Clinical Disclaimer: This article is written for educational and informational purposes. It does not constitute a clinical diagnosis or professional mental health advice. If you recognise yourself in what is described here, you are welcome to reach out to Sacred Space Counselling LLP for a confidential conversation.
By Jeffrey Pang
SAC Clinical Member and Registered Counsellor
M. Coun., Dip CSBD (ISAT)
There is a moment that happens fairly regularly in my counselling room. A man has come to see me about pornography — usually after years of managing it privately, convinced that the problem is a moral failing, a discipline issue, or simply a character defect he has never been able to fix. We talk about the behaviour. We talk about the patterns. And then, gently, we start talking about his father.
Sometimes the conversation shifts quickly. Sometimes it takes weeks to get there. But it almost always gets there. And when it does, something in the room changes. The man who walked in ashamed of what he does starts to understand, perhaps for the first time, something important about why.
This article is about that connection — the link between a father wound and the development of compulsive sexual behaviour. It is a connection that research supports clearly, that clinicians encounter consistently, and that is almost never named plainly enough for the men who need to hear it.
First, What Do We Mean by a “Father Wound”?
The term “father wound” is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a shorthand for a cluster of experiences in which the father — through absence, emotional unavailability, harshness, inconsistency, addiction, or outright abuse — failed to provide what a child needed from him.
Father wounds are not always dramatic. Some of the men I see had fathers who were present in the house but emotionally somewhere else entirely — working, drinking, disengaged, or simply constitutionally unable to express warmth or interest in their son. Others had fathers who left — through divorce, death, or choice — before the son had any framework for making sense of it. Some had fathers who were critical and shaming, whose approval seemed perpetually out of reach. Some had fathers who were violent.
What unites these varied experiences is the impact they have on the developing child’s internal world — their sense of self-worth, their model of what relationships look like, their capacity to regulate difficult emotions, and their blueprint for how men relate to intimacy, vulnerability, and the people they love.
Research published in BMC Psychology in 2022 by Garfield and colleagues found that fathers who were emotionally distant — and particularly those who were abusive — gave rise to feelings of rejection, sadness, and anger in their sons that were rarely acknowledged or addressed. These sons coped by sublimating the pain, disguising vulnerability, and seeking emotional comfort in other ways — leaving them, as the researchers noted, “susceptible to situations which threatened their psychological security.” For many of the men I work with, pornography became one of those coping strategies long before they had language for what they were managing.
The Research: Childhood Wounds and Sexual Compulsivity
The clinical literature on this connection is substantial and growing. Let me walk through the most relevant findings without losing the human being in the data.
Adverse Childhood Experiences and sexual behaviour
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, originally conducted by Felitti and colleagues in 1998, remains one of the most important datasets in the field of trauma and health. The study followed over 17,000 adults and found a clear, graded, dose-response relationship between the number of adverse childhood experiences a person had and a wide range of negative adult outcomes — including what the researchers categorised as sexual promiscuity and risky sexual behaviour. The more childhood adversity, the greater the risk. And crucially, the relationship operated across all ten ACE categories, including emotional neglect, physical neglect, and parental absence through divorce or abandonment — the categories most directly associated with what we would clinically describe as a father wound.
The ACE questionnaire explicitly includes the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death, or abandonment as one of its ten items. This is not incidental. The original researchers recognised early that parental absence was not a peripheral variable — it was a core wound with measurable long-term consequences.
The attachment pathway
More recent research has refined our understanding of how childhood adversity gets from early experience to adult sexual compulsivity. The answer, increasingly, is through attachment.
A landmark 2019 study by Kotera and Rhodes, published in Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, examined the pathways from adverse childhood experience to sex addiction in a gender-balanced sample of 104 adults. Their findings were illuminating: adverse childhood experience did not directly predict sex addiction. It did so indirectly — fully mediated through anxious adult attachment. In other words, childhood wounds create anxious attachment, and anxious attachment then drives compulsive sexual behaviour.
This is a clinically important finding. It means that the man using pornography compulsively is often, at a deeper level, a person who never felt securely held — who learned early that relationships were unreliable, that love was conditional, that the people who were supposed to be safe were sometimes the source of the greatest pain. And pornography offers something that feels, neurologically and emotionally, like connection and soothing — without the terrifying vulnerability that real intimacy requires.
A separate study published in PMC found positive correlations between both anxious attachment (r=0.46) and avoidant attachment (r=0.39) and sexual compulsivity, across heterosexual and homosexual men and women alike. Both the person who clings and the person who withdraws are at elevated risk. The common thread is not the specific attachment pattern — it is the underlying insecurity.
The father-absence research specifically
A large UK birth cohort study published in 2023 in JAMA Network Open, drawing on data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and following 8,409 children, found that early childhood father absence was strongly and persistently associated with depression and poor mental health trajectories into young adulthood. Crucially, the timing mattered — father absence in the first five years of life had stronger effects than absence in middle childhood, suggesting a sensitive developmental window during which the father’s presence or absence shapes the child’s foundational psychological architecture.
Depression and unregulated emotional distress, as the broader literature makes clear, are among the primary drivers of compulsive pornography use as an emotion-regulation strategy. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed that hyperarousal symptoms — a feature of unresolved early trauma — were among the strongest predictors of higher compulsive sexual behaviour scores.
Childhood trauma, sexual narcissism, and hypersexuality
A 2025 study by Yaakov and Weinstein, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, examined 118 adults — including those in sex addiction support groups and a general population control group. The researchers found that childhood trauma was directly associated with sexual narcissism and hypersexual behaviour. Their mediation model showed that childhood trauma and sexual narcissism together explained 60.3% of the variance in hypersexual behaviour. This is a striking figure. It suggests that the majority of what drives compulsive sexual behaviour in the people studied could be traced, at least in part, to what happened to them in childhood.
What This Looks Like in the Room
I want to bring this back from the research to the actual human experience, because I think that is where it matters most.
The men I see with father wound and porn addiction are not, as a rule, men who have made a straightforward decision to pursue pleasure at the expense of their values. Most of them are deeply ashamed. Most of them have tried to stop many times. Most of them hold their faith seriously, love their wives, care about their children, and genuinely cannot understand why something they hate doing keeps happening.
What I observe, again and again, is a pattern that looks something like this:
A boy grows up without a father who is emotionally present — whether because he left, because he was there in body but absent in spirit, because he was harsh and critical, or because he was struggling with his own unresolved wounds. That boy learns, quietly and without conscious awareness, that men do not show vulnerability, that emotional needs are a source of shame, that love is either conditional or unreliable, and that he is fundamentally on his own with the complicated interior world he has inherited.
He finds, usually in adolescence and usually by accident, that pornography does something remarkable. It soothes. It numbs. It offers a kind of pseudo-intimacy that requires nothing from him — no vulnerability, no risk of rejection, no performance of emotional competence he has never been taught. The neurological reward is immediate and reliable in a way that human relationships, complicated and unpredictable as they are, have never quite been.
Years pass. The behaviour becomes entrenched. The shame accumulates. And the very wound that started the cycle — the unmet longing for a father who saw him, approved of him, and was genuinely present — gets buried deeper and deeper under the behaviour that is trying, clumsily and unsuccessfully, to meet the need the wound created.
As Dr Patrick Carnes, arguably the leading researcher and clinician in the field of sexual compulsivity, has described: what drives this kind of compulsive sexual behaviour is not primarily a failure of morality. It is a set of core beliefs forged in childhood — beliefs about whether the person is worthy of love, whether relationships are safe, and whether they will ever find genuine intimacy — that the compulsive behaviour is attempting, however dysfunctionally, to manage.
The Singapore Dimension
I want to name something specific about this in the Singapore context, because I think it shapes the presentation in ways that are worth acknowledging.
Singapore’s culture of high performance, emotional restraint, and the expectation that men should be providers and achievers rather than emotionally present and expressive means that father wounds here often go unnamed for generations. Many of the fathers of the men I see were themselves carrying wounds they never processed — working long hours, carrying the weight of family expectations, producing results but not demonstrating warmth.
This does not make them bad men. It makes them men who were shaped by their own experiences in ways they were probably never helped to understand. But the impact on their sons is real, and the sons — now adults — are often carrying a grief they cannot name, for a relationship they never quite had, with a man who may still be alive and sitting at the same dinner table every Sunday.
The ACE framework explicitly recognises emotional neglect — the failure to make a child feel loved, important, and valued — as one of its ten core categories. You do not need to have had a father who left or who hit you to carry a father wound. You can carry one from a father who was simply never truly there for you in the ways that mattered most.
What Healing Actually Requires
I want to be honest about what this means for recovery, because I think the church community in particular sometimes presents a version of sexual addiction recovery that is insufficient for the depth of what is actually happening.
Accountability software, prayer, and renewed commitment are not enough on their own when the engine of the compulsive behaviour is an unprocessed father wound. They address the behaviour at the surface — and the surface matters — but they do not touch the root. And unaddressed roots have a way of reasserting themselves.
What the research points toward, and what I observe in clinical practice, is that effective recovery from compulsive sexual behaviour that is rooted in childhood wounds requires:
Naming and grieving the wound itself. Many men have never been given permission to grieve the father they needed and did not have. This grief — for the approval that never came, the presence that was absent, the relationship that left a shape in the person rather than a memory — needs space. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and trauma-informed approaches create that space.
Addressing the anxious attachment patterns that mediate the wound. The Kotera and Rhodes research is clinically instructive here: because childhood adversity operates through anxious attachment, treatment that targets attachment security — learning to tolerate intimacy, to trust relational safety, to regulate emotions without reaching for external soothing — is essential.
Building self-compassion alongside accountability. The same 2019 study found that self-compassion moderated the relationship between anxious attachment and sex addiction — meaning that higher self-compassion was protective. This is not a soft finding. It is a clinical one. The man who can hold himself with some degree of care, rather than pure contempt, is more likely to sustain recovery than the one whose inner world is nothing but judgment and shame.
For men of faith: integrating a theology of grace that is robust enough to hold this. Romans 7 — “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” — is not merely a spiritual metaphor. For many men sitting in my counselling room, it is an exact description of their lived experience. The grace that meets that experience is not cheap grace that bypasses the wound. It is a grace that goes all the way down into it — that sees the frightened boy beneath the compulsive behaviour and says: you are not defined by this. You are beloved. And there is a way through.
A Final Word
If you are reading this and recognising yourself — not just in the pornography, but in the father wound beneath it — I want to say something directly to you.
Understanding this does not excuse the behaviour. It does not remove your responsibility for the harm it has caused in your marriage, your relationships, or your own soul. But it does change the question from “what is wrong with me?” to “what happened to me?” — and that shift, small as it sounds, is often where genuine healing begins.
You are not uniquely broken. You are a person who was shaped by experiences you did not choose and did not have the resources to process. And the fact that you are still carrying those experiences in the form of compulsive behaviour is not evidence that you are beyond help. It is evidence that you have not yet had the right kind of help.
That kind of help exists. It takes courage to reach for it. But it is available — and it works.
If you would like to speak with someone, book a confidential session with Sacred Space Counselling here. All sessions are conducted by a SAC Registered Counsellor and ACC (Singapore) member.
If you are not sure if porn is a problem, take our FREE and confidential WHO-validated online assessment here.
References
- Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. doi:10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8
- Kotera, Y., & Rhodes, C. (2019). Pathways to sex addiction: Relationships with adverse childhood experience, attachment, narcissism, self-compassion and motivation in a gender-balanced sample. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 26(1–2), 54–76. doi:10.1080/10720162.2019.1615585
- Yaakov, R., & Weinstein, A. (2025). A study on childhood trauma and sexual narcissism in individuals with compulsive sexual behavior receiving counseling. Archives of Sexual Behavior. doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03137-y. PMC12162750
- Garfield, C. F., & colleagues. (2022). Emotional constraint, father-son relationships, and men’s wellbeing. BMC Psychology. PMC9513388
- Lacey, R. E., & colleagues. (2023). Father absence and trajectories of offspring mental health across adolescence and young adulthood: Findings from a UK birth cohort (ALSPAC). JAMA Network Open. PMC10666570
- Weinstein, A., & colleagues. (2015). Sexual compulsion — relationship with sex, attachment and sexual orientation. Journal of Behavioral Addictions. PMC4394850
- Privara, M., & Bob, P. (2023). Pornography consumption and cognitive-affective distress. Behavioral Sciences, 13(3). PMC10399954
- Briken, P., & colleagues. (2024). Compulsive sexual behavior, sexual functioning problems, and their linkages to substance use among German medical students: Exploring the role of sex and trauma exposure. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1423690. PMC11661911
- World Health Organization. (2022). International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision (ICD-11). Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder, code 6C72. icd.who.int
- Carnes, P. J. (2019). Recovery and treatment of sexual addiction: An interview with Dr. Patrick Carnes. Open Access Journal of Addiction and Psychology, 2(5). irispublishers.com
- Grubbs, J. B., Perry, S. L., Wilt, J. A., & Reid, R. C. (2019). Pornography problems due to moral incongruence: An integrative model with a systematic review and meta-analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48(2), 397–415. doi:10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x
- Kraus, S. W., Krueger, R. B., Briken, P., et al. (2018). Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 109–110. PMC5775124
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