The process of recovery from porn addiction focuses primarily on getting people out of the wild addiction cycle of “I can do anything/I can do nothing.” Somewhere in the middle is the area each person needs to get to in order to sustain long term recovery.
The wild emotional and thus physical swings need to be reduced in order for a person to feel better about themselves and want to keep going on the journey.
One of the worst things that a person can do is to set unrealistic expectations for themselves and then fail to meet them. When we do this we end up getting down on ourselves. We have got to get back to the process of “sowing and reaping” in order to see the sort of moral harvest we are looking for.
Conditioned for Addiction
“Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Gal. 6:7
At the turn of the 20th century, 90% of Canadians and Americans lived in rural communities. In rural areas of the world, there is a pace to life that is very different from the large metro areas that are highly prevalent in the 21st century.
The people that the Apostle Paul was speaking to in the first century church understood intimately the principle of sowing and reaping. If they were going to have enough food for their survival, they would need to sow in the spring and harvest in the autumn.
They would need to know how to store the harvested food in ways that would allow them to live through difficult times when food was not plentiful. The animals they kept also required daily care to ensure their good health and thus the survival of the family members.
Very few of us today, have any idea how our food is produced/grown and where it even comes from.
A better term for us today would be “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s a computer term that makes it clear that we can’t expect good things to come out of the computer if we program it with junk.
The sowing and reaping that Paul was talking about was spiritual in nature and based on the principles of cause and effect: “the direct relationship between an action or event and its consequence or result.”
But...what if the enemy of our souls, has conditioned you and I for addiction and therefore dramatically impaired our ability to act upon the Biblical truth of sowing and reaping?
I have used a term that excellently describes the culture we now live in as being “pornified.” (It’s a term I heard, I take no credit for it)
Porn has been normalized to such an extent that we have young girls proudly walking around wearing t-shirts saying “future porn star!” Did this pornification of society happen in a couple months or even years? No. As someone born in 1965, I have been able to watch the regression in real time.
At the age of 28, I was working as a driving instructor. It was a very interesting job in part because the teenagers who I primarily taught, reeeally wanted to get their license. As a result, they were always on their best behaviour. I never had to deal with any “attitude” from them at all.
Another interesting aspect of the job was also related to the unique position I had in their lives: I wasn’t their parent and I wasn’t one of their peers. As a result, they would talk to me about all kinds of personal things because I was safe. There was no chance that what they shared with me would ever get back to their parents or peers.
One day, a young lady who I had given a few lessons to, talked with me about a party she was going to. She was conditioned with the common attitude of general society: if it feels good, do it.
She was a very nice person, just young and naive. I pressed her on the idea of “if it feels good, do it.” She repeated the mantra of the day, which stated that “as long as you weren’t hurting another person, it was fine.”
“Well,” I said. “What if you go to a party with a guy you like and he wants to have sex. You tell him no, but he forces himself upon you, against your will. Is that OK?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“But...to him it ‘felt good, so he did it.’” She got it! The devil was promoting lawlessness, which is the opposite of the law of cause and effect. This girl was conditioned to be ignorant of God’s universal law of sowing and reaping and it had the potential to cost her dearly.
We live in an age of addiction, and compulsive addictive behaviours are simply actions we take to avoid dealing with the trauma/pain we have experienced in our lives, be it currently or in the past.
A person who is regularly dealing with loneliness might find themselves frantically hopping from relationship to relationship in order to get their “fix.” Instead of dealing with the underlying issues that are causing the strong feelings of loneliness, they use other people like an alcoholic uses booze.
Perhaps the lonely person grew up as a latch key kid and had little parental input into their lives? Perhaps they were bullied and ended up retreating in order to save themselves from more pain? There could a number of reasons for pain they feel, but using other people won’t fix it!
On my 28th birthday, I first heard about the term codependent. It was suggested that I might be “one of those.” I decided to check it out and bought a popular book on the topic by the author Melody Beattie. One particular story really hit home for me.
The author spoke of having a habit of going to social gatherings and ending up taking home the most pathetic man in the building. This sounded just like me, except the genders were reversed...bummer.
Many of us were conditioned for addiction in two primary ways.
1. We were conditioned for addiction through our painful/traumatic experiences in our formative years. This is called imprinting. These deep impressions form a framework for our future decision making, how we interpret the world around us.
Some imprinting is good and some is bad, with differing degrees of each. In this article, I am addressing the bad/traumatic experiences that negatively impact our ability to live in a healthy, God honouring manner.
The personal scars from my early childhood trauma have never been fully processed by me and never will. I can’t go back to an event where I was bullied and undo the pain. The best I can do is try and make sense of the event(s) and not try and stuff the feelings of pain and rejection I felt at the time but had no capacity to deal with. I was personally in a bind that is quite common.
On one hand I was being bullied which was deeply painful both physically and psychologically. On the other hand, it wasn’t acceptable, or so I was taught, to allow the pain to surface in the form of tears and sadness. I was a typical male who was in a double bind, maybe a triple bind.
1. I couldn’t stop the bullying completely.
2. I couldn’t express the deep hurt and sadness I felt.
3. I rarely had someone to talk with about the painful experience that could help me understand what I was going through.
And of course #4, I was a child, with a limited comprehension level. Prior to puberty my capacity to understand abstract concepts was limited, so even the best efforts by a loving parent or family member would have had a limited impact on me.
My first point regarding being “conditioned for addiction,” starts with the basic premise that Satan works to destroy God’s creation and specifically mankind, as we were created in God’s image. He is a liar and deceiver and when people lie and deceive one another, there are scars, pain and trauma.
The devil plays both sides of the argument, first he causes the wounds by tempting people to sin and mistreat one another.
He then trashes people for their wounded states and tells them “no one will love them or accept them because they are damaged goods.”
He is the God of this world, which is stated in 2 Corinthians 4:4, and you can see it in how the dog eat dog world works at the top of power structures.
Weakness generally means you’re a failure, and yet not acknowledging a shortcoming makes it impossible to fix!?!?!?!
“It is impossible to change or heal what I do not acknowledge.”
Satan’s intention is to get us in a double bind, at bare minimum.
Get people to act in selfish and sinful ways which harm those closest to them, then “shame” the mistreated and hurt by trying to convince them that there is something terribly wrong with them that can’t be fixed or changed.
Can you think of one person, that hasn’t dealt with traumatic/painful/hurtful events in their life?
Can you think of anyone past or present, yourself included, that has been hesitant to talk about traumatic events they went through for fear of being looked down upon or rejected?
As someone who knows this “crazy making” bind all too well, the logical solution for someone like myself was to find an “out.” An out for me at 16 was being able to drink a dozen beer and still stand.
In my mind, I was accomplishing something. I was in control of something; beer in this case, and I was not being controlled at that moment in time by a painful experience, (with that much liquor in me I felt no pain) because I had found something to help me run away from my pain.
Another “out” for me that I acted on was in the form of a pretty girl who told me she loved me. Several months into the relationship a friend mentioned to me that it seemed like my girlfriend and I argued a fair amount.
I didn’t see the logic because I was being loved, and I had no recollection of ever being told I was loved in my family growing up. I may have been, but I can’t remember, but I do remember being hit and sworn at.
I stayed in that mediocre relationship for years because she loved me. As time went on the intensity and duration of the arguments would increase. At the end of another unsuccessful attempt at a productive conversation we would float the idea of splitting up and then we would both say, almost in unison, “but I love you,” as if that was enough to make that relationship work.
My attempts at running away from the scars of my childhood didn’t work. Booze didn’t do it. Sex didn’t do it. Drugs didn’t do it.
As a young male in my teens and 20’s there was little chance I was going to openly admit to my deep pain from my childhood trauma. If I did that, I would be openly admitting to having needs and therefore be written off by society at large. No, it would take many more years of pretending before things got so bad that I had no choice but to admit I needed help.
I cannot remember where I copied the following quote from, but it does a good job of addressing the issue of childhood trauma and it’s long term effects.
“When a child enters adulthood and has little healing in their areas of trauma, then chances of the trauma being reproduced in the next generation is high. The church is supposed to be the place where healing is paramount, but if the church of Christ isn’t willing to address trauma and it’s effect, then more trauma is done to the new believers hoping for healing.”
2. We were conditioned for addiction through the unrelenting marketing efforts of “something for nothing/the quick and easy fix.”
This fact of modern life is so pervasive it’s often hard to even recognize.
It’s natural for me to want an easier way to solve a problem than a more difficult one, of course. The problem is: does easier mean better results or simply easier?
The title of this article begins with the words “porn addiction recovery timelines,” but it could also be re-phrased as “trauma recovery timelines” in order to be more accurate.
Very rare is the person who is using porn in an addictive manner only struggling with addictive behaviours in that area of their life. Food, work, exercise and church involvement can all be used as a means of escape also.
The goal of recovery groups like the one’s we run, is to deal with the root issues that cause the erratic behaviour. Before the addictive behaviours are acted on, people usually have strong feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, depression, frustration, shame, agitation, guilt or helplessness.
A person’s mental and emotional state leading up to the addictive behaviour forms the foundation of the unwanted behaviour and the job of dismantling that is rarely “quick and easy.”
I can say with absolute certainty it is worth the effort and it can be done. It is not for the overly educated but primarily for the committed. Commitment to positive change is the most important component in the healing/discovery process!
But...maybe you are also addicted to the lie of the “quick and easy.” If you have a porn addiction that you want help with, you probably already know the answer.
Realistic porn addiction recovery timelines are diametrically opposed to the quick and easy solutions that we are bombarded with daily.
In many respects, porn is the ultimate addiction because it is completely devoid from reality.
No effort is required to build a relationship with another human being. No sacrificing for the other person. No need to listen to their stories of how their day was and what they had to deal with. Just addiction.
Over a decade ago I was working with a family member who’s marriage was in distress. We spoke on the phone numerous times and after several weeks of conversations I realized the person really wasn’t committed to the change they claimed they wanted.
They wanted a better marriage, a healthy marriage, but they would not, no matter how hard I tried to convince them, simply read a book on the subject.
A year and a half later they phoned me in distress and asked for my help. I asked them, “whose name was on the marriage licence?” It was their marriage not mine. I could not fix “their” marriage any more than I can fix “your” porn addiction.
They needed to be the one leading the charge and the main change agent. All a person like me can do is offer helpful information, support and guidance. The work of healing their marriage was up to them.
The recovery from porn addiction is up to you, the individual.
If my story is of any help, I am constantly working on recovery from addictive ways of behaving. I hit rock bottom 32 years ago and my life continues to get better and better.
The older I get the more screwed up I realize I am and the more awed I am by the God I serve and how gracious he is. The salvation I received in 1994 had absolutely nothing to do with my goodness in any way whatsoever.
Porn addicts are the prostitutes and tax collectors of Jesus time on earth.
He has no limits on who he can help and he’s got no self esteem issues that we need to be worried about. If I have a problem, he can handle hearing about it and he is eager to help me deal with it.
Dig in, it’s worth it!