was like does this increase violence and that was like a big public policy push too even when cities had more like sextic districts like Time Square was a big sextic District in like the 70s and 80s and politicians would point to like crime in that area is like being caused because like people are masturbating to pornography and porno theaters and stuff so and it was contributing to Crime delinquency and to violence and so from a public policy perspective it it it was has a long history of being scapegoated but a recent meta analysis recent as in like last four years really doesn't find that in terms of good quality studies that looked at the effects of watching pornography on subsequent violent Behavior including violence toward women it doesn't really hold up unless the person already is predisposed to violence they have a History of Violence they're a sex offender high-risk sex offender high risk for recidivism yeah those kinds of guys high risk of recidivism from a previous sex offense should not be watching violent pornography research has shown that yeah that doesn't that's not the greatest uh for them but overall especially nonviolent depictions within pornography for most people it's not going to be causing them to engage in any more types of misogynistic behaviors including violent behaviors uh toward women that's being driven by other personality characteristics uh that would be driving violence so would you say that it's sort of like the Chicken and the Egg those people who are more driven to violence are going to watch more violent pornography yeah absolutely a lot of these studies within pornography are correlational and so the catchy headline is something like uh porn watching causes violence toward women it's like no there's a small study that was correlational that found this like small relationship between it wasn't a cause effect uh the Rel the study couldn't confirm that and so yeah it is like a kind of a chicken or egg thing like there's a lot of other factors that could explain why someone could be drawn to a particular type of pornography as well as just be attracted to a different type of pornography as well as engage in violence could be some third Factor that's contributing to both yeah but if you're interested in that kind of pornography it doesn't mean that you're NE necessarily violent person exactly yeah absolutely right right there a whole host and that's the other thing that's so messy with porn research of how even like violence is defined uh how even pornography is defined that varies across study to study there's no Universal definition of that that's used even within the The Sciences um but yeah how is violence defined how I think of violence in media is a lot different than somebody who thinks just like one kind of a verbal name calling is like a an indication of violence and that's how it was coded for that study and so yeah violence is has a a wide range of what we consider um to be aggressive or violent content in the media and it's not universally defined and when it's not universally defined we can't we have a hard time like comparing studies and we're really just kind of doing individual studies and we can't really do much cross comparison and so does watching I guess sexually deviant is a term that they look at in the research so does that that sort of incorporates atypical sexual act but does it also incorporate like watching sexually deviant pornography like would that be in that same realm it can that's why those words are kind of useless to me someone in sexual deviant I'm like are they in defeat because fetishism is sometimes considered like a deviance or a perversion like how archaic are using this term or it could be like no this person is a rapist and they're you know level three sex offender and they're incarcerated for that so yeah the terms like deviant sexual deviant sexual perversion they've kind of lost lost all meaning for me and there are obviously big differences between like a foot fetishist and somebody who engages in nonsexual uh contact yeah non-consensual non-consensual yeah yeah so I think the important thing to take home is like even if you're interested in something that is not typical it doesn't mean that you're a bad person you're going to become violent you're going to become this horrible misogynistic person and if your partner is watching that then also same thing applies right absolutely know that just because some you're turned on by something that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to act it out and so even if you are like fantasizing about something or watching um you know a fictional depiction of something in pornography that's depicting if it was real would be criminal that doesn't mean that you're at risk of like acting on it like you have to know that for yourself there's a difference between being aroused by something Desiring something and having an urge to actually do that and so for most people things can just stay within the Fantasy Realm without a problem if you enjoyed this CLI of the Reena Malik MD podcast make sure you check out the full episode with Dr Eric sprankle right here

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