NOTE: This is a post that’s going to talk about masturbation, porn use, and the practices of “edging” and use of substances like poppers to facilitate longer masturbation sessions.

I do not specialize in sex therapy or behavioral addictions but I have completed courswork in the diagnosis and treatment of both, and I am a person who supports people who want to find what is healthy sexuality for themselves, many of whom are in recovery.

The diagnostic constructs of “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” are contested, particularly in factions between sex therapy and addictions professionals, and these conflicts have escalated in ways that I find frankly unprofessional and baffling, and we lose a lot because of the polarization. My position is that I am pro-consensual sex, I am not anti-porn, and I also find there are people with sexual behaviors that feel problematic, compulsive, or destructive to them and need help working through this regardless of what we call it.

Men who have become habituated to constant masturbation, anonymous sex, sex on meth, or masturbation while watching porn or using poppers report to me that it can feel very difficult to enjoy or even imagine having sex without those supports. What is discussed here may be one component to support recovery in conjunction with working with a trusted sex therapist or behavioral addiction counselor who will listen to you and work with you to define and work on your recovery goals. For some, this discussion may not work in alignment with your recovery needs and goals, and I encourage you to stay with what does.

Lately I suspect that many men, and likely others, do not really practice enjoying themselves sexually. What most of us do is “jerk off,” either as a habitual routine thing or a repetitive, hours-long epic experience that involves porn and ritual acts to try to maximize orgasm. Jerking off serves many functions: tension release, dealing with arousal, or avoiding uncomfortable things we’d otherwise feel we need to do.

I’m not involved in communities that practice “NoFap” or “No Nut November” but what I do know about them, I think there are some places where we might agree. The kinds of masturbation that we tend to do may end up being deadening, time-wasting, and diminishing. Green Day sung about this in their song “Longview” in which the singer describes an apathetic, listless, declining life that’s momentarily interrupted by the thrill of masturbating, “bite my lip and close my eyes / take me away to paradise” and then dropping back into boring, deadened monotony.

The rituals of watching porn, using poppers or otherwise getting high and edging for hours may be thrilling the first time or two but may quickly fall into the time-wasting habits that end up separating ourselves from our sexuality. Often I think of a maxim from the Jackie Chan breakout film, Drunken Master, in which the young Chan is apprenticed to learn a style of martial art that draws upon the fluid and adaptive movements of a severely intoxicated person, both to confuse the enemy and to deliver effective blows. At times, to practice the art, the apprentice drinks to intoxication, but always must contend with his Master’s warning—”Water floats, but also capsizes boats.”

While perhaps not everyone will appreciate the relevance of deep wisdom from a comedy/martial arts film, this phrase has often spoken to me of the tender balance of walking the middle way of substance use. We gravitate to them because they open us up beyond our regular behaviors and judgments, allowing us to have experiences we wouldn’t otherwise. Yet the line between floating and capsizing is quite hard to discern and easy to cross.

Porn is not a substance in the same way as alcohol or poppers, yet to me looking at it as such offers interesting insights. Porn may be a fun way to stimulate desire and expand our erotic imaginations, and it may also become something that takes over our sexuality and fills us with unrealistic expectations that make it difficult to enjoy the un-choreographed and un-edited realities of sex with other people.

Lots of men I think have gone through periods of problematic behavior that may not rise to the level of an addiction or dependence. One question that I find really useful is to think about a behavior that you do on a regular basis, and then tell yourself that this week you won’t do it once. Notice how you feel. If you feel anxious, afraid, angry, uncomfortable, or otherwise wonder how that would even be possible, it is worth exploring deeper what purpose this behavior is serving and if it’s in some way keeping you from being the person you want to be.

All of this is different than the kind of sexual self-experience I’m wanting to talk about, in which you take time to be with yourself, to really experience yourself without distractions or intoxicants, to find out what your body likes sexually, what kinds of fantasies you have, what kind of touch is pleasing to you. This kind of self-sex is about connection and presence.

I define connection as being about being fully and consciously present in my body, with my experience, and able to be with you being fully and consciously present in your body, with your experience. Harder than it sounds. This connection becomes possible with the supports of confidence, vulnerability, and relational safety, all of which are supported by embodying those with and for myself. If I know with confidence that I will be okay no matter what happens, and all my feelings are okay, and that I can protect myself if needed and care for myself if needed—or that I have people available to support me with all this—then I can be fully present and connected.

When it comes to sex and our bodies, some of us get glimpses of that state of being when we’re children who haven’t yet internalized all the conflicting messages of sex in our cultures. When we simply have bodies that have all these sensations and we’re curious about them and they don’t “mean” anything. Eventually, most of us lose contact with this state of innocence and presence as we’re taught a whole host of ways we’re supposed to think and feel about our bodies under threat of shaming judgment, ridicule, or exile.

All of these messages and the emotions that go with them still live in our bodies and affect our relationships with them. Yet the sexual need exists, for many of us, and seeks satisfaction one way or the other. For some of us, we don’t desire sex and believe that we are supposed to want it. These and other influences may cause us to find solace in ritual, porn, substance use, and so forth.

What does this do to the way we pay attention to and experience ourselves? This is something perhaps worth exploring for yourself for the next few weeks. When you are having sex, where is your attention? When you masturbate, where is your attention? What do you notice? What do you attend to? Are you focused solely on rubbing your genitals until they hit the joy buzzer? Are you constantly clicking on different videos trying to find the right one, or just barely avoid getting the right one, to hit the buzzer? Is your attention so much on the porn or the fantasy that you’re not really in your body?

When I am feeling sexually connected and really enjoying it, I feel that my attention is in my body and able to take in a range of sensations. When I feel stressed or pressured to perform, my attention is usually on my partner’s body and the parts of me that are worrying about whether they’re having a good time. In a state of connection with another person who can hold the connection, there is this beautiful exchange of pleasure and energy and fun.

Exploring this state of self-sex is both simple and highly challenging, as most simple tasks are. Take time, alone, to be sexual with yourself. Find a comfortable spot where you can be relaxed and uninterrupted and consider having no screens in the same room as you. Do this sober, without porn or poppers or other external intoxicants.

Then explore touching your body, noticing what kinds of touch your body enjoys. Engage with yourself sexually the ways you desire to be engaged, in whatever ways are practical—using your actual imagination helps with this. Try to stay in your body and take in the sensations you’re giving yourself. 

Notice what comes up and what gets in the way. Whatever it is, those things affect your sexual relationship with others too, in some form. Consider journaling about these afterword.

You don’t have to do this all the time, but consider doing it occasionally. This could help us be more aware of when and why we’re using other substances for sex, and help us to better understand whether that enhances or detracts from the experience. Again, this is not about saying whether one’s regular habits are “healthy” or not, but helping you to know when you’re connected to yourself or not.

This practice will be uncomfortable for a lot of people. Straight men in particular get exposed to a number of weird messages about sex that on one hand make it this really important thing that they have to get all the time and on the other hand make it really hard to actually enjoy. Really taking pleasure in being sexual with one’s self without the mediating influence of porn seems to be provocative. There may be internalized beliefs that one is low-status or a “loser” if they’re not having sex with another person. One fear that occasionally comes up is it’s somehow “gay” for a straight man to enjoy his own body.

Neither of these really make that much sense and seem steeped in an insecure adolescent fear of being judged and outcast and so preemptively accusing others of what one fears he is. What would be wrong with practicing desiring ourselves to the extent we want to be desired?

Is the desire to be approved of by your friends interfering with your ability to get to know yourself and really learn to understand what you like and desire, and enjoy being in your own body? Do your friends need to be involved with what you do alone in your own time? Wouldn’t being able to care for your own sexual needs help you to feel more confident, at ease, and less desperate when finding someone else to share yourself with? If you’re still a teenager, your friends don’t have to know, and if you’re an adult man, now’s your opportunity to take the wheel of your life back. 

It’s also worth noting that some reasons are religious prohibitions on masturbation and sex outside of a committed relationship, and if those are your values, I assume you would not be interested in this exercise and wish you well. If you are curious about another way to think about the spiritual relationship between sex, life force, and self you might consider reading my book.

In recent years, certain groups have promoted abstaining from masturbation altogether as a way to increase testosterone, gain self-mastery, or increase motivation to get out of the house and look for partners. There is certainly merit to this approach as well—conscious abstinence or conscious engagement are both ways of helping us know ourselves, cultivate will, and build confidence. Self-sex ideally would not be the center of one’s life at the expense of other important facets of ourselves. What’s important to me is that we’re abstaining or engaging with an intention, not because masturbation is “bad” for some vague reason.

My one concern about abstaining from masturbation to motivate seeking partners is that I think men would be well-served to consider horniness as a state of intoxication under which they are less likely to make clear-headed choices. (Note: I am not suggesting this as a literal scientific or legal truth, although I would be curious to see research on the matter.) Men make a lot of choices we later regret when horny, especially when horny and tired, lonely, drunk, stoned, or otherwise intoxicated. We may be less likely to hold our boundaries and standards or more likely to pressure others and disregard their boundaries.

There is a common wisdom that one should not go to the grocery store while hungry because you’re more likely to buy food you’ll later wish you hadn’t, and to be honest I advise men to use the same guidelines when using apps or going to bars while horny. If you’re looking for sex, go for it. If you’re looking to have fun and meaningful connection, might as well take care of yourself first. 

This idea of horniness as a state of intoxication brings us back, again, to being intentional in relating to ourselves sexually. Whether abstaining and harnessing that energy toward other tasks, or engaging to make sure we have meaningful and pleasurable experiences, these willful acts help us to feel more loving and appreciative of ourselves, and more confident. All of these qualities are great to have whether we’re in committed partnerships or on our own. Rather than pinning all our hopes for sexual and romantic fulfillment on other people, when we cultivate this for ourselves, we’re actively creating the life we want.

Witnessing as healing, as vengeance

Once, a person I saw as a mentor hurt me. Our relationship had begun in a friendly, amiable, affirming way, but over time began to feel coercive and pressuring. Wanting to protect his feelings, I gently refused and expressed discomfort when he asked things of me I did not want to do, and in response he said the right things, but his actions showed my boundaries would not be respected. The situation felt intolerable, particularly as a person who easily sees the best in others and has a tendency toward people-pleasing to avoid conflict.

When we were about to spend time together, I would rehearse the ways I would stay centered and focus our interactions on what I liked about our relationship, but in person I felt my boundaries and concerns dissolving under the very skills and expertise that I wanted to learn. Walking away, I felt good and told myself I was okay with everything that happened, but within an hour I would fall into anxious nervousness, shame, and wondering how to avoid this happening again. A part of me saw him as holding an enormous charisma that overrode my will, and it was hard to shake though I used every tool I could. Every tool except for telling others what was happening outside of my closest people.

Eventually I broke off contact, but later ended up in another shared community space. I told myself I would be fine, but I felt wracked with shame and a quavering sense of terror every time we inadvertently made eye contact or had to speak. With the support of my therapist, I began telling my story to others. This validation of the ways I’d been manipulated helped me to ground myself in recognizing what was happening wasn’t okay and to see how much I had been doing to protect this person’s feelings at the expense of my own.

A confluence of circumstances created the opportunity for the two of us to have a facilitated confrontation. It was the kind of restorative justice process that is dreamt-of and so hard to accomplish. We showed up, and the facilitator was both skilled and aware of how power skews what seems like a neutral relationship. I told my story, and the facilitator met my ex-mentor’s deflections and dismissal with firm, kind accountability and encouragement. 

As I watched, I saw my ex-mentor’s countenance start to soften, and tremble, as his defenses against pain relaxed and he began to feel his guilt and shame over what happened. At the same time, I felt my own heart lighten as I became unburdened of all I carried. I walked into the process trembling in fear, and walked away feeling joyful, light, and free. There was no more for me to carry, no desire for further retribution, nothing.  

The seed of vengeance may simply be in the longing for having one’s hurt witnessed and validated by the person who caused us harm. An instinctive knowing that this could bring healing and relief. But so rarely are those who have caused harm able to bear the feeling of their own guilt and shame. Instead they defend against it, minimize it, reject it, or compel others to hold it. Lacking that outlet for healing witnessing, vengeance becomes that venomous instinct to cause them a hurt that will match the hurt we feel, escalating rather than healing discord. 

What we want and what we owe

Perhaps the fear of guilt is that it aligns with a sense of obligation that is greater than the gratification of our own wants and needs. The feeling invites us to reckon with the conflict between others’ needs and expectations and our own desires. So much goes back to power and its uses. Guilt is that which weaves us into just and beloved community. Guilt knits communities together, and it may be wielded abusively by someone with power and authority who feels threatened by the needs of another. We may give a gift out of love, and then use that gift as a hook later when we feel angry or scared, as a way of coercing the person to take care of us. 

Guilt may be an inner prophet who calls us out when we’re out of integrity and need to make rectifications. It is appropriate to feel guilt for committing, participating in, or allowing harm or injustice to occur. Guilt spurs us to make things right and grow as people. Yet those who cannot tolerate guilt may demand forgiveness as though it’s owed to them, and crumble when it’s not given. Such a demand asks the harmed person to do their emotional work for us rather than letting us suffer and work through our own guilt.

Meanwhile, many of us have been trained not to allow others to feel guilty, ashamed, or in pain. We are all too ready to spare them their guilt and remorse, consoling ourselves with a story about our strength or virtue. Forgiveness may be granted before the offense is even known. When we hesitate to take on the pain ourselves, we feel our own pang of guilt. We may tell the story that by letting them be accountable and feel their guilt, we are torturing them. Yet all we are doing is letting them feel their own feelings.

Ironically, in those moments, if everyone involved was willing to simply practice feeling their own guilt and allow each other space, there would be greater healing than the urgent efforts to fix and shut down pain.

As animals who crave connection, we seek it through its many guises: approval, love, sex, enmity, vilification. At times it does not matter what the connection is, whether it feels good or awful, so long as it exists and we know we exist. Shame, however, is an emotion of disconnection. It is the emotion that tells us we have been severed from the group and are in danger of death, social or otherwise. 

As we’ve learned thanks to Brené Brown, Shame says, “I am bad,” while Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong.” Yet in our flattening, moralizing way, the overculture of the United States collectively believes that only bad people do bad things, and therefore to feel guilty is to prove the story of shame. This is to our detriment. We are all capable of causing hurt and harm, and likely will at some point in life. When we cannot tolerate the guilt and repair process of hurting another, our hurting tends to escalate. Defenses against feeling guilt render us more indifferent to others’ suffering.

In a cyclical model of time and development, metaphors of spiraling and pendulums are useful for contemplating how growth occurs. We turn into one direction until we’ve gone as far as we can, until it begins to hurt and impede our growth, and continue curving to the other side of the polarity. 

One possible journey: We experience pain when we’ve hurt someone in the process of following our own desires, and start feeling a sense of guilt whenever a “selfish” impulse arises. Over time, however, we find ourselves hemmed in by guilt and always prioritizing the wants and needs of others from that feeling of obligation, setting aside parts of us. Eventually we feel the chafing of making ourselves smaller for the comfort and satisfaction of others, and reject guilt, shame, and obligation in favor of prioritizing ourselves. 

Another possible journey: We see the smallness in the lives of people around us who submit themselves to relationships that look painful and loveless, and vow to put ourselves first. We deny and refuse anyone who expresses hurt or upset with us, fearing the loss of autonomy and control, until one day we hit a limit. Perhaps we feel utterly alone, with no one special in our lives. Perhaps we are held accountable in a painful and undeniable way, that fantasy of independence shattering when the harm we’ve caused finally catches us. Eventually we begin listening to that guilt and longing for connection, learning how to remain ourselves and respect the needs and feelings of others.

We reach the edges and continue curving back, each oscillation becoming more refined and skillful. Soon those vibrations seem almost invisible from the outside as we gain greater mastery and inner complexity, learning we always have a range of responses to every moment, and each response offers a gift and a limitation.

Autonomy and intimacy

So long as we treat emotions as things done to us, injected into us, we allow ourselves to be under the power of others. At the same time, we are capable of feeling others’ feelings and taking them into ourselves, and experienced and instinctive manipulators know how to find the people who will do this for them. In the swinging between autonomy and intimacy, we have all we need within us to practice discernment between what to give and what to retain.

Start within. Start breathing and imagine you find the core of aliveness, the belly center that gathers in your vitality, your passion and will, the core in which the fires of life burn. This is the center that has been with you since you were a feral child taking pleasure in the brightness of the colors of the sky and grass, disgusted with the textures of food, who played and kissed with innocence. Sense how that is in you today.

Imagine you find the core of relationship, the heart center that gives and receives social connection, that feels the web of relationships and your place within it, that senses how others feel toward you and you toward them. This energy reaches out into your environment with breath, communicating yourself into the world, and draws that connection back into yourself as guidance. The emotional field is the field of relationship, and this is the center that knows how to navigate this realm. Sense how that is in you today.

Find the core of potential, the head center that receives knowledge from the visible and invisible worlds, that gathers it into the cup of the skull and filters it through the nervous system. Here is the throne of that which we may call the higher self, the deep self, that which can see further and broader and deeper. That which sees the bigger picture, sees what is possible, that can bring us into radical, intentional, and beautiful action. Sense how that is in you today.

Imagine a circle around you that contains all you know yourself to be, all that is your responsibility. Imagine that as a cellular wall, a membrane, a fence, a bubble through which we can take in what we need and push out what does not belong to us.

With this connection, let us return to guilt and shame. That connection of the fires of the belly, who knows my innate worthiness, and the chalice of the head, which can see further, helps us to look at the matters of heart and connection with more discernment, self-compassion, and dignity. Without the head and the belly, those ruled by the heart center may be wholly subsumed by concerns about others’ opinions and approval.

Too often feeling guilt causes us to crumble and feel as though we must utterly abase ourselves for forgiveness or reject the accusations of harm. Again, guilt bound to shame, a combination that says “I am bad because I did something bad.” When this story is alive, we feel our worthiness and capacity for future happiness are based on the forgiveness and opinion of the person we’ve harmed. Which, you might think would make us more inclined to be kind to them, but more often than not elicits all the defensiveness, denial, controlling, seducing, and further gaslighting that only compounds the harm.

Let your guilt be here fully, in your sphere. Let yourself know that no one owes you forgiveness or the opportunity to make amends. This guilt belongs to you, it is telling you who you are and what you are capable of. More importantly, it tells you who you want to be. What does your guilt say to your belly? Your heart? Your head?

When we struggle with harming others we can feel at a constant impasse. “I want to be better but I keep fucking up!” We may get anxious and overwhelmed, afraid our friends and family will get exhausted by our failures and walk away from us. What we may not recognize is that it’s our avoidance of guilt and defensiveness that is the most alienating. The capacity for forgiveness is quite expansive when the guilty person demonstrates genuine remorse, contrition, respect for the hurt person’s healing process, and commitment to change. 

All of this is helped by simply feeling our own guilt, before doing anything about it, and while we work to make amends. Pain spurs us to change, and guilt is a pain that says what we are doing is unacceptable. We have no reason to grow when we assuage, avoid, or numb our pain. 

Those who have been harmed do not owe, and cannot be expected to provide, kindness. Some may be able to offer that, but spend much energy protecting and supporting one’s own hurt. Pressuring someone to provide forgiveness or kindness to assuage your guilt only compounds the hurt and slows down the outcome you want. Better to slow down, express remorse, and give the hurt person the space and power to determine how they want to interact with you in the future, what they want from you.

In the meantime, we can work on listening to the lessons of our guilty feelings and continue to grow and live our lives.It is impossible and unwise to stop living entirely while processes of accountability unfold, but it is useful to get support from a class, a community, a support group, or trusted friends and mentors to help us work through our conflicting thoughts and feelings and figure out what boundaries are appropriate. Even better if these supports are not people who unfailingly take our side and tell us we’ve done nothing wrong, but who help us to sort through our behaviors and figure out how we can do better.

Finding our place within collective and ancestral legacies

I grew up a white person in a country built with on the supremacy of white people, and lived in a Midwestern state that at one point actively embraced the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. So I was surrounded by explicit and implicit racist thought and action, some of which I recognized. Yet even when I actively rejected white supremacy, I was not fully aware of the extent to which racism informed my words and actions. When my friends of color started to push back and call me out, I did not respond graciously. I made it harder on them. I dismissed their experiences or focused on my own feelings rather than acknowledging the hurt.

Over time, I realized those who called me out were acting in self-care for themselves and respect for me. They cared enough about themselves to not let me be a shithead around them all the time, and they cared enough about our relationship to invite me to work on it and change rather than walking away. Many, I suspect, did walk away. 

Listening to my guilt rather than defending, taking time to stew on my feelings and try to see things from their perspective, helped me to radically reorient my humanity. I aspired to be a person who is kind, just, and in integrity, and guilt showed me how far apart was the distance between that ideal and the ways I’d been practicing relationship. It continues as a spiral process of progress, regression, curiosity, discovery, hurt, regret, and accountability.

Most of us living in the United States who are not one hundred percent Native or the descendent of enslaved people owe our existence to the forcible taking of land, property, and personhood of others. We benefit from hurt that continues to live in the bodies of the descendants of those harmed, in the inequities of policing, income, wealth, and access to healthcare, clean water, food, and safety. Yet those that benefit most from this wonder, “Why should I feel guilty?” 

If I were given a beautiful painting, and then learned that painting had been stolen from someone else, that would be a complex ethical issue. Perhaps I myself did not do the crime, but now I know the crime has been done and harm exists, and I have an opportunity to participate in rectifying it or continue perpetuating it. To admit that we do feel guilt means knowing that our pleasures and eases have been paid in blood. We confront in stark terms the depths of conflict between personal comfort and satisfaction and that which we owe to others.