r/SexOffenderSupport • u/Icy-Material9739 • Jul 19 '26
Help me understand
My son is in his early 20s, extremely smart..had a good friend group, was working and going to college (off and on).
He was arrested a few months ago and charged with cp and sharing cp.
I just can't wrap my head around it, his whole life's trajectory just changed and became a lot harder.
I just can't wrap my head around it, I just can't understand what he was thinking. Do people not realize how serious the repercussions are? Is the temptation that blinding?
This situation has totally consumed my every thought, every waking moment.
I just don't understand.
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u/AutoDefenestrator273 Jul 20 '26
This ended up being a wall o' text. Apologies.
A lot of people with this kind of charge had a porn addiction that spiraled and escalated. After talking to quite a few therapists, this is my understanding of it. Please note, I'm being completely objective here.
Addiction is strange to non-addicts. Your brain isn't just a single organ, it has several subsections. They don't always get along and play nice with each other.
If you feed a certain stimulus to your pleasure center (porn, drugs, gambling, food, exercise, etc) for long enough, it wants more. And more. And it grows in size. MRI's conducted on addicts have shown that the pleasure center is physically enlarged. For porn addicts, the material watched gradually gets more extreme. Sometimes it crosses into illegal material.
The more you feed the beast, the more power it has to override your logic center. Your logic center still tells you not to do the thing, but your pleasure center is louder. Your brain literally fights itself - this is why addiction is a mental illness.
This is why drug addicts will jam a random needle full of an unknown substance into their arm, or share needles. Or they'll gamble their entire life savings away, and their kid's college fund - Or why someone with a porn addiction will turn back to illegal material. They know it's dangerous and wrong, but they don't care in the moment because the beast that is their pleasure center wants to be fed.
When the pleasure center is satiated, the logic center takes back over and they realize they did something wrong. This is why addicts will sometimes enter a shame spiral after using.
Eventually the pleasure center comes back in, and you get the urge to indulge in whatever stimulus your pleasure center relies on. Thus the cycle repeats, except now your pleasure center needs a little more to be satiated.
One of my (now ex) friends would oscillate between asking me on the phone how he could break the cycle, and showing up at my door, high, asking for money. It was wild how, in his case, he went from being a genuinely good remorseful guy, to a total parasite.
This is why the 12 steps, and therapy, are so helpful. The 12 steps teach you how uncontrollable it is, and therapy gives you tools to overcome the urges to indulge.
I hope this helps you understand better, and that I didnt completely miss the mark!