Best. Answer. Ever.

Darlings, please go read Cary Tennis' brilliant answer to the pornography-addicted gentleman, right now. Please read it in its entirety.

And what might you be running from? Well, take your pick. For starters, how about just the unbearable anxiety of existence? And many people would say, well, life is shit so why not jerk off to porn all day? Yes, why not? Because you feel bad about it, that's why. And why do you feel bad about it? Because you are being dishonest about it, but more important, because saying that life is shit so why not jerk off all day is not the true journey. The true journey involves the phenomenon that precedes the porn -- the existential loneliness and despair. Encountering our bare, unadorned condition of divine mortality -- that is the true journey.

Pretty Lady has only one thing to add, to Cary's inspired treatise; that is, that all therapeutic process is worthless if one does not set one's intention to heal. Without this intention, therapy itself becomes another form of masturbation.

Intention, darlings, is not the same thing as Brute Willpower. Brute Willpower is the voice that says, "I will pummel this addiction into submission; I will force the Nobel Committee to give me the Peace Prize; I will punch the oppressor in the jaw." This voice is always and ultimately doomed to failure, because there is an entire world out there of other Brute Willpowers opposing it, not to mention the laws of biology, chemistry, psychodynamics and physics.

Intention is something else entirely. It is a compass. When it hits an obstacle, it does not force its way through; neither does it sit down and give up. It merely continues pointing north. One may have intention when one has literally nothing else; not health, not happiness, not money, not friends. One may have it when one hasn't got the slightest idea what to do with it, or how to accomplish one's goal. It is a reminder that, when we see a way around the obstacle, or under it, or through it, we can safely take it, and not get lost along the way. It enables us to take in new information and be strengthened, not stymied. It is an inner light in the darkness around us.