I can’t stop watching porn.
No really, I want to.
I have made promises and tried fresh starts in the New Year. I have even gone forward in church, gotten down on my knees, and begged God to help me stop watching it.
But I can’t quit porn! What is the real problem? Will I ever be able to stop watching porn? Because based on my past it seems impossible.
Porn addiction is an extremely complex issue with no simple answers or cookie-cutter solutions. But most people I talk with fall into what I call the “Zap Trap”—praying that God would just heal them or looking for some other instant solution. They want to stop watching porn without having to fight the fight for recovery.
However, in working with hundreds of men over the past ten years, I have learned that instant healing in this area is rare. So, let’s look at three main reasons why it is so hard to quit looking at porn.
How Hard Is It to Quit Porn?
Editor’s note:
As Dr. Alvin Cooper noted many years ago, the anonymity, affordability, and accessibility of digital porn make it much easier for people today to become addicted.
Not everyone experiences the pull of pornography in exactly the same way. However, some former drug addicts and alcoholics attest that pornography is more difficult to overcome. This is not everyone’s experience. Many factors contribute to the severity of an addiction, such as the age of first exposure and how many years they’ve been consuming pornography.
Additionally, pornography addiction often begins when porn is consumed out of a desire for genuine intimacy. As John Doyel notes below, isolation fuels addiction. Part of the challenge, however, is that pornography often feels like a substitute for real relationships.
3 Reasons It’s So Hard to Quit Porn
1. Porn is addictive.
Apart from the spiritual battle you are in by simply being a Christian, you are in a physical battle with a physical addiction that traps you into watching porn. You have literally become a drug addict. The drugs you are addicted to are those released in your brain when you become sexually aroused.
God designed those drugs as a wonderful part of His plan to bond a husband and wife as one during times of sexual intimacy. They all have a distinct purpose and are marvelously effective. However, your brain does not differentiate between having sex with your wife or having sex with porn. The same drugs are released with the same effect. Pleasure, focus, energy, release, and other things happen that make having an orgasm one of the most enjoyable things God has given to us.
We can’t quit porn because we like it. We like it a lot. So, we want it again and again. With that experience accessible in a five-minute trip to the bathroom with your smartphone, we start using it more frequently. When we get stressed. When we get angry. Or when we want to escape from problems, we can easily get a fix that does not fix anything.
Dopamine, testosterone, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and serotonin flood our brains, and we feel good for a while.1 Then shame and fear return, and it is not long before we want another escape. It’s hard to escape porn when porn is your escape. Scientific research shows that porn warps the brain like any other substance.2
Those who can’t stop watching porn do not like it when I tell them they are drug addicts, but that is the truth. The drugs are between their ears. They don’t need a pusher. Their drugs are basically free of charge and are extremely effective. We can now access whatever things we want to view and get a quick fix within a few seconds.
Also, we can walk out of wherever we just acted out and seem fine to everybody. No hangover. No trace of what you have done unless you forget to delete your history. Breaking free from this addiction takes a lot of work, and most men are not ready to fight that battle. Especially due to reason number two.
See Why Is Porn So Addictive?: 4 Reasons It’s Tough to Resist.
2. We remain in isolation.
How many people know about your secret struggle? You can’t quit without telling someone about it, but you feel like you can’t tell anyone. Telling means risking your job, your friendships, your wife, and your family. People will drop dead in shock because everyone thinks you have it all together, and so that pressure keeps the truth buried deep in your darkest places. You feel trapped because you are in a prison of your own making.
I know this from experience. As a pastor for 26 years who struggled with sexual addiction for eight long years, I hated myself. I committed many sexual sins, and there was no way I could just say to my wife and my board, “By the way, I am addicted to sex.”
However, God in His mercy revealed my secret life and my recovery began in September 2005. Talk about a train wreck and painfully injuring my wife and our four adult kids.
See Understanding the Shame Cycle.
Remaining in isolation makes it seem impossible to stop. Recovery demands confession, disclosure, coming clean, and genuine repentance. If I had been a better and braver man I would have stepped forward and asked for help. But I lived in denial and minimized my actions by telling myself I knew enough to be able to stop watching pornography.
We like to say that a lone sheep is a dead sheep. If you remain in isolation, you are a dead man and won’t be able to break free. Porn has its hooks in deep, and you will need a team of people to help you pull the hooks out and stop watching porn.
To make it through a withdrawal period of about 90 days, you need people available to you on a constant basis. You need to learn how to reach out to them when the whole temptation process to watch porn begins. We like to say reach out before you reach in. Reach out to your team before you reach into your pants.
The opposite of isolation is community. Scripture has a lot to say about community and our ministry was founded on this passage in 1 John 1:
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
Secular research conducted outside the Church likewise underscores the vital importance of accountability:
- One study found that having an accountability partner can make you 95% more likely to accomplish your goal.
- Gallup Business found that accountability is a key component in employee engagement. Businesses with highly engaged—and highly accountable—employees reported up to 17% higher productivity, 21% higher profits, 10% higher customer satisfaction, and 59% lower turnover rates for employees.
- One study suggests that accountability can even help people treat one another more fairly.
Fellowship is community. It is being daily connected to other men to help you fight the battle. How many armies send their troops out alone to fight the enemy alone? None. Stupid question. So why are you trying to fight it alone? Lone sheep are dead sheep.
3. We don’t take it seriously.
It is so easy to say to yourself that everybody is doing it. It is not such a big deal. Are you kidding me? Porn use is destroying families and marriages at an alarming rate.
God says sexual sin is a big deal. He calls us to purity and holiness. He has started a good work in us and plans to finish that work, but if we are walking in sexual sin like porn, we grieve and stifle the Spirit within us and will continue to be pulled into deeper areas of sin.
Every Monday night, about 100 men gather at our church because their sexual sin has been and is ruining their lives. They cannot stop and are heading into very dangerous and dark waters. We lie to ourselves when we think that we can handle it. If you could handle it on your own, why are you reading this article?
Not only should we take it seriously because God does, but we should take it seriously because of the effects porn has on us and society.
Did you see the cover of Time on March 31, 2016? They found that Millennials who have used porn over the years are experiencing erectile dysfunction because they have trained their brains to see sex as something you do online. So, when it comes time to have a real relationship, they fail to answer the call.
Are you aware of the rise and prevalence of sex trafficking around the world?
We Need Daily Encouragement to Stop Watching Porn
I believe with all my heart that God’s Word holds the path to stop watching porn. He calls us to community with no condemnation. He wants all of us to be connected and truthful with one another (and Covenant Eyes can help with this). We need to do as James says. We need to confess our sins to one another and pray for each other, and then healing can begin to come. Lastly, we need encouragement. Look at this passage in Hebrews 3:
“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”
We need encouragement every day or we will be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. To start your journey, check out How to Quit Porn: 6 Essential Steps.
1 William Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2009).
2 Frederick Toates, “A motivation model of sex addiction – Relevance to the controversy over the concept,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 142 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104872.
Hey, I am a 17yr old female and I have been struggling with pornography and masturbation for years. From the age of 3 or 4, I began actively pursuing sexual stimulation before knowing that what I was doing was essentially masturbation. I believe I was in elementary school when I was exposed to pornography. I had found my dad’s porn while looking around his room. My younger sibling also saw it as well. Although we thought it was disgusting and quickly left it alone, the cover image on that CD was etched into my mind and has changed my life for the worse. I started searching for material like what I saw out of curiousity and from there it spiraled out of control. The content of what I watched became really dark, and even more appalling but I continued to watch it anyways. I had always called myself a christian but I didn’t fully give my life to Him until earlier this year. Over the years, I have tried to quit because I know it is sin, I am aware of the negative impact it has on my perception of people and my life in general, and I don’t want to be like this yet I keep falling back into it. I honestly thought I was over this because I had been clean from sexual immorality for almost 2 months. I stopped listening to sinful music, and cut off other triggers I knew I had, was praying more, and actually reading the bible consistently. Recently, I moved away from home for university and my sibling was my accountibility partner but it just isn’t the same. Also, my sibling was able to resist falling back into this sin and has been on fire for Jesus. I am involved in a christian group on my campus, feel like God is calling me to take part in ministry, and was helping others with their own struggles when I was clean but now… I feel unqualified, sinful, ashamed, and pathetic. I don’t want to be this way and I know I need help. I don’t have anybody here to confide in about this; or maybe I just don’t trust them enough because they’re still new to me, and people think I’ve got it all together but I don’t since I had disclosed how I became free of it and now I’m in it again. It feels impossible, and I don’t want to be taking God’s grace for granted. He has been so good to me… I just feel like I need to move on from this and do His will instead of dealing with the same issue all the time. He has brought me a long way but this problem is still here and it needs to be resolved. I’ve been under spiritual attack as well and I don’t want to be leaving room for Satan in my life. I just want to be basking in God’s love always. I know God’s design is so much better but I’ve accustomed myself to settling for less. Sorry for the life story, I’m trying to take steps in the right direction by being completely transparent for once and begin healing.
Hi there.
I am so sorry for the pain you are suffering and I’m so glad you wrote in. Hopefully I’ll be able to help.
First of all, deliberately exposing children to pornography is a form of child sexual abuse. Perhaps you were only accidentally exposed to your dad’s porn, but he brought that into your house and did not protect you from it, which meant that you were exposed to traumatic sexual content at a very early age without any way to process or understand what you had seen. Children will ALWAYS “act out” what they are trying to understand.
Secondly, it is very normal for children to explore their own bodies. Our sexual system is part of our physical selves, and it’s normal for us to figure out how that part of us works. We learn to walk, we learn to talk, we learn about our sexuality. There is nothing weird or abnormal about that. However, we have a great deal of shame in our culture around sexuality, especially for girls and women. Women aren’t “supposed” to be sexual while men are “supposed” to be hypersexual. Our sexuality is normal.
Third, shame is a liar. Shame says that you are “unqualified, sinful, ashamed, pathetic” when in fact you are completely loved, safe, and chosen, created in the image of God, totally beloved.
Fourth, shame will never, ever help us be healthy. It only makes us feel worse. So, while it’s a liar, it also drags us deeper into our problems. Here’s a short animation I made recently on shame and how it never helps, and what we can do to break out of shame cycles.
So. What’s the way forward? Well, since you mentioned that you’re a college student, I’m going to bet that there are campus counseling services available to you. I would suggest that you make an appointment and talk to someone about the trauma you suffered as a small child through porn exposure. Work through the shame that you’re feeling around your sexuality. I think once you take care of the trauma and the shame, you’ll be much better prepared to make healthier choices for yourself going forward. Once you’ve talked to a counselor you may feel safer to open up to one or two other safe people. And I bet you will find that you are FAR FROM ALONE in what you’re going through.
Peace to you,
Kay
Please don’t allow this downfall to make you believe that you’re unworthy. Firstly, forgive yourself, secondly join this Christian Group as it will encourage you to pray and meditate on the word and before you know you’ll be delivered, and finally bear in mind that it is possible to help yourself by helping others, see for the mere fact that you’ve been a victim of the devils trap for so long means that you know how it feels and you can lead someone out of their bondage by simply trying to help them.
I KNOW YOU’RE GONNA BEAT THIS, I KNOW YOU CAN SO PLEASE BELIEVE IT
I’ve been dealing with sexual addiction and porn since I was a kid.Im 38 years old and felt drawn to the ministry. When I was saved I had no want to watch porn. I was free for over a year before fell back in it. Maybe if I tell others about my problem I can then find healing. So here it is. I’m addicted to porn. I know I’m going to heaven, however I want to be obedient to the Lord and be porn free.
Josh, I appreciate your honesty. As a leader of a flock, it’s time to get serious. You cannot pour freedom and purity out of a dirty cup. Get open and honest with at least one, if not multiple “wingmen.” James 5:16 compels us to live openly and Ephesians 5 compels us to live in the light. You can’t beat it alone.
Chris
can i have the emails but not the god stuff
Hi, jungle Jhon, I’m 23 old man, I think I’m addicted to porn, when I’m in 14, I watched my first porn, my friends taught me porn and masturbation. When i watched porn at the first time i was so scared but after that it becomes part of me. in my 14 i watched lots of porn videos and photos all the day and night without sleeping without going to school with out going to relatives without going functions. I lost my confidence. Now I’m scared about my life and my life partner. I kept it secret. Now i want to share with you and quit porn and recover my life and yours
Please help me and pray for me because i want to be cleansed of this awful porn addiction so that i can be a good Christian saint in my Pentecostal Christian church for my dear Jesus christ.
My husband started looking at porn and going to strip clubs when he began working out of town. He kept it all a secret until I accidentally found out about it. It has practically destroyed me as I had no idea he was this type of person, and we have been married 30 years. He has been working hard to redeem himself and has been doing good and I have been going to counseling but I never knew he had so much lust in his heart and that is the part that kills me. Even now he still struggles with it and it makes me so sad because he would never be able to find another woman that loves him as much as I do, and have.. and yet sometimes it seems its just all about sex. Like you wrote in reason #1, it doesnt matter if it comes from your wife or porn…the feeling is the same. Isn’t there more to life than sex and a woman’s body parts. How about what she has to give from the inside. Do men ever get it?
There absolutely is more to life than sex and body parts! The older we get, the more important it is to invest in those things…
I think men can get it. It takes a long time and lot of work, though. They have to stay in their process and keep doing their work. The real, true work of recovery is very painful and pain-staking. And, I think our culture generally does not allow men the kind of emotional tools that are needed for work like this. Our culture says, “be a man” and “big boys don’t cry.” Men learn that when they’re in pain, their only options are to be angry or act out sexually. They aren’t allowed to feel or to process their pain in healthy ways. To truly recover requires the acquisition of these emotional skills. Often men will be able to do okay behaviorally in terms of habitual behaviors, but that is only the first step. If he’s not able to work through his own pain and learn new ways of coping with his emotions, he’ll go back to what’s always worked: porn.
My husband got it, and our marriage is better today than it ever was before porn. But it hasn’t been easy, quick, or painless. I wrote a bit about the difference between behavioral trust and emotional trust a while back, and I think that might connect to the thoughts you’re expressing here.
Peace to you, Kay
Im a 21 year old man and i get exactly what your saying. Theres a part of me who wants to find a women whom i can hold and cherish. Share a life with and grow a family with. The bad thing theres a part of me that has the lust for porn. Its so difficult to quit completely. I cant sleep, it makes it hard to focus. Porn and sex addiction is a SERIOUS problem. I hope your husband gets better. I really hope that my addiction is gone so i can pour myself into a healthy relationship.
hi! i am a guy suffering porn addiction and masturbation since i was 16 yrs old now i am22.i hate my life because these addiction messes my life.. i am a college student but i dont have enough GPA even to get a job after graduation.. porn disturbs my spritual & academic life I’ve been high ranking student back in elementary & highschool.i wish i have never been born
Hello, Jon – I’m so sorry to hear about your situation. You were meant to thrive – not suffer like this. It sounds like maybe you’re trying to beat this monster on your own. It’s just not possible. Secrets are destroying you. They always win in a battle with just you. Can you find other “wingmen” for this battle? Can you find ONE trusted person that you get really open and honest with? Can you close the doorways to the internet that are causing problems? After 6 years, it will likely require some professional help, in addition to all of those things I just suggested. It will take a team. And, of supreme importance for your team must be the Holy Spirit of God, as you ask for renewal of your mind. I’m not trying to heap a bunch of “to-do’s” to your life. But, you can’t expect different results when you keep digging in the same hole. New choices. New thoughts. New paths. New behaviors. All of this is necessary for a new result. You do these things and then watch God sweep in a turbo-charge your efforts. The choice is yours!
Peace to you,
Chris
Please pray for me, I really want to feel Gods presence and be close to him and be used of him. But I can’t stop watching porn I’ve been a Christian for 2 years now and I’m worried that I might not be truly converted because I feel like I’m a slave of porn, can someone please pray for me and put their email address below to be my liability partner?
Hello, Roy – finding a good accountability partner – someone you can trust even with secrets – is tough. Have you tried a virtual accountability relationship? One like Bravehearts: https://mighty-men.mn.co or X3 Groups: https://x3groups.smallgroupsonline.com
I need help in this area. I feel like a failure, was baptized last year and now I’m doubting why, if I have not changed my actions or thoughts. Will God forgive me for committing this same sin? Am I still considered a Christian?
Hi, one of the many amazing characteristics of God is His ability to forgive. Instantly. Tomorrow is a new day! Fresh mercy, for you. Let’s get to the root – why haven’t you stopped? Do you still have too much access? Is it time to get rid of the iPhone or whatever you are using? What steps are you really willing to take to quit? Only you can answer that.
Go read Romans 8 – that’s what you are! A warrior. Fearless. Of God. Rooted on by God. Will God forgive you again? Yes. Are you stilla Christian? That question implies that the act of watching porn may have erased your initial commitment. The answer is yes, you’re still a Christian – porn didn’t remove that. But, let me say this with all the love and grace and directness that I can – it’s time for more! And, you won’t experience a “more” and full and amazing life while watching porn. It’s impossible.
So, stand up, look up, repent, and step forward. Tomorrow is a new day!
Chris
I need help bad im so addicted to porn
Hi, Chet, I’m glad that you’re stepping forward. What have you tried? Are you using Covenant Eyes? Staying stuck is your choice. Only you can make the decision to stop and we can help if you make that decision. Sign up. That will give you a first step and prove that you’re serious about breaking free. There’s an old proverb that says, “fall down 7 times but get up 8.” I hope that’s you.
Chris
I am a woman who suffers this . I’m addicted and believe me when I say I want to stop. I beat myself emotionally trying to stop and I fall back. I don’t know what to do. I have a family, I am married I still love my husband intimately, I have no issues in that. I just really want to stop. It makes me feel disappointed in myself after it. I started doing this when I lost my virginity at 16 to a much older man. He’d say it was ok to watch. Anyways he messed up my life in a lot of ways. I thank God I found the “out” but what I didn’t find an out to was porn. I am happily married, my husband used to watch it all the time but he stopped cold turkey i don’t know how but he did.
Hi, Em – I’m proud of you for saying something. Now it might be time to do some drastic things. How badly do you really want to stop? It starts with a clear, effective, on your knees, shouting out commitment to go a new direction. Here’s a blog post with some really practical steps for men or women: https://www.covenanteyes.com/2012/04/23/how-to-quit-porn-6-essential-steps/ I hope that it’s helpful.