Context

This is an exercise which porn addicts benefit from greatly, due to the way it changes your visual perception of reality.

So let’s get crackin’.

The intention behind a lot of these exercises is to assist you in breaking down what you understand of your mind.

The word “understand” of course, meaning the conglomerate of knowledge you’ve gained and learned up until now.

Part of the reason why we want to break down your understanding of life and reality, is because what you currently “know” is largely counter-intuitive.

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You see, what you "understand" is part of the reason why you're addicted to porn.

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What you currently “understand” is that you really want to watch porn.

What you “understand” is that you don’t have the self-control not to watch porn, and that it’s a lot easier if you just relapse and watch porn.

And certainly, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I mean, it’s what you understand. You can’t help what you’ve been taught up until now, it’s all your brain knows.

On the other hand, it’s also perfectly fine to change your understanding of reality so that you can allow yourself the opportunity to overcome your own porn addiction.

Which is exactly what this website aims to do.

For today’s exercise, what we want to do is break down our visual understanding of reality, and how that relates to our own thoughts and feelings.

Which is to say that we want to separate our thoughts and feelings from what we’re actually seeing in front of us.

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As human beings, we tend to attach meaning and value to that which we can physically see.

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It could be a trinket that belongs to your family which evokes emotions of pride and belonging.

It could be the sight of a McDonalds in the distance, and the memories that place evokes. It could even be something more conceptual, like a particular scene within a movie.

And with this exercise we want to learn to separate these two elements, because what we see is not what we feel.

They are two completely separate elements which we’ve learnt to associate together, no different to watching porn and all the feelings associated with it.

Both empowering and overwhelmingly negative.

Think of them as being two completely different sensations. The sensation of seeing, and the sensation of feeling.

So why is this important?

Well, let’s look at porn addiction for example.

For porn addicts porn isn’t just “two people having sex”. Rather, it’s a complex relationship which evokes a whole range of feelings and emotions.

Porn is also feeling immense guilt for having relapsed, porn is feeling completely empty and drained on the inside, porn is the shame of lying about our habit to our friends and family.

Yet when you think about it, porn really is nothing more than “two people having sex”.

Sure, it’s something that a lot of humans find destructively addictive, but it’s hard to deny that from a visual perspective, there really is nothing that awful about it.

With this in mind, what this exercise attempts to do is help you come to the understand that porn is simply “two people having sex”.

And the way we do this is by separating what we feel and what we see into two different categories.

Because currently we may have developed a habit of jumbling the two together, and not quite realising all the steps our mind makes internal when jumping to the conclusion of “I really want to watch porn”.

One thing to notice is that this exercise may seem incredibly similar to Dissolve Your Visual Perception Of Reality.

Both exercises focus on manipulating our visual understanding in some way, however both exercises do completely different things.

Dissolve Your Visual Perception Of Reality attempts to completely absolve our understanding of reality, while this exercise attempts to rearrange our understanding of it.

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Instructions

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For this exercise, what we want to do is look at some things, and try and figure out the difference between what we’re seeing and what we’re feeling.

We can do this sitting down at home, or anywhere really. Observe what you see. Observe what you feel.

It could be a building. It could be another person. I tend to do this exercise using everyday objects, although sentimental objects can work well too.

Especially objects that we’ve kept around the house for a while, that you’ve spent a lot of time with. (for example, it could be a video game console)

Can you distinguish any difference between the object and the feeling? What are those differences? Is there even a difference?

Is there any feeling at all, and are you responsible for creating that feeling or is it the object which is responsible for how you feel

Play around with it.

Try this exercises in different areas and different places. See if you can discover any common themes.

The world truly is your oyster ^^