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Masturbation is totally normal and healthy, and you're spot on that it shouldn't be demonized or shamed. In men, it might even reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
At the same time, it's important to have a balanced and psychologically flexible relationship with masturbation and sexuality. As psychologist Steven Hayes, a leading expert on psychological flexibility, explains: getting too fixated on any one activity or coping mechanism, even a healthy one, can lead to psychological inflexibility if it is used to avoid experiencing your life fully (For a thorough explanation of how this works, feel free to check out A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes). Psychological inflexibility here means getting stuck in rigid behavior patterns to the point that it messes with living a full and meaningful life.
So while I'm totally with you that masturbation is healthy and that bullshit social taboos against it should be rejected, it's also good to be mindful about your motivation behind doing it. Are you doing it because you're escaping pain? Or are you doing it because it aligns with your values and makes your life meaningful? If you rely on masturbation too much and don't have ways of accepting your emotions and connecting with the world, it could potentially tip into unhelpful psychological rigidity and a frustrating life. The key is to be able to experience masturbation while still staying flexible enough to show up fully for the rest of your life too.
What if I'm masturbating because my body demands I masturbate when I look at porn, even though I'd rather just look at porn without masturbating?
Thanks for the response. What you're describing - feeling a bodily urge to masturbate when viewing porn, even if you'd prefer not to - is very common. We're kinda designed so that our bodies respond to sexual stimuli. Many people can relate to that internal tug-of-war between an impulse and a conflicting desire.
From a psychological flexibility perspective, the key is to approach those urges with mindful acceptance rather than struggle against them. Fighting with or trying to suppress an urge often just makes it grow stronger, like a beach ball you keep trying to push underwater - it keeps popping back up with greater force (1). Instead, psychological flexibility invites us to open up and make room for the urge, observing it with curiosity and letting it be fully present in our awareness.
This doesn't mean you have to act on the urge. In fact, by giving it space to exist without resistance, you gain the ability to unhook from it and consciously choose how to respond in line with your values (2). You might say to yourself "I'm having the thought that I need to masturbate right now" and feel the sensations of that urge in your body, while still maintaining the freedom to decide if acting on it is truly what you want.
Imagine for a moment that a dear friend or loved one came to you struggling with this same dilemma. How would you respond to them? Most likely with compassion, understanding, and encouragement to be kind to themselves as they navigate this very human challenge. We could all benefit from extending that same caring response to ourselves.
At the end of the day, you're the expert on your own life and what matters most to you. By practicing acceptance of your inner experiences, unhooking from unhelpful thoughts and urges, and clarifying what you truly value, you can develop psychological flexibility to pursue a rich and meaningful life - whatever that looks like for you. That means that there's no one "right" way to relate to masturbation and porn. The invitation is to approach it mindfully and make choices that align with the kind of person you want to be.
(1) You can check out the "rebound effect" or "ironic process theory." It's been studied extensively in the context of thought suppression. The seminal paper on the topic is Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5
(2) This meta-analysis reviewed laboratory-based studies testing the components of the psychological flexibility model, and how psychological flexibility techniques increase behavioral flexibility. Levin, M. E., Hildebrandt, M. J., Lillis, J., & Hayes, S. C. (2012). The impact of treatment components suggested by the psychological flexibility model: A meta-analysis of laboratory-based component studies. Behavior Therapy, 43(4), 741-756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2012.05.003
Mindfulness sounds like a lot of work when I'm already planning to get genital nullification surgery
EDIT: Lemmy users love to downvote trans people's lived experiences because they're transphobic
Yes, but I feel mindfulness can solve many problems. I'm not sure how many of your problems will be solved with surgery, but you might need to mix in a bit of mindfulness for good measure.
I'm mindful about lots of things, but I'm not mindful about my genitals, because they give me dysphoria. I'll be mindful about my lack of genitals when I don't have genitals.
You can't mindfulness your way out of being trans. It doesn't work, I tried.
Very well. I know it's not a fix for everything. I just found it helped me growing up and when I remember to be mindful as an adult. When I forget and get too caught up in my own head is when I need it the most.
I wish you luck on your process and hope the best for you.
Being present with yourself and learning to sit with your thoughts (mere transient, ephemeral nothingness) is probably not going to be more work than undergoing literal surgery.
And it's pretty insulting to gender diversity for you to attribute to transphobia our revulsion at seeing your level of emotional intolerance.
I'm mindful as shit about plenty of other stuff, just not my genitals. Being mindful about my genitals is bad because I have dysphoria. But I don't expect a transphobe like you to understand my medical needs when you've already made a reductive judgement about my entire psychology based on a single statement in a specific context. You're eager to judge, not to understand.
and you are eager to bemoan and cry persecution and not very eager to be understood. i cant believe you never mentioned being ace but only being trans. and yet it is our fault for not knowing this about you?
Asks question about psychology and masturbation. Gets well thought out response with source material and excellent advice. Responds to said comment in a rude way.
EveRYoNe is sO tRanSpHobiC!!
Lol. No. Your response was shitty and had nothing to do with the topic or the incredibly well thought out and empathetic response that you received. That's why you're being downvoted. Your gender does not give you permission to treat others poorly and you're acting no better than actual transphobes.
I wasn't being rude, I just gently informed the other person that they were giving bad advice, without getting angry or aggressive or belittling them in any way. You're only reading my normal, pleasant interactions with other people as rude because you want an excuse to hate a trans person.
This is what is called gaslighting and it's deplorable.
No, gaslighting is when someone tries to make you question your sanity. Someone disagreeing with you isn't called gaslighting, it's called a disagreement. Obviously I'm going to disagree with you when you make up nonsense about my own actions. And if I had been as obnoxious and incorrect as you are, then I would have accused you of gaslighting when you told me my own actions were different than they really are.
K. I'm done feeding the troll. Try being more accepting of people and you may find that your imagined persecution happens a lot less. Have a good day.
i just realized that discussing mindfulness with people suffering from persecutory delusions is literally my day job and i dunno why im reading work stuff on my day off wtf
but uhh yeah you made the right call here, delusions dont tend to respond well to logical confrontation
Wow, your job is mental healthcare? And yet your go-to move is accusing strangers who disagree with you of mental illness to win internet points? You must be ruining your patients' lives. I hope someone gets you barred from practice so you can't hurt anyone anymore.
yep im hitler. although i never accused you of mental illness, i dont believe in mental "illness". i accused you of being delusional. that's a very human condition, just a symptom not a diagnosis. as far as courtesy goes, you arent my pt and i dont owe you shit - and sometimes people need it gently, sometimes they need it bluntly. you are free to bring this up with the ethics board /j
Do you really think they were giving bad advice? They presented something really well thought-out and with flippin citations! And I can say that Hayes is absolutely a credible expert in the field who has done amazing work in mental health and addiction.
You just don't like the answer. Because you believe the answer is too hard for you.
And it's an easy excuse to say you're being persecuted for your identity, but really it is your attitude being criticized. Honestly it's frustratingly transphobic of you to try and lump in maladaptive sexual responses with transness too. Do you see what kind of damage it can potentially do to portray a hypersexual trait as something essentially trans???
It's good advice in general, but it's bad advice for me, as I already explained multiple times. And I'm asexual, not hypersexual. I tell you I'm getting genital nullification surgery and you still go and erase my very obvious queerness.
you never mentioned that you are ace and being ace has nothing to do with being trans!!!!
Thank you... most of the responses in this thread are really immature, arrogant, entitled, and pretty fucking cynical.
I work with people with severe depression and also the occasional sex/porn addict. Sexuality can lead us to some healthy lifestyles and can function as a healthy coping skill but it's also one that's easy to overdo. There are folks out there who try to treat their depression by masturbating all day long. They're desperate for any hit of pleasure, and they have quite literally milked that cow dry.
This post reminds me of the Reddit marijuana communities, that rubber-banded so far beyond reasonable moderated consumption of a helpful medicine, but refused to see how maladaptive their ritual had become. No one in this thread is questioning the original premise. "But it's so good!" That's the immature, arrogant part. And the entitled part is the attitude that any criticism of my precious coping tool is a threat to my hollow happiness, and the cynicism is that the only reason to criticize it is because of a corrupt society! Jesus fucking christ this thread broke my brain, you all broke my brain, we all suck.
I've ended up having sex with my marijuana and smoking my semen.. And I can't help but ask myself, where did it all go wrong?
Rigid behavioral patterns like having to work 40 hours a week, shop, feed yourself, clean, do laundry, go to the doctor, pay bills and so on, over and over and over again for the rest of your life?
Bro you can't just list basically every human ADL and say it's a "rigid behavior". That's basically like saying "Oh, you claim to like variety? Then how come you spend every day ALIVE?" thats idiotic, arrogant, cynical
Well excuse the fuck out of me for not having enough free time to actually enjoy my life.
you cant compartmentalize things like that. there aren't "chores" vs "fun" and everything you have to do is pain and the fun is just the chemical rushes. you gotta learn to enjoy the little things, enjoy yourself while you're doing your job or your chores, have some gratitude that you still live and breathe. you probably are gonna wanna get screened for depression
I can't pick and choose what I do or do not enjoy doing. There's nothing engaging about cleaning or doing laundry. When I first got out on my own there was at least some challenge in figuring out the most efficient way of doing things but that's all been mastered long ago. My job mostly consists of going down a list of projects and emailing people to find out why they haven't finished things that should have been done weeks ago. Then when I leave I get to sit in traffic for half an hour. Maybe stop at one of the over crowded, understaffed grocery stores to overpay for food. Get home, work out for an hour, shower, cook food, clean up, do whatever else needs doing. There's nothing to enjoy about any of that. It's all tedious as hell. I might have an hour or two after everything else is done to unwind before bed and even then I usually have too much on my mind to really get immersed in anything.
I get how you can feel like that is a fault of the world, but don't you see any agency in changing any of this? Or you just leave it at "Well I don't like it so that's that"
Of the things I listed:
Job - I'm always on the look out for better options, so far nothing has come up that pays more and I'm already not making enough to do the things I want to do.
Cleaning - Already said I have gamified it to get some enjoyment out of it in the past but I don't see any more room for improvement there.
Traffic - I can leave work early to beat rush hour sometimes but that that only helps a little.
Grocery store - I've tried going to different ones but it's more or less the same issues at all of the ones I've tried. I've figured out which days are usually less busy but it still sucks.
Working out - I vary my routines to not get too boring but it's still more or less the same stuff over and over again. It was fun when I was making gains but now my physique is where I want it to be so it's just maintenance.
Cooking- can try making new stuff but that just takes longer and comes with the risk of waste if I mess it up or don't like it. Also sharing a kitchen with housemates that tend to pack all the freezer space with garbage they buy from costco.
Free time - I guess I could stay up later but then I'll feel like shit all day the next day.
I'm open to suggestions but you're acting like I don't think about this shit constantly.
Yeah it does sound like you think about this a lot and you're really trying to make it work. I guess thinking about it isn't gonna be the solution.
It sounds like your dopamine systems are all screwed up - and make no mistake, most of ours are nowdays. When we spend our days getting flooded with quick hits of pleasure, scrolling memes here, gaming after school, masturbating whenever we want, etc., it's really hard to feel pleasure from the little things in life. But that's the point of dopamine: it's supposed to tell us when we're doing the right thing and make us feel rewarded just from having our life in order. But the pleasure of caring for your home is not going to be as intense as the rush you get from leveling up or opening loot boxes or whatever.
That's why we always see in these kinds of threads comments like "You wanna take away the ONE THING i enjoy in this miserable existence!" well shit sometimes that one thing you enjoy is making it so you can't enjoy anything else.
Then the question becomes How do I recalibrate my dopamine systems? And that's a complicated answer - if that's even the issue here! But yeah, more thinking (or words from me) probably wont do the trick.
I mean that's definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.
So I dunno, I'd generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it's something like "mindfulness", right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we're extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of "archetypes" from other cultures and then supposes that they're universal when really it's all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he's coming up with on the fly.
I uhh, I don't like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I'm saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.
Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT. that's like calling the Rolling Stones elevator music
I admire the skepticism but you haven't read it and clearly haven't taken time to fully understand it. he isn't making prescriptive claims. he's speaking on behavioral science. "A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info."
i understand the apprehension about psychological research but it is fundamentally a subjective science - psychology is what makes subjectivity possible, after all! and we humans clearly need treatment. if everyone listened to the ideas you planted in here, then what would we do? not try any treatments at all? not test our treatments? not seek evidence that our treatments are working and improve them? not share our findings?
the issue fundamentally is that you need to learn more about reading and interpreting scientific literature. you're presenting a pseudo-intellectual skepticism which is admittedly a healthy protective mechanism from many things online, but is not going to be a useful attitude for all kinds of growth
im sorry im being a dick but this thread has funked up my barometer for crazy and i probably misinterpreted your level of it, be well
I mean, both can be true, right. It's not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that's sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.
No yeah for sure I haven't read it, don't claim to have read it, I'm just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I've had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they've read like one book about it. I don't even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" type books, "The Bell Curve" type books, "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "Poor Dad, Rich Dad", shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit's kind of old, but, you see what I'm getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that's probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.
If I'm really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven't finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that's like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I'll read the rest of the paper, but that's just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:
Like what do you mean by this? Because you're looking at this through "treatments", right, and I dunno if that's the correct lens with which to view most people's problems that they have in life. I mean it's not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you're expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It's not a shocker when we're experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I'm really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there's not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don't think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.
If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I'd probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we're collecting, compared to just like, some guy's written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn't gonna share their massive amounts of data they're collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we'd probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you'd also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we're actually able to draw from the noise.
Then, even if you were able to do that, you'd still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we're just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there's too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you'd probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you'd be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you'd have enough information.
I'd maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that's also not quite a good method because it doesn't really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.
So, I dunno, probably I'd just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I'd dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I've tried mindfulness, and I've found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn't really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they're doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.
Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It's fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It's basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn't nailed down to anything in particular.
I respect your skepticism and I can see why you would mistrust the field broadly based on those figures in it. I just don't think we need to throw out the whole field because of bad actors. Someone like Jordan Peterson is widely discredited in the field.
Treatment IS important. There are REAL problems with roots in our own psychology. It is not purely psychological, but always biopsychosocial. Disregarding the psychological is not the way to treat biopsychosocial issues. In fact, it is one of the only ones we have any real agency or control over. And the more we develop psychology, the more just our understanding becomes. Think about 50 years ago when almost everything was just called "schizophrenia" and we treated people by shocking the shit out of them. That's where we'd still be if we didn't do this kind of work.
When someone comes to me writing in pain from traumatic flashbacks, or wildly out of control of their lives due to mood swings, or losing grasp on what is real or not, or paralyzed with anxiety from the rat race you're talking about, or they just plain cannot enjoy anything anymore and want to kill themselves... it is a low priority for me to discuss systemic issues with them. We can acknowledge them as a tool for alleviating shame and guilt surrounding mental disorders, and we can brainstorm ways to work around them, but expecting a suicidal client to begin marching in the streets? That is not going to be a sustainable means of making their immediate lives better. It is often more of a distraction than anything. Systemic justice and advocacy work is the kind of thing you do for no singular client in particular, and usually done in addition to the individual work.
But mental health treatment is how we help people find peace right here and now. It is how we empower people to find agency in their own lives, and help make them strong enough people to go out and support others in the longer term. It's the people who do not treat their mental health that end up devoting themselves to bizarre causes. I mean, think about how many Q anon supporters have addictive or psychotic tendencies.
If you acknowledge that there are real mental disorders (with both internal and external etiology), and you acknowledge that treating the individual can be a positive step towards addressing systemic issues, then the question becomes what kind of treatment should we use? That's where the scientific method comes in too. Yes there will always be problems and questions, but we do what we can with what we have.
I have seen people make real progress and really turn their lives around. That includes the masturbaters too lol, who do come through from time to time. I don't care if there are swindlers out there - as long as there are real people who are really helping others. Helping people figure out what is truly important to them can help them find strength to endure the shit they cannot change. Helping people build tolerance for and even appreciation for pain can help them make decisions that give their lives greater meaning. It helps people free themselves from the grasp of addiction and start giving back to others. It helps people find reasons to live. It is doing an immediate, person-to-person good. I don't know what kind of world you dream of, but I hope it is one with room for that kind of justice.
Thank you for your thoughts on all this!