- Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
- Written By Luke Gilkerson
- Categories: Accountability Software, Filtering Software, Lust - Fighting the Battle, Member Testimonies, Pornography Addiction, Wives of Porn Addicts Back to Blog Home
How I Quit Porn: The wake-up call that turned my world upsidedown
What happens when your husband’s porn addiction, adultery, and lies reach a point where you can’t take it any longer? This was the place Nicole Meengs was in 2008. Two weeks after her eighth wedding anniversary she packed her bags, took the kids, and left Jon.
This was the wake-up call Jon needed to help him see the steep cost of his addiction. He tells his story in this 16-minute video.
(You can read Jon’s story here, or read my interview with Nicole here.)
While Jon and Nicole’s story has a happy ending, it is not that way for many other couples. Some are still living in the nightmare. For some, divorce has seemed the only way of escape. But for others like Jon and Nicole, when both are willing to do whatever it takes to heal their broken hearts and broken marriages, the slow process of healing begins to happen.
The High Cost of Porn Addiction
Like Jon, many guys were exposed to pornography when they were young, and this can have a profound effect on someone’s sexual beliefs and their attitudes toward relationships. Clinical studies confirm: repeated exposure to porn decreases our sexual satisfaction in marriage, can make us devalue commitment to our spouse, and creates a thirst for more pornography rather than a desire for authentic relationships.
The good news is, like Jon, our minds can be renewed. Our recent e-book, Your Brain on Porn: 5 Proven Ways Pornography Warps Your Mind and 3 Biblical Ways to Review It, is a beginner’s guide to those who want to know the harms of pornography, and want to stop looking at porn but don’t know where to begin.
Good Friends: Essential to Finding Freedom
Instrumental in Jon’s freedom were the relationships with friends and family who supported him. I thought what Jon said here was very powerful:
Accountability, for me, in the addictive relationship that I had with pornography, was the world to me.
Initially I did have to come out and explain to my family and some of my closer friends what I was involved in. And much to my surprise, the lies that I told myself up to that point weren’t true: they didn’t turn and run away from me, they didn’t abandon me. In fact, they turned and faced me and really embraced the whole situation. They’ve been my friends for a very long period of time, and they have a vested interest in seeing me succeed.
And so the accountability relationship that I have with them is the world to me, like I said, because they have every right and responsibility—given to them by me—to question me and to question my actions. So through a report that they might get of things that I’ve looked at on the Internet, more often than not, they will send me an e-mail or they will make a phone call, and they will question me on those things: “What is this? Explain this to me.” And it’s a reciprocal relationship, and I’ll do the same with them.
Without accountability, I—left to my own devices—would not have found freedom. It’s the love that I get from my accountability partners, and the non-judgmental attitudes that I get from them, that allows me to be open, to be transparent, and to ultimately be free from the addiction that I suffered early on in my life.
Covenant Eyes to me is a very special program. What it did initially for me was to create a barrier for those things that continued to trip me up day after day after day. And it set a barrier well back from the cliff. For me, if I got to the cliff, it was impending failure. So now I could free myself from even remotely getting close by setting the filtering in the software as high as it would go, and to back away from that, and find freedom in that.
But moreover than that, what it did was establish a level of trust between myself and my wife and my accountability partners. That I would make the effort to put that on my computer, to show them and be transparent and vulnerable to what I was doing, and to want them around me through this, meant more than just protecting me from it, really, because it provided an atmosphere to be able to rebuild the trust that had suffered so greatly with what I had done in my past.
I love Covenant Eyes because of the opportunity it provides to rebuild trust from a broken relationship.
Recommend on Facebook- Tweet about it
- Print for later
- Tell a friend
My ex-husband’s addiction to Internet porn didn’t end happily for us as it was the main reason we got divorced. Unfortunately for my ex, the last I heard he never got any help for his addiction, although that was almost a year ago so here’s hoping that he was able to turn his life around.
@Dee,
Here in lies the problem for those of us that struggle with porn. Admitting we have a problem in the first place. Until we reach a point in our lives (often referred to as hitting bottom) we’ll never see what we do as a negative, only something we need to do a better job of “managing.”
That he didn’t see how what he was doing contributed to the end of your marriage must be tough. I also saw in another post of yours that he’s currently trying to go it alone through his own will and prayer. I will never argue against the power of prayer but if that’s his idea of working towards recovery, I wouldn’t expect much. We need people around us to make change happen.
I don’t say that to be negative but simply to speak to the reality of my life and my struggles with porn off and on for 20+ years. Until I came face to face with who I had become and the reality of losing my wife and sons I would have lied, manipulated, cheated, done whatever, to do what I wanted. I would give my wife just enough to get through whatever situation we were in only to immediately regress back to doing what caused the issue in the first place. You can check out my wife’s thoughts by checking out the link at the start of the article.
For recovery to happen, it needs to start with him and his acknowledgement that the activities he is engaged in are destructive. Destructive not only to those around him, most times the most obvious but also to him personally, what we utterly refuse to own up to. Unfortunately, it seems the reality of divorce didn’t clued him and that really makes me sad. Bear in mind that the clues will build over time and I pray he sees the reality of what he’s engaged in sooner versus later.
Hold your head high. Your true value does not come from him or his actions. God Bless.
I am both encouraged and saddened by this testimony.
I am encouraged to see that there are men who are willing to take control for their recovery and to better themselves; it gives me hope that I will not lose every man I date to porn…
I am saddened, though, by the comparison of this situation to mine. I am in a similar situation of Nicole, but earlier in the process. My boyfriend and I are still only dating, though a future of marriage is my hope. However, I feel like I have to heal his addiction in order to keep him. I had to put the software on his computer. I had to schedule the therapy (to which he has made no follow up sessions). I was even the one to convince him to stay with me… He wanted to throw in the towel for our relationship when he saw the pain in my face after yet another usage of porn; he said he “didn’t think he could stop hurting me.”
I wish I could give him the same wake up call that Nicole gave, but I don’t think he’d gain anymore desire to fix himself, or us. I wrote him a letter telling him all my feelings and how his neglect towards his addiction will eventually make me have to leave, and I am still waiting to see him do something about it, more than just empty promises and sweet words…
I may be young, and I know there are “other fish in the sea” so to speak, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I wish my pain mattered enough to him to change. I don’t want to keep starting over with men because they care more about porn than they care about my tears…
Anyway, thank you, Jon, for being a wonderful example that porn won’t always win, and that there is hope.
@Shannon,
Thanks so much for the kinds words. There is much that lies ahead for me yet regarding my recovery but the truth of what pornography really is/does keeps me moving forward.
As I read your post, I think back in my own life and conflict avoidance was something I was quite good at. I’ve looked back at prior relationships and while none were very successful all had a similar theme. I wasn’t willing to give of myself and when things became difficult. I left rather than deal with the underlying concerns.
To actually deal with what was causing the conflict would have made me relinquish control over the other person. It would require me to “open myself up” to what I perceived as a forced examination. Knowing that would end up in a showdown of sorts, I chose to leave. Easier (for me). Less messy (for me). And at at least one of us would still be smiling in the end. I didn’t truly want to hurt anyone but mired in my addiction, I was lost to understand any other way to be or act.
Your push for his recovery and his subsequent reactions are pretty typical in my experience. While not absolute, for progress to me made the individual has to make a personal decision to want to change from his/her current state. The old line of leading a horse to water is perfect in this case. You can bring him right to the brink of acknowledging that the activities he is engaged in are destructive. They hurt himself. They hurt and devalue and objectify you. Then, he himself, must utter those words and set out on a new path for himself first. Then you.
I pray that you don’t have to keep starting over. I pray that your tears are absolute evidential truth of the destruction porn causes in relationships. I pray for friends/family to gather around you and love you for who you are so that you know how valued you are as a person and I pray the same for your boyfriend, so he, too, can see his value from a broader perspective and know for sure that porn has no place there.
God Bless
It’s hard for people who already know the Lord as well. We have been married for 14 years now but for more than 11 years the porn addiction was life ruling. He was shown pornography by his dad at the age of 3, told that it was what it was like being a man. The hardest thing is that my husband by all appearances is a straight edge, good guy. Everyone who knows him says the first thing, he is a good guy. But I lived everyday for many years playing warden, in pain, and deceit that was unbelievable. I would see the proof of the porn through cable reciepts or emails and he would still deny it for hours, sometimes until he made me feel like I was the one that was plain nuts. He does not understand the abuse this was, not to mention the fact that he is a computer analyst and I always feel like he can break any security I put on our computers. It wasn’t until after he actually had an affair that I put my foot down and decided to safe guard my kids because even after the affair, and his repentance for the affair, he still looked at porn for 4 years later. Now he says he has been delivered since last year but I still look over my shoulder because I have heard all the lines and I feel he thinks he’s ok, so I should be too. I feel it has become the elephant in the room and if he’s delivered, he would talk about it more. I love him, he does not smoke, drink, curse, he is a great father, but I am the one who has to see this other side of him which makes it seem like I only pick out his faults which is not true. I just don’t want to be hurt again, and I want to know how to trust again.