2011
The beginning
Something changed in my practice.
I started receiving a growing number of inquiries from men struggling with pornography. Not occasionally — consistently. Week after week, the volume increased.
High-speed internet had only become widely available a few years earlier. What followed was a sharp rise in people developing compulsive patterns around pornography that they could not control.
I was a Clinical Psychologist in Sydney with a broad clinical practice. Pornography addiction was not something I had trained for specifically. But the need was real, it was growing, and there was limited practical guidance available. There simply were not enough experienced therapists to serve the demand.
So I started doing the work.
The problem
What made this different from other addictions.
Traditional addiction science helped — but not as much as I expected.
Problematic pornography use differs from substance use disorders in a fundamental way: you are not trying to give up sex. You are trying to redirect sexual behaviour in a more values-aligned direction. That is a different problem entirely. With alcohol or drugs, the line is relatively clean. With pornography, you are working with desire, habit, emotion regulation, secrecy, conditioning, and often a growing split between how someone wants to live and what they keep doing.
The first significant body of clinical research did not begin appearing until around 2015. I needed more than theory. I needed to understand what was actually happening in people's lives when they tried to stop.
2012
The research
Thousands of forum posts. Two years of pattern mapping.
Over roughly two years, I read everything I could find. Clinical papers, yes — but more importantly, I read thousands of posts on recovery forums like NoFap, YourBrainOnPorn, Reddit recovery communities, and dozens of smaller forums.
I was not reading casually. I was mapping patterns. What worked. What failed. Where people got stuck. Why relapses clustered at predictable points. What the first weeks of recovery actually felt like from the inside — not from a textbook, but from people trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again.
That research shaped my understanding of this problem more than any single clinical paper.
The model
Building a treatment that holds under pressure.
I developed the treatment approach over years of direct clinical practice with hundreds of clients. What works in theory does not always work under pressure — and pornography cravings create enormous pressure.
The breakthrough was structural. Most approaches gave people tools and expected them to work in every situation. They did not. A strategy that works when you are calm is useless when you are activated, narrowed, and vulnerable. I kept seeing the same pattern: intelligent, motivated people who understood the problem perfectly and still could not stop when the moment arrived.
The Gradient Model
Different psychological states require different interventions. Recovery becomes realistic when people know which tool to use at which point on the intensity curve.
The Break Glass Technique
I took something people occasionally mentioned anecdotally — using cold to interrupt an urge — and turned it into a structured, physiologically grounded crisis intervention that works when clear thinking is no longer available.
Now
The program
Why an online program.
I could have kept this work in my clinic. One client at a time, face to face, in Sydney.
But I kept coming back to the same realisation: there are not enough experienced clinicians to serve the number of people who need help with this. And many of those people will never walk into a therapist's office — because of shame, cost, geography, or simply not knowing who to trust.
The online format is not a compromise. Every technique is captured on video. Every concept is revisitable. The companion app helps people notice patterns and apply tools earlier. The material does not disappear when the session ends.
So I spent years building an online version of the protocol — the same principles, the same structure, the same tools — in a format that is private, accessible, and designed for real life.
This site is the result.
Angus Munro
Clinical Psychologist — Sydney, Australia
Master of Clinical Psychology
Master of Business Administration
Bachelor of Psychology (Honours, First Class)
Graduate Diploma in Business
Bachelor of Science (Psychology)
My psychology training helps me map the nuance of the human mind. My business training helps me build systems that actually work. Both were essential in creating this program.
15
years
100s
clients
70
sessions