“Everyone needs to write their stronghold down on a piece of paper and give it to your accountability partner.”
My blood started to boil, and I set my jaw. Never before had I been more aware of my rights. You can’t make me do this, I thought. You can’t make me tell you anything. I looked up, conflicted, tears welling in my eyes. “Do I have to?” She seemed shocked, and nodded her head.
I looked back down at the paper. God, why this? Why couldn’t it be something else? Bible reading, prayer life, anything but the porn. I don’t need to tell anyone. I can beat that on my own.
God’s answer, inaudible, was gentle and firm, “No, you can’t.”
Failing On My Own
Confession. Accountability. Those words can make our skin crawl. The idea of telling someone our deepest darkest secrets, of admitting our most personal failures, is far less than appealing.
Every expert I listened to. Every resource I found. They all talked about accountability, and it made me angry. I did not need other people. I could do this on my own. I got myself into this; I could get myself out.
I tried the hatred route: I would go online, print off pictures, and then set them on fire. I tried the negative thinking route. I tried sheer willpower. I would just get up in the morning and tell myself today was the day. This was the day I would finally be free.
Within hours, I would realize how ineffective my methods were. Then would come the wave of guilt, feelings of worthlessness, and determination that tomorrow—tomorrow would be the day.
Eventually, I ran out of tomorrows, and just decided to live with it. I was a porn addict and just needed to accept that fact. Surely, I could love God and serve Him in spite of my porn addiction. It was not that big of a deal. It was just something I did in private. It did not affect my public life at all. I was doing well in college, had great friends—life was good.
Yes, my relationship with God was a little rocky. I often felt like my prayers were bouncing off the ceiling. I just attributed that to my immature Christianity. I needed to practice praying harder. I needed to practice serving more. My faith was just out of practice.
The Night It All Changed
Then came a women’s night at my college and the one statement that changed my life: “We know some of you struggle with pornography and masturbation, and we are going to help.”
There was recognition! For the first time, my struggle was validated. Someone else acknowledged that I—a woman—could be addicted to pornography. There was help. They offered acceptance and counsel. They offered freedom. One thing stood between my struggle and that freedom—me.
Confession is the bridge that connects the hurt with the healing. It is how brokenness becomes whole.
Why We Hate to Confess Porn
So why is it so hard? Is it because we have a hard time being truthful? No, because many of us are truthful about other things. Is it because we do not want help? No, because many of us do.
Confession is so hard because we love ourselves. In our heart of hearts, we care about how people see us. The last thing we want to be viewed as is the porn addict. That immediately lumps us in with a class of societal rubbish—serial rapists, murderers, pedophiles, adulterers, prostitutes. It is not pleasant company.
What is so hard to see from that place of secrecy is that so much of our shame is of our own making. We do not tell because we are afraid others will ultimately see us the way we see ourselves. We think there can be no way that confession leads to anything other than humiliation. We imagine forever walking around with a label, doomed to bear the condemnation for our sin for the rest of our lives.
But we are wrong.
Confession leads to grace.
Confession removes one of the last obstacles standing between us and freedom—our pride. We love ourselves, and the moment that we admit that we make mistakes, the moment we confess that we actually aren’t that lovable, that love of self dies.
You would think that a dead love of self leads to self-loathing. After all, if I do not love me, then I must hate me, right? No. A dead love of self leads to brokenness, a sense of unworthiness, a sense of helplessness, and that is exactly when grace shows up.
But confession actually paves the way for grace. Grace, not shame, comes to the humble.
Killing the Shame
Shame is a product of our secrets. Keeping my struggle a secret only made me feel isolated and, at times, inhuman. The longer I kept my secret, the more I believed I could never share it. The longer I kept silent, the darker and stronger my sin grew. The longer I kept silent, the more convinced I became that I would just have to live the rest of my life with this.
With confession came light, hope, and freedom. With confession came the death of my overly high opinion of myself. No, I did not have it all together. Yes, I had fallen. Yes, I desperately needed help. That night, I acknowledged that I desperately needed his grace.
The beautiful thing is, it came.
Hurting hurts. Nobody wants to hurt, so we avoid it. Much that has been written conveys that the road to freedom from sin is confession, repentance, and a knowledge that God loves us more than we understand. The Bible tells us this, but the Bible does not tell us how to get there. A signpost points the right way, and even tells us how far the destination is, but it reserves telling us how to arrive. We all come from different roads. It does not have my name on the sign, but everyone’s name. It is a guide put out by the Holy Spirit. The Bible is also void of pictures; man inserts them, The Creator wants us to see pictures which He inserts that are not clouded. His impressions are perfect. Our eyes were meant to see what was good, but the Fall cursed not only man, but the whole Earth as well. Whatever we see with our eyes is stained with sin. God wants us to “see” with our hearts, by faith. It is a struggle. Some may take a year to overcome their sin. Others may take ten, but God keeps no record of wrongs. He wants us to finish as winners. No one in Heaven got there sinless. The great “Cloud of Witnesses” were made new—restored according to the Gospel. We cannot do this ourselves. We are broken, and we come to Jesus with the words, “I cannot stand up alone. There is nothing in me strong enough to get back up. I need You.” Do we see this? Do we believe this? Jesus said, “It is finished.” He already won. We cannot add or subtract a single thing. And He did it because He loves us. Paul did not say that we could not boast. He said, boast in the Cross. To the extent that we shout His name, brag on Him, and share His love with others will be the extent to which we will be free.
Hi guy,
Nice thoughts here, but I’m curious: What do you mean that the Bible doesn’t tell us how to get there? What do you mean that the Bible is void of pictures?
Thank you for sharing your story. I always felt like my struggle with pornography was part of just being a man. I always thought that women didn’t have those struggles. But I now know that women have the same struggles. This gives me hope for the future that when I do find my future wife that I can tell her of my past struggles with the grace of her understanding.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this! I agree with everything you said here! I was raised with morals and values and became a Christian at age14. I promised The Lord that I wouldn’t have sex until marriage. I stumbled upon porn and because disgusted, shocked and addicted. I would tell myself it was ok because my friends were having sex with their boyfriends and I was single and pure. I met my husband when I was 21. He was very worldly and got saved within the year we met. We waited until our wedding night and I’m so glad we did… Even though there had been some smooching that lasted a little too long! I really thought that I would be healed of the addiction when I got married. And I was for a while… Until life became stressful… Pregnancy, house, bills, depression… Hormones, feeling ugly after having babies… Life was so weird. 4 kids in 7 years, husband with ADHD and bipolar 2… Started counseling last year, to deal with life. And my own ADD… Confessed the porn and learned that I had to find out why I was going to that. And fix that… Confessed to my husband just 2 months ago and our marriage has become more amazing than I ever thought possible. He struggled with this in the past too, but these past few years it has been more of a struggle for me. The open, honest confession and conversation that we shared changed our marriage. I felt free. Our sex life is even better too. Even though I am overweight and still struggling with my self esteem, I feel closer to him than ever. I haven’t even talked to my best friend about this because I don’t want her to know. I’m sure she would be great about it, but I’m not ready for that… The shame that comes with this is awful and I pray for more hope and healing for all women struggling with this.
Jessica,
Even amidst our low self-esteem, we want others to see us as healthy, self-sufficient, regular, good people. Keeping our own struggles and sinfulness to ourselves is a way to try to preserve our “image.” We don’t want them to know who we really are, because then they won’t accept or love us. But, this is not true. This is a lie from the devil. The beauty of Christ is that he tells us that when you are weak, then you are strong. Letting a trusted, wise, Christian friend know of your struggles is freeing, and helps both people to acknowledge their sinfulness, and rejoice in the goodness of God and His mercy. In sharing our struggles, we free ourselves of the burden of trying to preserve our “image”, and in our honesty and weakness we allow God to fill us with grace, and others to pray for us and help us be accountable. In the Catholic faith, this practice is seen visibly through confession, where a man/woman confess their sins to a priest who has been ordained to act in the person of Christ. The priest gives guidance to the confessor and through and only through the grace of God is able to give absolution of sins. This practice does not mean that one should not also have a good friend who they are accountable with about their struggles. God created us to love and serve Him and one another. We must fight against the “me and God alone” mindset. God bless!
Philip,
Thank you for that. A Catholic friend once shared with me that the beautiful thing about confession is that you go and, if there is a line, you realize you are standing in a line of sinners, and they are all aware of it.
I think that is an attitude we need to keep in the church as a whole, Catholic or not. If we functioned every day aware of our own sinfulness before a holy God and sensitive to the brokenness in others, the church would function differently than it does today. The fear of judgement would be gone. I agree, we do need to fight against the me and God alone mindset, and I hope I communicated that clearly.
Thank you!
Shame and low self-esteem are two very different things, though both are rooted in pride. It is error to confuse them.
Please add a “print” button so that your articles of interest might be printed for reference reasons.
Thank you.
jc
Hi John, if you hit the print feature on your browser, you should see a stripped down preview of what will print.
Give me a break. Poor self-esteem? Let’s keep this Biblical if this is supposed to be a “Christian” site. Sin IS love of self. The criminal and sinner has excellent self-esteem. Like Satan and His fall from grace, the sinner thinks he’s superior to God. That’s pretty good self-esteem. When i committed adultery, I thought I was better than anyone else, including my wife. The thought that women who are in to porn have “poor self esteem” is psychobabble and a submission to the psychology baloney (I practice psychiatry). I recommend a reading of the standard Biblical counseling texts by such as Jay Adams to reorient your thinking to a Biblical paradigm.
Blessings.
jc
John,
I appreciate your feedback. I think the obvious misunderstanding might just boil down to the difference between counseling men and women on this topic of pornography addiction.
I have background in Nouthetic Counseling so I am well acquainted with the writing of Jay Adams. I also share your apparent apprehension for modern psychobabble. I would encourage you to keep my comment in its context, because in the article I touched on the self-esteem to which you refer to. The reason we do not confess is because we esteem ourselves highly which is why it is important to knock that pride down and pave the way of grace through confession.
However, the comment I was responding to was one to love Christ more and love yourself less. And I specifically referenced women struggling with pornography, which is a significantly more emotional struggle. If you go up to many of the female porn addicts and ask them if they love themselves, they are actually going to tell you no. They don’t. They hate themselves for getting into this and hate what they are doing to themselves. They are not proud of what they have done and they don’t think they are better than everyone else for doing it. While the sin does have a base in a love of self it is not a love of self they can see. So, that approach will not work.
Speak with them and many times you will hear the undertone of self-loathing. They feel worthless, freakish, disgusting, etc. I work with many girls who struggle with self-harming, suicide, and eating disorders as well as pornography. Low self-esteem (read: low self-worth) is not an excuse, but it is an issue. It’s not necessarily the reason they get into it, and I never stated that it was, but it can be a byproduct of it.
When I considered actually joining the adult industry, it was not because I thought I was better than any one else or even because I didn’t love God. I wanted to love God, but I truly believed that He could never love me. It was because my time in pornography had broken me to the point that I felt I could never get free.
I honestly believed I was worthless, so I gave up. I stopped fighting, figured God had made a mistake, that He couldn’t possibly have a plan and a purpose for me. I didn’t love me, and if someone had walked up to me and said, “Jessica, you need to get over yourself. You need to stop loving yourself so much.” I would have looked at them like they had ten heads.
Pornography, by its nature, robs women of their worth. Leave them in it long enough and they don’t even know who they are anymore. There is absolutely nothing unBiblical about showing a woman who she is supposed to be in Christ and building up her worth in that way. She has to understand God’s love for her or she will never be truly free because part of her captivity is believing all the lies porn tells her about herself.
This comment seems harsh and out of line with Eph 4:15. Adding “blessings” to the end of a harsh and hurtful comment doesn’t actually make itany less harsh or hurtful.
Additionally, the author makes no mention of self-esteem. Where are people getting this?
It’s funny how God puts things in our lives. Been wanting to write a blog on my sexual addiction porn and masturbation but it’s funny I don’t want to put it on my blog I write now. So liked what you said about Confession leading to grace. We are far more worried about how people see us. I read this week that somebody said why we are ashamed t o confess when we all sin. Good point. So I want to talk about my addiction but want nobody to know who I am. Maybe that’s my pride creeping up so now I read your blog I can’t get away from it all. Thanks God
Sarah, I’m in the process of writing a book about porn addiction and that its not just for men anymore. I want to include a few testimonials from women that have struggled but are finding freedom. Would you consider writing a testimony for me and I can add it to the book with or without your name. Your choice. if you feel you need to share it but don’t want to reveal yourself maybe this would be the best way.
My name is Kimberly Tippit and my email is kimberlytippit@gmail.com
I always thought that women viewing pornography was the devil s way of deceiving me/us.
As a man one of the ways I continued on somewhat of an unhealthy spiral of Shame and addiction was the lie that no woman would want a man who looked at pornography.while thus is fairly true for most women, it still is not true that only men view it. Knowing that we are (men) some evil animalistic creatures with a unique gender-biased addiction, makes me feel human again, like i’m not only not by myself because there are tho whose in my gender who struggle but i’m not alone because all MANKIND needs a SAVIOR and everyone struggles. Thank you for this article
LW,
Loving Christ is the key. Fear of telling someone doesn’t always stem from a love of self. In fact, many women trapped in porn have a very low self-esteem. They hate themselves and figure everyone else does too. So, for them, the answer might be, “Love Christ more, and believe in how much He loves you.”
How can I stop watching and preventing myself from getting addicted…seriously I need help..looking onto your response thru my mail Thanks
Love Christ more and yourself less. This is the key.