What providers can do to assist in the pursuit of purity and freedom

Summer vacation removes the scaffolding of ordinary life. Schedules dissolve, social accountability thins out, and the hours between meals and sleep fill with a restlessness that is partly physical (heat, idleness, loosened rhythms) and partly emotional. Jorge Gutiérrez, director general of the Spanish foundation Dale una Vuelta ("Give it some thought"), told ACI Prensa that summer is "perhaps always more conflict-ridden" for people struggling with pornography because "there is more free time and more opportunities."[^1] What his foundation's nine published tips name at the practical level points toward a clinical question providers are positioned to address: how to accompany a person toward the conditions in which freedom becomes genuinely possible.

The emotional engine underneath the habit

Gutiérrez was specific about the mechanism: pornography addiction "has a lot to do with emotional factors such as tension and anxiety and the desire to escape unpleasant moods."[^1] That locates the clinical target. Gabor Maté's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts argues that addiction generally is rooted in the attempt to relieve emotional pain, which makes attachment-informed accompaniment a primary tool for providers, not a supplement.[^2] When a person reaches for pornography during an unstructured afternoon, what's being managed is not primarily a sexual appetite but a spike of anxiety or a pool of ambient dissatisfaction. Maté's broader account also treats addiction as multidimensional, shaped by personal history, emotional development, and social conditions together, not any single cause.[^2] Providers who address emotional regulation are targeting the functional mechanism of the habit, not a peripheral symptom of it.

The disruption of routine surfaces what structure had been masking. A person who managed tolerably well during the academic year may find, by the third week of July, that the urge to use pornography intensifies in direct proportion to unstructured afternoon hours. Gutiérrez frames this as an opportunity as much as a risk: "a change in routine can also become an opportunity to leave the habit behind."[^1] For a provider, that window is a chance to help the person see the emotional architecture underneath the behavior while it's visible.

Trigger mapping, values, and the re-ordering of appetite

Dale una Vuelta's first tip is to identify triggers, "situations, objects, places, or people" that spark the desire to consume pornography, so the person can anticipate or replace them.[^1] Steven Hayes's Acceptance and Commitment Therapy frames compulsive behavior as experiential avoidance and positions values-based action as the alternative,[^3] a framework that maps directly onto this work. The clinical task is to help the person notice the trigger without immediately acting on it, then redirect toward a chosen value. Gutiérrez's tip on willpower training makes the same move in behavioral terms: delay any urge by five minutes to strengthen self-control.[^1] What Hayes calls defusion, creating space between stimulus and response, and what Dale una Vuelta describes as a five-minute pause are the same intervention, arrived at from different directions.

The Thomistic anthropology underneath the Catholic Christian understanding of this process is direct. Virtuous habits form through repeated acts directed toward genuine goods, so providers who help persons channel energy through authentic relationships and activities are participating in a classically described process of re-ordering disordered appetite.[^4] The foundation's counsel to "release your best dopamine through activities and relationships that you genuinely enjoy and that help you become freer" is a practical application of the same principle: replacing a disordered movement with one ordered toward a real good.[^1] The provider's role is to help the person identify what those genuine goods actually are, which is why Dale una Vuelta's core slogan is "Know yourself, love yourself, better yourself."[^1]

The provider as architect of conditions

That three-part slogan gives providers a concrete scaffold. Help the person understand their triggers (know yourself). Build sufficient self-regard to motivate change (love yourself). Identify specific practices that generate genuine satisfaction (better yourself). The nine published tips map onto each stage: trigger identification and relapse analysis belong to the first; strengthening personal relationships and avoiding isolation belong to the second; organizing the day, training willpower, and replacing pornography with embodied goods belong to the third.

Kevin Majeres, a Harvard-affiliated psychiatrist who works at the intersection of cognitive-behavioral therapy and Catholic formation, treats attention as a trainable faculty and recommends substituting richer, embodied goods for the stimulus being avoided.[^5] This maps onto several Dale una Vuelta recommendations directly: structuring vacation days around real hobbies and social contact, avoiding isolated spaces where pornography "thrives on solitude," and, in the foundation's most striking tip, learning to "humanize the way you look at others," seeing the other person as "an individual with their own life story, family, problems" rather than an object of sexual use.[^1] That recommendation is an attentional practice as much as a moral one: training the person to perceive the full humanity of another, which pornography systematically suppresses.

Policing behavior, counting relapses, issuing prohibitions, treating the habit as a willpower deficit, misses the mechanism. What a person trapped in pornography use typically lacks is not information about its harms; Dale una Vuelta's eighth tip recommends educating oneself on the industry's realities, but treats this as one tool among several.[^1] What they lack is sufficient emotional regulation to tolerate unpleasant moods without escape, sufficient relational density to make isolation unattractive, and sufficient experience of genuine goods to make the substitute non-compelling.

The person who arrives in a provider's care in late July, three weeks into an unstructured vacation and struggling, is showing in plain relief what the rest of the year had obscured: an emotional regulation gap, a disordered appetite, a person who has not yet found activities and relationships that satisfy deeply enough. Accompanying that person toward specific, embodied, genuinely ordered goods is the work.

References

[^1]: 9 tips to combat pornography during summer vacation. (2026, July 20). ACI Prensa / EWTN News. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/europe/9-tips-to-combat-pornography-during-summer-vacation (Original: https://www.aciprensa.com/noticias/126901/9-consejos-combatir-pornografia-vacaciones)

[^2]: Maté, G. (2008). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction. Knopf Canada.

[^3]: Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

[^4]: Royo Marín, A. (1962). Teología de la perfección cristiana (4th ed.). Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. (On the formation of virtuous habits through repeated acts ordered toward genuine goods.)

[^5]: Majeres, K. Harvard Medical School faculty (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center); public work on cognitive-behavioral therapy and Catholic spiritual formation, including Overcoming Anxiety and public interviews (e.g., National Catholic Register, "Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals Healthy Ways to Channel Coronavirus Concerns").