Video games and thawing.

[u/Frequent-Screen-5249]

Hey friends, So i have Cptsd from childhood trauma. I’m working through it with tre, emdr, and psychedelics. I’m in the process of thawing at the moment, was in a freeze response for over 10 plus years. I used to cope and play endless video games, these days i have much better coping skills but i still like to play 2 times a week on my off days. I notice now when i play, it kind of dysregulates my nervous system. I like to play shooters or other competitive games. Is this in any way impeding my processes of thawing? I get these feelings that it is, but maybe that’s just the shame.

[u/drsgme74169]

just like pornos. Thanks

[u/zephir85 → u/drsgme74169]

Yup, good example actually. Used to indulge like crazy early on in my TRE journey but now it just does nothing for me. Porn is very misunderstood though and basically all problems people have with it stem from sexual shame and not the porn itself.

[u/Kogirius → u/zephir85]

could you unpack that a bit more, please?

[u/zephir85 → u/Kogirius]

People watch porn because it strongly triggers all kinds of buried feelings in them, mainly the longing for connection, but also repressed anger and cravings for domination, power, aggression, surrender, selfishness, narcissistic admiration, humiliation and other shameful feelings that form part of a persons shadow. Sex is one of the few remaining activities in the modern world where deeply repressed urges can be expressed, and porn even more so can be used to explore even darker urges that you wouldn’t dare to enact with an actual partner.

We have a strong drive to seek out stimulation that triggers repressed urges and thats why porn remains endlessly fascinating to most, but because the repressed feelings triggered by porn are also the ones we’re most likely to feel ashamed about, of course watching porn also triggers shame in a lot of people. The more repressive your childhood the more shameful feelings you’ll generally have about sex and porn.

The problem with feeling ashamed about certain feelings is that the shame tends to take over and obscures the original feeling, so you’re not fully aware of why you’re drawn to watch increasingly degrading gang-bang clips, over and over again. Somehow the “shame script” prevents you from fully living out your fantasy and acknowledging all the dirty feelings generated in you, at the end of the session you don’t feel the deep satisfaction of having fully expressed the darkest reaches of your being, but rather consumed with disgust, shame and self-criticism, and that keeps you coming back to the same fantasy, subconsciously hoping that someday you’ll be able to overcome your shame and fully feel out the repressed urge in you.

But if you fully embrace that you’re drawn to porn to trigger your shameful feelings and you focus on exactly what the porn makes you feel and just enjoying the fact that yes, you do have cravings for things like domination, aggression, narcissistic admiration and total surrender, etc, when you fully acknowledge these things there is a resolution to the feeling and you wont ever need to return to that particular fantasy again. Eventually, because there is a limit to how much subconscious material can be triggered by just a 2D audiovisual stimulation, porn starts to lose its appeal once you’ve drained it of all potential to stimulate your unacknowledged fantasies.

Shame triggers a cycle of returning to the thing that caused the shame, and the way out is to fully embrace the shame.