Beating Porn Part 3
|
At this point you have a pornographic fantasy life in your mind and you have habits that feed that fantasy life. If you are going to overcome this addiction you will have to overcome your current fantasy life.
My fantasy life was always about imagining having legal sex with my wife, imagining my wedding night. As a teenager and then a single who had no girlfriend or prospects for a wife I thought about what sex would be like and then began looking for the answer, and began looking for porn. Of course I didn’t call it that then, it was art not real women, then it was real women but you couldn’t see everything, eventually the porn I always looked for was what Dr. James Dobson described in his book to adolescence, because that was what my fantasy life was built around. Generally at this point in the book or sermon on porn the answer is to not think about it. That’s not what the Bible says to do. The Bible says to bring into captivity your thoughts on porn (2 Corinthians 10:5) . When I was in high school I remember my youth director often using this illustration. He would tell us to not think about a white elephant then he would constantly tell us to not think about the white elephant because he kept repeating it we could not get it out of our heads. We live in a very pornographic society, if I told you to never think about sex until you got married you couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it because everywhere you go you will be reminded of sex. Even if you could hide in a cave and live like a monk your body would remind you of sex. But there is a very correct place in your mind to put these thoughts. We need to do four things to put these thoughts in the correct place. First we are going to fast. We are fasting to bring us closer to God, and after the fast it will highlight what draws us to porn. We will try to stay away from those things because it will give us a lot less thoughts to capture. Then we are going to confess our sins to someone who is spiritual who will help us restore our minds (James 5:16). This is a must, these deals with repentance and learning how to develop a right relationship with people. As you are capturing your thoughts this will give you someone to help you capture your thoughts. They are going to help you bear your burdens (Galatians 6:2). They are going to pray for you. This person will on one hand be your councilor, on another your accountability partner and they will become your mentor. The topic you are discussing with them is too personal for them to become anything else. The third thing you are going to do is you are going to sit down and write out how you got into pornography how it developed and all the things you did to get out of it, and what your different struggles/withdrawal symptoms are. Your struggles/withdrawal symptoms will likely be very different from mine. Everyone who overcomes this sin does so differently. Keeping a log of your struggle/withdrawal symptoms will be helpful especially when you occasionally go back look at it and see several days where you really struggle and realize you don’t remember them. You are not doing this for yourself. One of these days you are going to meet a girl you will fall in love and ask her to marry you. She will say yes, and sometime between then and when you get married you will have a time where you will confess your pornography addiction to her, At this time you will still be addicted to pornography, although you have overcome it for 100. 300, 500, 1000 days it will still be an issue in your life. You will let her know when you repented from the sin and that you have an accountability partner, but as you are getting married she is becoming your ability partner. She is your help meet and you need her to help you with this area of your life. She is uniquely qualified to do it. You will apologies for defrauding her by looking at porn, and you will let her know all the things you have done in your life to keep it from happening again, the places you cannot go, the things you cannot do because those things draw you to porn, and by conviction you can only have eyes for her. This will be a very private conversation. Maybe you will have your mentor there (if you decide to do this in a pre-marital counseling session), but you probably won’t. Number 4 is where we really deal with fantasy. My fantasy was always imagining my wedding night and legal sex. But if I do that I will go back to porn so I cannot do that anymore. So what I am going to do is remove as much of my fantasy life away from my wedding night to the day I confess my sin to my fiancé. When I imagine my wedding night I am imagining the mechanics of sex. No more. Thinking of my wedding night and legal sex is not allowed in my life. What is allowed is letting my fiancé know my addiction and what my preconceived ideas of sex are, and finding out hers. When I struggle with my mind, where my mind brings very sexual pornographic thoughts usually in relationship with what I think my wedding night will be like I often out loud start practicing what I will say to my fiancé when I confess my sin to her and ask her to forgive me for defrauding her. I will say “X amount of days ago (When I practice this I always say the current day I am on, on overcoming my addiction) God showed me great grace, He allowed me to overcome an addiction. I confessed my addiction to brother so and so (I will use his real name) and in that God brought healing (James 5:16), I am not confessing my addiction to you today for healing but for forgiveness. God has allowed me to overcome the terrible addiction of pornography. I am so sorry I have defrauded you in what I saw. God has allowed me to repent of this sin and I have not looked at pornography in x number of days and I am committed to never look at pornography again.” Where does this conversation go from here? Does she call off the engagement? It happens. Does she confess her past to me. I mean I confessed sin, so if she has sin in her past it will allow her to easily confess it. Does she need to talk to someone to process what I just said, if she is obviously having a hard time coming to terms with what I just said then I will let her know she can talk to anyone she feels she needs to talk to. If the engagement continues I will need to at this conversation or realizing this confession is all she can handle at one time in the next conversation, let her know how I came to get into pornography and I will need to tell her my story, especially the part of how I was shown grace by God and overcame this terrible addiction. Remember we are fantasizing about this conversation instead of sex. Especially if you are a Christian guy who has made a habit of fantasizing about legal sex in your possible future marriage. Sooner or later after your confession and being given forgiveness you will need to discuss your preconceived ideas on sex. Part of the reason we are going to fantasize about this CONVERSATION is because a lot more often than you like something is going to come up in the news, a conversation, or a sermon which WILL get you thinking about sex. Over the years you have trained your mind to be okay with this so we are going to retrain your mind to instead of thinking about sex to think about a conversation with your future fiancé about your and her preconceived ideas on sex. This conversation is NOT discussing the mechanics of sex. This conversation is discussing your basic idea of sex and hers to make sure we do not have any major conflict on our wedding night. Some women strongly believe that they should only have sex to make babies and if the girl you marry believes that way and doesn’t want a kid for 2 years that is going to affect your wedding night, and you strongly need to know it. Many women believe sex is bad for many reasons. Some grew up in the church and feel that God barely tolerates sex. Others have been molested and raped. Because you just told her your sexual sin she can tell you hers, and her answer will greatly affect her preconceived ideas on sex. I can tell you right now you have several preconceived ideas on sex. If you repent from the sin of pornography then one of your preconceived ideas on sex is not only that you will never have sex with anyone else, but you will not look at another woman, and anything that draws you to LOOK at a woman with lust cannot be in your life. Furthermore when you first tried to stop looking at pornography and masturbating how long did you usually last before you gave into the temptation? That is probably how long you got before you as a couple are in incontinency (I Corinthians 7:5). That is a pretty clear indication of a preconceived idea on sex. What are your preconceived ideas on sex that doesn’t actually involve talking about the mechanics of sex? In all honesty I have several that will never make this book or be told to anyone but the woman I marry because they deal far too deeply with who I am and they are not anybody elses business. None of them are pornographic in nature, all of them are too personal in nature to discuss anywhere else but in this conversation with my fiancé that I fantasize about instead of my wedding night. Everything porn, Hollywood, sex ed, etc has told you about sex is a lie. As you change your fantasy life you will come to this conclusion. It was probably 14-15 weeks (around the hundred day mark) before I could begin to realize this. Up to this point my mind was to busy fighting me for me to realize this. Its as if the world, the porn industry, Hollywood, sex ed, all the sex “experts” in magazines and on talk shows want to make sex to be nothing more than two dogs humping. Or in this case two humans humping. Nothing else. Its almost like they are desperate to belittle sex to two dogs humping, where they teach that every now and then you have the urge you do your thing it feels good and then you go on with your life. If you ask me they desperately want to use sex to dehumanize everyone, man or woman. As you change your fantasy life from the mechanics of sex to confessing your sin to your fiancé and talking about both your preconceived ideas about sex you will find yourself humanizing not just her but yourself. As the world seems desperate to use sex to dehumanize you and everyone else, we must recognize why God made sex. God made sex to bring you closer to someone than you could possibly be any other way. Sex deals with the entire being of man. As the world tries to turn sex into just two dogs humping in reality it is trying to destroy a part of you. I am told there are many men who cannot feel emotionally connected to someone outside of sex. If the world convinces that man that sex is just a minor thing, two dogs humping then it is likely that man will never feel emotionally connected to anyone, even to his wife. Even if they are both virgins on their wedding night, simply because porn and the world has taught this man that sex is just a small thing to make you feel good, instead of the thing that will bring you closer to your wife than anything else could. The first mention of sex in the Bible is Adam KNOWING his wife in Genesis 4:1. This is not saying that Adam finally saw her naked and now knows what she looks like. This is Adam and Eve having sex and because of sex knowing each other on the deepest level possible. God’s first mention of sex is how sex is about knowing a person. Again this is a preconceived idea of sex. Is sex a minor thing that you do when you feel the need like two dogs humping or is sex something God made to bring two people closer together than anything else could? If sex is something God made to bring two people closer together than anything else could then it necessitates that long before you have sex you are emotionally and spiritually close to one another and part of that is developing a relationship to the point that once you are engaged you can confess your addiction to your fiancé. This confession will either break the relationship or far more likely bring you two closer together, as a Christian couple you want to be as close emotionally and spiritually as you can be before your wedding night, so that the physical intimacy greatly draws you even closer together emotionally and spiritually. There are four types of intimacy. There is physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Up until now when you had a fantasy you imagined the physical intimacy. But now that you are imagining how you are going to present this to your fiancé you are imagining emotional, and spiritual intimacy, and perhaps intellectual to. Emotional intimacy is when you share your burden with someone else. You are practicing this with your mentor, and you are imagining practicing it with your future fiancé when you imagine how you are going to tell her about your porn addiction and how you repented from it. Spiritual intimacy is when you help someone carry their burden. No matter what your fiancé’s view on sex is if you become her husband it is a burden you will have to bear. When you shift all sexual thoughts from what you are going to do with your wife physically to how you are going to share your heart with your fiancé and how she may share hers with you, turns your thoughts into thoughts of emotional and spiritual intimacy instead of thoughts of physical intimacy. No porn can show emotional or spiritual intimacy. Can not do it. Porn can only show physical intimacy and porn always does its best to dehumanize everyone in the sex it shows. So when you capture your sexual thoughts in a place that forces you to focus on emotional and spiritual intimacy it will really help you overcome your addiction. As a virgin as an unmarried person this is going to allow you to send your sexual thoughts into a place that is acceptable to your place in life. You should have emotional and spiritual intimacy with people right now, it is something you should be practicing at least weekly. Again we are not discussing or thinking about the mechanics of sex, the whole point of this fantasy is to fantasize about becoming emotionally and spiritually intimate with the person you will one day marry because we recognize sex will make that intimacy far greater and as a couple you two far closer. This fantasy teaches you that you are not a dog like the world would love for you to become. As you go about your day and life you will have off the wall thoughts hit you. On day 134 the flesh or the devil really sent a curve ball my way on fantasy. I read an article about some guy who sold a company for more than a billion dollars, and this guy said he “Never felt more isolated.” My exact thought on the matter was go to some third world country and buy yourself some wives. Unfortunately for me my porn addiction involved two things, rated R movies and hentia. In hentia you got women fighting each other to seduce the man. My thought was that this rich guy goes to a couple third world countries where the girls grow up with their entire role in life is to please their husband, divorce is not a concept and marry a few of them over the years. Then they are all so busy trying to get his attention he wont have any marital trouble. My thoughts were not this pg they were rated R, barely. I really had to sit down and pray as to how to turn these wicked thoughts back to the day I confess my addiction to the one I will be engaged to be married to. First I realized that in my fantasy those girl unconditionally loved me but I very conditionally loved them. In my fantasy I have their total attention but they only get my attention if they please me. I thought about how sad it would be to be married for life to a person who you gave your entire being to and they only gave you time when it was convenient. I recognize it’s a very satisfying thought having women compete to get you, but I also recognize that in the Bible every time a man is married to multiple women it gets ugly. There is no exception to this rule. Then I thought how wonderful it will be one day when I get engaged that I will get to unconditionally love one woman, and she will unconditionally love me. If I married a bunch of women, or even slept with a bunch of women how could I unconditionally love my wife? But in being a virgin when I get married and only having the one woman I will be able to totally give myself to her. Even in this fantasy which had nothing to do with what I dreamed about (my wedding night and legal sex) I found a way to turn it to the fantasy of one day confessing my sin to my future spouse. I know I will unconditionally love her. I greatly desire this. Even this sinful thought brought to the time I confess my sin to my future fiancé gave me a preconceived idea on sex. I need to unconditionally love my wife. Again this is a preconceived idea on sex that does not deal with the mechanics of sex. I really struggled with this fantasy of multiple wives for several weeks and prayed about it and sought some counseling on it, and on day 176 God dealt with it. My pastor was reading out of the book ecclesiastics. Solomon wrote the book of ecclesiastics and he constantly uses this phrase “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” He had all the riches you could ever want, 700 wives 300 concubines, and he says over and over again it was vanity. He was rich but it was about being better than the other rich guy. He had a lot of wives so he could brag to the other men he had been with more women than they had. But in the end his pride, his vanity brought him to depression. When you talk about how the day you die is better than the day you are born, then you are depressed. Depressed with what? All the things he took pride in including his harem. When I recognized his harem depressed him all of a sudden a verse I had struggled with for years finally made sense. Pro 30:18 There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: Pro 30:19 The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. I had always wondered what Solomon meant when he said he did not know the way of a man with a maid. He was married to 700 women, and had 300 concubines. In Solomon’s eyes all 4 things listed are wonderful, 3 of them are wonderful in a way humans cannot experience. Sure humans can now fly, but its not under your power, and it is without the elegance that an eagle has. A snake will enjoy a rock in a way a human cant, all reptiles do. How neat would it be to be content with a rock like a snake? Again the way a ship moves through the sea is wonderful in a way humans cannot experience. We can swim but we cannot cut through the water like a ship. But this man with 700 wives and 300 concubines says he has never had the wonderful experience of the way of a man with a maid. This is not talking about sex. Solomon is saying that because he has more than one wife he cannot unconditionally love a woman and he envies any man who can unconditionally love a woman. I would imagine that through the years Solomon married woman after woman for many reasons, but after his second marriage he never again had the opportunity to share his entire self with another person. I wonder how much of Ecclesiastes was written because he realized he was alone surrounded by his wives and concubines, but the young men in his court who was only pursuing a girl was more complete than he was because they loved their girlfriend/betrothed more than he could love any of his wives. I can imagine Solomon saying “Vanity of vanities, I have all the women a man could want because of my pride I wanted to prove I was more of a man. Now its too late and I find out that those men with one wife have so much more. I want to know what they have but I can never know it because of my pride and lust.” On day 176 this made the thought of a harem nauseous to me. Truth be told this is the fantasy that I had the hardest time dealing with due to its endurance. Most fantasies only bothered me for 3 days at a time this one bothered me for weeks. But I confided it to my mentor weeks ago when it began, and I kept in prayer every time it came up, and I stayed in my Bible daily, and fasted off and on. Then God used his Word to deal with it. Is this victory? No something else will pop up. This is simply preparation for the wonderful woman God has in my future. God intends to turn this evil into good. In all seriousness as you stop looking at pornography, get the things out of your life that draw you to pornography, confess your sin for healing, you will begin to have very different views on sex within a few months. Probably around month 3 or 4 as your mind starts healing your views on sex will begin to change radically but the thing is you cannot dwell on those thoughts, you need to send those thoughts to the day you confess your sin to your fiancé. One last thing to fantasize and pray about is one day a young man may come to you and confess their sin of looking at pornography. How will you help him out? If you do what I suggest and confess your sin so you can be healed, then one day you will greatly need to pass it forward when another young man comes to you. How will you deal with that situation? That is what this website is about, helping other young men out of this terrible addiction. |