Part Two: Naturism and Pornography- When the Cure Becomes the Problem

What the naturist community needs to hear about sexual behavior disorder

In Part One: The Elephant in the Room – Sexual Behaviour Disorder, we shared what naturism has done for us personally. The quieting of the noise, the slow recalibration that neither of us fully expected. We were honest about where our experience runs out. We’re not clinicians. We haven’t sat across from someone whose life is genuinely unraveling because of a compulsion they can’t break. We’ve just lived in these spaces and paid attention.

But that honesty is exactly what interested us in Shawn McCammon.

Before we get to the conversation, it’s worth taking a moment to understand the landscape of naturism and pornography. Pornography and sex addiction or, Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD), is not a fringe issue. Even if it remains difficult to measure cleanly because shame and secrecy make honest reporting harder. Around 5% of the world’s population meet the criteria for CSBD 1. Estimates vary by country, but research often places problematic or compulsive sexual behavior in a meaningful minority of adults… and rising.

In the early 2000s, there was a physical barrier to access online adult content. You had to go to a specific room, turn on a machine, and wait for it to boot up. This created a “buffer” where a person could potentially talk themselves out of a compulsive urge.

As internet speed improved, cam sites shifted the model from “private shows” to “public performances.” Perhaps the biggest change in recent years is the move away from traditional images and videos toward interactive platforms like OnlyFans. And now we the have new wave of AI sexual companions. The result is a public health pattern that most people are still too uncomfortable to talk about honestly, which means it continues growing in the dark.

Since 2010, the internet and adult entertainment are now in our pockets 24/7, and the platforms built on that access are not neutral… the are designed to maximize engagement… not reflection.

What makes this conversation different is where it’s happening. We’re not talking about these addictions in the abstract. We’re talking about it in the context of a naturist community that has quietly become part of the conversation whether it wants to be or not.

There is a growing belief in some corners of the naturist world that social nudity can cure sexual compulsion. That the simple act of spending time around non-sexualized bodies will reset the brain and dissolve the problem. It’s an attractive idea. It’s also, on its own, wrong… and the consequences of getting that wrong fall on the people who are already struggling and on the communities that welcome them in.

That’s what Shawn has been watching from the inside.

Meet Shawn McCammon

Shawn McCammon is a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist and a certified sex addiction treatment provider with degrees spanning theology, divinity, strategic leadership, and counseling. He spent 34 years in the United States Army, retiring as a Colonel after serving as a Chaplain. He has been working with people recovering from sex addiction for over a decade, developing processes that don’t just achieve sobriety but pursue what he calls total freedom… a distinction he takes seriously because he lived the difference himself.

What makes Shawn’s perspective uniquely valuable isn’t just his clinical credentials. It’s that he lived this from the inside.

He grew up in a hyper-fundamentalist household where the body was treated as inherently shameful, and where the gap between what was preached and what actually happened at home was wide and damaging. He was introduced to pornography at a very young age. The attachment wounds from that childhood… the absence of safe, reliable connection… became the engine that drove his compulsive behavior for years. He tried everything: willpower, accountability, behavioral rules, confession. All of it failed for the same reason it always fails. The behaviors weren’t the problem. The wound underneath them was.

What eventually brought him to freedom was the same three-stage process he now uses with his clients… trauma work, identity work, and finally a confrontation with the body itself that naturism made possible. We suggest you read his full story in his own words at Hineni Counseling on Substack before proceeding “A Journey to Freedom”.

Shawn is now a naturist. He reached out to us after reading some of our articles, and what he had to say needed its own voice.

What follows is a lot of honesty in conversation.

You experienced naturism as part of your own journey. Without getting too personal, how did that intersect with your recovery and did it surprise you?

Although I had done a lot to recover from my own addictions and heartbreaks in life, and I was not actively searching for ways to emotionally salve my wounds, I was still bound by the threat of losing everything that I had worked for. It was exhausting. I felt like I was in a war zone with my head on a swivel, always looking for the next thing that would cause me to lose my sobriety. My relationship with unrelational sex, in that case, was still very much alive even if I wasn’t looking at it. I was weary from revolving my life around NOT doing the destructive thing.

When naturism came along as a result of some of my studies about healthy nudity, I was extremely cautious and even afraid of where it might lead me. But because I was at the end of my proverbial rope, I gave it a try. What happened next truly surprised me. Not only was I not looking at porn and compulsively acting out with it, I was not even tempted to view it anymore. The threat of the human body went away when naturism helped me divorce the unholy relationship between prudery and pornography. Naturism helped me understand that a healthy view of human bodies falls in between fearfully and shamefully covering them up and egregiously exploiting them. It was the final piece of the puzzle that I needed. Sadly, it is the essential part of healing that most therapists ignore or simply fail to investigate for themselves.

We asked Shawn to unpack that phrase, “the unholy relationship between prudery and pornography” for readers who haven’t considered that connection before.

Whether it’s a dogmatic prudish view of the body or an exploitative and consuming view of the body, both views are symptomatic of a single root cause. Both positions agree that the body is meant for sexual means only. One says, “It’s sexual! Cover it up!” The other says, “It’s sexual! Expose it for profit!” Each agrees with the pornographic mindset. Thus, the porno-prudish mindset is consummated. That relationship must be divorced if a truly healthy view of the human body is to have a chance to breathe.

You list “become a naturist” alongside rubber bands on the wrist and nanny software as a failed behavioral strategy. But you are also a naturist yourself and clearly believe in it. Where exactly is the line between naturism as a tool in recovery and naturism as a shortcut that backfires?

When naturism is introduced after the addicted person is no longer confusing the naked body with sex, no longer has a need to medicate wounds that have been healed, and understands who they are without the false relationship they had with porn and sex, then it becomes like the final seal of authenticity for their sobriety. Like it did for me, naturism introduced in the right place becomes the very thing that creates a total transformation of the mind. It’s beautiful. It’s like magic, but better.

You have worked with clients who are naturists and still struggling with addiction. What does that look like in practice and how does someone use a naturist environment to feed a compulsion rather than heal from one?

This is often the convoluted junction between swinging and naturism and why some people confuse the two things. Without judgment to anyone’s choices, I add that these are clearly not the same. If an addicted person goes to naturism before doing the important trauma and existential work, then naturist communities risk becoming target rich for people that are hurting and don’t know a way out.

If we are simply talking about compulsive pornography use, then those who went to naturism too early tend to become guilt and shame ridden because the need to salve the wounds of the past still exists. What is more, when the false promise of naturism to heal all porn addiction fails, there is room for even more shame to tell them that they are a hopeless case who will never get better. So their bodies and their brains tell them they still need the very thing that has helped them medicate their wounds, until the moment when porn use and compulsive behavior has betrayed them and left them feeling broken. Helping these precious people is just a matter of going back into the traumas of the past and helping them find healing and getting a better sense of who they are when compulsive behavior is not present.

We asked Shawn to expand on what that actually looks like inside a naturist space.

When a truly addicted person enters a naturist environment without first dealing with the reasons they turn to sex, every naked body becomes a temptation. Every person is seen for their parts instead of the person that they are, and so becomes a target for exploitation in the addict’s mind. Adrenaline rises as the addict’s body stages itself for an eventual sexual release. Depending upon the severity of the addiction, no one is off limits. Everyone becomes prey. I don’t say this to scare people unnecessarily. We all know that predators exist. This is just some insight into what may be happening inside their minds during the process of the hunt, even if they first went to the club as a means to try and get clean.

Your three-stage recovery process involves trauma work, identity work, and then desensitization to the body. What actually happens to someone who skips the first two stages and walks straight into a naturist club expecting it to fix them?

The problem with someone going to naturism before they have done trauma work and before gaining a much better understanding of who they really are, is that the naturist environment becomes for them a breeding ground for consistent backsliding and failure. After a while, a person might even become numb to their compulsions and provide excuses for their acting out. At worst the naturist club may become the location that some use to prowl. This hurts the community and it hurts the person who is addicted.

Trauma, by the way, does not have to be abuse or a serious accident or something a soldier faces on the battlefield. While those are all serious traumas that need healing, trauma can also be something as simple as a teenager who didn’t get their way in the house and then internalized their anger and replayed it over and over. Shame is trauma because it attempts to redefine who a person is in a negative way. So when I talk of healing attachment traumas, I am usually talking about even the simple things for which we carry unforgiveness, especially if by carrying that unforgiveness we feel the need to salve our negative emotion by going to porn and sex.

We asked Shawn to help our readers understand just how wide that definition of trauma actually is.

There is not a person on the planet who has not endured what therapists call “little t” traumas. The word trauma has probably gotten undue attention and is perceived as a dysfunction of some kind, but most of us are able to adjust very naturally and soothe these wounds with friends and family. However, there are a few who are unable to soothe relationally. They learn to distrust others and find ways to soothe themselves in other ways. Those ways are often destructive in the long run.

The naturist community works very hard to present itself as non-sexual. But that defensiveness might also make it harder to have honest conversations about addiction within the community. Do you think naturism has a blind spot here?

Absolutely. Talking about sex is not the same as engaging in it at the club. While there must be good boundaries with sexual behaviors at the club, by creating a culture that refuses to even talk about it, we tend to make it a “naughty” thing. It isn’t. Sex is fantastic. I’ve run into this at the clubs I attend. People ask me what I do and when I tell them, the topic is quickly shifted or worse, I am overtly told not to bring it up. So we need a better balance between maintaining the culture of separation so that naked bodies and sex are not automatically married, and being afraid to even talk about it in the relational and loving context it is meant to be in.

When the culture makes it something that cannot be addressed at all, we create shame around it, and when we create shame around it, it gains power. It’s like me telling everyone that they’re not allowed to think of a four-ton pink elephant with purple polka dots sitting in an apple tree. What are you thinking about right now?

Are there warning signs that naturist clubs and resorts should be aware of, behaviors or patterns that suggest someone is using the space in ways that are not healthy for them or for others around them?

I think that we are doing a pretty good job with this one actually. The spaces I’ve been to will have rules that prohibit explicit public displays of affection, public self-pleasure, overt staring, and similar behaviors. When these things happen, the community is pretty good, though admittedly not always consistent, at calling it out and sending the person packing.

More subtly, if someone is hurting and needs help, I often look for the person who is always looking at the ground or refusing to make eye contact, evidence of active shame. These are the people that I go to and strike up a conversation with in an effort to help them out.

There is a difference between someone who discovers naturism organically and someone who arrives specifically because they have heard it might cure their addiction. Does that distinction matter clinically, and does the motivation someone brings through the gate affect what happens next?

Yes. Expectations upon arrival do make a difference, especially early on. A person who has not yet done the prior work will feel more anxious and skeptical and guarded, waiting for the experience to prove their shame correct, that even this will not work because they are a hopeless case. If someone has already done a lot of work to get clean from addiction and then arrives because they heard it might help, then the expectation is more hopeful, excited about what will happen and the possibility of being free from a mind that has married sex to the body.

This subtle change in expectation is a world of difference. After a while, there is no difference at all between the person who discovered naturism organically and the person who initially came to address the final component of their addiction. Both are wonderfully free.

You write about gymnophobia, the normalized fear of nudity, as something that feeds both addiction and body shame. How does a naturist environment specifically address that, and where does it fall short?

In the United States, the naturist movement is in a difficult catch-22 with our prudish culture. I spent a lot of years in Germany and have a great appreciation for their cultural relationship with nudity and the Freikörperkultur (FKK), or free body culture. It was not uncommon there to see a topless woman in the park simply enjoying the sun without harassment, or to see people step out of their cars in a traffic jam to relieve themselves. No one thought twice about it. Here, it would be called lewd and indecent and a person could potentially be arrested.

Consequently, the naturist community tends to strive for more overt expressions of protest like the World Naked Bike Ride. These events are fun but are also often filled with people who do sexual things and pollute the message. Or we hedge ourselves into clubs that cost more money than the average person is willing to spend and then wonder why so many of them are closing. Yet there are communities that have legalized toplessness for women in any area where it is reasonably expected for a man to also be without a shirt. Some places even allow total nudity. What if we simply took advantage of these places without going out of our way to make a spectacle?

The better we are at making nudity normal and everyday, the less fear and shame will be attached to it. Ironically, the less influence naturism tries to wield through protest, the more free the average person may become. In an ideal world, we could all just be human.

We asked Shawn what naturist communities could do differently from the inside to help move that needle.

If today’s naturist takes advantage of those places where nudity is authorized and refrains from being a defensive or angry protestor, then FKK in the USA has a better opportunity to become normalized. When met by someone upset by our nudity in a zone where it is clearly authorized legally, our response must be peaceable, confident, and non-confronting. We may explain our desire to be left alone to enjoy nature and our legal right to it in that place, but we do it in a peaceful, matter-of-fact manner rather than as a lecture or a desire to persuade the other to agree. Maintain a healthy curiosity about how the other feels and thinks, and show them a friendly mercy that demonstrates our ability to rise above the offense. This is the heart of FKK for us here.

For someone reading this who is struggling and wondering whether naturism could be part of their healing, what would they honestly need to ask themselves before they show up at a club or resort?

What has porn and sex honestly given to me that helped me feel better when I was feeling down? Is it still achieving the same result or has it betrayed me yet? How do I know? Who am I without it? Am I repulsed by the naked human body for fear of falling sexually? Do I despise my own naked body? What do I tell myself in the mirror as I stand there naked? Do I hold unforgiveness in my heart and mind for someone that has hurt me or for myself?

If you are someone who is ready to honestly sit with those questions, you might be ready to take the next step. If those questions make you want to walk away, you may need to speak with someone first. If you live in Kansas or Missouri, you’re welcome to find me and we can talk. Otherwise, I can be reached through my Facebook page at Hineni Counseling.

The naturist community genuinely wants to be a place of acceptance and healing. What would you want our readers, people who are already naturists, to understand about how to be that for someone who is struggling, without becoming naive about the risks?

There was a time when I felt hopelessly addicted to pornography, but over time I learned that much of my problem made sense emotionally. Because I endured some trauma to attachments that were supposed to be safe, I found ways to emotionally regulate all by myself. That is really all that addiction is.

Addicted people are just people. Most have never crossed the threshold of criminal activity, most are not dangerous, they are just stuck. If you find yourself talking with someone who has struggled to separate the body from sex or who compulsively seeks it to satisfy emotional wounds, encouraging them to seek counseling is a good start. Have good boundaries for yourself by understanding who you are and what you want. Many people struggling with addiction are very good at self-protection and deflection. If you know who you are and have good boundaries, you can engage with compassion without putting yourself or others at risk.

There is no need to be afraid of them. But if they have broken the rules, enforce them and remove them from the space, and have a list of trustworthy counselors ready to give them on their way out. If they use it, great. If they don’t, then their journey toward healing is simply prolonged, and that is their choice to make.

In Closing

If you’ve read this far and something in Shawn’s answers felt uncomfortably familiar, we’d ask you to sit with that feeling rather than scroll past it. Not because there’s anything wrong with you, but because recognizing yourself in something is usually the first honest step toward changing it.

Shawn said it better than we can… addicted people are just people. Most are not dangerous. Most have never done anything criminal. They are just stuck, and they have been fighting alone for a long time, which is part of what keeps them stuck. If any part of this conversation spoke to something you’ve been carrying quietly, please don’t carry it alone any longer. Reach out to someone you trust, or reach out to Shawn directly through Hineni Counseling on Facebook. I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not but Hineni is a Hebrew word that means, “Here I am, all of me. I’m all in” It’s Shawn’s promise to everyone who goes to him for counseling.

The conversation that feels the most impossible to start is usually the one most worth having.

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