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Comedian Marcus Brigstocke has opened up about a difficult porn addiction, which he says left him in a “terrible place”.
The 59-year-old actor, known for his stand-up comedy and acting, including a cameo in Love Actually, said he’s been in recovery for over seven years.
“It changed my sexual self completely,” he told The i about his challenges. “The things I was into sexually were altered by what I was seeing. I won’t go into specifics but it taught me there is so much elasticity in our sexuality.”
He added that porn addicts have “really f**king awful sex if they’re having sex at all”, describing his experience as “awful, shameful, lonely”.
He added: “It’s unhappy. Unhappy making. Afterwards, porn addicts will lie there thinking: ‘Well that seems to have made us really quite miserable’.”
Brigstocke said that it “one hundred per cent” changed the way he interacted with women, leaving him in a cycle of shame and isolation and creating a “hole” that left him feeling unlovable.
The comedian split from his first wife Sophie Prideaux after an affair with his 2010 Spamalot co-star Hayley Tammadon.
“It’s a terrible place to find yourself in, because even if somebody looks you directly in the eyes and says ‘I love you’, you’re thinking, ‘That’s because you don’t know what I did,” he said. “You wouldn’t love me if you knew’.”
After a difficult detox that took months, Brigstocke says that these days he is overly cautious and is unaffected even by images on social media.
”You can start to be in the world and enjoy the simple things again,” he said. “I’ve quit it in all its forms. Even a scantily clothed person on Facebook, I scroll past and do not pause for a split second. Now I have rediscovered the joy of simple things, of living in the moment again.”
Describing the effect on children, he explained that he’d had a frank discussion with his son about porn and its dangers.
“I had a conversation with my oldest son about it when he was in his early teens,” he explained. “I said: ‘You’re going to see things that don’t look like love, don’t look like sex, don’t look like how people in the real world should treat each other.”
If you have been affected by this article, you can contact the following organisations for support: actiononaddiction.org.uk, mind.org.uk, nhs.uk/livewell/mentalhealth, mentalhealth.org.uk.
