Over the 13 years that I struggled with pornography the two biggest struggles I encountered were hopelessness and apathy. You can only have so many moments where you tell yourself, “This is the last time I am doing this,” only to fall the very next day before you begin to question your resolve. This is precisely what happened to me. I felt hopeless that I could change and the only way to feel good in those moments, to feel connected in some way, was to turn back to the pornography.
I have come to realize that we need love in a very fundamental way and we cannot just say “I quit!” and give up pornography. The reality was that I was turning to pornography because there was a gaping hole of love in my life that needed to be filled with something true, good, and beautiful. My desires were good, but I was fulfilling them in the wrong ways. My heart yearned to be filled with love, I just did not know it yet. All I knew was that someone had told me that this was wrong, but that I did not feel I had the strength to stop.
This place of hopelessness was usually accompanied with apathy. Though some part of me knew that what I was doing was wrong, I did not care. I did not see the people on the screen as persons. All I could feel was that I wanted to satiate this desire. At this moment in my life, my capacity to love and see the dignity of another did not overcome my apathetic drive to satiate my desires.
I still could not die to myself.
Finding Victory
I believe that victories over pornography can only begin to happen when the person realizes that what they are doing is bad precisely because what is being distorted is so good.
Woman is the apex of creation in the second account in Genesis. She is meant to be beautiful.
I think the first victory I had was when I realized that the desires I had, at their core, were good. The error was in the way that I was directing these desires. I did the Strive 21 porn detox and learned that the problem was not that I was seeing something bad, but that it was so good that it had to be protected and enjoyed correctly in the privacy of marriage.
As C.S Lewis said:
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak… fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us… we are far too easily pleased.”
It was not that my desire for love was too strong; it was too weak! As I grew in love and knowledge of man and woman, so did my hate for pornography. I deeply desired love and had a new, rightly ordered perspective with which to combat my temptations. Realizing these desires were inherently good made it easier to combat them. This newfound understanding strengthened me to reclaim the beauty of sex and the depth of the union of marriage. It allowed me to see the intimacy of the marital act and see how, in it, the spouses re-consummate themselves to one another and will the good of the other.
This was truly the greatest victory I had over porn—seeing just how good and intimate sex was.
The Ongoing Journey
I wish I could say it ended there, but now I had about ten years of bad habits to combat. If anything, having learned how beautiful marriage and sex were, it only made the subsequent falls hurt more. Now, every time I fell I felt more and more alone and even more like a monster. I asked myself, “How can I still be distorting such a beautiful thing?”
Thankfully, a priest who was in my life at the time directed me to Covenant Eyes. He even offered to pay for it himself. From that moment on I had him as my accountability partner and would update him regularly about how I was doing at our biweekly spiritual direction sessions.
Covenant eyes helped remedy the isolation that pornography caused. Pornography was impossible to even look up, but, more than that, there was a constant source of accountability. The routine dialogue between the Father and myself continuously brought everything into the light.
As St. Therese of Lisieux said, “[Satan] wanted me to keep quiet about my distress and so remain entangled in his snare.”
Through isolation, the Devil kept me from reaching out when, in reality, that is the best thing I could do. Covenant Eyes helped initiate and guide that process. We are creatures of intimacy made for God. The only way to remedy the loneliness, isolation, and apathy that pornography causes is to reconnect with people who love you and who can be channels for that love. Pornography eventually pointed me to the deeper desire in my heart for infinite love; this love is what God created me for, and this is the Love that I am never too far from no matter how many times I fall.
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