ABSTRACT
In the early days of this clinic, a man came to me with a problem with internet pornography. This is his story. He temporarily lived and worked in France and came home to his wife once a month. He worked in an Anglo-French publishing house as an IT expert. He told me that when the week ended on Friday, he would go online and watch pornography until late in the evening, then continue all day Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning, he would get up to go to work feeling exhausted and despicable. He would ruminate that he had wasted two days and three evenings doing nothing but looking at pornography. During the week he would knuckle down and get on with life but every weekend the same pattern of behaviour kept repeating. He also found that he would get tired of just watching video clips of people having sex and would range further and further into the fringes of the internet for extra erotic stimulation. His wife knew nothing of his secret life. This whole process was undermining his confidence and destroying his self-esteem. Unfortunately, the internet can become a downward spiral pulling you further and further into an online presence and an offline absence.
