You've been trying to stop for two decades. Twenty years of promising yourself this is the last time. Twenty years of succeeding for a few weeks, maybe a month, then crashing back harder than before. Twenty years of searching for the spiritual discipline, the moral strength, the sheer determination that would finally make it stick.

And here you are, convinced that if you just had more willpower, more faith, more character-you'd be free.

But what if the problem isn't your willpower at all?

What Nobody Tells You About Willpower

When someone struggles with pornography for years, or finds themselves binge drinking with increasing frequency, the conventional wisdom is clear: it's a discipline problem. A spiritual failing. A weakness of character.

This explanation makes intuitive sense. After all, you make the choice to click, to pour the drink, to give in. So logically, making a different choice-just saying no-should solve it. The entire multi-billion dollar self-help industry is built on this premise. Just be stronger. Just want it more. Just commit harder.

And you've tried. God knows you've tried. You've white-knuckled your way through days, weeks, sometimes months of abstinence. You felt terrible the entire time, every moment a battle, until finally the dam broke and you went back even harder than before.

So you concluded what seemed obvious: you're fundamentally broken. There's something wrong with you that you can't just stop.

Why Does Willpower Fail?

But here's what doesn't make sense about the willpower explanation:

If this were really about discipline or moral strength, we'd expect to see certain patterns. We'd expect that people who succeed in other areas of life-who've built careers, maintained employment, managed complex relocations to new countries-would have an easier time. We'd expect that when someone tries harder, commits more deeply, or feels more ashamed of their behavior, they'd be more likely to stop.

Instead, research consistently shows the opposite. The more someone views their addictive behavior as a moral failing, the worse their outcomes tend to be. The more they rely on willpower alone, the more likely they are to experience the exact cycle you've lived: brief success followed by harder relapse.

And here's the question that breaks the whole framework: if lack of willpower is really the problem, why did the behavior start in the first place? Why at 18 or 19, roughly a year after you moved to the UK? Why not at 15, when you were meditating and felt spiritually connected and at peace?

The timing reveals something the willpower explanation can't account for.

The Trauma Secret Nobody Talks About

In approximately 90% of cases where people seek help for substance use or compulsive behaviors, they report prior trauma. Not 50%. Not 60%. Up to 90%.

But here's what most people don't realize: the behaviors aren't evidence of moral failure. They're evidence of an emotional regulation problem stemming from unprocessed trauma.

Think about the timeline of your own experience. At 15, you had a meditation practice that brought you profound peace and centeredness. You had a spiritual foundation that genuinely worked. Then at 17, you experienced what researchers call migration trauma-an abrupt relocation from Nigeria to the UK with no family support system, no community, no foundation. You lost everything overnight.

You stopped meditating. You were too busy trying to survive. You had to figure out housing and work completely alone in a foreign country. And about a year later, around 18 or 19, the pornography use began.

That timing isn't coincidence. It's cause and effect.

What researchers have found is that migration trauma involves far more than just the relocation event itself. It encompasses loss of support systems, identity disruption, experiences of discrimination, and insecure basic needs like housing and income. Every single one of those factors is associated with mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

And when you're 17 or 18, living alone in a new country, overwhelmed by loneliness and pain you don't have the resources to process, your brain does what it's designed to do: it finds a way to manage those unbearable feelings.

You didn't choose pornography because you lacked character. You turned to it because it temporarily made you feel less alone. Because it soothed feelings you didn't know how else to handle. The same is true for the alcohol-it helps you not feel the frustration, the stuckness, the shame of failed relationships and stagnant goals.

The real cause of the behavior you've been fighting for 20 years isn't lack of willpower. It's unprocessed emotional pain from trauma you never had support to heal.

The Shame Mistake Hurting Your Recovery

But there's something else happening that makes this pattern so brutally difficult to escape. Something operating behind the scenes that most people never see.

It's a cycle, and it works like this:

You use pornography or binge drink to escape difficult feelings-loneliness, frustration, the sense of being stuck. The behavior provides temporary relief. But the next day, you feel deep shame. You tell yourself you're a failure, that there's something fundamentally broken about you, that two failed marriages are proof you're damaged beyond repair.

And when you feel that shame-that crushing sense of being fundamentally flawed-what do you want to do with those feelings?

You want to escape them. With the same behaviors. Which then create more shame.

Research published in 2024 examining the relationship between trauma, shame, and substance use found something critical: shame doesn't just result from addictive behaviors. Shame actually mediates the relationship between trauma and addiction. In other words, shame is fuel that actively keeps the cycle running.

The behaviors create shame. The shame creates unbearable feelings. Those unbearable feelings drive you back to the behaviors for relief. Which creates more shame. The cycle compounds on itself, each element making the others worse.

This is the invisible mechanism that's been operating in the background for 20 years. You thought you were fighting a behavior. You were actually caught in a self-perpetuating system where the shame about the behavior has become one of the primary drivers pushing you back to it.

And here's what makes this particularly insidious: the willpower-based approach you've been trying? It makes the shame worse. Every time you "fail," it reinforces the belief that you're broken, which intensifies the shame, which strengthens the very mechanism keeping you stuck.

The Truth About Your Addiction

Once you see this, everything changes.

The pornography isn't your main obstacle to spiritual wellbeing. It's a symptom of the obstacle-the unprocessed trauma and the shame cycle it created.

You're not broken or lacking in character. Your brain developed an adaptive response to overwhelming circumstances you didn't have support to process.

The behavior isn't evidence of moral failing. It's evidence that you experienced something traumatic at 17 and your nervous system found a way to cope with feelings you didn't have the resources to manage.

This reframe isn't just semantic. It changes everything about how you approach healing.

Studies examining problematic pornography use have found that emotional avoidance, difficulties in emotion regulation, and dysfunctional stress coping are the strongest predictors of compulsive behavior. The use of pornography for emotional regulation is one of the main risk factors-not sexual gratification, but emotional avoidance.

The same research shows that effective interventions must include strategies for regulating emotions and developing adaptive coping mechanisms. You can't bypass trauma to get to peace. You can't use willpower to stop a behavior that exists specifically to manage emotions you haven't learned to process another way.

Think about meditation. It requires being present with yourself. But if being present means feeling overwhelming loneliness and unprocessed pain from abandonment in a foreign country, your brain will resist it. It's not safe to be present yet. Once you process that pain, being present becomes safe again. Then spiritual connection becomes accessible.

What Treatment Overlooks

And here's what almost no one tells you: while trauma-informed care has made enormous progress in recent years, it has largely overlooked shame as a critical treatment target.

A 2024 systematic review examining shame, interpersonal trauma, and substance use found robust associations among all three. Shame is associated with greater substance use among trauma survivors. The coexistence of two variables-shame and trauma, for instance-exacerbates the third (addiction).

Yet most treatment approaches focus on either the behavior (stop using pornography, stop drinking) or the trauma (process the migration experience) without addressing the shame that's connecting and compounding both.

This explains why approaches that focus on only one problem fail so consistently. Research comparing integrated versus non-integrated treatment for co-occurring disorders found that addressing mental health issues and substance use simultaneously leads to significantly better outcomes, particularly for PTSD symptoms, compared to treating them separately.

The data is unambiguous: approximately 21.2 million adults have co-occurring mental health and substance use conditions. Among people in addiction treatment, 43-50% have co-occurring PTSD. And when people have both conditions together, they have more severe symptoms of both disorders and poorer treatment outcomes if only one is treated.

Focusing solely on stopping the pornography while ignoring the underlying trauma isn't just ineffective. Research shows it's a fundamental treatment error that leads to worse outcomes.

How to Finally Move Forward

For 20 years, you've been fighting the wrong battle.

You've been trying to develop enough willpower to stop a behavior that exists specifically because you're using willpower to survive. You've been viewing these behaviors as obstacles to overcome, when they're actually signals pointing to pain that needs processing.

This is why "just stopping" never worked. Why you could white-knuckle your way through a few weeks but felt terrible the whole time. Why the relapses came back harder. You were trying to remove a coping mechanism without addressing what it was helping you cope with.

The path to the spiritual wellbeing you're seeking doesn't go around the trauma by just stopping behaviors. It goes through the trauma. Through processing the loss of community and foundation you experienced at 17. Through building capacity to feel and regulate difficult emotions without needing to escape them. Through addressing the shame that's been compounding everything.

Once that foundation is in place-once you're not carrying unprocessed trauma and shame-the behaviors you've been fighting for 20 years will naturally decrease. Because you won't need them anymore. Just like you didn't need them at 15 when you had your meditation practice and felt spiritually connected.

The evidence supports this. Therapeutic approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy significantly reduce both problematic pornography use symptoms and the underlying craving. But they do this by helping you process emotional pain and develop healthier regulation strategies, not by helping you fight harder.

Simple First Steps

The first step is finding a therapist who specializes in trauma-informed addiction treatment-ideally someone who understands migration trauma specifically. This isn't about finding someone to help you stop using pornography. It's about finding someone who can help you safely process the trauma that the pornography has been helping you avoid.

In the meantime, there's something you can start practicing immediately:

When you notice the urge to use pornography or binge drink, pause. Don't fight the urge. Don't judge yourself for having it. Instead, ask yourself:

"What am I feeling right now that I'm trying to escape?"

Loneliness? Frustration? Shame about something else? The feeling of being stuck?

Just notice it. Write it down. Don't try to fix it yet. Don't judge it. Just start building awareness of what emotions these behaviors are managing.

That awareness is the foundation. Because once you can see what you're actually dealing with-the unprocessed pain, the difficult emotions, the shame cycle-you can begin to address those root causes instead of spending another 20 years fighting symptoms.

You're not broken. You're not lacking willpower or spiritual discipline or moral strength. You experienced trauma without adequate support, and your brain found a way to survive. That's adaptation, not failure.

The question now isn't "How do I stop these behaviors?"

It's "How do I process the pain they've been protecting me from?"

That's a completely different question. And it has completely different answers-answers that actually work.

What's Next

Stay tuned for more insights on your journey to wellbeing.