Tag: Pornography

“Why Does He Prefer Porn Over Me?”

Published on by Scott Williams8 Comments

Penny FlameThis week’s “Dear Whys Guy” blog features a heartbreaking scenario where the husband would prefer to watch pornography on his phone than have a real sexual encounter with his wife of 22 years. How does a romance go from head over heels in love to utter indifference?

Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson, the authors of “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow”, have written an outstanding article in Psychology Today on the debilitating effect of frequent pornography viewing on men. They observed that “recent behavioral addiction research suggests that the loss of libido and performance occur because heavy users are numbing their brain’s normal response to pleasure. Years of overriding the natural limits of libido with intense stimulation desensitize the user’s response to a neurochemical called dopamine.”

Ultimately, continued use of pornography by a man leads to a decreased response to dopamine. This results in declining natural desire and in a cyclical effect, increased need for even more visual stimulation. This insatiable hunger for pornography will increase as the reward for watching it decreases. This is the inevitable downside of addiction.

In addition to this physiological deadening, University of North Carolina Professor Joshua Knobe and his colleagues showed that porn use also changed the way men view women.  Professor Knobe described this effect male porn use had on the way men perceived women as  “animalification-treating a woman as though she lacks the capacity for complex thinking and reasoning, but at the same time, treating her as though she was even more capable of having strong feelings and emotional responses.”

There is little that the wife of  the pornography addict can do to interest her husband. He has used artificial means to go beyond the outer limit of human beings. He is not feeling the ordinary joy he used to experience and he doesn’t even look at her the same way.  The husband must hit bottom,  break the cycle of addiction and allow his natural limited desire and perception of the opposite sex to return before they can together return to a healthy fulfilling sexual relationship as husband and wife.

The wife can use this terrible crisis as an opportunity to re-evaluate the whole marriage from the ground up once the man seeks help. Many men are not finding acceptance in their conventional monogamous relationships. These men are unconnected to their unsuspecting spouse and children and seek a temporary high, connection and escape from reality in pornography, lap dances in Gentlemen’s Clubs, prostitutes or serial adultery.

How did these once ardent paramours end up having to tip toe in at 2AM, shed their clothes into the washer, shower off the stink of cheap perfume from a stripper and slip quietly into bed next to their slumbering spouse? The sad reality for many men is that their conventional relationship was based on inappropriate emotional and physical intimacy and the deception of approval seeking. After the ephemeral high of the honeymoon fades, these men find themselves trapped in a prison of their own device. They enjoy symbolic physical nakedness in each sexual encounter with their wife, but there is no acceptance of their naked self, because these rejection fearing mirage men never give their partner the chance to really know and accept them.

These men will cope with their empty marriage by employing real or virtual women to provide them with the temporal acceptance they find lacking in their steady relationship. It will only last for a few hours before they must flee back into their alternative universe where they live with their wife and children. The next day these mirage men will find themselves just as alone and disconnected as before. This will feed the need to keep seeing the person or website who gives them that high, which will lead from a dalliance to addiction.

Mirage men won’t admit there is a problem in their marriage until it reaches a crisis point or the various addictive coping behaviors that spring up become so blatant they can no longer be ignored. These addictions  will lead to an exaggeration of their character defects. The family will learn to adjust as the mirage man  becomes more and more eccentric, after years of living with no mooring to his true self.  In this Whys Guy blog case, the man is openly watching porn on his phone and tuning out all those around him.  It took a long time for his secret life of addiction to become this outrageous and shameless. We can only hope he will hit bottom and seek help before his wife considers ending the relationship over grounds of emotional abandonment.

Published on November 7, 2011 by J. R. Bruns, M.D. in Repairing Relationships

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Guest Blogger – I’m a Sex Addict. I’m Also a Pastor.

Published on by Scott Williams3 Comments

Wednesdays I host a guest blogger – professionals, clients, friends, strangers; stories of success and failure, people who are suffering, some who are opinionated, all of whom are a work in progress. These are struggles about real life issues. If you are interested in telling your story email me at info@scott-williams.ca.

“Is that all? Is there anything else?”

“Uh huh…Is that all? Is there anything else?”

That’s pretty much all I heard for three hours as I recited the list of all the people I hated, all the fears I had, the long list of my sexual misconducts, and the ways I had harmed pretty much everyone I had ever met. Before that day, I had never told anyone most of the things on that list.

I’m a sex addict. I’m also a minister. That’s why this article is anonymous. Think what you like about that combination, I didn’t choose either one of those identities. One’s a wound, the other’s a gift. One is who I am, the other is who I’m called to be.

I can’t remember the first time I was exposed to porn. It was ever-present in my family, but never truly visible, never openly talked about. It was one of those things that adults could joke about in their indirect way, but an innocently curious kid could never get a straight answer about. I was just someone to laugh at and tell, “Wait until you’re older.”

When I got caught trying to find out what all the jokes were about, I was mildly rebuked and whatever I was trying to look at was taken away. It became a warped kind of game: find a magazine, sneak it someplace private and try to understand what it was all about, then get caught and teased for being so “curious”. It turned into an adrenaline-based obsession with the mysteries of sex.

Consequently, women have always stirred a mixture of shame and wonder in me that I still can’t really understand. My early exposure to porn added a sexualized “twist” to every interaction I have with a member of the female gender. I have always felt that I needed to both hide and apologize for that “twist”, even before I went into the ministry.

All through High School and Bible College I knew I had to “get it under control”. Of course I knew it was incompatible with my faith and my calling – I’m not stupid, nor am I without a conscience. So I went to work: Self-control. Cold showers. “Eyes on the face”. Bible reading. Accountability groups. Tear-filled confessions to girlfriends. On again/off again relationships. “Purity commitments.”

By some miracle, I got married, and hoped things would get better. What a joke. A real person with her own baggage was no match for my infinite curiosity/shame cycle. Despite what most people think about porn, it wasn’t that her appearance couldn’t measure up to the images. It was that her appetite could never match my curiosity, my need to know, and my longings to try and explore and experiment. I didn’t think she was a doll or some plaything, I just didn’t really know ANYTHING (and yes, I still feel that way after a more than two decades of marriage).

So there I was, preaching God’s Word every week, daily helping people with their problems. Surfing porn every chance I got, trying to quit every time I surfed. Hypocrite. Guilty. Dirty. Shameful. The more guilt I heaped on myself, the worse I felt. The worse I felt, the more I needed something to make myself feel better. This led to increasingly greater compulsions to surf, leading to more guilt. A wretched, solitary cycle with no end in sight.
And then, out of the blue, a miracle happened. Someone in my church asked me to do a “Fifth Step” with him. I had no idea what that was, so I asked my friend Scott. He explained it to me – told me what to do, how to not react, what to say at the end. So, I booked some time at a monastery. This guy and I went into a room and he started talking.

And talking.

And talking.

I listened, nodded and said, “Is that all, do you have anything else you need to tell me?” And at the end, I looked him in the eyes and say, “Now that you’ve confessed all these things with God and one other person, you are forgiven.”

I’ll never forget the change that came over that man. You had to be there to believe it. It was as if light entered his body and shone out his face. Tears of gold streamed down into his goatee. This tough old drunk jumped up, grabbed me in a death-hug and sobbed for what felt like an hour. Then he turned around and walked out the door.

Alone in the room, standing in shock at what had just happened, the thought came to me, “I wonder who I could ask to do that for me?” I couldn’t think of anybody good, so I asked Scott. (Actually, that’s kind of the truth – I didn’t want to do this with ANYONE. But I picked Scott as the best option I had.) We went for a drive, and he did the same thing to me that he told me to do to that other guy. He listened and asked, “Is there anything else?” Even though I knew what he was doing, I found myself telling him everything. All the stuff I was embarrassed about. Things I was ashamed of. Things I was ashamed of being ashamed of. Everything I could remember came out on that drive.

Greatest gift ever. Suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone. Suddenly I wasn’t the only one who ever struggled. I wasn’t a hypocrite anymore, because someone else knew the whole story, the real me. Someone saw that confused, curious little boy that just couldn’t get any answers. Someone heard all my scary, stupid, shameful shit and didn’t run away screaming. Or laughing. I think that’s what I was most afraid of, now that I think about it – having my depravity laughed at. Having my sickness being pointed at as being small and weak and pathetic. My first step five dignified my sin as being bad enough to need confession, but not bad enough to need condemnation. And then it washed it all away.

Notice I said my FIRST step five. Much as I’d like to say that was the key to a miraculous transformation, and that lust and shame are no longer a part of my life, that’s not the case. There’s no magic bullet for me. Almost fifteen years after that day, and multiple times through the 12 Steps, I still struggle. I still bring a sexual “twist” into every interaction with a woman. And I still feel a twinge of shame & a desire to apologize for it. My marriage is still “interesting”. I carry an extra load every day in addition to the “normal” load of a pastor trying to honor God and love His people. It’s hard enough being a pastor – doing it as a sex addict amps up the challenge even more.
But – something did change on that day. I know I’m not the worst. I’m not the weirdest. I’m not pathetic, and I’m not alone. I’m a legit member of the human race; strengths, struggles and all. I have hope that I can be both a sex addict and a pastor. I’m finding a way to act out my calling without acting out my disease.

And once I knew that ONE person could know me as I truly am, it gave me the courage to show that same person to others. One at a time, God has given me the ability and privilege to tell my story to several people in my life so that every day, someone I see knows who I am and what I’m dealing with.
I am a pastor. I am a sex addict. I am loved. And one day at a time, I can be free. Greatest gift ever. Thank God. Thanks Scott.

Overexposed and Under-Prepared: The Effects of Early Exposure to Sexual Content

Published on by Scott Williams2 Comments

Adult Content .. Penn St officials head to cou...From Psychology Today:

“Children as young as 8 and 9 are coming across sexually explicit material on the Internet and in other media. Although research is just beginning to assess the potential damage, there is reason to believe that early exposure to sexual content may have the following undesirable effects:

Early Sex. Research has long established that teens who watch movies or listen to music that glamorizes drinking, drug use or violence tend to engage in those behaviors themselves. A 2012 study shows that movies influence teens’ sexual attitudes and behaviors as well. The study, published in Psychological Science, found that the more teens were exposed to sexual content in movies, the earlier they started having sex and the likelier they were to have casual, unprotected sex.

In another study, boys who were exposed to sexually explicit media were three times more likely to engage in oral sex and intercourse two years after exposure than non-exposed boys. Young girls exposed to sexual content in the media were twice as likely to engage in oral sex and one and a half times more likely to have intercourse. Research also shows that teens who listened to music with degrading sexual references were more likely to have sex than those who had less exposure.

High-Risk Sex. The earlier a child is exposed to sexual content and begins having sex, the likelier they are to engage in high-risk sex. Research shows that children who have sex by age 13 are more likely to have multiple sexual partners, engage in frequent intercourse, have unprotected sex and use drugs or alcohol before sex. In a study by researcher Dr. Jennings Bryant, more than 66 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls reported wanting to try some of the sexual behaviors they saw in the media (and by high school, many had done so), which increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Sex, Love and Relationship Addictions. Not every child who is exposed to sexual content will struggle with a mental health disorder, but research shows that early exposure to pornography is a risk factor for sex addictions and other intimacy disorders. In one study of 932 sex addicts, 90 percent of men and 77 percent of women reported that pornography was a factor in their addiction. With the widespread availability of explicit material on the Internet, these problems are becoming more prevalent and are surfacing at younger ages.

Sexual Violence. According to some studies, early exposure (by age 14) to pornography and other explicit material may increase the risk of a child becoming a victim of sexual violence or acting out sexually against another child. For some people, habitual use of pornography may prompt a desire for more violent or deviant material, including depictions of rape, torture or humiliation. If people seek to act out what they see, they may be more likely to commit sexual assault, rape or child molestation.

Preserving Our Children’s Youth

Early exposure to sexual content in the media may have a profound impact on children’s values, attitudes and behaviors toward sex and relationships.”

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