Some people who say they are addicted to porn barely use it at all. So, what is really going on?
Psychologist Dr. Joshua Grubbs has an answer: moral incongruence. When our behavior clashes with our values, shame can feel exactly like addiction.
“When we’re trying to regulate natural biological drives, it gets messy and complicated.
Dr. Phil Stieg and Dr. Grubbs explore where the clinical line really falls and why the wrong label can make things worse. Dr. Grubbs shares the one question to ask about any habit you cannot shake.
https://psych.unm.edu/people/faculty/profile/joshua-grubbs.html
Phil Stieg
Millions of people believe they are addicted to pornography. Many of them consume it, feel guilty about it, and mistake that guilt for something going wrong in their brain. My guest today, Dr. Joshua Grubbs, is a psychologist at the University of New Mexico who has spent the last decade studying a strange gap— the gap between what a person does and what they believe they should do. He calls it moral incongruence, and it may explain why so many people feel out of control of their behavior that, by any objective measure, they are not out of control. Dr. Grubbs built his career on pornography addiction research, but his model has since spread. It shows up in how people describe their gambling, their gaming, even their time on social media. Today, we will talk about guilt, shame, and the difference between feeling addicted and being addicted. We’ll ask what happens when a therapist mistakes one for the other, and how do we know when a behavior is truly a disorder? And when is it just a behavior we have decided to be ashamed of?
Josh, thanks for being with us today.
Joshua Grubbs
Glad to be with you. I appreciate the invite.
Phil Stieg
All right, so let’s start off with what is pornography in your mind? How do you define that?
Joshua Grubbs
Yeah, no, that’s a big question and it’s a surprisingly tricky one. I was actually recently at kind of small summit that involved a lot of researchers that work in the pornography-related space We agreed that it’s tricky to define what pornography is, right? I think there was a classic Supreme Court case where one of the justices in their opinion said, “it’s hard to define pornography, but I know it when I see it”. And that’s seems to be kind of how we operate, right?
I think for academic purposes, we do try to drill it down. And most often how we describe it is, you know, images, whether they are still or in video format, typically displaying nudity of the entire body, including the genital area, with a clear goal of promoting sexual arousal. And that’s – that last part is that kind of nebulous line between art and porn, for lack of a better word, right? When is it just a still life nude or an artistic sort of rendering versus something that’s designed to promote sexual arousal? But that does seem to be the distinguishing mark in the literature and in how people even evaluate pornography themselves.
Phil Stieg
Apparently when you first started, or early on, you were doing some studies and the results that you got weren’t what you expected to get. You were surprised by them.
Joshua Grubbs
So, I’ve been doing this since 2009, so approaching 2 decades now— Very early on, I probably would have really argued for the idea that “Yeah, you know, we need to understand what pornography addiction is”. And I thought when we’d studied this that we would see that people that were, you know, reporting that they were addicted to pornography would just be using tons of pornography. And what we found was that, yeah, some people do. Some people that say that they feel addicted to porn are using a lot of porn, but some people are barely using any and are still reporting that they feel addicted. And, you know, that led to a whole line of research of understanding why do people think that they’re addicted.
So, I kind of shifted from understanding, you know, what is porn addiction to more of why do people feel like they have an addiction? Why do they describe a behavior that’s, you know, maybe it’s not even that excessive, but why would they say this is an addiction? Whereas they might not say that about something else. You don’t typically hear people say, you know, man, I’m addicted to exercise. I just exercise 7 days a week. Or I’m addicted to pressing the snooze button on my alarm. I press it 4 times each morning and it’s wrecking my workday. Right? But we don’t hear people calling those addictions very often. But, you know, I’m viewing porn once a week and I feel like I shouldn’t. I think I have an addiction. What’s that difference there?
Phil Stieg
How would, how would you specifically define addiction?
Joshua Grubbs
Yeah, no, it’s a big, big question. When I define addiction, I’m referring to an out-of-control or excessive behavior pattern that is likely creating severe problems in your life, and that you continue to persist in even when you’re not finding, you know, any enjoyment out of it anymore. Even though you’re not enjoying it anymore, you’re being drawn into it. But even that is a messy definition. And where do we draw the line? between something that is an addiction and is not always clear, even when we’re talking about substances.
Phil Stieg
So, let’s ask the question another way. I’m an individual that actually thinks that I am a porn addict. What’s the first question you’re going to ask me?
Joshua Grubbs
First thing I’m going to ask if someone says, you know, I really think I’m addicted to porn, I’m going to ask, well, tell me what you mean by that, right? I mean, I want to know when you say you have an addiction to porn, what do you mean? And it depends on the client. But most often I hear, well, I view porn more than I want. I’ve tried to stop and I keep going back to it. I can’t quit using it for any long period of time. And then more often than not, I hear some version of the problems associated with it.
So, a very common one is that, you know, and it’s causing problems in my marriage, my long-term relationship, something like that. And those are the typical answers that I hear. But every single time I’ve asked that question, it’s, I’m using porn more than I want to be, or I’m using porn more than I feel like I should be.
Phil Stieg
So, this leads us into the concept of “moral incongruence”, right?
Can you make it understandable to me what you’re saying or implying with the concept of moral incongruence?
Joshua Grubbs
Yeah, it’s a super basic psychological principle. This is going back to very basic things like psychologists talk about things like cognitive dissonance, right? Where when our ideal self, our thoughts about ourselves and our actual actions don’t line up. So, when we think about values or beliefs about how we should act and what we should do and who we should be, all of us have an image in our head of what that is. We all have an idea of who we want to be. And right, sometimes those ideas are, are based on things parents have told us, religious leaders have told us, schoolteachers have told us.
Sex is something that there’s a lot of those ideals around. And this has been true for a lot of human history. Religious groups, social leaders, governments have a lot to say about what is the right and the wrong way to do sex. It is a very morally laden construct. There are people telling us how we should be.
And whether we realize it or not, we internalize a lot of those messages about what, what sex is okay and what sex is not okay, what types of behaviors are good and which ones are bad, right? And when we violate those internalized beliefs, we typically feel bad about it. So if you think that porn use is bad because you’ve really thought about it and you think it’s bad, or just because you’ve always heard it’s bad, or because your religious leader told you it was bad, or your mom told you it was bad, or your school teacher told you It was bad, and then you start using it, you have to wrestle with, I think this is bad, but I’m still doing it, and I keep coming back to it.
So, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with me that I would keep doing this thing that I think is bad? I think murder is bad, and I’m not going out there and murdering somebody. I think porn is bad, and I’m doing it. I’m using it. I must have something wrong with me. Maybe I have an addiction. And that’s, that’s that construct of moral incongruence that we talk about, right? Of your, your beliefs and your behaviors, they aren’t lining up, and you feel bad about it, and you’re looking for an explanation for why your beliefs and behaviors aren’t lining up.
Phil Stieg
So, what I’m hearing from you then is the standard criteria for discussing addiction about alcohol and, and certain drugs, cannot be applied to things like gaming, porn addiction and social media. It’s a very different thing.
Joshua Grubbs
Yeah, I mean, I would make that argument, and I could point you to scientists that would disagree and say, yes, they can be applied, right? That’s how we are, right? But I do strongly believe that certain aspects of what we look at with substance use, right. When we talk about things like, you know, tolerance and dependence, that those don’t make sense in the context of behaviors. And for a very simple reason, you know, when we’re talking about dependence on alcohol or dependence on opioids, we know anyone that’s worked in addiction treatment knows if someone’s been using this for years at a high quantity, and we just cut them off cold turkey, they’re there are very real and very dangerous medical implications, right?
That’s not how it is with gambling or gaming or porn. It might suck to quit cold turkey, but it’s not withdrawal in the same sense. It’s not, it’s not that dependence that will literally threaten your life if you cut it off. We don’t have to pretend like they’re the same thing as substance use disorders for them to be real things that need to be taken seriously.
Phil Stieg
I presume you’ve looked a little bit at the legal side of this, and there must be, I would think, a legal definition of what a porn addiction would be, or aberrant sexual behavior. And maybe those are 2 separate things.
Joshua Grubbs
I will say at the present moment Legally, addiction isn’t the word that is really used. There’s a lot of focus on whether or not the porn use meets the criteria in the International Classification of Diseases for compulsive sexual behavior.
The criteria are very clear, right? You’re persistently involved in this behavior. The behavior is consistent. It is frequent enough that it is causing substantial impairment in your life. You have tried to quit and you can’t. You’re persisting in it despite negative consequences. And what’s really interesting when we’re talking about that criteria, that benchmark, there’s this rule-out piece that says distress over sexual behavior that is just moral in nature does not meet this criteria. You know, you can be really upset about violating your own morals, but if it’s not objectively interfering beyond that moral shame, it does not count as this diagnosis.
Phil Stieg
What do you see that’s different between the person who is out of control using pornography versus the individual who sees themselves or believes they are addicted to pornography? There’s got to be a line there somewhere that you use.
Joshua Grubbs
Yeah, for sure. Right. There’s— I mean, saying that there’s this one hard red line would be hard, but in general, you know, I have clients that come in that talk about getting fired from jobs because they were caught viewing porn in their office privately, not exposing themselves to anyone, but privately, and leading to lost productivity. I’ve talked to people that are like, you know, I missed my kids’ pickup, you know, 2 times last week because I was masturbating to porn at home and I couldn’t stop. I’ve, you know, those kinds of stories.
And then I have some people that come in that it’s like, I viewed porn twice in the past month. And it was for about 30 minutes each time. And I’m absolutely convinced that I’m addicted because I know that this is wrong. And I’m still doing it. And you look at kind of the downstream effects in their life, and the only harms that they’re experiencing are those related to guilt and shame around the porn use.
And so those are, those are 2 different things, right? And it doesn’t mean that I’m telling the second guy, well, you just need to get over it. It just means that I’m probably approaching it a little bit differently than the guy that is literally spending 2 or 3 hours a day, that’s doing it at work, that’s missing his kids’ pickup, things like that.
Phil Stieg
Can you please define what your model or your hypothesis was when you started all this? And then what criticisms did you experience as a result of that?
Joshua Grubbs
You know, the early version of the model— so it’s revised over time. This is again one of the cool things I think about being a scientist is that when we discover problems in our models, we can change them.
And so early on, we basically said that, you know, people that use porn and disapprove of porn, the more you disapprove of porn, the more addicted you’re going to feel. And one of the criticisms that we got that I think was totally a valid criticism was, you know, if you ask someone who’s addicted to alcohol if they think it’s morally bad to drink alcohol, they’re going to say yes. For them, they may not say for everyone, but they say, yeah, it’s bad for me. Right? We thought about it a lot, and we’re like, you know, just thinking that this is bad and thinking that you’re addicted to it, that’s, that’s not really what we’re talking about.
What we’re talking about is this interaction between thinking it’s bad and still doing it, that interaction between the two, the belief and the behavior. And so, we, you know, define the new model statistically as this interaction where we’re looking at how those work together. And that model basically lays out that, you know, at the higher level of disapproval, the more you disapprove of porn, the more likely that any use is going to make you feel somewhat addicted, right? So, if you’re extremely high in disapproval and you’re using a little bit, you’re still quite literally as likely to feel as addicted as someone who doesn’t think it’s morally bad but is using a lot. And thinking about how that moral disapproval affects your own interpretation of your beliefs.
Now, we’ve gotten other criticisms along the way. You know, one of the early criticisms we got a lot that I thought was a little less fair was that, oh, you’re just trying to prove porn addiction is not real. You’re trying to say that everyone should feel good about viewing porn. And no, I’m not trying to say that, right? You know what, if your beliefs, whether they’re because you don’t want to exploit women, whether it’s because your religious beliefs tell you that you shouldn’t view porn, if your beliefs tell you that you shouldn’t view porn and you walk into my office, I’m gonna work with you to figure out how we can reduce your porn use, right? That’s my job.
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Phil Stieg
So do you think then that society should draw the line between porn use and compulsive sexual behavior disorder. And, you know, I’m searching for where that line is. When does it become harmful to your neighbor?
Joshua Grubbs
Right. Yeah, no, I think it’s, it’s tricky to draw a hard line. And I think if I were to draw it, I would look at the point where the amount of use, the frequency of use itself is creating genuine impairment in your life. Not, not the guilt over the use, not the moral distress or being ashamed overuse, but the actual use itself, right? So again, those examples of it’s interfering with work, it’s interfering with relationships, it’s interfering with responsibilities. That’s clearly a real disordered behavior.
Phil Stieg
Yeah.
Joshua Grubbs
Uh, and it’s the flip of that, and this is where drawing the line gets tricky, is, you know, there was a paper a few years ago that came out, and literally the title of the paper was “High Frequency Porn Use May Not Always Be Problematic”. You can’t just look at how often someone’s viewing. A single, you know, adult with no family responsibilities and a stable job that spends 2 or 3 hours a night viewing porn because they want to spend that time and it’s not creating problems, that’s probably not a disorder.
Another person could be spending 2 or 3 hours at work and missing kids’ pickups and blowing up their marriage, and that is a real problem. And they’re doing the same behavior with the same frequency. And this is where it gets messy. It’s not like alcohol. I mean, if you’re telling me, you have 7 drinks a day with alcohol, I can say that’s, that’s not great – you probably have an alcohol use disorder.
If you tell me you view porn for 2 or 3 hours a day, I need to know how it’s functioning in your life to tell you whether or not it’s compulsive sexual behavior disorder or whether you just have a high frequency of viewing porn.
Phil Stieg
I was surprised to read that you were surprised to find out that moral incongruence was relevant in gambling addiction. Why?
Joshua Grubbs
I don’t know. I think I started as a compulsive sexual behavior researcher, and I had spent so many years deep in that literature, not defending, but exploring this idea. It never really occurred to me that it would matter for other behavioral addictions. This was the sort of thing that I just kind of thought, well, Sex has a lot of moral norms. The church has a lot to say about porn, you know, whichever your church might be. Religion has a lot to say about sex. So, this is probably just about sex. But no, certainly we, we have a lot of evidence – growing bodies of evidence that show that it seems to matter for gambling, for gaming, for social media. Um, and so it was, again, it was surprising because I, I had gotten really caught up, I think, internally in my own head on the religious aspects of things, and when maybe the principle of violating our own beliefs is bigger than just religion.
Phil Stieg
Do you believe that by, uh, I’m not using the right term, but by being softer on what you want to call addiction, you’re going to give people permission, and with the permission, there’s going to be a significant increase in pornography, and then the societal impact that that can have.
Joshua Grubbs
You know, I think there are good reasons to think about the societal impacts of pornography, but to answer the first part, the permission piece; Pornography use is quite high already, and in fact, I don’t know that we’re likely to see any increases in it. It’s just a function of we’ve had high-speed internet now for several decades pretty much throughout the U.S.
I think getting really caught up on addiction is missing the aspects of pornography use that we should be much more thoughtful about, right?
So sure, getting out of control is one risk factor, but there’s a growing body of literature that suggests that teenagers are learning what they think is normal for sexual behavior based on viewing porn. And there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that shows that something like a third to a half of college-aged women— so this would have been about 2021, 2022— said that they had choking involved in their last sexual encounter. Right. Choking is not a sexual behavior that was popular when I was in college. Um, it, it is a behavior that there is a pretty clear trend line of it becoming more popular in porn and then more popular in young adults.
So, we can’t just say it definitely was caused by porn, but there’s a lot of data there to suggest that they certainly are coinciding with each other.
I’m not trying to judge choking or not choking. But I think it’s interesting that a lot of young adults talk about— a lot of teenagers talk about learning about sex from porn. That’s concerning to me because porn is produced for consumption, and that’s not the same – that’s not necessarily real sex, so to speak.
Phil Stieg
I was surprised to read that shame can look exactly like an addiction. How so? And what’s the difference or the similarity between shame and addiction?
Joshua Grubbs
Right. I, I think, you know, I don’t know that I’d say shame looks exactly like an addiction, but I do think there’s a lot of similarities to the extent of – when you’re thinking about shame over a sexual behavior, you end up feeling a lot of negative emotions around it. It consumes a lot of your mental space. If you feel like this is really bad, I can’t do it, this is really bad, I can’t do it, well, you’re still really focused on it. And there’s a mental preoccupation with it that we often see in addictive behaviors too, a very strong mental preoccupation.
There also tends to be this like kind of— we describe it as this white-knuckling approach of like they’re just holding on like, “I can’t, I can’t view porn and I can’t masturbate. I can’t view porn and I can’t masturbate”. They’re persisting into it. And then inevitably, when you’re that focused on not doing something, it becomes harder and harder to avoid.
And that is also something we do see oftentimes with addiction. There’s a— with even with substance use disorders, we talk a lot less about just trying to force the resistance and more about, you know, urge surfing and you know, not working against your own self to stop your behaviors.
I think the big difference is the extent to which the consequences in your life are the result of the behavior versus how you’re feeling about the behavior, right?
If you’re profoundly depressed and anxious and upset because you’re viewing porn once or twice a month, and it’s really impacting your mental health, that is bad. And if you’re losing, you know, relationships because you can’t stop viewing porn, you know, all the time, and you can’t, you know, function at work because you’re staying up till 3 AM viewing porn, that’s also bad, but in a different way.
Phil Stieg
What’s been your experience with patients that have been falsely diagnosed, wrongly diagnosed, or accused of being porn addicts and they’re really not? What does it do to them?
Joshua Grubbs
The shame gets worse. I have never seen someone where the addiction gave them permission to do it or made them feel better. There’s a lot more, uh, like a lack of agency or belief that they can change. Well, this is an addiction and I can’t get over it. It’s a disease, right? So, I see some of that, a lot less belief that they can change their own behaviors too We do a lot in, uh, for those clients in a framework called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where it’s really about finding behaviors that line up with their values and move them closer to their values.
But if you’re constantly obsessed with fighting your addiction, this porn use that may have been quite normal becomes a central defining feature of your life. And your relationship to porn ends up still interfering with your life, even if you’re trying to reduce it.
Whereas paradoxically, if you let go of the addiction label for those people that don’t have it, and focus more on just living consistent with what your values are, you actually think about porn less, you focus on porn less, you end up using it less, and feeling less guilt and shame if you accidentally— or maybe you do slip up, so to speak, but you don’t have to hate yourself for the next 6 weeks because of it.
Phil Stieg
So, tell me if I’m wrong. Do you think that this is an error in an individual’s perception? of themselves or their interaction with the world, their interaction with pornography? And then tell me, how is that different than dealing with anorexia?
Joshua Grubbs
So, I do think there’s a perception piece that’s there that can be it. But at the end of the day, Erroneous or wrong perceptions ourselves and our behaviors underlie so many psychological disorders.
I actually think a really interesting analogy between porn use and binge eating disorder is actually quite fascinating. fascinating, where people get these very moralized views around how they should eat and what they should eat, and then they slip up and, you know, eat 6,000 calories in one sitting. That’s quite consistent with someone saying like, oh, I don’t think I should view porn at all, I don’t think I should view— and then this weekend I went on a bender and viewed it for 4 hours, right?
I think there are some consistencies there, and I think one of the things that’s helpful to think about in both of them is that when we’re trying to regulate natural biological drives, it gets messy and complicated. And trying to white-knuckle force yourself to only be a certain way, fighting your own biology, whether it’s food or sex, is going to have some negative downstream effects.
Phil Stieg
Somebody’s listening to this show and, uh, they feel that they’re addicted to pornography. What do you say to them?
Joshua Grubbs
The first thing I always say if someone in the general public contacts me is, have you talked to a professional about this, right? You know, if you’re genuinely concerned that you think you have an addiction, reach out to a counselor, to a trained therapist, a licensed professional to talk about it and be honest with them about what you’re feeling, thinking, and critically, exactly what you’re doing, right?
I don’t think that you telling me that you have a porn addiction, I’m never going to say you’re wrong. I’m never going to say you need to change your view. I’m going to say you probably need to talk to somebody about this and figure out what this means for you.
Phil Stieg
I would just think that it’s really hard to get people up to open up that door, you know. And I’m hopeful that we can do it.
But then, like you say in your paper, and I was thinking about it, well, what about shopping? What about the exercise addict, you know? What about the work addict? I mean, I’m a work addict, and I’m reading your paper and I’m going, shoot, now what do I do? Should I feel guilty or be shameful about living my life?
Joshua Grubbs
I know people That work 80 hours a week and it honestly works for them. If I worked 80 hours a week, it would completely wreck my life. I would be miserable and it would destroy my family, right? But I know people that can do it.
Shopping, sex, gaming, gambling, I think it’s all the same. Like, how is this behavior that you’re engaging in working for you? And if it’s creating problems, it’s okay to do an honest inventory of what’s going on in your life and say, maybe I need to talk to somebody about this.
\ Phil Stieg
Final question for you: what is it that you want people to take away from this conversation?
Joshua Grubbs
The thing that I always encourage people to do with porn is not to think good porn, bad porn, I should masturbate, I shouldn’t masturbate, I should do this, I shouldn’t. I want you to think, is this behavior, is this activity functioning in my life the way that I want it to function?
Is it doing for me the way that I want it to do. And if the answer is no, it’s okay to reach out and talk to somebody and look for help in that space.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Joshua Grubbs, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I think it’s important that we teach people how to be able to talk about this so when it does become problematic in their lives, they can seek help and not feel shameful about the fact that they may feel that they have some disorder. Thank you so much for being with us.
Joshua Grubbs
Thank you for having me.
